On 29 August 1966, the Beatles played their last paid concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, with 17,500 tickets unsold. Paul McCartney asked for it to be taped, but the recording cuts off during the final song

On the night of August 29, 1966, the Beatles walked onto a small stage behind second base at Candlestick Park, the windswept home of the San Francisco Giants. They played 11 songs in about half an hour and closed with “Long Tall Sally.” They never played another concert for a paying audience.

That last show was, by Beatlemania standards, a disappointment at the box office. And the tape recorded from the field ran out before the final song was over.

Thousands of empty seats

According to The Beatles Bible, Candlestick held 42,500 people, but only about 25,000 tickets were sold. That left roughly 17,500 seats empty. Tickets cost between $4.50 and $6.50.

The money did not work out for the organizers either. The band took 65% of the gross and the city of San Francisco took 15% of paid admissions. Between low sales and unexpected costs, the local promoter, Tempo Productions, lost money on the night.

The setting did not help. The stage stood about five feet high inside a six-foot wire fence, a long way from most of the crowd. The evening’s compere, local DJ “Emperor” Gene Nelson, later remembered the ballpark as cold, foggy and windy, and the dressing room as packed with local celebrities while he tried to keep a chanting crowd entertained.

The band knew it was the end

The show was never announced as a farewell. Inside the group, the feeling was different. Ringo Starr later said there had been plenty of talk that night about stopping, although he did not feel completely sure until they were back in London. John Lennon and Paul McCartney took a camera onto the stage and photographed the crowd, the rest of the band and themselves.

McCartney explained the decision years later. In a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, he said that by Candlestick the four of them had had enough of wet stages, poor sound systems and audiences that were louder than the band.

A last-minute request

On the way to the stadium, McCartney asked the band’s press officer, Tony Barrow, whether he had his cassette recorder with him. He did, and McCartney asked him to tape the show. Barrow later recalled that he simply stood in the middle of the field holding up the microphone. He did not think it was a special concert musically, though he noticed the band adding more chatter and ad-libs between songs than usual.

The cassette held 30 minutes on each side, and Barrow never turned it over. On the plane out of San Francisco, McCartney leaned over the seat to ask whether he had got anything. Barrow told him he had the whole show, except that “the tape ran out in the middle of Long Tall Sally.”

The souvenir that went missing

Barrow gave the original to McCartney and put a copy in a locked drawer of his office desk. Years later the recording surfaced.

In that same 2016 interview, Rolling Stone asked McCartney what had happened to his copy. He had no idea. Asked whether he had ever played it, he said: “I don’t remember listening to it. So that probably means I didn’t.”

Finishing the song

Candlestick got a postscript. On August 14, 2014, McCartney played the stadium’s final public event before its demolition. According to JamBase, he performed 40 songs for a crowd of about 50,000.

Thirty-seven songs in, he played “Long Tall Sally,” telling the crowd it was the last song the Beatles had performed there in 1966.

The 1966 tape still stops in the middle of “Long Tall Sally.” Forty-eight years later, in the same ballpark, McCartney played it to the end.