Ticket to Ride

6 down, 44 to go.

A couple of days ago I finished Larry Kane's Ticket To Ride: Inside The Beatles' 1964 & 1965 Tours That Changed The World. Kane was the only American reporter to follow the Beatles through each stop on their first two American tours. His book covers his experiences with the band as they move from city to city.

I bought Ticket To Ride after seeing Kane read at the University Bookstore a few months ago. In person his stories were really interesting so I had high hopes for the book. Unfortunately, those hopes were dashed as I started to dig into the book. While there were indeed plenty of interesting stories, Kane's writing style felt formulaic and choppy. His background is in broadcast journalism, so I think his personality translates much better when he is speaking than it does in print.

Despite the less than stellar writing, there were still plenty of interesting things to take away from the book. Here are a few of the things that I found to be the most interesting:

• The ticket price for most of the shows on the Beatles' first two tours was about $5.50.
• Most of the concerts on the tour were only 33 minutes long.
• The famous Shea Stadium show in 1965 had a crowd of 55,600 which at the time was the largest audience in music history.
• It was really interesting to me to think about the fact that concerts as we know them today didn't exist before the Beatles' tours. People just didn't go out to see bands live in a stadium type setting.
• The crazy fan scenes in A Hard Day's Night weren't an exaggeration. A good chunk of the book is dedicated to talking about all of the crazy schemes fans tried to get to meet the band, all of the security issues around getting the band from place to place, etc.