Fifty years ago Wednesday, The Beatles played a concert at Municipal Stadium in Kansas City, Mo.
The concert was not originally part of the band's first cross-country U.S. tour, but business man and owner of the Kansas City Athletics baseball team, Charlie O. Finley, managed to bring them to Kansas City.
Finley flew to San Francisco to talk to the band's manager, Brian Epstein, and offered $50,000 to bring The Beatles to Kansas City. They finally agreed on $150,000, and the Fab Four flew into Kansas City to play a show on one of their only days off from the tour.
"At the other stops on the tour, they made between $25,000 and $50,000 per show," says Kansas City Star reporter and blogger Rick Hellman.
Finley was trying to cultivate a younger fan base for his baseball team, says Chuck Haddix, director of the Marr Sound Archives at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
"He became a hero," says Haddix, who also hosts Fish Fry on KCUR. "He was doing pretty much what we continue to do today to try to attract younger fans and cultivate the younger fan base by bringing The Beatles to Kansas City."
The concert was held at what was then the baseball stadium, which was unusual for concerts.
"It really foreshadows what would happen in the 1960s and 1970s with these big concerts," Haddix says.
Before they played their 31-minute set in to a crowd of around 20,000, The Beatles attended a press conference and answered reporters' questions about their hair, screaming girls and whether or not they would ever consider living in the United States. The images above are from that conference, and you can read the full transcript here.
Two KCUR staffers and many listeners had their own memories of the concert, and they shared them with Steve Kraske on Tuesday's Up To Date.
"You couldn't hear the first song, that is what I remember," Ron Jones, director of community engagement at KCUR, told Kraske. "The screaming was so loud you couldn't hear any music."
There is not audio from the show, but you can watch a short clip that was filmed covertly by a fan.
