...right here, right here at this show in McCormick. Okay, not really. But there is an opportunity to take a selfie with John, Paul, Ringo, and George at Hal Leonard’s booth (2125), where life-size cardboard cutouts of the fab four await your portrait. Backbeat Books, an imprint of Hal Leonard, is celebrating the upcoming softcover publication of Some Fun Tonight! The Backstage Story of How the Beatles Rocked America: The Historic Tours of 1964–1966. Beatles fans (and who isn’t?) can also enter a drawing to win a copy of the original hardcover slipcased set. There are three ways to enter: the traditional business card method; by sharing a photo with your favorite Beatle on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram with the hashtag #somefuntonight; or via HLPAPG’s new online performing arts community, backwing.com. Don’t despair if you’re not the lucky winner. Backbeat boasts that its $40 edition of the slipcased glossy, full-color two-volume set is no less lush than the $160 hardcover set published to great success last year.
Covering the group’s three North American tours in the mid-’60s, author Chuck Gunderson gives readers a city-by-city synopsis of the Beatles’ activities as they traveled the United States and Canada. So authoritative is Gunderson’s work that Ron Howard is using it as source material for his upcoming Beatles documentary, due out later this year.
From San Francisco’s Cow Palace show on August 19, 1964, through the group’s last-ever live performance at that same city’s Candlestick Park on August 29, 1966, Some Fun Tonight! covers the music and the madness that characterized the Beatles’ North American tours. Hundreds of photographs and images of rare memorabilia chronicle in depth what is arguably the most important period of the Beatles’ long and winding career. Some Fun Tonight! includes the behind-the-scenes negotiations, mayhem at the airports and hotels, the cheeky quotes delivered at press conferences, opening acts, concerts, and the stories behind the shows as seen through the eyes of the Beatles, their entourage, the promoters, the emcees, and the fans.
This article appeared in the May 11, 2016 edition of PW BEA Show Daily.
