Note his classic Southern ‘reach around thumb’ approach to fretting one of the Beatles’ Rickenbackers, as George Harrison eggs him on.Īnd that is how one arrives to play a Beatles concert, Memphis-style. The guitar was Tucker’s first instrument. “We pulled up and I said, ‘We’re here for the tour!’” “There must have been 5,000 teenage girls standing there at the gate, and one guy who looked like Barney Fife holding ’em off,” he recalls. Bob Tucker was riding shotgun, hauling stacks of black cases and luggage, and now he emerged from the truck like a ship’s captain leaping from the prow at landfall, waving at a cop. And sometime well before the first downbeat, onlookers would have seen the sea of humanity part, making way for a battered pickup that could have been collecting salvage, puttering up to the curb of Geneva Avenue. By nightfall, at least 17,130 people congregated at the Cow Palace, the historic concert arena on the outskirts of the Bay City. This, we are positive, is absolutely nothing compared to what the Cow Palace will be like thi s evening. And the police have their hands full trying to keep the street clear.

Hundreds of people, mostly girls as you can see, have massed here behind ropes which have been put up by the police. An unidentified TV newsman, incredulous, reported live from a nearby hotel: The streets in San Francisco were already getting unruly though it was still only afternoon on Wednesday, August 19, 1964. We were in and out of that little room in 60 seconds to get this picture.” Everybody thought we were with the British Broadcasting Corporation. Says Bob Tucker, “I had those jackets made up for the tour. Paul, Sammy, Bill English (vocalist), Reggie, and Bubba.

G string try on