When Memphis’ Bill Black Combo Joined The Beatles’ First U.S. Tour

Memphian Bob Tucker not only directed the Bill Black Combo, but took rare photos of the Fab Four as they conquered America.

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The streets in San Francisco were already getting unruly though it was still only afternoon on Wednesday, August 19, 1964. Hearts quickened with anticipation. An unidentified TV newsman, incredulous, reported live from a nearby hotel:

Hundreds of people, mostly girls as you can see, have massed here behind ropes which have been put up by the police. And the police have their hands full trying to keep the street clear. It’s not an easy task. This, we are positive, is absolutely nothing compared to what the Cow Palace will be like this evening.

He was right. By nightfall, at least 17,130 people congregated at the Cow Palace, the historic concert arena on the outskirts of the Bay City. 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. 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.

“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. “We pulled up and I said, ‘We’re here for the tour!’”

And that is how one arrives to play a Beatles concert, Memphis-style. Indeed, Bill Black’s Combo, the band Tucker directed, epitomized the Bluff City’s unique blend of hip and square, Black and white, bluesy cool and cornball soul, that was still making waves long after Elvis Presley’s rise and partial fall. Bill Black himself, the band’s namesake, didn’t even need to show up. He made them groovy by proxy, having played bass with Presley and going on to found a band that topped the R&B charts multiple times since 1959, an unusual feat for a white group. Now, Black’s health had rendered him unfit for touring (he would die of a brain tumor the following year). Tucker, who moved to Memphis after his Arkansas group, The Tarantulas, released a single on Atlantic Records in 1961, was leading Bill Black’s Combo on the greatest journey of their lives: opening for The Beatles on their first U.S. tour.

“I thought, here we are, a bunch of rock-and-roll hillbillies from Memphis, and these guys are here to listen. I know they didn’t come here to hear us, but they’re sure going to!” — Bob Tucker

The Cow Palace wasn’t exactly The Beatles’ first rodeo. By August, they had already conquered America via two appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, a couple of live performances, and six number-one singles. After a triumphant world tour, the group stopped in Liverpool for the July premiere of their film, A Hard Day’s Night, then played another smattering of home concerts and started work on their next album.

Now this tour, an ambitious hopscotch of 29 shows across North America over a month, was to be the glorious and profitable culmination of that ascendance, and the full lineup of entertainment was assembled. “I got a call from Bill’s manager in New York,” Tucker recalls. “And he said, ‘I’ve got this tour I can put you guys on a big tour. It’s a group called The Beatles. I said, ‘Hell, who are they?’ You have to understand, there were a lot of Sundays when we were on the road. We didn’t watch Ed Sullivan. We were into Southern rock-and-roll.

“The manager said, ‘Well, they’re very big. They’re busting wide open. But there’s one catch: The Beatles want you on it, but we’ve got an agent up here packaging the thing, and we’re gonna have to pay this son of a bitch off to get it.’ So I go down to Western Union on Third Street and send $2,000 to New York. Three hours later he called me and said, ‘You’re now the opening act on The Beatles’ tour!’”

If Tucker knew how to grease the wheels, he was also cheap. Balking at the cost of flights from Memphis to San Francisco, he piled the band into a Greyhound at $50 a man, and 55 hours later they found themselves at a Bay Area bus stop cab stand with a small mountain of music gear and suitcases.

“They said, ‘You’re gonna need six or eight cabs with all that.’ Well, there was an older Black fella standing there, listening to all this, and he came up to me and said, ‘I’ve got a pickup truck and I’ll carry all your equipment for $25.’ I said, ‘Well get that damn truck around here!’”

Once inside the Cow Palace, they got down to business. Not only would they play their combo’s hits, they’d back the other opening artists for the duration of the tour. “We got in there and the Righteous Brothers and Jackie DeShannon and a vocal group, the Exciters, were all there. We were down to play a few tunes with them every night. Of course, the show was a sell-out. Then, about 15 minutes before the show, a symphony orchestra starts playing. Fifty pieces! I thought, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Well, the building had an agreement with the musicians’ union: If they had a show in there, they had to have so many pieces perform. So hell, they played Beethoven or something.”

Beethoven having been duly rolled over, a local DJ then stepped out to rile up the crowd. “So they come out,” says Tucker, setting the scene. “And they yelled, ‘Are you ready for the Beatles??’

“People screamed, ‘Yeah!!!!’

“‘Are you ready for Paul, Ringo, George, and John??’

“‘Yeah!!!’

“‘Well — here’s the Bill Black Combo!!!’” Tucker laughs. “I tell you, it was brutal, man!”

Seasoned touring pros all, the combo nonetheless plowed through their set, playing the two-minute minimalist instrumental masterpieces they were known for, “Smokie” and “White Silver Sands,” plus some featuring guest vocalist Bill English, then backing their fellow opening artists, all the while wondering who could actually hear them.“There was no sound reinforcement in 1964,” says Tucker. “No big PAs. We had good amplifiers, but they weren’t built to play for 10,000 or 20,000 people. I don’t think anybody heard anything. I was playing bass, and maybe you could feel it for the first eight or ten rows, but I don’t think anybody heard it. And hell, when The Beatles came on, no one could hear it anyway because everybody was screaming. Screaming like crazy.”

Journalist Larry Kane was traveling with the tour and describes “teenagers stomping their feet on the ground, creating a rumble that resembled thunderclaps. Jackie DeShannon, a mere 20 years old, animated and excited, was trying to sing over the din. Her voice was drowned out in a sea of noise ... ‘We want The Beatles! We want The Beatles!’”

Teen screams were the common denominator of every night, with many shows growing so manic that The Beatles feared for their safety. Producer George Martin, who oversaw live recordings four days into the tour that would later be released as The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, said the process was “like putting a microphone by the end of a 747 jet,” such was the intensity of the ritual shrieking. Tucker, for his part, took it in stride. “Anyway,” he shrugs, “we adjusted to it.”

While all the opening acts together played an hour, The Beatles typically played the same 12 songs each night in a set lasting less than 30 minutes. Then came a mad dash, often involving limousines used as decoys while an ambulance carted away the Fab Four to an American Electra turboprop plane that all the artists shared as they flew from show to show. And if each city loomed ahead ominously with the promise of more unrestrained fan mania, the plane was a refuge of calm and quiet where the musicians could mingle.

As Tucker describes it, “The plane seated probably 100 or more, but we only had about 25 or 30 people. And three stewardesses. They would serve steak or lobster, or some high-class entrée, with any kind of liquor or wine you wanted. I mean, it was first-class. The Beatles had a lounge in the back, kind of a wraparound thing. They were back there most of the time, but they were very receptive to us going back and visiting if we wanted to.”

In his book, A Ticket to Ride: Inside The Beatles’ 1964 Tour That Changed the World, Kane describes the freer and easier atmosphere of life on the plane: “Jackie DeShannon was friendly with The Beatles, making her way up and down the aisles with regularity. Clarence Frogman Henry [who replaced the Righteous Brothers later in the tour] was a regular aisle walker. Of The Beatles, John and Ringo were the ones who regularly left the rear and walked the plane, often sitting down in a vacant seat and chatting with reporters and opening-act musicians.”

It was but one way that Memphis music affected The Beatles. While their love of Carl Perkins, Bill Justis, and Elvis is well-documented, Tucker himself guided them to some classic deep cuts when they were decamped at Key West, waiting out Hurricane Dora.

While Kane even describes the Fab Four working on “a song that would later become ‘Eight Days a Week,’” the hours were typically filled more with reading (comics, in Ringo’s case) or games. “I’ve got a Monopoly board with British properties on it, that they played on a lot,” recalls Tucker. But when conversation did flow, it could have some important musical repercussions. As Tucker remembers it, “I know Harrison and McCartney picked up on Reggie real quick. They said, ‘This guy is making chords we don’t know.’ And George sought out Reggie to talk about guitar playing.”

“Reggie,” of course, would be the late Reggie Young, an original member of the Bill Black Combo who proved to be one of the greatest guitarists ever to emerge from the Memphis scene, eventually playing on countless hits from Hi Records and American Sound Studio, and later touring with the Highwaymen and Waylon Jennings. The USA Hit Parade blog quotes Young as saying, “George asked me, because I’m a blues player, ‘How do you bend and stretch your strings like that?’ I told him, ‘You have to have light-gauge strings.’”

Tucker remembers that Young used a trick of the trade that was a hallmark of Memphis guitarists. “Reggie wired his guitar different than a lot of people. He threw out the big E string at the top of the guitar, put a banjo string down there for the little E string, and moved every string up; that made the B string become an unwound G string.” In an era when all G strings were bulkier and wound like the heavy lower strings, having a thin, smooth steel G instead made for much easier bending.

It was but one way that Memphis music affected the Beatles. While their love of Carl Perkins, Bill Justis, and Elvis is well-documented, Tucker himself guided them to some classic deep cuts when they were decamped at Key West, waiting out Hurricane Dora.

“Malcolm Evans, the road manager, called me and said, ‘Look, Paul and Ringo are bored as hell. Can you go buy them some albums?’ They gave me five or six hundred dollars. So I found a record store in Key West and bought everything I thought they might like. I brought them back to the room, they got out this record player, and they’d put an album on, listen to a cut, and then just sail it across the room like a Frisbee. But when they got to the Memphis stuff — Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis — they listened to every cut.”

“There was no sound reinforcement in 1964. No big PAs. We had good amplifiers, but they weren’t built to play for 10,000 or 20,000 people. I don’t think anybody heard anything.” — Bob Tucker

Not all musical exchanges were as fruitful, however. Also in Key West, “We were the only ones in the motel,” Tucker recalls. “They had a lounge with a piano, drums, and everything. That afternoon, I saw The Beatles were in there, kicking around. So I said, ‘Let me sing one with you guys. Let’s do this! Okay,’ I said, ‘We’re gonna do ‘Memphis’ in the key of G. Let’s get it!’ And Ringo goes off on some tangent, like we’re in the Congo or something, and McCartney’s on piano. I don’t remember Harrison being there. Anyway, we did ‘Memphis,’ and I said, ‘Guys, this is the worst damn band I ever saw.’ And Lennon said, ‘Well, you’re not high on our list of vocalists, either!’”

One vocalist who was high on their list, in every sense, was Bob Dylan, who famously got them high for the first time while visiting the group at New York’s Delmonico Hotel on August 28th. Bill Black’s Combo had played the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium with them that night, but were otherwise oblivious to the lofty history that was being made in The Beatles’ suite afterwards. Nonetheless, one member of the combo would soon play a pivotal role in helping The Beatles further touch the green, green grass of home.

But first, the tour raged on towards the final show in Dallas on September 18th. (The Beatles played an additional charity show in New York two days later before returning to England, but without the supporting acts.) Still less than a year after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination there, Dallas held a particular dread for The Beatles, according to Larry Kane, a dread exacerbated by (groundless) bomb threats, nationwide racial tensions, and the ever-present threat of unhinged crowds.

Nevertheless, a sense of celebration informed the final hours of the trans-Atlantic camaraderie between The Beatles and their support acts. “We were in Dallas,” says Tucker, “and they had Neiman Marcus bring a truckload of stuff over, so they could buy stuff for their wives and girlfriends back home. My girlfriend had flown in for the show and they called and said, ‘Is your girlfriend here? Can she come up here and try on some of this stuff?’ She went up there and tried on furs and things for them. And Neiman Marcus was also where they bought the money clips.” Personalized with the initials of each musician who’d opened the tour, the gold money clips presented by The Beatles served as a final thank-you for a tour well done. But there was still one last exchange to come.

As it turned out, the president of the airline that provided the plane for The Beatles knew of a dude ranch in southern Missouri. As the supporting artists parted ways, arrangements were made to land the group in nearby Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, and from there they were driven to Pigman Ranch. While they cavorted on horses and otherwise depressurized, one member of Bill Black’s Combo wended his way back home to Memphis, a man on a mission.

“Clarice ‘Bubba’ Vernon played keyboards with us,” Tucker recalls. “Everybody knew him as Bubba. Well, The Beatles smoked marijuana, when we could get it to them. And after the Dallas show, they got a big order from Memphis delivered personally by Bubba. He got a bus home to Memphis and bought a load of grass for them, then met their plane in Walnut Ridge and delivered the goods.”

Knowing the role of such mind-bending in The Beatles’ future music, Bubba may well have had as much impact as Reggie Young telling George how to bend guitar strings. And if Bob Dylan is celebrated as the first to get The Beatles high, as the story goes, then surely Bubba has earned his place in history as the one who first helped The Beatles score.

The little band from Liverpool would thus return home with well-stocked larders, imbued with the dank aromas of Memphis, and go from success to success, never again attempting anything as grueling as the ’64 tour. Tucker and Bill Black’s Combo, for their part, would dip into greater obscurity as the 1960s wore on. “We left Hi Records when Bill died, and signed a deal with Columbia. We were cutting shit like cover versions of ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.’ And we cut ’em pretty damn well, but it didn’t sell.”

Still, the combo found new fortunes on the country market in the ’70s, and, more important, served as a through line of Memphis music from Elvis onward. “Bill Black’s Combo was like a sports franchise,” reflects Tucker. “All of Memphis was our taxi squad. You’d have a very hard time finding musicians from the late ’50s through the early ’70s that didn’t play at least one gig with the Bill Black Combo. We’re almost like a rite of passage. They may have only played one or two gigs, but they’ll be quick to tell you when they mention their credentials that they did their stint.”

Bob Tucker himself got a day gig, teaching music business at the University of Memphis for 31 years, but he’s kept the band and the name active. Looking back on the 1964 tour, he offers one last thought: “I can remember playing in Las Vegas, and I looked out on the front row and there were Pat Boone and Liberace. And I thought, here we are, a bunch of rock-and-roll hillbillies from Memphis, and these guys are here to listen. I know they didn’t come here to hear us, but they’re sure going to!”

Thanks to Robert Gordon for information on Reggie Young.