Sir Paul McCartney will be in D.C. tonight, filling the Verizon Center with some sweet, sweet music.
He’s here on his “One on One” tour, and is scheduled to perform two shows in D.C. (tonight and tomorrow night). Based on the concert’s early reviews alone, it’ll be a fantastic night.
All this Beatles talk has made us reminisce, particularly on the important role the District of Columbia had in the band’s British Invasion.
The Beatles’ first ever stateside concert was here.
After performing on the Ed Sullivan Show in New York City, the famous four traveled to Washington, D.C. by train. On February 11, 1964, they performed to a packed crowd (pictured above) at the Washington Coliseum, a now abandoned building converted into a parking lot.
McCartney told the Washington Post in 2010 that performing in America for the first time was incredible: “We’d seen a lot of British stars come back from America with their tails between their legs. We made a promise to ourselves to not go until we had a No. 1. We were so excited to be madly popular in America, which was to us the Holy Grail because every shred of music we ever loved came from there. It was euphoric, and now we were heading to Washington on the train, which was very glamorous. And to cap it off, there was that beautiful snow. … It was terrific. We’d been used to it in smaller doses. But in our minds, it’s only right that it should get bigger. And where better for it than America, where everything is bigger? It was very exciting, just having that many people — predominantly girls, all screaming.”
The supergroup played around a dozen songs, and tickets were $4 each. Oh, how we wish that was the same now. Here’s a cool video about the historical moment:
