Buy your Beatles tickets now! Information at the bottom of the survey results in the omission of songs 41-60 on the July 25, 1966 WIXY-SIXTY Survey.
Check out those ticket prices! The Beatles Concert at Cleveland Municipal Stadium took place on August 14, 1966.
If you're from Cleveland, you know how massive that stadium was.
Think about this... the Cleveland 1966 could have been historic.
Cleveland Municipal Stadium had over 80,000 seats as it was built in hopes of landing the Olympics in the 1930s. The Cleveland Indians would eventually abandon League Park and make their home at the massive ball park.
Despite the large seating capacity, roughly 20,000 fans showed up, no thanks to the negative publicity due to John Lennon's misunderstood statement "We're more popular than Jesus now." The statement, made earlier in the year, wasn't published until just a few weeks before the Cleveland show.
Ticket sales practically stalled from that point forward.
The Cleveland show was heavily promoted in Pittsburgh in hopes of selling enough tickets for WIXY 1260 to break even.
If the show took place in 1965 at the stadium, it would have gone down in history as the largest Beatles concert ever. It didn't happen in 1965 due to Cleveland Mayor Ralph Locher banning all concerts due to the hysteria from a year before. Instead, the historic Beatles concert took place at Shea Stadium in New York. Cleveland could have topped that show!
What could have been.
Then again, with 20,000 screaming fans at Cleveland Municipal Stadium drowning out The Beatles performance, imagine what 80,000 screaming fans would have sounded like. The decibel level might match or exceed that of the crowd at Cleveland Browns games in the 1980s.
Opening for The Beatles on August 14, 1966 were The Remains (the greatest American band from the 1960s that never made it), Bobby Hebb, Cyrkle, and The Ronetts (minus Ronnie Spector).
For those wondering if songs 41-60 were on the back side of the survey, here's your answer.
Someone's gotta pay for the printing costs, so an advertisement for a killer Vic Dana album appears instead.
I was being sarcastic.
On the front side the survey shows the #1 song as "They're Coming To Take Me Away, A-Haa." The song was banned in many cities, but it got played enough in Cleveland to score the #1 spot.
#10 - Julie Monday's "Come Share The Good Times With Me" is one of those songs that was really big in Cleveland but failed to be a big national hit.
The Troggs have both sides of their ATCO single on the survey: "Wild Thing" at song #11 and "With a Girl Like You" at #31.
#40 - The Distant Cousins "She Ain't Lovin' You No More" became a big hit in Cleveland.