Somehow, yours portly ended up following the WordPress-powered website for the Buxton Museum and Art Gallery in Buxton, United Kingdom.  Apparently, the cool little museum is closed temporarily due to some structural damage to the build that houses their enigmatic collection, but it still maintains a fairly active blog, with posts about Death’s Heads Hawk Moths and their summer programs (featuring an artist called “Creeping Toad“).

They recently posted a fascinating little piece about The Beatles performing in Buxton twice in 1963, featuring black-and-white photographs from the Buxton Advertiser.  Attendees apparently sat on the floor, and girls who fainted were dragged to a changing room recuperate.  According to the piece, “This was one of the last small gigs they played before playing to over 50,000 people in Shea Stadium in 1965.”

Imagine seeing The Beatles in a packed concert hall in a midsize English town in the early 1960s, on the cusp of the group’s rise to superstardom.  It’s hard to grasp how different the world was at that time, although plenty of those attendees could still be alive and shaking today.  Indeed, I’m astonished Ringo and Paul McCartney are still hanging in there (not to mention The Rolling Stones).  The Museum’s piece indicates that at the first of the two 1963 shows, in April (the latter was in October), “it hadn’t been appreciated how big a success the group would go on to be.”  Still, girls were feigning swooning so they could get a tad closer to the foursome.

It’s also remarkable to me how close these events were to the end of the Second World War.  A mere eighteen years after the war, the world was already changing at a rapid pace.  I’ve been listening to a longform, multi-episode podcast about Jim Jones and the People’s Temple, the incredible work of Darryl Cooper, who recently garnered controversy (I still can’t quite ascertain why; the claim is that he’s a Holocaust denier, but I did not take that away from his interview with Carlson at all) when he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show last week.  The span of time from the end of the war to the rise of early 1960s radicalism is pretty shocking, but it makes sense when you consider there was a generation of young people looking for meaning and action in their lives, especially as they grew up in material comfort and hearing stories of their parents’ heroism during the War.

Regardless, there is something so visceral and cool about hearing a live band in a packed little concert hall, which (from the photos) appears to lack even a stage.  You get that kind of intimacy at open mic performances; imagine it with The Beatles.  Mind-blowing.

But even The Beatles had to start somewhere.  God Bless Buxton for letting the Fab Four play.