A new exhibition commemorating the 60th anniversary of The Beatles’ arrival in Canada opened July 10 at Calgary’s National Music Centre (NMC) – our version of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame – and includes everything from a rare copy of the infamous Yesterday and Today “butcher” album cover to photos, posters, films and ticket stubs.
From Me To You: The Beatles in Canada 1964-1966 – which runs until January 5, 2025 – was curated by Toronto-based Beatles historian Piers Hemmingsen, 69, author of the 2016 book The Beatles in Canada: The Origins of Beatlemania, who loaned much of his personal collection to the fifth floor exhibit.
Accessible with paid admission to NMC’s Studio Bell, the displays look at the short span in the group’s ten-year existence that brought John, Paul, George and Ringo to Canada for a total of nine concerts – six at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, one at Vancouver’s Empire Stadium and two at the Montreal Forum – along with the radio breakthroughs, the mania, fan clubs and more.
Canada, it turns out, was ahead of our neighbours to the south when it came to the Fab Four. A transplanted Brit named Paul White at Capitol Records of Canada released The Beatles’ Love Me Do on Feb. 18, 1963 – a full year before John, Paul, George and Ringo first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in America. London, Ont.-based radio station CFPL played that single and the next two, Please Please Me and From Me To You, but it wasn’t until She Loves You, released in September 1963, that the Beatles landed their first Canadian chart-topping hit. In November of that year, White released the album Beatlemania! With The Beatles. It sold a reported 300,000 copies out of the gate. They had not yet broken in the U.S.
By 1964, when The Beatles came to Canada, Capitol presented them with an award for over one million records sold.
Hemmingsen, who was born in Salisbury, England, has signed some Beatles In Canada posters for the gift shop and is awaiting the second edition of his book. “I’m in the process of coming up with a partner book, The Evolution, which goes from ’64 to ’70,” he told Zoomer ahead of the opening of the exhibit. Full of detailed stories, he spoke about the exhibit, the impact the Beatles made on Canada and how the Beatles broke through here before hitting it big in America.
KAREN BLISS: Why have the Beatles, a group that was only together for a decade, had such a cultural impact?
PIERS HEMMINGSEN: The music has lasted the way that classical music by Beethoven [has] … In Liverpool this month, there’s a symposium on the Beatles, people from universities and colleges all over the world convening to present papers about not just their music, but about their impact on the world.
KB: Did you attend any of the Beatles concerts?
PH: Sadly not. I mean, if you looked at the numbers, there were 20,000 in Vancouver, 35,000 in Toronto, and about 30,000 in Montreal. So not even 100,000 kids were lucky enough to see the Beatles.
KB: The past year Dick “The Tall One” Williams passed away. He was among the first Canadian DJs to play the Beatles on air, in 1963. What were some of the other firsts for Canada?
PH: We had the first Capitol single, Love Me Do, in February of ‘63. We had the first Capitol album, Beatlemania, in November of ‘63. Paul White had two masters. He had Los Angeles and he had EMI in England. He was able to issue records for the Canadian market that were tailored more for a Commonwealth country.
Kids could read about the Beatles in magazines here. They didn’t see them on television until Ed Sullivan, but the Toronto Daily Star was one of the first papers to publish a picture of the Beatles on stage in Sweden. That came at the end of October ’63.
The Montreal Gazette, Montreal Daily Star, the Montreal Star, Ottawa Journal – they all published pictures of the Beatles in late October of ’63. The album shipped about 50,000 units before Christmas. My brother got one of them. She Loves You went to No. 1 in Canada just before Christmas of ‘63.
KB: Tell us about some of the cool items in this exhibit?
PH: A lot of what comes from my collection has to do with the story of how the Beatles got going in Canada. When I started the project more than a quarter of a century ago, the question to be answered was: “why did Canada adopt the Beatles before the U.S. did?”
So, what I try to do [in the NMC exhibit] is to visually portray the story of the people who were part of creating the early stages of Beatlemania, getting the records produced here, playing the music on the radio. I’ve tried to highlight those people, whether it was Paul White or Sandy Gardiner at the Ottawa Journal, who was the first journalist in Canada to write a review of a Beatles record in a newspaper in March of ’63.
Then, of course, we have the fan clubs. Without the fan clubs, a lot of people wouldn’t have adopted the Beatles early in ’63. So, we have a great interview with the founder of the Ontario Beatles fan club, Trudy Medcalf. There’s a little section about the fan clubs.
KB: What are some of the most valuable pieces in this exhibit?
PH: We have pictures that I think are incredible, all taken in Canada, whether the Beatles are receiving awards or they’re on stage in colour. I love the one of the Beatles in colour with Miss Canada, where she’s wearing the red and white.
The most valuable item, I guess, would be the “butcher” cover, which is on loan from a collector [Bruce Spizer] in the U.S. That was Paul White’s sample butcher cover. In 1966, they wanted to make a statement about how Capitol Records would take their British albums and chop them up and make their fewer tracks and they get more albums, more sales. Well, [the Beatles] posed in butcher smocks with cut up meat and cut up dolls. They put that as a cover of an album in ‘66 and quickly it had to be withdrawn and destroyed. Well, a couple survived. Paul White had one. It’s since been sold to a collector in the U.S. I don’t even know what that would be worth.
We have the British copy of Love Me Do that Ray Sonin played on CFRB in 1962 before the record was released in Canada.
All kinds of newspaper articles, pictures, and of course, the Beatle bar with all the original merchandise that Eaton’s sold in its Beatle bar in the summer of ’64, and the Beatle bedroom.
We’ve got films running here. There is Canadian footage of wax Beatles, where they flew four wax Beatles over from Madame Tussauds in England and they were on display at Eaton’s across Canada and at wax museums. And if you couldn’t get a ticket to see the Beatles, you’d go and hug one of these wax Beatles in Montreal, have your picture taken. And I found out through my research, one or two of those wax Beatles that were here in Canada in ‘64 and ‘65, made it to the cover of Sgt. Pepper.
KB: This must be very exciting for you to have an exhibit with a national scope.
PH: Montreal did an exhibit back in 2014, but it really was just focused on Montreal. So this is the first time we have something that tells a story, albeit it’s ’64 to ’66. But those are the years they came to Canada. Those are the years that kids could see the Beatles on stage. You know, ‘66 was the third pass for the Beatles through Toronto, and it didn’t sell out. The afternoon show didn’t sell out. The evening show didn’t sell out. They had to do a poster. We actually have the poster for that ‘66 show. The Animals were coming, the Stones were coming the same time, the Supremes, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Hermits Hermits. “I’ll see the Beatles next year.“ Well, there was no next year. That was it. So on the evening of Tuesday, August the 17th, 1966, the Beatles played at Maple Leaf Gardens for the last time. They never came back.
From Me to You: The Beatles in Canada 1964-1966 runs from July 10, 2024 to January 5, 2025 at the National Music Centre. Visit the official website for more information and ticket prices.
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