The Beatles fans' screams. 'Live Beatles' and 'Studio Beatles' had become entirely different beasts." The band's concert at San Francisco's Candlestick Park on 29 August was their last commercial concert. It marked the end of a four-year period dominated by almost nonstop touring that included over 1,400 concert appearances internationally. Freed from the burden of touring, the Beatles embraced an increasingly experimental approach as they recorded "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", beginning in late November 1966. According to engineer Geoff Emerick, the album's recording took over 700 hours. He recalled the band's insistence "that everything on "Sgt. Pepper" had to be
The Beatles' 1966 tour of Germany, Japan and the Philippines have regularly toured the country since the late 1980s. Following the controversy surrounding the Nippon Budokan's first hosting of a rock concert in 1966, the hall has become the main venue for acts touring Japan. Writing in "The Japan Times" in 2016, Steve McClure said that the Beatles' performances at the hall had "conferred on it a quasi-sacred status in rock mythology". Among the fans who saw the Beatles perform there were future Japanese music-industry executives Aki Tanaka and Kei Ishizaka. Tanaka describes the concerts as "a social phenomenon" and credits them with inspiring "the birth of a real Japanese