Mystery photos of the Beatles’ last concert on display
An inveterate patron of junk stores and flea markets, Dave Seabury was rummaging through a box at a garage sale in San Pablo in 1986 when he came across an old photographic contact sheet with 72 images of the Beatles in performance.
“I knew it was a find,” recalls Seabury, a Bay Area musician, painter and sculptor of salvaged material who performs with a piquant array of local bands — among them Psychotic Pineapple, the Rock & Roll Adventure Kids and the Chuckleberries — while working days at the Presidio Trust running the recycling and refuse disposal operation.
Seabury bought that unsigned contact sheet, which had previously been purchased at the Berkeley Flea Market, for $1. He tucked it in his collection of photographs and posters and didn’t think much about it, other than it was cool. Some time later, he was looking at Jim Marshall’s famous pictures from the Beatles’ last live concert, at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on Aug. 29, 1966, when he realized they were wearing the same patterned shirts they have on in the tiny images on the contact sheet.
“It’s definitely from that last show,” says the 63-year-old Beatles lover and collector, who researched these images at length, consulting with experts like resident rock sage Joel Selvin and other mavens about the nature and provenance of the images.
By: Jesse Hamlin
Source: SFgate
