He’s not being paranoid. Right before their shows in Dallas and Las Vegas, the band is told that someone phoned in a bomb threat. Yet when John is performing, the stage is his sanctuary. “I feel safe as long as I’m plugged in,” he tells a reporter. “I don’t feel as though they’ll get me.”

The Beatles travel with an entourage, including British and American reporters. To pass the time on flights, the boys play poker and Monopoly. Art Schreiber, senior correspondent for the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company, says “John always got really involved and excited. He always stood up to throw the dice.”

But Schreiber also picks up on a darker current in John, one that director Richard Lester had observed on the set of A Hard Day’s Night. “I noticed this quality he had of standing outside every situation and noting the vulnerabilities of everyone, including myself,” Lester remarks. “He was always watching.”

“What really surprised me was what a helluva lot John already knew about this country,” Schreiber—whose longtime beat was politics, not entertainment—later says about Lennon. “The thing he couldn’t understand was the violence…the murder of Kennedy, the police brutality against innocent marchers in the South, the guns he saw being carried everywhere. I could see the soul of an activist building up in him.”

An activist, yes—but not a diplomat. John especially chafed at expectations that the group appear on behalf of charitable causes. “I always hated all the social things,” John says. “All the horrible events and presentations we had to go to. All false.” At a cocktail party at the British embassy in DC, he became irate over the imperious way the diplomats acted. “These people have no bloody manners,” he groused.

On August 23, 1964, they play the Hollywood Bowl. Months before, advance tickets had sold out in less than four hours. The amphitheater, with its white shell-shaped roof, dates to the golden age of Hollywood and is one of America’s most important live-music venues.

John approves of it, noting, “We could be heard in a place like the Hollywood Bowl, even though the crowd was wild: good acoustics.”

Crowd noise is a very real obstacle for George Martin, who is recording the concert (unreleased until 1977) for Capitol Records. Dealing with the screams from thousands of Beatles fans was like “putting a microphone at the tail end of a 747 jet,” Martin says.

Ringo develops his own technique. “I just had to hang on to the backbeat all the time to keep everybody together” over the screams. “I used to have to follow their three bums wiggling to see where we were in the song.”