Surrounded by a police detail, the Beatles file into the back of the armored van that will transport them to the Mid-South Coliseum. A member of their entourage remembers that “we had to lie down, because they thought snipers might shoot us.”

The Beatles take the stage at 4:00 p.m. and play an uneventful show.

During their second performance, George is singing the first verse of “If I Needed Someone” (on the Rubber Soul album in the UK, Yesterday and Today in America), when a loud popping noise—the sound a gun would make—rips through the concert hall.

“Every one of us,” John later recalls, “look[ed] at each other, because each thought it was the other that had been shot. It was that bad.”

When they get offstage, the band learns that two teenagers had lobbed a cherry bomb from the upper balcony.

A pair of teenage girls had smuggled their own contraband into the coliseum: a cassette recorder. In 2007, the “cherry bomb tape” surfaces. Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald reviews the recording, and the moment the Beatles react to the explosion, “the men of the moment blast off into double-time, Lennon positively flogging his rhythm guitar,” though a 1966 article from UPI notes that “the four performers didn’t bat an eye or miss a note” when a “cherry bomb went off with a loud report at the booted feet of drummer Ringo Starr.”

There are six more cities to play before the tour is complete. On August 21, contending with rainy conditions that caused the cancellation of the show at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field—“The only gig we ever missed!” says George—and impeded travel to St. Louis’s Busch Stadium, the band reaches its limit.

“After the gig,” says Paul, “I remember us getting in a big, empty steel-lined wagon, like a removal van. There was no furniture in there—nothing. We were sliding around trying to hold on to something, and at that moment everyone said, ‘Oh, this bloody touring lark—I’ve had it up to here, man.’”

When the band arrives in Los Angeles ahead of the August 28 show at the Hollywood Bowl, Capitol Records executive Ken Mansfield sees the stress on John’s face. “When I hung out with him years before, he had this carefree, lighthearted attitude, but in ’66, his mood was entirely different. He was struggling mightily to get out from the comments he made.”

John says of the cumulative effect of the backlash, “It was as if they were all in a big movie and we were the ones trapped in the middle of it.”

There is one last show—a thirty-minute set—to be played at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on Monday, August 29. An AP photographer captures conflicting signage—GOD SAVE THE BEATLES and JESUS LOVES YOU—DO THE BEATLES?—while one fan declares: LENNON SAVES.