My dad's popularity on the [KNX Sunset] radio brought other perks. I was a Beatlemaniac and on Sunday evening, February 9th, 1964, had watched their U.S. debut on The Ed Sullivan Show along with 73 million other people. My dad took black-and-white Polaroids of their performance off the televsion screen, which I cherished for decades. I saw all three of their Sullivan appearances, and their album Meet the Beatles was played nonstop at my schoolmake Pete Walker's make-out parties. I watched from the periphery as those progressive Encino girls gave long, soulful kisses to their steadies. I bought John Lennon's book In His Oen Write, which I found hysterically funny, and my cousin Sandra and I went to see A Hard Day's Night at the Pix Theater on Hollywood Boulevard three times in one day because the audience kept screaming through the movie and we couldn't make out all the dialogue..

In August 1964 the Beatles were going to play the Hollywood Bowl. I felt I had to see them live and in person. My dad mentioned on his radio show that his son longed to see the Beatles at the Bowl and if any listener had extra tickets for the soldout show he'd buy them. A woman called KNX and said she had four tickets that she couldn't use. The tickets were $5.50 each, and my dad, my mom, my Aunt Bunny and I were witnesses to the wild abandon of eighteen thousand young people and adults. It was a wonderful madness. To me, selfishly relishing the electric atmosphere of the Bowl full of Beatles, I realized there was definitely a plus side to my dad's celebrity. I temporarily forgot the discomfort I usually felt about my dad's fame..

Two summers later, my dad would make a call to the Wallach Brothers, who were only slightly more than casual acquaintances. One brother was an executive with Capitol Records and the other ran the most successful record store chain in Los Angeles, Wallach's Music City. The result of that phone call had Dave Arnoff and me sitting in the first row behind the visitors' dugout at Dodger Stadium while out pals the Beatles took the stage up at second base. This concert turned out to be their penultimate live show. Arnoff and I sat as close to them as one could get in a stadium rock show. Forty-five thousand of us hung on every note, not realizing that the closest we'd ever get to seeing the Beatles live again would be the Let It Be film of their impromptu jam from the rooftop of Apple Records in London in January 1969. And that was it. Though there were still several brilliant records to come, the innocent joy that was Beatlemania was unofficially over. I felt a real sense of loss thinking I'd never see those carefree moptops again.

-- from Robert Crane's book Crane: Sex, Celebrity, and My Father's Unsolved Murder.