Why did The Beatles stop playing their old music?

@ World Famous Neffer @Dr Robert ... great responses from both.

I just wanted to add that the decision to stop touring (by mutual agreement between the 4) was considered too risky for the Beatles, especially by critics. The Beatles were at the height of his career, but even so they risked. They preferred to innovate and be experimentalists.

Therefore born Sargent Pepper (Considered by critics as the best album of all time)

At the time, the competition between the bands was very significant, every one wanted to innovate more than the other.

It is no coincidence that the 60s was considered the golden age for music.

The Beatles loved performing live in the early days, but living under the microscope of being Beatles made traveling as a band very difficult. The sound equipment was nowhere near the sophistication that was to come - so they could barely hear themselves play because of the screaming fans.

The creativity level was always so high with these guys - John, Paul and George were all great song writers in their own right - so dwelling on the old stuff wasn't even necessary. They produced so much material in such a short period of time, but it probably burned them out being together constantly. Finally they had to part ways, mostly due to creative differences; they were headed in different directions musically and personally.

If they had stayed together as a band, no doubt they would be leaning on the old stuff like the Stones, the Who, etc. No one expects to hear another "Paint it Black" come from the Stones ever again - we're just amazed that they're still able to perform live.

Well, in my view, mainstream music back then was, by and large, simply heads and shoulders above what I'm hearing from the current generation. Don't get me wrong: I'm not suggesting that there wasn't plenty of mediocre and highly forgettable crap back then, nor am I making a blanket statement about every contemporary Top 40 artist - I do realize I'm painting with broad strokes here. But as a general rule, I'd say that pop music in the last 15 to 20 years has become borderline unlistenable at best. And even mediocre artists in those days at least did things like sing (without technological assistance, shall we say) and/or play instruments. That's more than can be said about a number of people these days - I'll refrain from disclosing names.

The Beatles played what people wanted to hear and that was their latest recordings, remember they stopped touring in 1966 after the US record burning several airlines got phone calls saying there would be trouble if they let the Beatles fly with them, that coupled with the fact that primitive touring equipment meant they couldn't play songs like Strawberry Fields live , Paul still plays the old Beatles songs on his tours.

They'd originally written songs like She Loves You and I Want to Hold Your Hand with a pop music audience in mind...and while they're good songs, they were written to sell records. By the time the records were sold and the Beatles became the most popular group, the band felt they could now expand their songwriting since they weren't limited anymore.

They started doing more of what they wanted to do, and if they played any concerts at all they wanted to take the time to show off their new songs as opposed to just doing the "same old, same old" which is what the concerts started to become like to them, anyway.

Yours is a good answer! Plus the older songs are the best ones (personal taste).

I also think they felt that their old songs were their true sound, and before they were just writing simple rock tunes. All the experimentation they did afterwards is what is considered their great contribution to the world and maybe that is why they are the most popular tunes even now.

Look that Paul is still playing the old songs in his tours (Hey Jude, Let it Be, I've Got a Feeling), and not the ones from the early stages.

They didn't tour NEARLY as long as the other classic bands. From '63 to '66, they mostly played the songs from the albums they were promoting. The constant screaming during shows and their prisoner-like stays in hotels lost them all enthusiasm for playing live.

However, Paul does play some of the older Beatle tunes when he tours.

You also have to take into account the fact that, in the early 60's, Rock'n'Roll music was considered a fad, given that it only appealed to teenagers (who would soon grow up and start listening to the same music their parents liked). Nobody could envision doing this for a living five years later, much less fifty. If you watch very early interviews with the bands from that period, you'll see John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend etc. talking about how long they think this will all last, and speculating on what they might do for a living when their music career is over. This was usually estimated as three to five years, although Lennon thought it might go on for as much as seven. In one interview, Roger Daltrey is speculating about going back to work at the sheet-metal plant once "the whole Who thing" is over.

Keep in mind, the person with the longest career in Rock'n'Roll music up to that time was Elvis, and they recognized that he was a special case, not the norm that they saw in themselves. Rock'n'Roll music itself had only existed for about ten years, so there was no blueprint for a long career. Given the fleeting nature of the business (or so they thought), it made perfect sense to heavily bias their shows toward their current material over their earlier songs. After all, "Please Please Me" was soooo two years ago, and there wasn't any sense in revisiting a history that at that point was expected never to exist.

Also, it was good business to promote this year's product (or given that The Beatles would release two or three albums and tour three or four times in any given year, this season's product). Brian Epstein had based his forecast of The Beatles' career arc on what had usually happened with other artists before. Therefore, he'd made a series of very bad business deals in the beginning, based on the current model for 1963. Could you envision a manager today signing a "lucrative" contract with a record company giving the artists one half penny per single and four pennies per album sold? Epstein did, and considered himself damn lucky to do so. They weren't making very much money in the first place, so he'd turned their lives into a non-stop machine of touring-recording-touring-TV appearances-touring-recording-touring in order to capitalize on their fleeting success.

Keep in mind also that Rock'n'Roll shows of the time were usually "package tours" like those promoted by Dick Clark. There would be no less than five artists playing, and in the case of The Motown Revue, as many as fifteen. The headliner might play four or five songs, but the supporting acts would play two (or in many cases, one). Nobody had played a half-hour show, let alone three or four.

Also, you do have to include the unprecedented amount of screaming from the Beatle audience (mostly teenage girls, so extremely piercing and shrill). For an estimation, the loudest parts of the audience on "Cheap Trick At Budokan" approximate the QUIET parts of a Beatles show. At the time, proper PA systems weren't necessary, so they hadn't been invented yet. The sound coming from the stage would be from the guitar amps themselves, with the vocals coming from the same system used to make announcements like: "now at bat for the Tigers, here comes number 6, Right Fielder Al Kaline!" The Beatles themselves couldn't hear what was going on, much less anyone else. It didn't matter what The Beatles played, so why not make Brian happy and push the new single? It was all going to end in another year or so anyway.

Yes, but if you see Paul McCartney now, he does play these old ones.

I suppose in those days it was better to move on and as you say, their new stuff was seen as just as good, if not better. They stopped playing live though because I think they felt they could never get it the same as the record which was recorded in the studio with all sorts of effects added and also in the latter years they felt that people couldn't hear them properly anyway.

I've seen him play Long tall sally, Till There Was You, I'll Follow The Sun etc, etc,, plus many of the old ones which they never recorded but used to sing in the early days.

This is true about the Beatles having a new style. They came out with styles that nobody had heard before, such as the overdrive effect, and the crown went MAD!!!

If you had a new trick like that, wouldn't you use it to its full potential?

:o)