Sid Bernstein dies at 95; concert promoter booked Beatles concerts

Sid Bernstein, a music promoter who booked such top acts as Jimi Hendrix, Judy Garland and the Rolling Stones and hit the highest heights when he masterminded the Beatles’ historic concerts at Shea Stadium and Carnegie Hall, died Wednesday in his sleep at a New York hospital. He was 95.

A daughter, Casey Deutsch, cited no illness and said he died of natural causes.

For decades, the squat, floppy-haired Bernstein excelled like few others at being everywhere and knowing everybody. He worked with Garland, Duke Ellington and Ray Charles, promoted Dion, Bobby Darin and Chubby Checker and managed Esy Morales, the Rascals and Ornette Coleman. He was an early backer of ABBA, setting up the Swedish group’s first American appearances. He was behind one of the first rock benefit shows, the 1970 “Winter Festival for Peace” at Madison Square Garden, which featured Hendrix and Peter, Paul and Mary. And he helped revive Tony Bennett’s career with a 1962 show at Carnegie Hall.

A master of schmooze and schmaltz, Bernstein also had a studious side that led to his biggest break. He took a course on Western civilization at the New School for Social Research in New York that required students to read a British newspaper once a week. It was 1963, and the Beatles were just catching on in their native country.

“This was the right time to be reading an English newspaper,” he explained in a 2001 interview with the music publication NY Rock Confidential. “So here I am reading little stories about this group from Liverpool that is causing a lot of `hysteria.’ By the end of the course, I was so Beatle-ized by what I read, even though I did not hear a note, I said, ‘Gotta get ‘em.’ ”

As Bernstein recalled, he couldn’t get his agency interested in the group, so he handled the job himself. He tracked down Beatles manager Brian Epstein and convinced him that he could line up a gig at Carnegie Hall. The Beatles were still unknown in the U.S., and the price was cheap — $6,500 for two shows, a fraction of what Garland might have commanded. The promoter used his own money to pay Epstein, while officials at the classy Carnegie, where no rock stars had been permitted, apparently thought they had taken on a folk quartet. (The story has varied over the years.) The timing was perfect. By February 1964, Beatlemania had crossed over to the States, and the band was set to play on “The Ed Sullivan Show” just three days before the Carnegie concerts, guaranteeing maximum attention at minimum cost.

Once the Beatles hit, Bernstein was primed to get the bands that followed. He arranged shows for the Stones, the Animals and other British groups, while saving his biggest dreams for the Beatles. Everything for Bernstein was the latest and the greatest, but his word was never more golden than in 1965, when he landed the group at Shea Stadium, the idea given to him by a ticket manager at Carnegie Hall.

It was rock’s first major stadium concert and its all-time primal scream. With about 55,000 fans losing their voices and their minds on an August night, the show broke box-office records and likely some sound barriers. The New York Times described the scene as meeting the “classic Greek meaning of the word pandemonium — the region of all demons.”

The Beatles played again at Shea in 1966 but turned down $1 million from Bernstein to return in 1967, after they had given up touring.

Bernstein was the son of Jewish immigrants, born Aug. 12, 1918, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and raised in Harlem. He sneaked into the Apollo Theater as a boy, booked local acts in high school and, while studying journalism at Columbia University, ran a ballroom in Brooklyn.

At age 90, ever the promoter, he opened a Twitter account.

Bernstein and his wife, Geraldine Bernstein, were married for more than 40 years and had six children.

news.obits@latimes.com