The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl is a live album by the Beatles, released in May 1977, featuring songs compiled from three performances recorded at the Hollywood Bowl in August 1964 and August 1965. The album was released by Capitol Records in the United States and Canada and on the Parlophone label in the United Kingdom. It was the band's first official live recording. A remixed, remastered, and expanded version of the album, retitled Live at the Hollywood Bowl, was released on 9 September 2016, on CD for the first time, to coincide with the release of the documentary film The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, directed by Ron Howard. Background Capitol Records considered recording the Beatles' February 1964 concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, but it could not get the necessary approval from the American Federation of Musicians. Six months later, KRLA DJ Bob Eubanks booked the band's performance of 23 August at the Hollywood Bowl, in Los Angeles, where Capitol recorded their performance with the aim of releasing a live album in America. The sound quality of the tapes proved to be inadequate for commercial release, however, although Capitol used a 48-second excerpt of "Twist and Shout" from the concert on the 1964 documentary album The Beatles' Story. High-quality black-and-white film of the 1964 show was also made and preserved. Excerpts of "All My Loving" and "She Loves You" from the 23 August 1964 performance appeared in The Beatles Anthology documentary series (1995). When the Beatles returned to the Hollywood Bowl a year later, during their 1965 American tour, Capitol recorded two performances by the group at the same venue. The sound quality of the 1965 recordings was equally disappointing. The Beatles were among the few major recording artists of the 1960s not to have issued a live album. Consequently, among Beatles fans, pent-up demand for a concert album continued to build. John Lennon set off a minor frenzy when, in a 1971 Rolling Stone interview, he incorrectly identified an obscure Italian compilation album, The Beatles in Italy, as a live recording ("There's one in Italy apparently, that somebody recorded there"). Despite the obvious demand for a live album, the tapes from the three Hollywood Bowl performances lay untouched in a Capitol vault. In 1971, after American record producer Phil Spector's salvaging of the Get Back tapes, which was released as the group's Let It Be album,