By Estelle Johnson
Special correspondent to the Cedar Falls News Hub
It sounds fabulous and it is.
In Cedar Falls, Iowa, you can hear many of your favorite Beatles hits live on Friday night.
No, not on the radio, you will get a chance to experience the music of the Fab Four during the Sturgis Falls festival.
The Grammy-nominated Beatles cover band, Liverpool Legends, will be headlining the 49th edition of the town’s annual festival at the main stage on Second and Main streets at 10 p.m. on June 27.
The group has won international fame with their performances. Their Facebook page, for instance, has 174,000 followers.
In town, they will perform a “theatre style show,” their co-founder, Marty Scott, told me in a recent Zoom interview.
How Liverpool Legends came together
It all happened serendipitously, when shortly after the passing of George Harrison on Nov. 29, 2001, at the age of 58, his sister, Louise Harrison attended a Beatles convention. There, she heard Marty Scott, Chicago musician, sing a George Harrison song and asked the organizer to introduce them.
As Scott remembers it, Louise Harrison told him she felt a connection with him and the two spent a lot of time together that first week.
“I don’t know, she saw something in me that she felt like we were supposed to be in each other’s lives,” Scott said. “It was like we were supposed to be in each other’s lives.”
Scott recalls how that first meeting changed the course of his life.
“It just kind of turned my life upside down,” he said.
A week later, Louise Harrison introduced Scott to Paul McCartney, and sitting between the two of them on a couch, he thought, “Man, this is weird.”
It was also life-changing.
Harrison and Scott then started working together over the next few years to pick the rest of the members of Liverpool Legends, a reference to the English city where the Beatles originated.
The idea was to come up with a tribute band that would keep alive the legacy of the Beatles by recreating the music and the characters of the musicians in the original band.
“We found four likely characters and we put Legends together from that and we ended up opening our own theatre in this town called Branson, Missouri,” he said. “It kind of looked like a yellow submarine.”
Performing 10 months out of the year at the theatre, doing five shows a week, the band learned how to work together before they started touring.
To be closer to the band, Louise Harrison moved to Branson and became a part of the show.
“She told us she wanted to hang out with the band and not just sit at home,” Scott said. “It’s a pretty unique story, it was quite a surreal thing.”
Not only did Louise Harrison narrate the show and chat with the audience during the intermissions, but she sang along on stage with Liverpool Legends, serving as a connection between the original and the tribute bands.
When Louise Harrison passed away on Jan. 29, 2023, at the age of 91, Liverpool Legends continued to keep her voice as part of the performances.
“She narrates the show on video, so she’s still a big part of us,” Scott said.
Playing their parts
When the tribute band hops on the main stage in Cedar Falls on Friday night, Beatles fans would see these five band members.
Joe Manrique, an Atlanta musician, plays guitar as John Lennon in the original group.
Neil Candelora, who has been playing guitar since he was 8 years old, acts as Paul McCartney. He took the impersonation to another level by learning how to play his bass guitar left-handed, just like McCartney did.
Behind the drums as Ringo Starr is Reagan Kretz. He joined the band in 2023, after impressing its members with his rendition of “Yellow Submarine,” according to myRGV.com.
In the group, Scott plays the guitar as George Harrison. He also takes care of such logistics as booking shows and finding transportation for the band, not to mention working with organizers in Cedar Falls and helping this writer with this story.
Unlike the Beatles lineup, the tribute band features a fifth musician, Bob Dobro, who plays keyboards. He may not represent a specific member of the Fab Four, but he is an essential addition to Legends, as Sturgis Falls music lovers are sure to discover during the concert.
The uniqueness of the group comes not just from the sound of the music they perform but also from re-creating the characters of the Beatles.
“It’s not just singing the songs, which is hard to do, you know, people think Beatles music might be easy, and it might be easy to strum it on a guitar and sing a song, but you’re trying to do it right. It’s really difficult,” Scott said. “Those guys (The Beatles) were really good singers and really good guitar players and good bass players and so we have to do all that, but then we also have to look at a certain way.”
Notable achievements
The group has traveled around the world playing Beatles music.
In 2014 and 2017, they headlined at the Rose Bowl stadium, the annual college football game that takes place on New Year’s Day in Pasadena, California.
One of their most notable appearances was at Carnegie Hall in New York 2016, which is particularly significant as The Beatles performed on the same stage in 1964.
This past week, Liverpool Legends were listed on Pollstar’s Live 75 chart – making them among the top 75 touring acts in the world.
The band was placed in spot 71. This chart features popular artists, including pop music icon Beyoncé, and popular country musician Kenny Chesney.
The group earned the prestigious Travelers’ Choice Award by TripAdvisor in 2023, which made them part of the top 10% of attractions worldwide.
Another highlight of the group’s career is performing Lennon’s hit “Imagine” at Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City, in front of 10,000 fans. They will be playing the same song for Sturgis Falls enjoyers on Friday.
On April 8, 2024, as the world prepared to view the solar eclipse, the group performed at a three-day festival called “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” in Russellville, Arkansas, and their performance, carried live on cable TV, reached 347 million households across the world, according to their Facebook page.
Speaking to a reporter on stage prior to that performance, Scott said this was the biggest stage they had played on so far.
“As soon as the sun goes in front of the moon, or vice versa, we’re going to play ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ because what else would you play?” Scott quipped.
What else would the group play in Cedar Falls?
Well, you’ve got to come and see for yourself.