Your usher at ‘Lion King?’ He really did meet the Beatles

By Jerry Fink

Monday, Sept. 14, 2009 | 5:59 p.m.

Barry Ferber owns a small piece of Beatles history.

The 65-year-old former disc jockey lays claim to being the first person to play the group’s music on the radio in his native Australia.

He was a 19-year-old announcer for radio station 3DB in Melbourne in 1963 when he began receiving tapes from a group out of Liverpool.

“Back in those days stations in Australia got tapes of interviews from artists in other countries and this one publicist in London sent me this interviews and intros for people like Gerry and the Pacemakers and Dusty Springfield,” says Ferber, who for the past five years has been an usher at the Mandalay Bay Theatre. “He kept sending me tapes (not records) of a group called the Beatles.

“I told him to quit sending me this stuff and he said they’re going to be big one day. So I had all these tapes piled up everywhere – hours and hours worth of tapes that had been sent to me over a year’s time.”

One day, he says, a record came with a tape – on one side was “Please Please Me” and on the other was “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

“So I stuck it on the turntable, played the intro, said "Here’s a new group from England.’ From that moment on everybody went nuts.”

The memories of his association with the Beatles were prompted by the recent release of the digitally remastered versions of Fab Four’s albums plus a video game featuring their music.

Ferber says he has a goldmine of taped interviews he had received from the Beatles over several months. He didn’t actually interview them until they arrived in Australia for their first tour in 1964.

“I was the only person they knew in Australia at that time,” Ferber says.

He snagged the first interview with the group, meeting them first on the roof of the Southern Cross Hotel and then accompanying them to their room, where the interviews took place. They conducted a press conference later that day, but by then Ferber’s interview was already airing.

Ferber still has a bumper sticker his station used to promote the Beatles – their images, his name and the call letters of the station.

“The station printed up 100,000 of them and they were sold out in two weeks,” he says.

Ferber is writing a book about his life. During his DJ days he emceed a lot of concerts for major artists touring Australia.

He hosted a concert in which the Rolling Stones and Roy Orbison shared billing. “It was the first time the Stones ever did that,” he says.

He has a photo with himself and the Stones, including the late guitarist Brian Jones.

Ferber became friends with the likes of Liberace, Phyllis Diller, Andy Williams and Tom Jones. “Lots of celebrities performed there,” he recalls.

After he quit the DJ business Ferber began managing radio stations.

“George Harrison bought a house on an island in Queensland when I was managing a bunch of stations there,” Ferber says. “Every now and then the phone would ring and it would be George. 'Hello, Barry. Want to come up to the island?’ I never did, but we talked a few times on the phone.”

Ferber managed a government owned radio station in the Fiji Islands, worked as an airlines vice president and hosted a radio show in Los Angeles and moved to Las Vegas 12 years ago.

“I had been coming here for 25 years and I always knew this was where I wanted to live,” he says. He was semi-retired when he went to work for MGM’s Mandalay Bay, where he

ushered for “Mamma Mia!” until it closed and now for “Lion King.”

“I still have one foot in the show business door,” he says.