Sixty years ago, on August 15, 1965, the Beatles played in the Shea Stadium in New York – And the world has never recovered from it. It was the largest pop explosion that the world had ever seen, with 56,000 young people who screamed for John, Paul, George and Ringo. It is the most famous show you have ever played – the most famous pop concert ever – although nobody could even hear a grade. Other appearances had brought far more crowds, much more money. But Shea is still the ultimate picture of fan hysteria. A huge amount of Beatlemaniacs that had gathered for one night together ecstasy. Connected by music. Screaming to complete exhaustion. The “Toppermost of the Popermost”. The “Yeah Yeah Yeah” of the gods. The biggest twist. With the loudest cry.
Hysteria in the stadium
“It was the first time that someone played in one of these stadiums,” recalled Paul McCartney 2003. “It was somehow normal for people like the Floyd later. We played about the baseball speakers, and you couldn’t hear anything because the crowd-this 56,000 ‘seagull’.”
But that doesn’t mean Paul didn’t enjoy every second. “I think we just got a little hysterical that evening,” he said. “We couldn’t believe where we were and what happened there, we couldn’t hear anything damn, and we thought: ‘It’s not particularly good, but it is great.’ The hysteria started.
But Shea was more than just the first top -class stadium concert. It showed everyone how huge, irrepressible and crazy pop music could be. It destroyed the hope of everyone who was still thinking, the Beatles – and their young female audience – were only a temporary fashion, which was still the common adult in 1965. The Fabs could no longer be dismissed, and the girls nor. It broke all the clichés about how show business should work. Never before had so many people gathered in one place to celebrate music – and on a lower level to celebrate each other. That is why “Shea Stadium” is still the two-word code for the fulfillment of pop dreams in its loudest, passionate, wildest and craziest form.
The sound of a volcano
The shea recordings are still a shock, no matter how many stadium shows you have already seen live or on the screen. The boys run the steps from the dugout – their changing room was the referee cabin – to a sound explosion like that of Krakatau, a scream that nobody had ever heard. A policeman desperately holds his ears. The boys are stunned, go, stumble, fluctuate, look around shocked.
No surprise: Paul runs faster than the others, he can hardly wait. He begins to run, jump, “come, boys!”, John also runs off, “Let’s go!”. Everything happens too quickly, but not fast enough for you. The band’s police officers gave way to the band, frightened, they have never seen or heard anything like that – nobody has ever. John is the first to run the stairs up to the stage. The very first thing you say before you welcome the audience is to greet each other: “Hello, Paul!” – “Hello, John!”
Everything looks so shaky – this stadium was not built for such a chaos. The boys look so tiny, the crowd so huge and wild. Everyone here this evening – apart from the police – dreamed of this moment for months, and yet nobody could even imagine how they would listen to or feel. Nobody dreamed big enough.
Ringo with soft knees
“When you look at the recordings, you can see how we reacted to the place,” Ringo recalled in the anthology documentary. “It was very big and very strange.” Check out the poor Ringo as he goes to the stage; He looks up and you can see how his knees can buckle with dizziness. George grins so wide that you are afraid that his jaw could cancel. Two of the screaming fans out there in the crowd should later be beatle wife-Linda Eastman McCartney and Barbara Bach. Olivia Arias Harrison screamed a few days later in the Hollywood Bowl. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were there in the Shea – probably the two most jealous people there.
It is the scream that makes the Shea legend more than anything-the girls reinforce each other and make their collective “Yeeeaaaaah” louder than a hundred thousand lungs should ever be. With countless solo shows, Paul asked the ladies in the hall: “Give me a big Beatles scream!” It is one thing to say that in a stadium – and yet I heard him say the beginning of this year in the Bowery Ballroom in New York, even though it is a bar that only holds a few hundred people. It doesn’t matter. Wherever strangers gather to scream for music, we are all Shea Stadium.
Where else was played baseball
This kind of happy noise did not usually sound in the shea, the home of the New York Mets, the most famous bad base team in history at the time. They ended the season with 50-112. But the Beatles, never sports fans, not even in their childhood, did not know or took care of America’s national sports. When they played in a baseball stadium for the first time in 1964, in Kansas City, they made fun of the whole sport at a press conference, in which Paul mocked: “Great game!” Ringo summarized it: “You throw the ball and then you have ten minutes to smoke a cigarette before throwing the next ball.”
The Mets are celebrating the anniversary tonight by distributing replicas of the Shea Stadium to the fans in the Citi Field, where they play against the Mariners. In addition, a Beatles tribute band will appear before the game. Shea was demolished in 2009, but fittingly Paul McCartney played the last songs. He jumped in a Billy Joel song for the last two numbers, “I SAW Her Standing There” and “Let IT BE”. In real Macca style, he played the same Höfner bass, which he also played there in 1965.
Ed Sullivan and a strange set
Ed Sullivan introduced them to the Shea and looked completely out of place as if he had been excavated for the occasion. Paul was the only one who took note of him or shook his hand. They performed at 9:16 p.m., after a surprisingly unspectacular series of opening agencies: Motown soul singer Brenda Holloway, saxophone legend King Curtis, Cannibal & The Headhunter, Sounds Incorporated, the still unknown Young Rascals (another six months from their first hit “Good Lovin ‘”). It was the first live concert of her short but eventful US tour-in the following weeks they met her idol Elvis Presley in Beverly Hills and took at a pool party with the Byrds and Peter Fonda LSD. (John converted this experience into “She Said Said Said”.)
They played an idiosyncratic half -hour set and left out their biggest crowd favorites – no “She Loves You”, no “I want to hold your hand”, no “I SAW Standing There”. Strangely, but wonderful, they played “Baby’s in Black”, a song that John and Paul always liked to sang together, eye on the same microphone. They insisted to play it live until their last appearance, although it was never a hit, not even a single, just a song that nobody loved as much as these two boys – for reasons that never betray them. The complete setlist: “Twist and Shout”, “She’s A Woman”, “I Feel Fine”, “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”, “Ticket to Ride”, Georges Solo number “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby”, “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “Baby’s In Black”, Ringo’s contribution “ACT Naturally” Hard Day’s Night “,” Help! ” And the B side number “I’m down”.
A year later the spell was over
A year later they played again at the Shea Stadium, in August 1966, but the fun of the tours was already over for them. The FABs stood as a live band shortly before the end, their last concert gave them less than a week later. Incredibly, the concert in 1966 in the Shea was not even sold out – not even approximately. But when we speak of the Shea Stadium, we mean that day in August 1965 and the way he lives on as an integral part of pop culture. It is still the benchmark that every pop star tries to reach.
“Today it is quite normal for people to play stadium or Giants stadium and all of these large places in the Shea stadium or Giants, but that was the first time,” said Paul in 1995 in the anthology. “It seemed like millions of people, but we were ready. Apparently they thought we were popular enough to fill it. Once you’re on stage and know that you have filled a place of this size, it is magical. Just walls from people.”
One evening, at one of these big US shows, her manager Brian Epstein fulfilled a secret dream that he had always had. He sneaked into the crowd unnoticed, stood with everyone else at the back and screamed out of full neck, as he always wanted to do. If you look at the Shea Stadium or listen to the noise, you are grasped by this orgiastic intoxication.
“We just made our thing”
“Half of the fun was to be part of this huge event,” said McCartney. “I don’t think we were heard a lot by the audience. The normal baseball stadium-Pa was intended for this: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the next player is …’. But that was practical, because if we were something out of tun or the wrong grade, nobody noticed it. We just went for the spirit of the moment.
The psychotherapist and Paul
Very open: I once had a therapist who was in the shea. She casually mentioned it during a session and I couldn’t possibly reduce her back to my problems, right? I holed them after every detail. Of course she was a Paul fan. These four brown dots on the green lawn. She couldn’t hear a sound, couldn’t call a single song that they played. She couldn’t see her faces. But she knew that one of these four points was Paul. Maybe it was stupid to spend an entire session with these stories – but I suspect it was one of the most productive therapy sessions I’ve ever had.
But that’s exactly why the Shea Stadium remains the most legendary concert of all time-the ultimate symbol of pop ecstasy in its most gigantic, most absurd form. It is far beyond every success that the Beatles had ever dreamed of in Liverpool. It is far beyond the fans’ fantasies about how wild and ecstatic a musical gathering could be.
The Fabs look at this amount, as F. Scott Fitzgerald described the Dutch sailors America at the end of the Great Gatsby – for the last time in the history of face to face with something that was amazed. And the crowd stares at the Beatles in the same way. Sixty years later, that crazy night in the Shea Stadium still defines pop music in its most lively, most exuberant moment.