Why the Beatles’ Shea Stadium Show Was Even Greater Than You Knew
Leaving festivals like Woodstock and Monterey aside, there is no more famous gig in rock & roll history than when the Beatles played Shea Stadium, an orange and blue ass pit of a venue in front of 56,000 mostly teenyboppers on August 15th, 1965. It is a gig one might even term infamous, for all of the misunderstanding it has generated over the years, with one old saw after another getting parroted in the various histories of rock.
If you’ve seen the footage, you know that the Beatles were positioned on a rickety stage on an infield diamond, with the screams raining down from all directions. The band laughs maniacally, exchanges “shit, can you believe this is happening?” looks and takes the piss with song introductions repeatedly.
Chances are if you’ve seen footage of a single Beatles gig, it is this one. And chances are, too, that you’ve heard they were rubbish as a live act once they became famous, couldn’t even hear themselves, just wanted to haul ass out of Dodge ASAP, all of that. And, for many years, the tales surrounding that Shea Stadium gig, plus the footage, plus the bootleg of the show, reinforced all of this. Which is a shame, and a matter in need of redressing.
Help! had just come out earlier in August. There may be no worse Beatles album. Granted, that’s not the most damning remark, given that we’re talking a record that contained the title track — one of John Lennon‘s half dozen best songs — “Yesterday,” “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” and “Ticket to Ride,” the last of which Lennon hilariously claimed invented heavy metal, a totally spurious argument that is nonetheless fun to muck about with.
Come 1966, when the band played Shea again — something rarely brought up — there were huge chunks of empty stadium seats, as this was an era when an uptick in psychedelia meant meant a downturn in the Y.A. market. “Eleanor Rigby,” the spinster with a face in a jar by her front door, lived a long way off from the world of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” That meant less head-flailing oohs and ahhs and shaking moptops as the next chorus rolled around. Plus, the States had just learned that Lennon had called the group more popular than Christ.
But in August 1965, the Beatles were having their last fling as a top shelf live band. They had uncorked fine sets on both The Ed Sullivan Show, in their last appearance there, and on Blackpool Night Out. The end of the month would find them tearing it up at the Hollywood Bowl, and on their best musical behavior, more or less, on account of George Martin hoping to get a releasable performance from the gig.
There aren’t a ton of new Beatles finds unearthed anymore, but one of the more significant of recent years was when a soundboard of the Shea show hit the bootleg market in 2007. It was called The Beatles and the Great Concert at Shea! — an effectively simple and hyperbolic title in the best bootleg sense — that told you right on the cover it was a line recording sans overdubs, a conceit that seemed almost too perfect, after all of those intervening decades.
The Beatles became who they were on the back of their catalog — which is to say, as songwriters — but that endgame would never have been secured without them first being absolute badasses of the stage. You hear an absolute mother of a band on something like the Star Club tapes, recorded — in exchange for free beer — in Hamburg in late 1962. This was a group that, from an in-concert standpoint, could beat the piss out of all comers. The songs were almost always not theirs, but the point wasn’t ownership in the compositional sense, but rather a kind of sonic rank pulling — in effect, saying, “Yep, we’ll have this bad boy number by you, Fats Waller, and you, Arthur Alexander, and we will make it no one else’s but ours.”