Rolling Stone: Why the Beatles' Shea Stadium Show Was Even Greater Than You Knew

[LiberalElite]

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/why-the-beatles-shea-stadium-show-was-even-greater-than-you-knew-20150814

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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.

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and I was there!

[BarbaRosa]

1. I have a question I've always wanted to ask someone who was there.

How well could you hear the music? Just wondering how well the sound reinforcement technology worked back then.

[LiberalElite]

3. Hear the music? HA!

I heard nothing but screaming. I was up in the nosebleed section and the moment they were seen - screams that didn't end. I didn't know what they sang till I read it in the newspaper the next day. The Beatles couldn't even hear themselves. It was like that so repeatedly that's one reason why they stopped touring.

[BarbaRosa]

5. That's what I thought.

I read that the Beatles couldn't hear themselves and suspected that nobody else could hear them as well. Thanks.

[malthaussen]

2. There is nothing quite so charming...

... as watching a bunch of 20-yr old hipsters argue about a concert that took place 30 years before they were born. The comments are hilarious.

Possibly it is the truest measure of the greatness of the Beatles that those 20 year olds are still arguing about them.

-- Mal

[LiberalElite]

4. Some of them

and younger show up at Beatle Fests and know more trivia than the "old" fans (like me). Of course, they had to study the ancient texts....hehe

[malthaussen]

6. The comments section could be a microcosm of DU's GD

A sizeable chunk of the posters misread a poorly-written sentence and accused the author, poor lad, of not knowing that "Yesterday" was written by Mc Cartney. Even when their error of interpretation is pointed out to them, they persist in perpetuating it, and condemn the entire article as one written by someone who knows nothing about the subject. A couple who have no idea what a "line recording" is do the same, all of course in the tones of one handing down The Final Judgement from On High.

What redeems the comments are a few valuable points made by thoughtful posters. Really exactly like GD, when looked at that way.

I never got to see the Beatles live, but my brother and I must have watched "Help" ten times when it finally got around to our local theatre. Every time the usher came around to kick people out (they were lying in the aisles, you can imagine) we'd tell him we'd just come in and missed the first part. Sat right in the middle of the first row. Ah, youth.

-- Mal

[LiberalElite]

7. It's the 50th anniversary of

Help! too. I recall one girl shrieking when the bad guys got Ringo. I thought she was crazy. It was after all, just a movie and a comedy at that.

I saw A Hard Day's Night probably 4 dozen times, because they didn't clear out the theater after one showing. Great way to spend a Saturday afternoon! I think I still know most of the dialogue, but this sticks out: "...A car and a room and a train and a room and a room and a room...."

[malthaussen]

8. "Are you a Mod or a Rocker?"

Ringo: "I'm a mocker." Such an apt line, not just for Ringo but all four of them.

According to Richard Lester, Ringo was the best actor of the four and actually had some talent in that area. He also says George was good. I think Ringo is probably the most under-appreciated of the Beatles, it's ironic that he was considered the best drummer in the Liverpool scene and was better-paid than the Beatles while he was with Rory and the Hurricanes. Speaking of which, there's a video of Rory with Ringo floating around on YT, but it appears Ringo was sick that day, his drumming is fairly mediocre. It appears that a tape of their August 1960 appearence at the Jive Hive in surfaced and got made into an album in 2012. Since I'm a sucker for pre-1964 Liverpool groups stuff, I love it. There's a surprising amount of moldy old tape recordings from those days. Kind of like litening to Debussy or Scott Joplin on an old piano roll.

-- Mal