主播大秀

by Bob Stanley of

August 15th was an oddly momentous day in the story of : in 1962 they played their last show with Pete Best; in 1969 they were recording their own eulogies - Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight and The End - for the 'long medley' on Abbey Road; and in 1965 they were at the Shea Stadium in New York, playing the first ever stadium show.

The third Beatles' US tour had begun on August 13th when the group took off from Heathrow and landed at JFK. On the same day, the American version of the Help! album was released. It was a second spike for Beatlemania, with shows the size and scope of which had never been seen before.

The Shea Stadium had only opened on April 16, 1964, just in time for the 1964-65 World’s Fair. It was built to accommodate the New York Mets baseball team, after the city's two National League clubs (Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants) had both relocated to the west coast in 1957.

Though the Beatles' show may have been a first, the bill was much like a package tour line-up – before they came on, 55,600 fans sat through the King Curtis Band, Cannibal and the Headhunters, Brenda Holloway, The Young Rascals and the Brian Epstein-managed Sounds Incorporated. It was a pretty strong bill, even without the Fab Four, but eventually Ed Sullivan walked on stage to announce:

"Now, ladies and gentlemen, honoured by their country, decorated by their Queen, loved here in America, here are The Beatles!"

The group ran out of the Wells Fargo van which had driven them into the stadium, through a tunnel, and out to deafening screams – you can see security guards covering their ears in documentary footage. The stage was positioned at second base on the baseball field, and fans were kept in their seats. The screaming – loud even by Beatles standards – meant the group couldn't hear anything they were playing.

Vox had designed 100-watt amplifiers especially for this tour, but it was still nowhere near loud enough, so the Beatles used the Shea Stadium's house amplification system. During I'm Down, the b-side of current single Help!, John started playing the keyboard with his elbows, like a deranged Jerry Lee Lewis. George cracked up, unable to play. It made no odds – no one could hear a note.

The following day, the Beatles got a chance to escape the chaos and relax in the Warwick Hotel, on 6th Avenue and 54th Street. Visitors included Bob Dylan, The Supremes, The Ronettes, Del Shannon and The Exciters. While all this was going on, a Mellotron was delivered to John's home, Kenwood, in Weybridge, England; he had seen one for the first time a couple of weeks earlier, when he was producing The Silkie's version of You've Got To Hide Your Love away at IBC Studios. The Mellotron's sounds, stored on magnetic tapes, would soon be put to use by John for the brass and string sounds on Tomorrow Never Knows once he got home from the States.

The Beatles returned to the Shea Stadium in 1966. As George Martin said in Anthology: “Curiously enough the second Shea Stadium concert had about 11,000 seats unsold. So it was a pretty unsettling time. And it was against this background that they said, 'Right, we definitely won't do any more. We are going to have a break and then we are going into the studio to make a record.'” The support acts this time round were equally stellar - The Remains, Bobby Hebb, The Cyrkle and The Ronettes. Sadly, the stadium was demolished in 2009 to make way for a car park.