In 1965, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr played a show at New York’s Shea Stadium. The concert was The Beatles’ largest to date and, understandably, jangled their nerves. While they said they always felt better once they got onstage, Starr noticed some surprising behavior in Lennon. He believed Lennon went “mad” during the show.
Ringo Starr said John Lennon seemed to have gone mad during a Beatles concert
The Beatles’ concert at Shea Stadium had over 55,000 attendees, making it their largest concert up to that point. They found it overwhelming and, according to Starr, the pressure got to at least one of them.
“If you look at the film footage you can see how we reacted to the place,” Starr said in The Beatles Anthology. “It was very big and very strange. I feel that on that show John cracked up. He went mad; not mentally ill, but he just got crazy. He was playing the piano with his elbows and it was really strange.”
According to Lennon, he was doing a Jerry Lee Lewis impression and using his feet to play the piano
“I was putting my foot on it and George couldn’t play for laughing,” he said. “I was doing it for a laugh. The kids didn’t know what I was doing. Because I did the organ on ‘I’m Down,’ I decided to play it on stage for the first time. I didn’t really know what to do, because I felt naked without a guitar, so I was doing all Jerry Lee — I was jumping about and I only played about two bars of it.
John Lennon said the show was extremely exciting, but Ringo Starr wasn’t as thrilled
Lennon spent the show amusing himself with the impression and found the experience thrilling.
“It was marvellous,” he said, adding, “It was the biggest crowd we ever played to, anywhere in the world. It was the biggest live show anybody’s ever done, they told us. And it was fantastic, the most exciting we’ve done. They could almost hear us as well, even though they were making a lot of noise, because the amplification was tremendous.”Starr had a different opinion of the concert. He felt they were too far from the audience, who was screaming so loudly they couldn’t hear the music.
“What I remember most about the concert was that we were so far away from the audience,” he said. “They were all across the field, all wired in. When I tour now, I like the audience right in my face. I like to have some reaction, something going on together between me and them. It was just very distant at Shea. Sure, we were bigtime, and it was the first time we’d played to thousands and thousands of people, and we were the first band to do it; but it was totally against what we had started out to achieve, which was to entertain, right there, ‘up close. And screaming had just become the thing to do. We didn’t say, ‘OK, don’t forget, at this concert — everybody scream!’ Everybody just screamed.”
John Lennon shared what he thought of the screaming audience
Starr did not like the wall of noise the audience met them with at shows like the one at Shea Stadium. It was so noisy that they could not hear themselves, which he believed was making them worse. Lennon didn’t have as much of a problem with it.
“We played for four or five years being completely heard and it was good fun,” he said. “And it’s just as good fun to play being not heard and being more popular. They pay the money; if they want to scream — scream. We scream, literally; we’re just screaming at them, only with guitars. Everybody’s screaming — there’s no harm in it.”
