The Beatles‘ 1965 Shea Stadium performance was the first of its kind. Before then, concerts never took place in sports arenas. At the height of Beatlemania, The Beatles needed a huge venue to hold thousands of fans. However, the decision to use the famous Mets baseball stadium was not conducive to sound quality.
Vox made special amplifiers for the band’s performance, but it didn’t help. Nothing could breach the sonic boom of the fans’ screams.
Vox made special amplifiers for The Beatles’ Shea Stadium performance
When The Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, told them about their Shea Stadium performance, touring had already done a number on them. It was exhausting hiding from hoards of screaming girls in cars and hotel rooms. Having the police escort them to the stage in armored vehicles was nerve-wracking.
Performing at Shea Stadium to 55,000 fans didn’t help things.
Since The Beatles would be playing to the most fans ever, Vox made them special amplifiers to help with the sound.
In Here Comes The Sun: The Spiritual And Musical Journey Of George Harrison, Joshua M. Greene wrote, “Stadium concerts had never happened before. No singer or group could fill so large a space. Originally conceived for baseball, football, and other relatively nonmusical events, the acoustics inside Shea Stadium were poor.
“For the Beatles’ concert, the Vox sound company created customized amplifiers with their usual thirty watts of power boosted to a spectacular one hundred watts. Nothing helped. The Beatles’ performance was swallowed up by an all-engulfing noise that drove the arena’s two thousand guards to despair. Screams overwhelmed anything coming off the stage.”
However, not hearing themselves was nothing new for The Beatles.
The Beatles’ performance at Shea Stadium wasn’t the first time they couldn’t hear themselves play
Once Beatlemania kicked off, The Beatles got used to not being able to hear themselves perform.
“Now we were playing stadiums!” Ringo Starr explained in Anthology (per Beatles Bible). “There were all those people and just a tiny PA system – they couldn’t get a bigger one. We always used to use the house PA.
“That was good enough for us, even at Shea Stadium. I never felt people came to hear our show – I felt they came to see us. From the count-in on the first number, the volume of screams drowned everything else out.”
Greene wrote, “Shea Stadium on August 15, 1965, was a gaping, howling maw filled with fifty-six thousand people, the largest crowd ever assembled for an entertainment event.”
The screaming and crying fans were caged in behind a high wire fence. The Beatles landed by helicopter on top of the World’s Fair building and were pushed into Wells Fargo armored trucks, which drove them as close to the stage as possible. When they emerged from the truck, fans “spewed an apocalyptic roar.”
The 2,000 security personnel who were hired to keep the fans under control held their ears.
A day after the concert, a reporter asked John Lennon, “Does it bother you that you can’t hear what you sing during concerts?” He replied, “No, we don’t mind. We’ve got the records at home.” It was the usual witty remark, but underneath, The Beatles hated it.
The band was nervous something terrible would happen during their performance
According to radio personality Cousin Brucie, a.k.a. Bruce Morrow, The Beatles’ Shea Stadium performance was a nerve-wracking experience. The band thought something bad would happen.
He befriended The Beatles after playing “I Want To Hold Your Hand” on heavy rotation. Then, he and Ed Sullivan introduced The Beatles on stage at Shea Stadium. “About 65,000 screaming fans,” he said. “There was energy like I have never felt. But now I say, it was an energy of love.”
Cousin Brucie said The Beatles were nervous before going on, but he reassured them everything would be OK. He said, “And in the dugout before we introduced them John Lennon comes up to me with Paul McCartney and John says, ‘Cousin, is this going to be safe? Is it dangerous?’
“And I put my fingers behind my back and I crossed my fingers because I was scared, and said, ‘John, Paul. This is going to be safe. All they want to do is be in the same space as you cause they love you.’ Frankly I was scared stiff – I’d never felt a cacophony of energy like I’d never felt.”
The Beatles performed at Shea Stadium once more in 1966. However, soon after that, they stopped touring completely.
