Watch extraordinary footage of The Beatles’ first stadium performance
In 1963, The Beatles played a basement in Liverpool called the Cavern club. This sacred space has a capacity of around 350 people fully standing. Within almost exactly two years, the band had led the British invasion of the States, kicked up the storm of Beatlemania, and were just about to take to the Shea Stadium in New York City in front of a sold-out 56,000-strong crowd. It was the first time anyone had done this.
Long play records had only entered circulation in 1948, and yet, only 17 years later, you had fanfare surrounding pop music that the world had never seen before. It was, quite literally, unprecedented. And yet, in the footage below, The Beatles are casually saying, “It makes us less nervous playing to a big crowd than a little crowd because if you’re playing to a little crowd they’re going to hear what you play.’
In a way, that’s the crux of The Beatles. Beatlemania itself was more akin to the adulation that surrounds a modern boy band than rock ‘n’ roll, but the ‘Fab Four’ themselves just happened to be artists with supreme integrity. This cocktail actually made this Shea Stadium show a pivotal moment beyond the history-making that it represented.
The screaming itself overshadowed the show. You also had people like Ed Sullivan being bafflingly introduced as “most important of all, a truly great American” which was far from in-keeping with the spiritual ethos they would soon adopt. And Ringo Starr would later comment, “It was coming to the end for me. Nobody was listening at the shows. That was OK at the beginning, but we were playing really bad.”
The sonics at the Shea Stadium certainly weren’t great, nevertheless, this is all part of the legacy of The Beatles, and it’s a manic moment that proves fascinating to watch. In order, to seed a message, you need an audience and while the mantra of the ‘Fab Four’ would elucidate itself over time, you still get the feeling that the following ‘Macca’ quote is in the air: “I still believe that love is all you need. I don’t know a better message than that.”
When you reconcile the fact that this was an incredibly difficult time for the young girls in attendance as their brothers were being shipped off to Vietnam and such like, this moment of revelry represented the boon of forthcoming pop culture. There were more people gathered for a music show than at any other moment in history in the video below—and all of them are having a good time, even the ones fainting.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.