Who was the first band to perform at a stadium concert?
Any artist is going to want to project their music out to the widest audience possible. Even if they aren’t the most competent musicians in the world, it’s about trying to strike a nerve with an audience and make every show feel like a community of people coming together to celebrate. Although the clubs and theatres were prime business models in the 1960s, it took The Beatles to help bring rock and roll into the stadiums of the world.
Nowadays, though, a stadium-rock show isn’t all that unheard of. Hell, looking at the way that some artists like Queen structured songs like ‘We Will Rock You’, they were looking to make something that could be blasted out in arenas, which wouldn’t have worked nearly as well had they tried to play them in a sweaty club.
But being a stadium act is something that bands grow into, and The Beatles were already known for their insane live act in the clubs as far back as the late 1950s. After cutting their teeth at the Cavern Club and in Hamburg, Germany, the Fab Four were seasoned pros by the time they hit the big time, usually being able to play for hours on end without breaking a sweat.
When they came to America, the massive wave of Beatlemania was too much for any club to handle. Looking at their theatre shows, it wasn’t uncommon for kids to lose their minds in the aisles and bust down the doors trying to get in for so much as a glimpse of Ringo Starr or seeing Paul McCartney wink at them. That’s not the safest environment for a live act, though, so the next logical step was to bring The Beatles to Shea Stadium.
How many times did The Beatles play Shea Stadium?
Then again, no one was prepared to put on a show like this for a standard pop group. The Beatles may have become too big for the clubs to handle them, but looking at their first major gigs at Shea Stadium, it’s understandable why they only managed to play two shows at the venue before they came off the road.
When looking back on those days, every one of them remembers how hard it was to hear themselves over the massive noise of the crowd. Since the amplifiers they had weren’t built to be heard over a massive baseball stadium, that meant they usually hoped for the best, especially when their second option was to plug into the announcement PA and sound like a distorted mess to anyone who actually bothered to listen.
Although acts like The Who would benefit from having much louder amplifiers when they hit the stadium circuit, it’s no big surprise why The Beatles later wanted out of their touring life, considering that they couldn’t hear themselves and were making records that were becoming impossible to play live, like the massive experiment ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ or the mournful ‘Eleanor Rigby’.
Still, McCartney managed to settle into the stadium rocker role with ease once he formed Wings, continuing to bring smiles to the masses every time he played and even managing to cameo at the final concert at Shea Stadium when Billy Joel closed up shop in the 2010s. The size of the venue might not mean as much to him as it did back then, but the fact that the Fab Four could pack baseball stadiums and have every fan losing their minds is proof enough that they had overtaken Elvis Presley as the biggest rock and roll act in the world.
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