What Was the Beatles’ Shea Stadium Concert Really Like? A Fan Who Was There Reveals the True Story, 60 Years Later

The year 1965 was one of launches. Several Gemini rockets were sent skyward, President Lyndon Johnson enacted his Great Society reforms, and civil Rights workers launched marches from Selma to Montgomery led by Martin Luther King. Unconscionably, fatal bullets were launched at Malcolm X. A riot blasted off in Watts. A giant gateway arch was raised over St. Louis.

By then, the Beatles had already been launched in America, flying into the newly-named Kennedy Airport in early 1964, to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show and change the culture forever and for better. But now, one year later, on August 15, 1965, they were back in New York, at Shea Stadium, where some 55,000 music fans would congregate to see them run out to the field and play a dozen songs through about 30 minutes. It was glorious chaos.

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So said my Cousin Judy, who brightly recalled how that event really came together, earlier in the year, as she and two of her best friends traveled into New York City to stay up for hours in Manhattan. They were 15.

“We waited on line all night long in Manhattan to get tickets,” she said of the wondrous hours of anticipation about five months before the show. “Everybody was in the same [joyous] mood.”.

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I was five years old then, and of course had no idea Judy was getting ready to participate in a moment in history. I don’t think it seemed that way to her, though; like kids of the era, she was just doing her thing.

As she recently remembered, her seats for seeing John, Paul, George and Ringo were “up in the crowds; it wasn’t too bad. Of course, everybody wanted to be sitting in their laps!” Soon enough, with Ed Sullivan’s introduction, the Beatles came running. “It was glorious,” she said. “I didn’t know how many other people were there and I didn’t care.”

What about the famous claim that no one could hear the music over all that screaming? “The music was dynamite!” she said. “Oh yeah, we heard it amidst the screams. And sure, I screamed, too. It was almost religious because at that point, they were so big.”

Then just like that, it was over. But as memory serves, the feeling remains even all these years later. “There were 50,000 people there but we were all one,” she added. “We all wanted and respected and loved the same stuff, and that was wonderful. It wasn’t the music; it was the experience.”

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It clearly was a moment in time for the lads as well. “Now we were playing stadiums!” Ringo Starr later recalled. “There were all those people and just a tiny PA system—they couldn’t get a bigger one. [But] I never felt they came to hear our show—I felt they came to see us.” And, as John Lennon added, “It was marvelous. 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.”

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