However, if the Beatles were feeling any pressure after landing at JFK International Airport in mid-August, they didn’t show it. Unlike on previous tours, the Fab Four didn’t wave to the crowd waiting hours for their arrival. Instead, they shuffled into a limo and headed via police escort to the Warwick Hotel in midtown Manhattan, where they eluded 1,500 fans stationed outside the hotel by sneaking in a side door. The band still met reporters in a de rigueur press conference, and were as quick-witted as ever, but the buoyancy of that magical first meeting with the American media was gone. It was clear the Beatles were weary of the endless interviews—“farcical affairs,” Lennon called them—touring, and Beatlemania in general.
It only took one glance at the cover of the band’s fourth UK album, Beatles for Sale, released in late December 1964, to see the transformation. In the photo the foursome, set against an out-of-focus autumnal background, look dour and dog-tired. They’re wearing heavy overcoats with the collars pulled up and thick scarves, as if a storm were heading their way.* The cracks in the band’s public facade were beginning to show.
* Not that US fans ever saw it: The band’s American record company routinely repackaged their albums, changing photos and songs as they saw fit. Instead, in America the album was morphed into Beatles ’65, with different tracks and a series of cheeky photographs of the Fab Four looking like mod versions of eccentric English gentlemen, sitting in their tailored suits and holding umbrellas indoors.
Inspired by the limitless parameters of Dylan’s poetic musings, Lennon began exploring more sophisticated themes in his lyrics. With songs like “I’m a Loser,” which despite its ironically upbeat tempo, featured oddly confessional lyrics—“Although I laugh and I act like a clown/beneath this mask I am wearing a frown.” “That’s me in my Dylan period,” Lennon later said of the song.
This new mood carried over to the band’s latest album, Help! whose title track and first single was a desperate plea—literally—for help. But once again the song’s message was obscured by the track’s upbeat tempo; it topped the Billboard charts in late August, sounding as optimistic as anything the Beatles had ever recorded. “I was fat and depressed and I was crying out for ‘Help,’ ” Lennon said in one of his last interviews.
Regardless of the band’s studio accomplishments, onstage their musical and lyrical innovations were lost amidst the howling, hysterical teenage fans. And on their ten-city, two-week North American tour—for which each Beatle was reportedly insured for $5.5 million by Lloyd’s of London—the screams would only get louder as the Beatles made history again. The band alternated between enormous outdoor sports arenas such as Atlanta County Stadium (like Shea, it was one of the new multipurpose civic stadiums being built around the country) and Chicago’s venerable Comiskey Park, and indoor venues such as San Francisco’s Cow Palace and Memorial Coliseum in Portland, Oregon, the latter show immortalized in verse by Ginsberg, who attended the gig, much to the band’s delight. (“We hear that Allen Ginsberg is in the audience,” announced Lennon in between songs from the stage. “We send him our regards.”)
No pop band or performer—including Elvis—ever played to audiences this size. And the tour’s opening show, at Shea Stadium in Flushing, Queens, would be, in the words of the New York Times, the biggest gathering of Beatles fans “ever seen and heard in one place.”
The show at Shea was the idea of New York promoter Sid Bernstein. A showbiz veteran, Bernstein had booked the Beatles’ two concerts at Carnegie Hall in February 1964, but found the venue was too small to meet ticket demand. “We had turned away thousands of fans,” Bernstein said. The hunt began for a larger New York venue. At first Madison Square Garden was considered, but ultimately was deemed too small. This was a first: No pop group had even been too big for such a large-scale arena. Then it struck Bernstein: Shea Stadium, home of the New York Mets (who were conveniently out of town in mid-August).
Shea was a brand-new facility, having opened on April 17, 1964—just four days before the World’s Fair. It was easily accessible by subway, the Long Island Rail Road, and a battery of highways, newly refurbished by Robert Moses. In fact, it would be as if the Beatles were actually playing the World’s Fair itself. Thousands of teenagers—Moses’ target audience—could, ostensibly, attend the Fair during the day and see the Beatles at Shea that night. In addition, Shea was nearly four times the size of the fifteen-thousand-seat Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, where they had played the previous August.
“I suggested Shea Stadium . . . to the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein,” recalled Bernstein. “He asked, ‘Do you think we could sell it out?’ and I told him ‘I’ll give you $10 for every unsold seat.’ ” He wouldn’t have to pay a single dollar: The Beatles sold out all 55,600 seats—an unprecedented audience in the annals of popular music.
On the evening of August 15, the band flew from Manhattan to Queens via a Boeing Vertol 107-II helicopter. Although R&B saxophonist King Curtis, one of the many opening acts on the bill, was in the middle of his set as the Beatles’ helicopter passed over the stadium, a deejay broke into the PA system to alert the crowds of their arrival. “You hear that up there? Listen . . . it’s the Beatles! ” The stadium exploded with the light of thousands of flashbulbs as fans aimed their cameras skyward, snapping photos as the Beatles flew past. The band peered through the helicopter’s windows at the ocean of fans below. “It was terrifying at first when we saw the crowds,” recalled George Harrison, “but I don’t think I ever felt so exhilarated in all my life.”
The helicopter landed on the heliport on top of the Port Authority Building at the World’s Fair. As they exited their helicopter, they waved to the two hundred or so local Queens kids, who only had to walk down the street and wait by the metal fence just on the other side of the Grand Central Parkway. Immediately, the Beatles were corralled into the Port Authority Building, ushered into a Wells Fargo armored truck, and driven the short distance across the Fairgrounds to Shea. Thousands of Fairgoers probably didn’t take notice of the armored truck carrying four of the most famous people in the world as they wandered Flushing Meadow that night.
After arriving at Shea, the truck drove straight into the bowels of the stadium, and the band found Ed Sullivan waiting for them in the visiting team’s dugout. Sullivan’s production company had thirteen cameras stationed throughout the stadium to document the concert (it would air as a television special in 1967). As the Beatles stood in the dugout looking at the frenzied fans, they couldn’t help but laugh; the scene was absurd, Fellini-esque. “It seemed like millions of people,” McCartney recalled. “But we were ready for it.” They were probably the only ones. Jagger and Richards were watching from the front row behind the Mets’ dugout. The Rolling Stones frontman seemed shaken by the spectacle of mass hysteria. “It’s frightening,” Jagger told a friend.
At 9:17 p.m. after Sullivan introduced them, the band emerged from the dugout in matching black pants, boots, and tan jackets, holding onto their guitars and waving to the throngs of fans as they made their way to the makeshift stage near second base. Immediately the 55,600-strong crowd exploded. Once onstage the Beatles tore into “Twist and Shout,” the first of their twelve-song, thirty-minute set, which included their most recent hits like “I Feel Fine,” “Ticket to Ride,” “Help!” and “Can’t Buy Me Love.” The New York Times declared that the noise generated by the screeching masses was true to “the classic Greek meaning of the word pandemonium—the region of all demons.”
Twin rows of fifty 100-watt amplifiers—specially made for the occasion by Vox—ran along the baselines, but barely a note was heard by anyone, not the band, the fans, or even Bernstein, who stood directly underneath the stage with Epstein. Scores of fans fainted, while dozens of others stormed the field and hopped over barricades while desperately trying to elude police. The fans were so excited to see their idols, to be this close to four live Beatles, they couldn’t be bothered to actually listen to the music
. “It was ridiculous!” Lennon later complained. “We couldn’t hear ourselves sing. . . . You can see it in the film, George and I aren’t even bothering playing half the chords, and we were just messing about.” Lennon even admitted to a British reporter a few days after the concert that he wasn’t always sure what key the band was in. The music had become almost meaningless compared to the spectacle of the Beatles themselves.
When their thirty minutes were up—per their manager’s instructions, they were not to play “a minute more or a minute less”—they waved good-bye then hurried into a nearby car and sped off. Several young female fans had to be carried from their seats to a makeshift first-aid station. A group of girls in the first row begged the police along the baselines for a souvenir from the field. “Please, please,” they cried. “Give us some blades of the grass. They walked on the grass.”
While the Beatles were disenchanted with the musical quality of the concert, their promoter, at least, was ecstatic over the box office receipts. “Over 55,000 people saw the Beatles at Shea Stadium,” bragged Bernstein. “We took $304,000, the greatest gross ever [at that time] in the history of show business.” According to Variety, the sum “shattered all existing . . . box office records.” And, as promised, Bernstein handed over $160,000 to the Beatles, but not before he made Epstein another offer: He would guarantee the Beatles $250,000 if the band returned to Shea Stadium the following summer, this time for two shows.
The Beatles’ Shea Stadium concert had shown—for anyone who still needed proof—that the Fab Four were no passing fad; the sight of 55,600 frenzied teenagers proved the Beatles were a commercial entity unlike anything the entertainment industry had ever seen. A year after resurrecting the rock ’n’ roll industry, the Beatles’ Shea Stadium concert redefined the economic reality of touring; by the end of the 1960s, such concerts would become a huge windfall for record companies and a massive source of revenue for rock bands.
Earlier that summer, in June, while the Beatles were maturing, thanks to his influence, Dylan entered Columbia Records’ recording studio on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan to begin the sessions that became his next album, Highway 61 Revisited. On June 16, backed by an ad-hoc rock band that included guitarist Michael Bloomfield of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and an improvised organ riff by Al Kooper, who was now working as a session musician, he recorded “Like a Rolling Stone.” This incendiary electric vamp was a musical revolution in six minutes and thirteen seconds. Before recording the song, Dylan had been pursuing literary ambitions, working on a novel and a number of plays. But after culling the lyrics from an angry letter he wrote—which he described as “a long piece of vomit”—while flying back from the UK, he had found his true voice. “I’d never written anything like that before and it suddenly came to me that was what I should do,” he told a journalist. “After writing that, I wasn’t interested in writing a novel or a play . . . I want to write songs.”
Although a number of tracks on Dylan’s previous album, Bringing It All Back Home, had featured a rollicking backup band, he had never recorded anything like this. Dylan took an acetate recording of the finished track to the Woodstock, New York, home of his manager, Albert Grossman, who invited friends to an impromptu listening party. For Paul Rothschild, who would later gain fame as the producer of the Doors, the song was a revelation. “I had them play the fucking thing five times straight before I could say anything,” he said. “What I realized while I was sitting there was that one of US—one of the so-called Village hipsters—was making music that could compete with THEM—the Beatles and the Stones and the Dave Clark Five—without sacrificing any of the integrity of folk music or the power of rock ’n’ roll. . . . I knew the song was a smash, and yet I was consumed with envy because it was the best thing I’d heard any of our crowd do and I knew it was going to turn the tables on our nice, comfortable lives.”
Four days after the song was released as a single, Dylan played the Newport Folk Festival. His first appearance that July 1965 weekend was at an afternoon songwriting workshop, where he played acoustic versions of “All I Really Want to Do” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” He was set to play the following night, as the weekend’s headliner. On Sunday, July 24, while the crowd applauded his arrival, Dylan, in a black leather jacket and with a Fender Stratocaster strapped around his shoulder, took to a darkened stage with a rock band that including Bloomfield and Kooper. When the lights went on, there was Dylan with an electric blues band ripping through a roaring version of “Maggie’s Farm.”
When the song was over, there was confusion. Mixed in with the tepid applause was what sounded like boos and catcalls. Someone shouted “Bring back Cousin Emmy!” referring to the old-time Appalachian country singer who had performed earlier in the day. Undaunted, the band forged ahead, playing a limp version of “Like a Rolling Stone,” then currently climbing up the charts. There were more angry shouts: “Play folk music! . . . Sellout! . . . Put away that electric guitar!” The band struggled through “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” before cutting the song short amid an unruly chorus of boos. Kooper, however, later said that’s not what happened at all: “Those weren’t boos, they were cries of ‘More! More!’ ” Whatever the crowd was yelling, Dylan apparently had had enough. “That’s it!” he shouted and walked off. As Kooper noted, that really wasn’t strange either: The band, which had only begun rehearsals the day before, only knew three songs.
Ultimately, Dylan was coaxed back onstage to pacify the crowd. Whatever they thought of his music, they had reasonably expected a longer set. He ran through “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” a fitting end to his career as the spokesman of his generation. In film footage of the performance, what looks like a single tear can be seen streaking down Dylan’s left cheek.
While others debated the meaning of Dylan’s appearance at Newport, the man himself laid low. “Like a Rolling Stone” was moving up the charts; by late August it would land at the No. 2 spot on Billboard ’s Hot 100 (kept out of the top spot by the Beatles’ “Help!”). Dylan was now a pop star with a Top 10 single.
When he reemerged, it was to play the first show of his upcoming American tour at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium on August 28. Just two weeks after the Beatles had proven their staying power at Shea Stadium in nearby Flushing, Dylan would defiantly confront his angry audience at Forest Hills, a fifteen-thousand-seat, open-air stadium where the US Open was traditionally held. It was the second history-making rock concert in Queens in as many weeks, while within the confines of the World’s Fair, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians were holding court six nights a week—just as Robert Moses insisted they should.
Unlike Newport, the sold-out crowd at Forest Hills knew exactly what to expect. Dylan gave them fair warning in the New York Times. “It’s all music: no more, no less,” he said a few days before the concert. “I know in my own mind what I’m doing. If anyone has imagination he’ll know what I’m doing. If they can’t understand my songs they’re missing something.” He went on to distance himself from his early albums. “I get very bored with my old songs,” he complained. “I can’t sing ‘With God on My Side’ for fifteen years.” Dylan admitted he didn’t have all the details worked out yet, but there was one thing fans should expect: The concert would be loud. “I’ll have some electricity,” he warned.
To many of Dylan’s fans, the sight of electric guitars and amplifiers was a sign that their hero had betrayed them and their cause. So was the black leather jacket (one journalist even referred to it as a “sell-out jacket”), the Cuban heels and black shades that he began to wear, were just more proof. But the final insult was the presence of New York’s cheesy Top 40 deejay, Murray the K—aka “the Fifth Beatle”—who walked onto the Forest Hills stage and introduced Dylan in his patented, faux-hipster lingo. “It’s something new,” he told the crowd. “It’s not rock. It’s not folk. It’s this new thing called Dylan.”
The crow
d unleashed a howl of boos. Dylan, who had once stood on the same stage as Martin Luther King Jr. is now cavorting with Murray the K? That was more than his New Left–leaning college fans could take. Soon Dylan appeared onstage armed with an acoustic guitar and harmonica. If the crowd was angry, they didn’t show it. As he played recent material like “She Belongs to Me,” “Gates of Eden,” and “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” they listened intently and applauded in all the right spots. It seemed like the battle was over.
But after intermission Dylan returned with his Fender Stratocaster and a band that included guitarist Robbie Robertson and drummer Levon Helm (both of whom would later form The Band), and once again Kooper on organ, and the latter’s childhood friend from Queens and musical partner, Harvey Brooks, on bass. Dylan issued a warning to the band before taking the stage. “I don’t know what it will be like out there,” he told them. “It’s going to be some kind of a carnival, and I want you all to know that up front. So just go out there and keep playing no matter how weird it gets.”
Once onstage they kicked off with “Tombstone Blues” from Highway 61 Revisited, which would be released the following week. If the Beatles’ Shea Stadium concert was an example of hysterical idol worship, then Dylan’s Forest Hills concert was a revolt against their hero. The Queens crowd began to boo violently. At the end of each song, they shouted catcalls that made Newport seem like an old-time religious revival. “Traitor!” someone shouted. “Where’s Ringo?” mocked another. Undeterred, the band kept playing, including a totally revamped “I Don’t Believe You” from the acoustic Another Side LP and newer songs like “From a Buick 6” and “Maggie’s Farm.” Dylan was confronting his unruly audience head-on, offering no quarter.
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