The Beatles and Various Artists (including Brenda Holloway and King Curtis) - Shea Stadium, New York City, 8-15-1965

Normally, I'm not that interested in recordings of Beatles concerts, because they generally played short sets with the same songs over and over again, and the sound quality is bad, with more screaming girls than music. But this is an exception, for three reasons. 

One: this was an incredibly important and historic concert. That's because it was the very first stadium-sized concert anywhere. The 55,000 person-sized crowd would remain the largest audience for any Beatles concert, and the largest concert in the U.S. by anyone until a concert by Led Zeppelin in 1973. After it proved to be a big success, stadium concerts have become a standard thing ever since. It also was highly symbolic, showing how the Beatles were a cultural phenomenon and the most popular music act in the world, by far. Even the cynical John Lennon later said, "I saw the top of the mountain on that glorious night."

Two: this is the only Beatles concert recording I've seen that includes the opening acts with worthy sound quality. So you get the full concert experience, complete with lots of local radio DJs and other emcees hyping things up. It's true the opening acts weren't the greatest, compared to other opening acts for other Beatles concerts. I'm mainly interested in King Curtis and Brenda Holloway. But still, all of them are interesting as a historical curiosity. Keep in mind that there are an extremely small number of concert recordings from rock concerts as far back as 1965, outside of the Beatles and a few other big stars. So we're very lucky to have the opening acts. 

Three: the sound quality is surprisingly good for all of it, including the Beatles set. That's surprising because most concert recordings of the Beatles are practically unlistenable, in my opinion, due to all the screaming. And we know this concert took the screaming to new levels. The Beatles were forced to use the stadium's P.A. system, which was woefully inadequate for the situation. That meant the Beatles could barely hear each other. For instance, John Lennon later said of the concert, "It was a happening. You couldn't hear any music at all." But somehow, this recording brought the crowd noise down to a normal, reasonable level. I've done a lot of audio editing of crowd noise for this blog in general, but I barely made any changes for the Beatles set. (To have no or very little crowd noise would sound weird as well.) Plus, the actual singing and playing by the Beatles sounds very good, considering the difficult circumstances. 

There's a lot more I could say about this concert. But I don't want to write a mini-tome. So instead, I'll suggest some links if you want to know more. There's no Wikipedia page just for this concert. So here's a page from the Beatles Bible website instead:

https://www.beatlesbible.com/1965/08/15/live-shea-stadium-new-york/

Here's a 17 minute long fan-made YouTube video that explains the story of the concert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sca-bR1b-qE&t=247s

And here's a Rolling Stone magazine article just about the concert: 

Why The Beatles’ Shea Stadium Show Is The Ultimate Pop Celebration 

Here's a Washington Post article from 2025, also just about the concert, written to mark the 60th anniversary of it. It has a lot of great photos and anecdotes, including extensive quotes for Brenda Holloway about her impressions of all of it:

The Beatles’ historic Shea Stadium concert, remembered 60 years later - The Washington Post 

Finally, and most importantly, here's the transcript of an interview of author Laurie Jacobson, who wrote an ENTIRE BOOK just about this one concert, called "Top of the Mountain." I highly recommend reading this one. It's not too long, and it's filled with interesting stories, for instance how Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were also at the concert, and what happened to them:

https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/the-beatles-play-shea-stadium-1965/

By the way, did you know a lot of then-current and future famous people were in the crowd of 55,000 people for that concert? Future Beatles wives Linda Eastman and Barbara Bach were there. So were Marvin Gaye, Bobby Vinton, John Sebastian, Ronnie Spector, and Mary Wilson of the Supremes. (Gaye actually got a brief mention by an emcee right before Brenda Holloway's set.) So were Joe Walsh, Steve Van Zant, Whoopi Goldberg, and Meryl Streep, all of them teenagers or younger at the time. (Streep held up an "I love Paul" sign.) And Bob Dylan did not attend the concert, but he hung out with the Beatles at their hotel after the concert ended. (He'd met them for the first time a year earlier.) 

Another aside. Some accounts claim that the Rascals, then known as the Young Rascals, performed at the concert. They did not. However, they did attend, and got prime seats in the third base dugout. At the time, they had signed a record contract, but were still unknown. Promoter Sid Bernstein wanted to hype them as the next big thing, and had the scoreboard sign flash the message "The Rascals are coming!" But Beatles manager Brian Epstein saw that and told Bernstein to stop it immediately, so it was stopped.

Now, let me address edits to this recording. I kept most of it, but I removed a song at the start called "Discotech Dancers Medley." It basically was a Muzak-like instrumental that played while a dance troupe called the Discotech Dancers showed off their moves. It was something I guess you needed to see more than hear. Also, there was very little cheering to be heard at the ends of songs for all the opening acts. So I generally upped the volume of the applause for all of those.

There also were extensive problems with most of the songs in the short set by Cannibal and the Headhunters. I did my best to fix those (which is why you see "[Edit]" in some song titles, but there was only so much I could do. The first half of "The Way You Do the Things You Do" is incomplete, and there's nothing I could do about that. There were the most problems with "Land of 1000 Dances," the band's sole hit, and the banter track right after that. I ran those though MVSEP multiple times to get rid of the strange crackling noises. Each pass got a rid of more, but I reached diminishing returns so I had to stop. It sounds a lot better than before, but there's still a lot of bothersome noise there.

The Beatles recorded this entire concert because they planned to make an hour-long BBC T.V. special out of it. And such a special was made, and shown in Britain in March 1966. However, there were a lot of flaws in the recording of the Beatles performance. For instance, Lennon's voice dropped out for one of the verses in "Help." I patched that using a different live version from 1965. Due to these problems, the Beatles went to a recording studio in January 1966 and completely rerecorded three of the songs: "Ticket to Ride," "I Feel Fine," and "Help." They used a different live version of "Twist and Shout." They also rerecorded other bits. For instance, Paul McCartney redid his bass parts for most of the songs. For Ringo Starr's vocals on "Act Naturally," they just patched in vocals from the studio version. This is the original recording of their concert performance, before the Beatles did their rerecordings (with the exception of the edit I made to "Help"). Perhaps I'll post that quite different BBC version of the concert at another time, since I like posting BBC stuff.

You can find a Wikipedia article about the BBC special of this concert, here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles_at_Shea_Stadium 

One last comment. If anyone knows of any other recordings like this were the opening acts to the Beatles were recorded as well, please let me know. Like I said above, I'm just as interested in those parts as the Beatles' part, since there are so few live recordings of non-Beatles musical acts from this time period.

The music here is still officially unreleased, except for "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby," which made it onto the "Anthology" albums.  

This album is an hour and 25 minutes long. 

01 talk by emcee (King Curtis)
02 talk by emcee (King Curtis)
03 What'd I Say (King Curtis)
04 talk (King Curtis)
05 The Prance (King Curtis)
06 Soul Twist [Instrumental] (King Curtis)
07 talk by emcee (Cannibal & the Headhunters)
08 Out of Sight (Cannibal & the Headhunters)
09 talk (Cannibal & the Headhunters)
10 Now Lady Now [Edit] (Cannibal & the Headhunters)
11 The Way You Do the Things You Do [Incomplete] (Cannibal & the Headhunters)
12 talk (Cannibal & the Headhunters)
13 Land of 1000 Dances [Edit] (Cannibal & the Headhunters)
14 talk by emcee [Edit] (Cannibal & the Headhunters)
15 talk by emcee (Brenda Holloway)
16 Shake - [I Can't Get No] Satisfaction (Brenda Holloway)
17 I Can't Help Myself [Sugar Pie Honey Bunch] (Brenda Holloway)
18 talk (Brenda Holloway)
19 You Can Cry On My Shoulder (Brenda Holloway)
20 When I'm Gone (Brenda Holloway)
21 talk by emcee with outro (Brenda Holloway)
22 talk by emcee (Sounds Incorporated)
23 America - Fingertips (Sounds Incorporated)
24 talk (Sounds Incorporated)
25 The William Tell Overture [Instrumental] (Sounds Incorporated)
26 Instrumental (Sounds Incorporated)
27 talk (Sounds Incorporated)
28 In the Hall of the Mountain King [Instrumental] (Sounds Incorporated)
29 talk by emcee (Beatles)
30 talk (Beatles)
31 Twist and Shout (Beatles)
32 She's a Woman (Beatles)
33 talk (Beatles)
34 I Feel Fine (Beatles)
35 talk (Beatles)
36 Dizzy Miss Lizzy (Beatles)
37 talk (Beatles)
38 Ticket to Ride (Beatles)
39 talk (Beatles)
40 Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby (Beatles)
41 talk (Beatles)
42 Can't Buy Me Love (Beatles)
43 talk (Beatles)
44 Baby's in Black (Beatles)
45 talk (Beatles)
46 Act Naturally (Beatles)
47 talk (Beatles)
48 A Hard Day's Night (Beatles)
49 talk (Beatles)
50 Help [Edit] (Beatles)
51 talk (Beatles)
52 I'm Down (Beatles)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/JXJAdAMN

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/NDfxXPlJ6q0RgxD/file

I had a lot of choices for a cover photo, since this concert was such a high profile event, with lots of photographers there. I chose this one, even though it only shows George Harrison and John Lennon, because they look so damn happy. I especially don't think I've ever seen any other photo of Lennon looking this overjoyed. When he later talked about the Shea Stadium concert being "the top of the mountain," this shows what he meant. 

And by the way, this photo was taken right at the end of the concert, when they were performing "I'm Down." Harrison and Lennon were especially amused and happy because Lennon had just played a short keyboard solo with his elbows.