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Thu 11 September 2025 20:30, UK
The world wasn’t ready for The Beatles to play Shea Stadium.
While that might be a grand opening line, the truth is, it wasn’t ready in a very literal sense. Grammy award-winning producer, Steve Lillywhite, got it wrong when he argued, “There’s an argument now that The Beatles never made anything you could play in a stadium. The Beatles never made anything you could play at a huge sporting event.”
Lillywhite, who produced Dirty Work by The Rolling Stones, continued, “So Queen, when you talk about the greatest bands ever – I would never say anyone is greater than The Beatles – but there’s an argument right now that Queen, because of their ability to transcend stadiums, there’s an argument that they are more relevant today than The Beatles are.”
However, fans of the Fab Four would argue that from mid-1964 onward, the band almost exclusively played either stadiums or large auditoriums. This was during an era when the sound quality of large-scale amplification made this a rarity. It also made it a mishap. When the group played Shea Stadium in August 1965, the first major stadium rock concert, it was the beginning of the end of the Fab Four as a live force.
They couldn’t hear themselves play over the screaming noise with rudimentary speakers that paled in comparison to the onslaught of Beatlemania. However, this was a necessary battle. The commercial success of the show meant that future large-scale events were inevitable, and technology simply had to catch up.
In David Byrne’s book, How Music Works, the Talking Heads man makes the pertinent point that there is a symbiotic relationship between venues, technology, and music, each adapting to a change in impetus from one prong of the live triumvirate.
(Credits: Bruce McBroom / Apple Corps LTD)
As Byrne wrote: “In a sense, the space, the platform, and the software ‘makes’ the art, the music, or whatever. After something succeeds, more venues of a similar size and shape are built to accommodate more production of the same. After a while, the form of the work that predominates in these spaces is taken for granted— of course, we mainly hear symphonies in symphony halls.”
Likewise, we mainly hear stadium rock in stadiums. But that genre wouldn’t have existed if The Beatles hadn’t been big enough to present the proposition in floundering style. So, after they called it quits on the road, several other acts looked to rise up in their wake, and soon enough, one band was big enough to sell out Shea Stadium in double-quick time.
So, who sold out Shea Stadium faster than The Beatles in 1971?
Having formed in 1969, the ascent of Grand Funk Railroad was like a bullet train. Their goal was to bring a fun, muscularity to blues rock. They succeeded in a flash with their debut album, On Time, selling over one million copies within months. Sensing their own whiff of Grand Funk mania arising, they spent huge $100,000 sums on Times Square billboards, and rattled off records at a prolific rate.
By 1971, they were able to announce a show at Shea Stadium, equaling the attendance record for a rock show previously set by The Beatles. However, it took the Fab Four weeks to sell out. It only took Grand Funk Railroad a mere 72 hours.
Beyond that stat, the show is a prominent piece of pop culture history because it also went off without a hitch. The sound might not have been magnificent, but at least the band could be heard. So, as Byrne prophesied, bands could now rock out in stadiums, songs were written to match that magnitude, and amplifiers were developed to project the noise.
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