{"id":914413,"date":"2026-10-03T07:42:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-03T07:42:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/914413\/"},"modified":"2026-10-03T07:42:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T07:42:14","slug":"ringo-starr-plays-forest-hills-stadium-first-time-since-beatlemania","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/914413\/","title":{"rendered":"Ringo Starr Plays Forest Hills Stadium, First Time Since Beatlemania"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tOn Aug. 29, 1964, the Beatles<\/a> played the second of two consecutive shows at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, wrapping up a packed couple of months at the outdoor venue in Queens, New York, that also included shows by Barbra Streisand, Harry Belafonte with Miriam Makeba, Joan Baez with surprise guest Bob Dylan, Johnny Mathis with Peter Nero, and a wild triple bill of Trini Lopez, Count Basie, and Woody Allen.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Bill Black Combo, the Exciters, the Righteous Brothers, and Jackie DeShannon opened for the Beatles, but they were unmentioned by most accounts in the press \u2014 which focused solely on the pandemonium that broke out during their 25-minute headlining set.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAn overflow audience of more than 15,000 persons, mostly teenage girls, shrieked their approval,\u201d reads an account of night one in the New York Times by Robert Shelton.<\/a> \u201cThey continued their frenzied, nearly hysterical screaming as the quartet sang a number of their fabulously successful hits. It was virtually impossible to hear the singing over the shrieking, which often reached the threshold of pain. It would be parlous to evaluate music making in a situation such as this. The event sounded like a flock of transistor radios blaring in a bull ring.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe world has gone through quite a few changes in the 62 years since those frenzied nights at the height of Beatlemania, but the interior of Forest Hills Stadium looks largely identical. That must have given Ringo Starr<\/a> a powerful sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu when he returned for the first time since those days to play a show with the All Starr Band on Oct. 1.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s great to be back,\u201d he deadpanned after opening up with the Carl Perkins classic \u201cMatchbox.\u201d \u201cNineteen-sixty\u2026[slurred, confused murmur] we played here, and here I am back, still doing it, that\u2019s the big thing. Are you ready to have some fun? Are you ready to hear some music?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tA few songs later, he again addressed the audience. \u201cWe did play here in 1964,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat a great gig it was. I did a song there, and I\u2019m going to do the same song since I do it every night, since even before that band you\u2019re thinking of. In [my pre-Beatles band] Rory and the Hurricanes, I started doing this song.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tHe was talking about the 1960 Shirelles classic \u201cBoys,\u201d which has indeed been in his live repertoire since the early days of the JFK Administration. It was the only repeat song from the 1964 concert since Ringo wasn\u2019t about to break out \u201cAll My Loving,\u201d \u201cI Want to Hold Your Hand,\u201d \u201cShe Loves You,\u201d or even their covers of \u201cTwist and Shout\u201d and \u201cLong Tall Sally.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn keeping with the tradition of every All Starr Band show since the inaugural run in 1989, the Beatles songs were limited to ones like \u201cOctopus\u2019s Garden,\u201d \u201cYellow Submarine,\u201d \u201cI Wanna Be Your Man,\u201d and \u201cWith a Little Help From My Friends\u201d that he originally sang. (We\u2019ve been waiting in vain these past 37 years for the live debut of \u201cGood Night.\u201d At this point, it\u2019s surely never happening.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tFor most of the history of these tours, Ringo rotated in a new crew of All Starrs every time out. You might catch the Guess Who\u2019s Randy Bachman, the Who\u2019s John Entwistle, Grand Funk Railroad\u2019s Mark Farner, Billy Preston, and the Rascals\u2019 Felix Cavaliere one summer, and then see Peter Frampton, Procol Harum\u2019s Gary Brooker, Cream\u2019s Jack Bruce, and Bad Company\u2019s Simon Kirke the next one. But he\u2019s stuck with Toto\u2019s Steve Lukather since 2012, Men at Work\u2019s Colin Hay since 2018, and Average White Band\u2019s Hamish Stuart since 2019.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tThey\u2019ve become the closest thing he\u2019s had to a consistent band since the Beatles, and they all \u201cpass the baton\u201d throughout the nights by singing their three biggest hits. It creates a fantastically surreal set where Toto\u2019s \u201cRosanna,\u201d Average White Band\u2019s \u201cPick Up the Pieces,\u201d and Men at Work\u2019s \u201cDown Under\u201d were played in unison, with Ringo on drums.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tThey have this set down to a science at this point, and it\u2019s a joy to watch Hay assist Lukather on the high parts of \u201cAfrica\u201d (\u201cIt\u2019s gonna take a lot to drag me away from you\/There\u2019s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do\u201d), and Stuart gleefully sing along to \u201cWho Can It Be Now?\u201d and \u201cHold the Line.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tStarr is just four years shy of his 90th birthday, but he played drums on practically every song where he didn\u2019t sing lead, and somehow had the energy to do jumping jacks at the end of \u201cWith a Little Help From My Friends\u201d before sprinting offstage, and running back to sing a coda of John Lennon\u2019s \u201cGive Peace a Chance.\u201d Scientists need to study Starr to discover the secrets of longevity.<\/p>\n

\n\tBack in 1964, even a relatively enlightened critic like Robert Shelton, who played a pivotal role in introducing Bob Dylan to a national audience three years before, was a Beatles skeptic. \u201cThe Beatles\u2019 ability to sway, manipulate and hypnotize an immature audience has been proved,\u201d he wrote in his New York Times review of the show. <\/a>\u201cThey have created a monster in their audience. If they have concern for anything but the money they are earning, they had better concern themselves with controlling their audiences before this contrived hysteria reaches uncontrollable proportions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tThat hysteria is long gone, even if the crowd shrieked every time Ringo took the mic and a white-haired lady perched near the front \u2014 waving a giant sign that she was there in \u201964 \u2014 shook her hips along to the music for two consecutive hours. There was nothing \u201ccontrived\u201d about her reaction to this music in 1964, 2026, or any point in between. Something fundamental about our world changed when the Beatles arrived in 1964, and the reverberations will continue forever.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Ringo, meanwhile, this was just another gig. He\u2019s now off to Portland, Maine, for the next one. He\u2019s been doing this for longer than much of the audience at Forest Hills was even alive, and he\u2019ll be somewhere playing \u201cBoys\u201d after we\u2019re all gone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Aug. 29, 1964, the Beatles played the second of two consecutive shows at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":914414,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,136,37881,36484],"class_list":["post-914413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-ringo-starr","tag-the-beatles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=914413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/914414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=914413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=914413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=914413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}