On Aug. 29, 1964, the Beatles 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.
The 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 — which focused solely on the pandemonium that broke out during their 25-minute headlining set.
“An overflow audience of more than 15,000 persons, mostly teenage girls, shrieked their approval,” reads an account of night one in the New York Times by Robert Shelton. “They 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.”
The 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 powerful sense of déjà vu when he returned for the first time since those days to play a show with the All Starr Band on Oct. 1.
“It’s great to be back,” he deadpanned after opening up with the Carl Perkins classic “Matchbox.” “Nineteen-sixty…[slurred, confused murmur] we played here, and here I am back, still doing it, that’s the big thing. Are you ready to have some fun? Are you ready to hear some music?”
A few songs later, he again addressed the audience. “We did play here in 1964,” he said. “What a great gig it was. I did a song there, and I’m going to do the same song since I do it every night, since even before that band you’re thinking of. In [my pre-Beatles band] Rory and the Hurricanes, I started doing this song.”
He was talking about the 1960 Shirelles classic “Boys,” 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’t about to break out “All My Loving,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “She Loves You,” or even their covers of “Twist and Shout” and “Long Tall Sally.”
In keeping with the tradition of every All Starr Band show since the inaugural run in 1989, the Beatles songs were limited to ones like “Octopus’s Garden,” “Yellow Submarine,” “I Wanna Be Your Man,” and “With a Little Help From My Friends” that he originally sang. (We’ve been waiting in vain these past 37 years for the live debut of “Good Night.” At this point, it’s surely never happening.)
For 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’s Randy Bachman, the Who’s John Entwistle, Grand Funk Railroad’s Mark Farner, Billy Preston, and the Rascals’ Felix Cavaliere one summer, and then see Peter Frampton, Procol Harum’s Gary Brooker, Cream’s Jack Bruce, and Bad Company’s Simon Kirke the next one. But he’s stuck with Toto’s Steve Lukather since 2012, Men at Work’s Colin Hay since 2018, and Average White Band’s Hamish Stuart since 2019.
They’ve become the closest thing he’s had to a consistent band since the Beatles, and they all “pass the baton” throughout the nights by singing their three biggest hits. It creates a fantastically surreal set where Toto’s “Rosanna,” Average White Band’s “Pick Up the Pieces,” and Men at Work’s “Down Under” were played in unison, with Ringo on drums.
They have this set down to a science at this point, and it’s a joy to watch Hay assist Lukather on the high parts of “Africa” (“It’s gonna take a lot to drag me away from you/There’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do”), and Stuart gleefully sing along to “Who Can It Be Now?” and “Hold the Line.”
Starr is just four years shy of his 90th birthday, but he played drums on practically every song where he didn’t sing lead, and somehow had the energy to do jumping jacks at the end of “With a Little Help From My Friends” before sprinting offstage, and running back to sing a coda of John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.” Scientists need to study Starr to discover the secrets of longevity.
Back 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. “The Beatles’ ability to sway, manipulate and hypnotize an immature audience has been proved,”he wrote in his New York Times review of the show.“They 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.”
That hysteria is long gone, even if the crowd shrieked every time Ringo took the mic and a white-haired lady perched near the front — waving a giant sign that she was there in ’64 — shook her hips along to the music for two consecutive hours. There was nothing “contrived” 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.
For Ringo, meanwhile, this was just another gig. He’s now off to Portland, Maine, for the next one. He’s been doing this for longer than much of the audience at Forest Hills was even alive, and he’ll be somewhere playing “Boys” after we’re all gone.
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