Entries tagged with “rock'n'roll” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

THIS DAY IN NEW YORK HISTORY

On October 12 and 13, 1982, the Clash opened for The Who at Shea Stadium. The Clash were touring support of their album Combat Rock. "Right away when we heard we were going to play there we thought about the Beatles at Shea," guitarist Mick Jones told the Associated Press. "Everybody knew about it." The band played fourteen songs in the rain:

London Calling
Police On My Back
The Guns of Brixton
Tommy Gun
Magnificent 7
Armagideon Time
Rock The Casbah
Train In Vain
Career Opportunities
Spanish Bombs
Clampdown
English Civil War
Should I Stay Or Should I Go
I Fought The Law

I didn't see the Shea Stadium shows, but I did see the band about a month earlier at Pier 84. It was an amazing show, and when the rain began to fall -- hard -- at the end of the show, it seemed only to energize the band. There's an account of that gig online here, along with descriptions of existing bootlegs of the show.

Meanwhile, the second Shea Stadium show has just been released on CD.  According to Rolling Stone's review of the album, "the album captures a rousing, crystalline-sounding Clash show." You can find out more about The Clash Live at Shea Stadium via this YouTube video:

Watching the premiere of Life on Mars got me reminiscing about New York in the Seventies. And then today I gave a brief talk at a College of Arts and Science admissions open house, which I preceded with the opening slides from Bryan's and my Writing New York class. I substituted a version of "Sidewalks of New York" performed by Duke Ellington for Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "New York, New York," which we usually play over the slides, but I still played Ace Frehley's "New York Groove" at the conclusion of the slide show.

Do you remember that song? It was from Frehley's "solo" album, released in October 1978. Frehley was the lead guitarist for the band KISS, and each member of the quartet released a solo album that fall.

Here's a video of the song from the KISS tour that followed the release of the solo albums and the group album Dynasty in 1979:

THIS DAY IN NEW YORK HISTORY

Shea Stadium, the home of the New York Mets, is in its final year. It opened on April 17, 1963 and cost $28.5 million to build. The Mets' new home, Citi Field, will open next April with a projected cost of $850 million ($450 million of which is being subsidized with public funds).

On August 15, 1965, Shea was host to a historic non-baseball event: the first concert in the Beatles' 1965 North American tour. It was the first stadium concert in the history of rock 'n' roll, with a a then-record audience of 55,600. The band was introduced by Ed Sullivan, on whose show they had appeared the previous night.

The setlist for the show at Shea: "Twist And Shout," "She's A Woman," "I Feel Fine," "Dizzy Miss Lizzy," "Ticket To Ride," "Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby," "Can't Buy Me Love," "Baby's In Black," "Act Naturally," "A Hard Day's Night," "Help!" and "I'm Down."

This video clip from YouTube will give you a sense of what it was like.



The concert was filmed and aired on television in the U.S. in December the following year. Much of the concert is included in the The Beatles Anthology on DVD.