When I had told some online Beatles pals that I was supporting a book all about the Beatles 1965 Shea Stadium concert on Kickstarter, I got a bunch of gripes. "Uh...another book about Shea? Don't we know all about that already?" "There are too many Beatle books out. This one won't be any good." I just wanted to stare at them (but since I was online that was impossible). Too many Beatle books??? Ummm....I do not recall there EVER being an entire book written about the Shea concert. So I scoff at you who do not want another Beatles book or who think we know it all on a Beatles topic. Scoff Scoff!
The book The Beatles at Shea Stadium is written by Dave Schwensen, the same guy who brought us an amazing book about the Beatles Cleveland concerts. I really enjoyed the Cleveland book and this one is just as great. Dave has done some extensive research in finding people to interview for this book. He has spoken to insiders who were there backstage with the Beatles as well as fans who were in the stands and everyone in between.
The book takes you song by song in the concert and lets you know what was going on with the Beatles as well as the fans during the songs.
My favorite story told about the concert comes from one of the fans in the stands, Judith Kristen (that name should sound familiar). She explains what was going on in her section of the stadium that caused John Lennon to do this:
The information about the actual concert was great, but what I really found interesting was how the Shea Stadium television special came to be. I especially liked reading about the Beatles re-recording parts of the audio for the special. They did this recording in early January 1966, right before John and Ringo left on their holiday and George got married to Pattie. There is a detailed letter in the book from one of the guys who worked on the project that was written back to his son in the United States (who was a Beatles fan). This letter goes into a lot of detail that we would not know otherwise about this recording session. Reading that letter alone was worth the book for me. Although there are a lot of things like letters, telegrams, etc in that section that just kept me wanting more.
The author, Dave Schwensen has offered up a code to the readers of Meet the Beatles for Real if you are interested in purchasing this book. It is worth 15% off the price of the book. The book only is available in paperback, but it is also available to read through the kindle, nook and ibook (if you are into that as well). The 15% off code is good for only the paperback book. To get the code to work, you have to go through this sight (which is connected to amazon) and put in the code CHHZB5W9.
There are many great Beatle book that just came out or are coming out this up coming year, and I would put The Beatles at Shea Stadium on the list of ones to read.