Boys Again in Forest Hills, Ringo Starr Returns to Queens

A woman near the front of Forest Hills Stadium is holding up a sign. It says she was here before. She means August 1964, when the Beatles played this old tennis stadium in Queens two nights running and the screaming drowned out almost everything else. On Thursday night, the man onstage answers her with a peace sign.

Ringo Starr is 86. He had not played Forest Hills since those two nights. On October 1 he came back with his All Starr Band, and the old tennis stadium, which by Rolling Stone's account looks almost exactly as it did then, got a second look at a Beatle.

The Night the Transistors Screamed

The first time was chaos. The Beatles closed out a summer at the stadium that had also brought Barbra Streisand, Harry Belafonte with Miriam Makeba, and Joan Baez with a surprise appearance from Bob Dylan. The Righteous Brothers and Jackie DeShannon were among the openers, though most press accounts barely mentioned them. The Beatles played for about 25 minutes.

Robert Shelton reviewed the first night for The New York Times. He counted an overflow crowd of more than 15,000, mostly teenage girls, and found the music almost impossible to hear.

The event sounded like a flock of transistor radios blaring in a bull ring.

Shelton, the critic who had helped introduce Bob Dylan to the country, was not a fan of the hysteria. He warned that the band had created a monster in its audience. Vulture dug up a few other details from that summer. Tickets cost $2.95 at the box office, and the band went on at 9:50 at night, long before anyone in Forest Hills worried about noise curfews.

Same Song, Different Century

Sixty-two years later, the hysteria has mellowed into something warmer. Starr opened with Matchbox, the Carl Perkins number, and then told the crowd it was great to be back. A few songs later he got specific. The Beatles had played here in 1964, he said, and it was a great gig. He had sung one song that night, and he was going to sing it again, because he sings it every night.

The song was Boys, the 1960 Shirelles hit. Starr has been singing it since before the Beatles, back when he drummed for Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. It was the only song from the 1964 set to make a return. There was no She Loves You, no I Want to Hold Your Hand. In the tradition of every All Starr tour since the first one in 1989, the Beatles songs were the ones Ringo sang himself. Yellow Submarine. Octopus's Garden. I Wanna Be Your Man. With a Little Help From My Friends.

At one point Steve Lukather of Toto started strumming the opening of Day Tripper. His boss cut him off, Vulture reported, with a short reply. Not that one.

Lukather has been in the band since 2012. Colin Hay of Men at Work joined in 2018, and Hamish Stuart of the Average White Band in 2019. For a group that once rotated new members every tour, this lineup is the closest thing Starr has had to a steady band since the Beatles. They pass the spotlight around, each man singing his own hits while Ringo keeps time behind them. So Forest Hills got Rosanna and Africa, Down Under and Who Can It Be Now, Pick Up the Pieces and Hold the Line. Vulture joked that fans get nearly as much Toto as Beatles. The crowd seemed amused.

Sixty-two years later, the hysteria has mellowed into something warmer.

Jumping Jacks at 86

The energy was the story. Starr drummed on almost every song he did not sing. At the end of With a Little Help From My Friends, wearing a glittering jacket covered in stars, he did jumping jacks, ran off the stage, and ran back for a short coda of Give Peace a Chance. Rolling Stone suggested that scientists should study him.

There was one rumor in the air. Paul McCartney is in town as a guest on Jimmy Kimmel's Brooklyn residency, which we covered when Kimmel brought his show home, and some in the crowd hoped he would turn up. He did not. Vulture's reviewer noted that after the finale, nobody was thinking about it anymore.

In 1964, the noise in Forest Hills was about what the Beatles meant. On Thursday it was about what Ringo still does. He plays. He waves. He sings a song he first sang more than six decades ago, as if it were brand new.

Then he packs up for Portland, Maine, and the next gig. The stadium goes dark. The woman with the sign goes home with a second story to tell.