Holy Shea Stadium! The Batman, Beatles, and Bob Dylan Connection
“I always loved Batman. The way I looked at it, you had to come from another planet to be Superman but I could be Batman. And you know I tried.” ~ Bob Dylan, Theme Time Radio Hour, October, 2008 — “Night”
In June 1966 Bob Dylan returned to Woodstock after a 45-gig world tour that had taken him from Louisville, Kentucky to London, England with stops in Hawaii, Australia, Scandinavia and France. You might think after that grind and with a wife, six-month-old baby, and four-year-old at home — none of whom he had seen in the past five months — the man was ready for a well-deserved break.
Yes, you might think that. If you did, you didn’t know Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, who liked his stable of stars best when they were out earning money and whose one known comment on Dylan’s upcoming accident was that so valuable a property shouldn’t be riding a motorcycle.
But this was more than a month before July 29, 1966, and Grossman was planning another Bob Dylan 64-date tour for 1966 through 1967 commencing on August 6th, less than two months away. The scheduling was still being firmed up, with venues as varied as Burlington, Vermont and the Soviet Union in play, but two dates were already definite, the Yale Bowl on August 6 and Shea Stadium a week later on August 13, 1966.
Shea Stadium! The Beatles had played Shea on August 15, 1965 in front of 56,000 frenzied micro-boppers, with screams, hot dogs, orange soda pop, and various prepubescent female undergarments showering down on them. August 13, 1966 would be almost a year to the day when Dylan would appear.
Karma, Fate, synchronicity, call it what you will, bubbie, if the Beatles had played Shea, then Bob Dylan at Shea Stadium was obviously something meant to be.
Interlude: “I Get High, I Get High, I Get High!”
But before we get to Shea, Sherman, let’s take the Wayback Machine to two years earlier — August, 1964. The place: The Hotel Delmonico in New York City, where the Beatles are ensconced, in wait for their Forest Hills concert that evening.
A blue station wagon makes its way through police barricades to the hotel’s front entrance and out tumble journalist Al Aronowitz, roadie cum chauffer Victor Maimudes, and Bob Dylan himself. The trio run a police gantlet in the lobby, shepherded by Beatles road manager, Mal Evans. When they arrive at the Fab Four’s floor, they find a hotel corridor packed with still more cops plus an overflow crowd from the suite next to the Beatles. A scrum of reporters and photographers and radio and recording and TV personalities and those hip enough to make it this far — including Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio — but not hip enough to get immediate access into the inner sanctum, are all waiting and hoping and wishing and praying to meet the Beatles.
However, Bob Dylan is the one human being on Earth who is hip enough, and is ushered into the Beatles’ suite, where the group is finishing up a room service dinner. This first encounter — in the words of Al Aronowitz and Allen Ginsberg — was “demure.” The Beatles offered Mr. D. champagne. Dylan, who was still in his boho beatnik phase, asked for cheap wine but had to settle for one of the more expensive vintages on the table. The talk eventually turned to drugs and the taking of same, as it often does among the hip and famous. Surprising to the Americans was the news that none of the Beatles had indulged in that evil weed Mary-Juana, being, as many British lads of the time were, dedicated pill-heads.
As their graceful hosts offered a selection of pills, Aronowitz said the Dylan entourage would rather smoke some pot with them. When one of the Beatles replied they had never smoked pot, Dylan, who had moved on to the room service Scotch and was well on his way to a full drunk, brought up that they had sung:
“I get high! I get high! I get high!”
… in their bubblegum hit, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” so what was that all about, man?
John pointed out that they were actually singing:
“I can’t hide! I can’t hide! I can’t hide!”
… and with that settled, the rolling of the Js took place. In a show of solidarity with fellow superstars, Dylan attempted to roll the first joint but most of the grass ended up in a fruit basket and Victor Maimudes took over the paper duties.
After taking a hit, Bob handed the joint to John, who, being no fool and suspicious of what mind-warping substance his American rival might be laying on him, immediately handed it to Ringo, who he dubbed his “royal taster.”
Being unfamiliar with pot protocol, Ringo bogarted the joint, and Maimudes ended up rolling individual marijuana cigarettes for everyone in the room, which, as Al Aronowitz noted in his memoir, probably worked out for the best, as the delicate Brits might have been freaked by the idea of passing a joint like a bottle shared by winos on a street corner.
Time passed. Everybody fulfilled the alternate lyrics to “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and got high, with Ringo periodically melting down into giggles and Paul so taken with his altered state of mind that he ordered Mal Evans to follow him around and write down all of his pronouncements. John produced a little yellow plastic airplane, zooming it over heads and into faces while everyone broke up with laughter.
It was a typical pot-head get-together. A good time was had by all.
One Night Never: Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul & Mary
Returning back to 1966, the advertising flyer for the third “Concerts at the Shea” show had Peter, Paul & Mary co-billed with Dylan, with ticket prices ranging from $3 dollars for the cheap upper level seats to $6 for field boxes. According to Mickey Jones, Dylan’s once and future drummer for the ‘66 tour, the plan was to have Peter, Paul & Mary open the show, playing their folkie set in the first half. Dylan and the band would close with an electric-only second act.
It seems like something destined for trouble, with Dylan electric rocker fans likely to be annoyed and restless during the first half of the show, and those expecting Dylan to play at least some of his acoustic folk hits outraged during the second half.
Perhaps Dylan thought it a way to give his folkie fan base what they wanted without his actually having to play anything. It’s more likely that Albert Grossman, outside of the financial benefit of collecting his percentage of both acts’ take for the Shea gig, was doing what he could to ensure a Dylan Shea Stadium appearance wouldn’t become an embarrassing disaster.
While those of us living in the Dylan fan bubble might think, “what the hell, this is Bob Dylan in 1966,” there was no guarantee that Dylan by himself could fill a venue with a capacity roughly four times larger than the largest gigs he was playing at the time.
Even the Beatles, who had sold out Shea Stadium in 1965, would leave 11,000 of the 55,000 available seats empty in their 1966 show. An audience of forty-four thousand was still nothing to sneeze at, of course, but was also nothing Grossman could hope for.
While Bobby D. was popular, and growing more so by the moment, he wasn’t anywhere near bubblegum Beatlemania popular. Maybe on a good day in 1966 he could bring 20 to 25,000 boppers to Shea as a solo act. Adding in PP&M wouldn’t boost the show to Mop Top levels, but would help put some more fannies in the seats. Anything would help, as the cavernous Shea made the optics of a crowd taking up less than half of its capacity look like a teenage wasteland. If the show had gone on, maybe Grossman would have been compelled to add even more acts from his stable of stars.
The Shea concert was being promoted by one Harry Bloomfield, a restauranter and would-be Broadway impresario who was trying to move into concert production with his “Concerts at the Shea.” As well as booking Dylan, Bloomfield had two other shows in the works for his concert series; Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald in July and an untitled variety show package concert with Adam “Batman” West as the headliner in June.
Batman? Yes, Batman. By the summer of 1966 full Batmania had seized the nation, with the year-old television show getting hit ratings and Adam West and Burt “Robin” Ward receiving thousands of fan letters a week. Here’s a typical letter addressed to Burt Ward:
“Dear you, wonderful, fabulous, magnificent, exquisite Boy Wonder, A cold chill runs up my spine every time I see you sock a villain, and, oh, how I cry when you’re even scratched. Please, don’t send me a mimeograph copy of interesting facts about you, I want your handwriting. I have a whole wall on my room dedicated to you.
Oh, Boy Wonder, I’m making a gum wrapper chain to symbolize my love for you. It’s going to be as long as I am tall, and I’m 5 foot 10 inches in stocking feet. Please, Boy Wonder, PLEASE, come next Saturday and sleep for a week or two. I will feed you breakfast in bed, I will make your bed for you, and I like you so much that I want you to spend the whole summer with me.
(I hope you know this is a girl writing)”
In California, high school students circulated a petition to keep their teachers from assigning homework on the evenings that Batman was broadcast. In New York, the White Horse Inn posted signs notifying its customers that Batman was on the house TV every Wednesday and Thursday.
In San Francisco, a North Beach cabaret began featuring a topless Batgirl dancing to music provided by a combo called The Bat Men. KGO-TV, the local ABC outlet, used a spotlight to project the Bat Signal on low-lying clouds.
You get the point: Batman was a big deal. During the Summer and Fall of 1966 Adam West and Frank Gorshin went on tour as Batman and the Riddler to promote the upcoming full-length Batman movie and, of course, the TV series itself. A changing cast of regionally popular bands would open the two-hour Bat-tacular before the featured event of dancing Batusi Girls, Batman and the Riddler exchanging corny jokes, Gorshin doing celebrity impersonations, and West closing the show with a few songs.
Adam West couldn’t really sing, as the clip below demonstrates, but this was during a time in Hollywood where the conceit was that anyone famous could sing, and sing they did. In fact, Burt “Robin” Ward, who couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, was signed to a record contract and released one single featuring the same song West sings below — no doubt for its Zap! Pow! Bam! connotations. As one would expect, Ward’s record sank without a trace, but is valued by collectors today for having been produced by Frank Zappa and featuring a back-up band consisting of The Mothers of Invention.
Anyway, singing aside, Batman 1966 was a big deal. Big enough to fill Shea Stadium. Or at least that was the plan.
When Things Go Wrong, They Go Very, Very Wrong
Things started going wrong for Harry Bloomfield right from the git-go. There were stories — stories which turned out to be true — that he was a convicted criminal (income tax evasion in 1949) who should never have been granted a license to put on the Shea concerts. A thousand tickets for the Batman show were stolen from a publicist’s office, presumably destined for sale at cut-rate street prices.
The New York Park Commission threatened to cancel Batman unless Bloomfield posted a $5,000 bond to cover potential damages as well as paying the Shea $10,000 rental up front. Booked acts — including Skitch Henderson and his Tonight Show Orchestra and M.C. “Cousin Brucie” — bailed after hearing of dismally low ticket sales, their slots to be filled with second-tier replacements. On the afternoon of the first show, Adam West had to personally guarantee the Teamster crew’s payment to stop them from deconstructing the stage.
Even though “Concerts at the Shea” claimed it had sold over 25,000 tickets to the Bat-concert(s), when the first show started on the afternoon of June 25, the opening rock acts were playing to an audience of somewhere around 3,000. Yet the show went gamely on. The various groups came out and played to the empty stadium, “proving conclusively,” a snarky Times reporter wrote, “that if there’s anything worse than having rock ’n’ roll groups drowned out by adoring fans, it’s having them not drowned out.”
Unsurprisingly, given that the afternoon crowd was largely composed of young Bat-fans accompanied by parents, the audience’s enthusiasm improved markedly when Batman finally showed up, even though he arrived in a Cadillac rather than the Batmobile.
From all reports, West and Gorshin were boffo with the kiddies with their hero-villain routine. Sample Riddler riddle: “Why are the Mets like my mother-in-law’s biscuits? Answer: “They both need a better batter.” Gorshin also teased West about his noticeable belt overhang. “I’m flabbergasted,” quoth the Batman. “Well, you have a lot of flab to gast,” riposted the Riddler.
Unfortunately, there’s no record of how the “26! Count ‘Em, 26!” dancing Batsui girls fared, but one can hope they were also a hit.
Although not as well-covered as the afternoon show, the 7:30 evening Rock/Bat concert reportedly had a larger audience of around 6,000, probably with more music fans in attendance, but still a financial catastrophe for Harry Bloomfield.
Appointment in Samarra
“A merchant in Baghdad sent his servant to the marketplace only to have him come home trembling, telling his master that he had met a woman, whom he recognized as Death. The servant fled to Samarra, where he believed Death could not find him. The merchant went to the marketplace himself to accost Death and to find out why she had threatened his servant. Death replied, “There was no threat. I was simply astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”
On June 30th, the Long Island Star-Ledger reported that the remaining “Concerts at the Shea” were in danger of cancellation, including Bob Dylan’s August 13th concert. But it didn’t matter. A month later Bob Dylan would narrowly miss his own appointment in Samarra. And Adam West and Frank Gorshin would continue on their own Never-Ending Tour as Batman and the Riddler.
Coda
Adam West passed away in 2017 at age 88. Although he had mixed feelings about Batman dominating both his career and life, he played the role to the hilt to the very end, often in spoofs of the straight-arrow character.
Frank Gorshin died at age 72 in Burbank, California. Best-known in his early career for impersonations of celebrities such as Burt Lancaster and James Cagney, Gorshin was labeled as “the best impressionist in Las Vegas.” He appeared as the Riddler in the first and many other episodes of the Batman series and frequently stole the show from West, Burt Ward, and even his fellow villains, especially in the Batman movie of 1966. In that film, Gorshin, Burgess “The Penguin” Meredith, and Lee “Catwoman” Meriwether put so much effort into upstaging each other that even Cesar Romero was forced to put energy into his usual lackluster Joker performance. Gorshin and Adam West were close friends and colleagues, often reprising their roles as Riddler and Batman together.
Burt Ward continued his role as Robin the Boy Wonder in the Saturday morning animated series The New Adventures of Batman (1977), the two-episode pilot Legends of the Superheroes (1979), the animated reunion films Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders (2016) and Batman vs. Two-Face (2017), and the live-action television event Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019). He remained friends with Adam West up to West’s death in 2017.
The Beatles broke up in 1969, with Paul McCartney making the “official” announcement in 1970. Of the Fab Four, George Harrison became the closest to Bob Dylan, staying at Dylan’s home, convincing Dylan to perform in The Concert for Bangladesh, and teaming up with Dylan, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty to form “the world’s most mellow supergroup” the Traveling Wilburys. Harrison died at age 58 of cancer.
Shea Stadium was demolished in 2009 at age 45 to create additional parking for the adjacent Citi Field, the stadium built to replace it and the current home of the Mets.
Bob Dylan recently turned 81, and is currently traveling on the “Rough and Rowdy Ways” tour.
The whereabouts of the 26 Batusi Girls are unknown.
