The top 10 most memorable NYC concerts of all time

Whiteman’s concert of experimental music might have disappeared into the history books if not for one little detail—it served as the world premiere for George Gershwin’s new concerto, “Rhapsody In Blue.” Commissioned specifically for the show at Whiteman’s request, written in barely a month and with the piano part played by Gershwin himself (who improvised some of it on the fly), “Rhapsody” proved the highlight of the February 24 concert, hypnotizing the audience and redefining the relationship between jazz and classical music.

These days, the thought of Carnegie Hall hosting a jazz concert doesn’t seem odd at all—but back in 1938, the idea of the biggest name in popular music performing there was laughable. Literally—Benny Goodman reportedly burst out laughing when his publicist suggested it. But the concert, featuring Goodman’s legendary orchestra and guest stars like Count Basie, proved a massive hit; the January 16 concert sold out weeks in advance (with the most expensive tickets going for a whopping $2.75), and pushed jazz into the world of well-bred music.

Forget NYC—the Beatles’ August 15 show at Shea will go down as one of the most memorable concerts in human existence. Coming at the height of Beatlemania, the kick-off show to the band’s 1965 U.S. tour saw the stadium jammed to the brim with 55,600 fans, each and every one screaming his or her (mostly her) lungs out almost the entire time. The performance itself was hardly John, Paul, George and Ringo’s best—it was only 30 minutes long, and the band couldn’t hear one another play—but the sheer madness of the show seared the concert into rock and roll history.

^{Photograph: Flickr/Creative Commons/its all about Rock (:}

When Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel reunited for a 1981 benefit concert to raise money for Central Park, their careers were doing about as poorly as the downtrodden park they were performing in; the duo had broken up a decade before, and their solo careers weren’t grabbing people the way their joint work had. But the 500,000 people who showed up for the free show—along with the double-platinum album and HBO special recorded at the concert that generated the money needed to fix up Central Park—proved Simon & Garfunkel, like NYC, still had plenty of people who cared about them.

When they burst onto the scene in the early ‘90s from the Bristol trip hop scene, Portishead became notorious for pushing the boundaries of alternative rock and electronic music. Despite their English roots, though, the only concert they deemed spectacular enough to release a live album from took place in New York City: their 1997 show at the Roseland Ballroom. Outfitted with a full string section in place of their usual samples and loops, the band delivered a once-in-a-lifetime performance unlike anything before—or since.

New York City had seen benefit concerts before, but never quite like this. This wasn’t to aid farmers or stop nuclear proliferation; this was to help NYC itself, in the wake of the worst day in its history. Organized by Paul McCartney, whose father was a firefighter, as a way to honor the city’s first responders after 9/11, an all-star cast of music legends came to sing for a Garden jam-packed with fire fighters and police officers. Everyone from Jay-Z to Billy Joel to Eric Clapton showed up—but it was The Who’s pounding four-song set that brought the house down.

Seen today, Dave Chappelle’s Bed-Stuy block party—which was less of a neighborhood get-together and more a carefully-coordinated concert made for a documentary Chappelle produced with Michel Gondry—seems like a time capsule from an era just departed. Chappelle was at the height of fame, only months from his famed burnout. Bed-Stuy was just seeing the first tentacles of gentrification. Kanye West was a hot young rapper, The Roots weren’t staples of late-night TV, and J. Cole was just a teenager in the crowd. But the music—the raw, 12-hour-long extravaganza of hip hop and R&B—is as fresh as ever, in large part thanks to the energy of that standing-room-only NYC crowd.

Few musicians can lay a better claim to knowing the heart and soul of New York than Billy Joel, so when it came time to send Shea Stadium off to that borough in the sky, it seemed only natural for him to be the final rocker to shake the bleachers. More than 110,000 people flocked to the stadium for two final shows, where Joel blasted through his hits and deep tracks alike with his usual energy, humor and aplomb—along with support from the likes of Garth Brooks, Tony Bennett, and Steven Tyler. But he seemed more than happy to honor the stadium’s most famous concert with a few Beatles songs towards the end of the last show…especially since Paul McCartney flew in from London just to sing at Shea one last time.

When LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy decided it was time for the band to, well, disband, the New York-based act made the choice to close things out on a high note—with a rollicking send-off concert in Manhattan’s biggest arena. The nearly-four-hour-long show served as a high-octane retrospective of the band’s short-but-rich catalog, as well as guest appearances from the likes of Arcade Fire and Reggie Watts. And when the time came to wrap things up once and for all, the band ended the night with the obvious-but-all-too-perfect choice: “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down.”