SAN DIEGO — Carmen Salmon and Gary Rachac have never met. But both giddily attended the first and only San Diego concert by the Beatles at Balboa Stadium on Aug. 28, 1965. Like many others who were there, both of them remember the experience so vividly that it almost seems like yesterday.

“It was so loud and so exciting! We’d never seen anything like it,” said Salmon, who was then a senior at Chula Vista High School.

“Seeing the Beatles on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ in 1964 was a life-changer for me. Seeing them at Balboa Stadium was like they’d dropped in from another planet!” said Rachac, who was then a 12-year-old student at Linda Vista’s Montgomery Junior High School.

The concert, which took place here 60 years ago this week, made a major impact even on some fans who were unable to attend.

“I was only 8 so I was too young to go, but I recall that date really well,” said leading San Diego rock drummer Joel Kmak, a longtime member of the Beat Farmers.

“I remember thinking that afternoon: ‘Wow! The Beatles are probably in town now.’ And then I remember thinking, a few hours later: ‘They are probably going on stage now.’ I have since met and talked to people who went. It was a huge deal.”

The Beatles’ performance here was the first rock concert ever held at downtown’s Balboa Stadium, which was then the home of the San Diego Chargers. The venue went on to host concerts by the Jimi Hendrix Experience; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Elton John; Santana; the Eagles; Fleetwood Mac; Yes; Peter Frampton and more.

Much of the stadium was torn down in 1979, but it is still used for high school and recreational sports team games. For one memorable night in 1965, the stadium was the center of the music universe as the already legendary English quartet from Liverpool — also fondly known by many fans as the Fab Four — took the stage.

Like no other band before or since, the Beatles redefined what popular music could do and how it could reflect and transcend its time and place. Beginning with its landmark 1965 album, “Rubber Soul,” the band transformed the creative parameters of rock music. By that time, the group had already transformed pop culture like no one since Elvis Presley, who — by coincidence — the four Beatles met in Los Angeles for the first time the night before their Balboa Stadium performance.

The show here was the ninth of 12 concerts on the band’s 1965 North American tour. It famously opened at New York’s Shea Stadium and drew a record-setting audience of 55,000-plus. No other act, English or American, had ever mounted a stadium tour before, let alone one that paid them a minimum of $50,000 per show, plus a percentage based on the total attendance count.

Intriguingly, the Beatles’ San Diego concert was something of a flop, at least commercially speaking. Only 17,013 of the 27,014 available tickets were bought. But for those who attended, witnessing Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison in the flesh was a dizzying experience and then some.

“It was crazy. All I could hear was the girls screaming. Just seeing the band in person, even without being able to hear the music, made a huge impression on me,” said Rachac, who credits the Beatles for his becoming a lifelong musician and producer.

“You could barely hear the music over the screams, but it was an awesome day,” agreed Salmon, who went on to found the Beatles’ fan club Come Together. She also co-founded the Wheeling Sands, an all-girl band that specialized in playing Beatles’ songs. Salmon later gave each of her children Beatles-related names: Rocky (after the song “Rocky Raccoon”); Zak (after the name Beatles drummer Ringo Starr gave his firstborn son); Sunshine (after the song “Good Day Sunshine”); and Jet (after the Paul McCartney & Wings song “Jet”).

The Beatles delivered their Balboa Stadium concert quickly. The band ripped through 12 songs in just 31 minutes, opening with its version of The Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout” and concluding with a classic driving rocker of its own, “I’m Down.”

“That show was something else!” said English drummer Tony Newman of Sounds Incorporated, one of the concert’s opening acts. “The kids in Balboa Stadium started to jump over the barriers onto the field. They came over the top of the barriers, and there were these police and security guards catching them to keep them from hurting themselves.”

Newman’s recollection in a 2020 San Diego Union-Tribune interview was shared by San Diego percussionist Randy Hoffman and former San Diego Police Chief Ray Hoobler.

“There were all kinds of cops who were chasing the kids down, one by one, and tackling them,” Hoffman said in a 2005 Union-Tribune interview. “I think the cops were probably better than the Chargers were in those days.”

For the concert, Balboa Stadium was equipped with a 4-foot-high Cyclone fence around the perimeter of the field. No one was permitted to be on it, apart from the 100 policemen and 100 security guards on hand. Undaunted, some determined fans jumped over the fence in futile attempts to reach the stage.

“I remember one youngster scaled the fence and ran out onto the playing field, and Officer Rufino Yaptangco made one of the finest open field tackles I’ve ever seen,” Hoobler said in a 1984 Union-Tribune interview. “The noise was damned near debilitating. It was bedlam.”

Hoobler, then a brand-new police lieutenant, oversaw security at the Beatles’ concert here. He died in 2001.

“It was, by today’s standards, a well-behaved crowd, that spoke well for the youth of San Diego,” Hoobler said. “I wouldn’t let my two daughters, who were 13 and 15 at the time, go to the concert. It created a lot of dissension, but based on the news clips of the concerts at other locations, I didn’t know what to expect.

“It was quite a learning experience and when I walked away, I had a more enlightened attitude about Beatlemania, and a very positive attitude about the youngsters in our community.”

Salmon, still a devoted fan, will be attending Paul McCartney’s Oct. 4 concert at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas.

“This country was a dreary place after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, so when the Beatles came here, it was like a giant light went on,” she said. “Their music was so great, and it called out to our generation. It still does.”

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