The Rolling Stones played Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens on July 2, 1966 — one of the summer stadium dates that made up an American tour in the middle sixties.

The stadium had been built in 1923 for the West Side Tennis Club and hosted the US National Championships until 1977. From the mid-1960s it doubled as a concert venue, a horseshoe of concrete grandstands seating around fourteen thousand, and its Music Festival series brought the touring acts too large for a theatre. The Beatles had played it in 1964. Bob Dylan's 1965 Forest Hills concert, weeks after Newport, is among the most discussed nights of his electric turn — the crowd booed the second half.

The Stones in the summer of 1966 had *Aftermath* out and "Paint It Black" at number one, and were still a package-tour act playing short sets into continuous screaming. The contrast with what was being built in San Francisco that same summer is the reason this date is in the chronicle at all: four thousand miles west, the Fillmore and the Avalon were teaching an audience to come and listen.