SANTA BARBARA — “In this next song,” mentioned Paul McCartney, “we’d like you to sing along.”
Oh, this was the one?
By an hour or so into his live performance Friday night time on the Santa Barbara Bowl — mainly someone’s yard by the requirements of the previous Beatle — McCartney had already gotten the capability crowd to hitch in on a bunch of all-timers together with “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “Love Me Do,” “Jet,” “Getting Better,” “Lady Madonna,” “Let Me Roll It” and “Got to Get You Into My Life.”
However for Sir Paul, even (or particularly) at age 83, there’s at all times a approach to take an viewers increased.
In order his keyboard participant plunked out the track’s lovably lopsided lick, McCartney and his band cranked by means of a quick and jumpy rendition of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” that left no person any selection however to hop up and holler concerning the candy certainty of life’s happening.
Paul McCartney and his band.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Occasions)
A sellout just about as quickly because it was introduced, Friday’s present was a form of warm-up gig forward of the launch subsequent week of the most recent leg of McCartney’s Bought Again world tour, which started criss-crossing the globe in 2022 and can resume Monday night time in Palm Desert after a nine-month break.
On the highway he’s enjoying arenas and stadiums, however this hillside amphitheater seats solely 4,500 or so; to make the night much more intimate, followers needed to lock their telephones in little pouches on the best way into the venue. (The presence of a number of cameras swooping round on cranes instructed that McCartney was filming the live performance for some unspoken function.)
“That’s our wardrobe change of the evening,” he mentioned at one level after taking off his jacket, and certainly this was a barely trimmed-down model of the flashy multimedia manufacturing that he dropped at SoFi Stadium three years in the past. That night time in 2022, he performed three dozen tunes over two and a half hours; on Friday he did a dozen fewer — no “Maybe I’m Amazed,” no “Band on the Run” — in about an hour and 45 minutes.
The benefit of the smallness, in fact, was that you would actually hear what McCartney and his longtime backup band had been doing up there: the folky campfire vocal harmonies in “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” the propulsive groove driving “Get Back,” the hardly organized chaos of a downright raunchy “Helter Skelter.”
Then once more, that assumes that monitoring these particulars is why anyone turned up in Santa Barbara.
Although he dropped an album of recent solo songs in 2020, McCartney has been fairly deep in nostalgia mode because the 2021 launch of Peter Jackson’s broadly adored “Get Back” docuseries. He’ll have a tendency the machine this fall with a brand new e book about his years with Wings and an expanded version of the Beatles’ mid-’90s “Anthology” collection; subsequent yr, a documentary concerning the Wings period is due from director Morgan Neville; in 2028, director Sam Mendes will unveil the 4 separate biopics he’s making about every Beatle, with Paul Mescal within the position of McCartney.
Paul McCartney takes the stage.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Occasions)
All that wanting again could make it exhausting for even a loyal fan to absorb the legend standing earlier than them within the flesh; as an alternative of overwriting recollections with contemporary data, the thoughts steeped in delusion can practice itself to do the other (particularly when the proprietor of that thoughts has shelled out a whole lot of greenbacks for a live performance ticket).
But you must hand it to McCartney, whose face bore a dusting of silvery stubble on Friday: As predetermined as this viewers was to have a superb time, he was tapped into the vitality of a musician making minute-to-minute selections.
He opened the present with a zesty tackle the Beatles’ “Help!,” which specialists on the web say he hadn’t performed in live performance since 1990, then adopted it up with one in every of his quirkiest solo tunes within the disco-punk “Coming Up,” which he juiced with a little bit of Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” theme.
After a flirty “Love Me Do,” he requested the ladies within the crowd to “gimme a Beatles scream,” then nodded approvingly on the sound. “Imagine trying to play through that,” he added.
“Jet” had a nasty swagger and “I’ve Got a Feeling” an attractive strut; “Live and Let Die,” in the meantime, was simply as trashy as you’d hope.
McCartney informed transferring if acquainted tales about assembly Jimi Hendrix and about his mom coming to him within the dream that impressed “Let It Be”; he additionally informed one I’d by no means heard about screwing up a efficiency of “Blackbird” — “Lot of changes,” he mentioned of the track’s sophisticated guitar half — in entrance of Meryl Streep. As a result of his spouse Nancy was in the home, he mentioned, he performed “My Valentine,” a weepy piano ballad anybody however Nancy in all probability would’ve gladly exchanged for “Junior’s Farm” or “Drive My Car.”
However then what was that selection if not a dedication to the circumstances of the second?
Paul McCartney arrives on the Santa Barbara Bowl.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Occasions)
