Paul McCartney - The US Tour 2005

20.09.2005, Atlanta, GA; "Philips Arena"

Magical Mystery Tour (back from 1993)

Please Please Me (new addition)

English Tea (band comes back) (new song)

I'll Follow The Sun (with reprise)

Follow Me (new song)

Paul McCartney

This reviewer is not an especially big Beatles fan. He knows, he knows, he knows — it’s a terrible sin for a music critic to feel ambivalence toward this band, and he will be punished severely in the afterlife. But lying about it would only make matters worse.

And so it was with some trepidation Tuesday night that he trudged into a sold-out Philips Arena, notebook in hand, thinking he might have to write something unpleasant about Paul McCartney’s concert, in the interest of telling the truth.

He is happy to report, however, that the show was a tour-de-force. The career-spanning 160-minute performance not only testified to McCartney’s artistic stamina, it reanimated a catalog of songs so overexposed that they’ve been systematically bled of their life force.

Against the odds, Sir Paul made them matter again. His voice, while not much worse than in his prime, is certainly not better. And his concert arrangements were generally straightforward, leaving the Beatles’ vintage studio work untouched. But he didn’t need a perfect voice, or a revisionist approach. He just needed to be himself, a 63-year-old boy.

McCartney came out wearing a goofy mismatched outfit and a bad haircut, and throughout the night he tugged at his jeans as though they were sliding down his Underoos. Along with all of that, however, came an infectious innocence, the innocence of someone still dazzled by his own powers of creation, someone who can’t dance but can write a pretty love song, someone who wants to hold your hand.

McCartney played a few tunes from his new album, “Chaos And Creation In The Backyard,” then joked about plugging the record, as though he were self-conscious about it, as though the billionaire singer-songwriter for the world’s most famous band has anything to be self-conscious about ever again.

He introduced “Too Many People” by exclaiming “This is for the Wings fans!” with no discernable irony. He dealt as gracefully as he could with the audience members who insisted on talking — and in some cases screaming — while he was trying to communicate. (Incidentally, the crowd’s behavior almost spoiled this reviewer’s mood. He found himself wondering how fans could spend $252 on a ticket, then gab through the show. And he wondered why the fans’ innermost thoughts couldn’t wait to be revealed at a time when they weren’t in the same room with a Beatle.)

In any case, McCartney carried on, playing his songs as though they were written yesterday. The parade of Beatles songs was enough to make ticketless fans stuck at home weep: “Eleanor Rigby,” “Penny Lane,” “Fixing A Hole,” “Please Please Me,” “Magical Mystery Tour,” “Yesterday” and a batch from “The White Album” including a noisy “Helter Skelter,” a sweet “I Will” and a gorgeous “Blackbird.” Late in the main set came “Hey Jude,” a singular experience. McCartney has a special gift for making “na na na na” sound profound. For this song the audience stopped talking and joined in a colossal chorus of na’s.

Around this time, Sir Paul noticed a fan hoisting up a baby. The kid looked too young to feed himself, much less sing along. But one got the feeling that he’d grow up to learn the words, and that he’d be reminded, emphatically, that one day long ago Paul McCartney came to town, and that he was there.

McCartney’s two encores were loaded with Beatles songs, and the most powerful came near the very end when McCartney, seated at an upright piano, played and sang “Let It Be.” Ever the master of the simple gesture, he provided ambiance by lighting a solitary candle. “When I find myself in times of trouble,” he sang, “Mother Mary comes to me. Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.”

At a moment in history when humankind is at war not only with itself, but also with nature, it’s plain that we have found ourselves in times of trouble. We have too few voices of universal reassurance, too few words of wisdom, too much pain to let anything be.

“And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree,” Paul McCartney sang, “There will be an answer. Let it be.”

This reviewer is not too proud to confess that, as the song unfolded, he felt a single tear slide down his cheek.

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Not long after that, Lennon and McCartney formed a quartet that enjoyed a fair measure of popularity in the '60s: "We thought the Beatles might last 10 years," he recalls. "We thought it would be pretty unseemly to still be playing rock 'n' roll at age 30."

When Beatlemania ruled — for a lot less Back on Aug. 18, 1965, when these screaming fans just couldn't help themselves, you could see the moptops for $5.50 at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Today, the top ticket for Paul McCartney's show is $252.

The irony is not lost on McCartney that he is now 63 and still playing rock 'n' roll, tonight in Philips Arena. He's well aware that next summer he turns 64, and everyone is going to have a veritable Olympics of irony-pumping, playing that silly old song he wrote about old folks sitting around by the fire, knitting and gardening. "Will you still need me, will you still feed me. ..."

But he's not going to get too serious about it, either: "We're gonna say to the audience, 'Do you remember this one? 'Cause if you do, you're pretty old!' " he jokes in a telephone interview. "I just figure as long as I enjoy myself, [aging] is something I can't do much about, except just to go with the flow." Once people thought that rock 'n' roll was a young person's game. Then the first generation of really big rock stars got old, and they didn't stop rocking. Mick Jagger is 62 and Keith Richards is 61; they've taken the Rolling Stones back on the road. (They'll also hit Philips, on Oct. 15.) Bob Dylan is 64 and hardly ever leaves the road on his "Never Ending Tour." Pete Townshend is 60 and dying to get back out there and attack his guitar if he can reassemble something fans will buy as the Who.

Tongue-wagging about "geezer rock" and jokes about Mick using a walker — contemporary echoes of McCartney's "pretty unseemly" comment — may still circulate a bit. But rockin' past retirement age has become accepted as just another way to fill an arena.

McCartney's Philips gig, with a top ticket of $252, is just the third stop on his new tour, which began Friday in Miami. He is rolling out a number of Beatles songs he's rarely if ever played live, including "I've Got a Feeling," "I'll Follow the Sun" and "Fixing a Hole." The best of his Wings period is also represented by "Jet" and "Band on the Run," and he also does a few songs from his new CD, "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard," which was released last week to mostly positive reviews.

It's a safe bet few fans are spending more than $250 to hear the new CD, though. McCartney knows there are songs he has to play — "Hey Jude," "Let It Be," "Yesterday" — and he doesn't mind.

"There's a lot of stuff the Beatles never played live. (They stopped playing live in 1966.) So the last time I would have sung some of them was making a record, and the tape went up on the shelf. And I've never revisited it since. And this applies to Wings, as well. So there's a huge volume of work we've never gotten round to that are begging to be done live. Some of them are just like, 'Play me onstage, please.' "

At 63, McCartney doesn't flinch at the word "legacy."

"I'm very proud of it," he says. "People talk about songwriting, and they talk about a gift. Some gift! Who gave me that? I'm very lucky that we [he and Lennon] wrote some kind of OK songs in the beginning, and then we wrote some really pretty good ones, and then we wrote some very good ones. It may sound conceited, but I think John and I did some seriously good work. I say I'm a lucky guy and I'm blessed."

He's also, however, had to live somewhat in Lennon's shadow since his former partner was shot and killed in 1980. Lennon's dramatic martyrdom accelerated the too-easy conventional wisdom that Lennon was the brilliant, iconoclastic revolutionary, and McCartney the cute one who wrote pretty melodies and had a better head for business.

The truth is more complex. McCartney, after all, is the one who's served jail time for pot possession; who wrote the Charles Manson-inspiring "Helter Skelter"; who was the subject of one of the all-time Hall of Fame urban legends, the "Paul Is Dead" myth of the late '60s. Maybe not a revolutionary, but more than the cute one.

But it didn't reflect well on him when he tried to re-list the credits on some of the songs he had primarily written to say McCartney-Lennon instead of the longstanding Lennon-McCartney. He talked about doing it on the Beatles' "Anthology" project and actually did it on a 2002 live album.

"That really came out all wrong, I must say. It got all out of proportion."

He says one of the reasons he did it was because Lennon used to get embarrassed when he would walk into a restaurant and the pianist, in tribute, would start playing "Yesterday," a McCartney song. Also, he adds, he thought it would help people understand which songs were mainly his, and which mainly Lennon's.

"But it became contentious, so I dropped the thing like a little hot potato. Lennon-McCartney. It's a brand, like Gilbert and Sullivan. I don't think people understood where I was coming from. So I thought, 'Fair enough. Let it be.' "

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