Review | Paul McCartney Delivers, in Spades, at the Santa Barbara Bowl

Paul McCartney positively lit up the Santa Barbara Bowl Friday night, leaving about 4,500 enraptured listeners grinning ear to ear. I was one of them. Initially, I couldn’t tell whether it was the music itself that got me or merely the idea of hearing Paul McCartney — a certified ex-Beatle — playing in the flesh. It was, I would eventually figure out, both.

 At age 83, McCartney could easily have phoned it in and gotten away with it. But he did nothing of the kind. He and his band — a tight-and-tasty, high-energy ensemble with whom he’s been playing since just after 9/11 — delivered a mighty gerontocratic flex, firing on all cylinders. For me, the quiet highlight was “Blackbird,” a croony wistful ballad from the Beatles’ White Album.  Accompanying himself on solo acoustic guitar, McCartney navigated some unusually tricky chord changes — replete with all the intimate scratchy sounds made by fingers scrambling to find their way on a fretboard. And no, he didn’t muck it up, he said afterward, like the time he did when Meryl Streep happened to be looking up at him. For “Blackbird” — and pretty much all the 25 songs McCartney performed — there were buckets of all of McCartney’s signature high-pitched  “Ooooos” and “Wooos” to embellish everything else. But these came with pretty much every song and cannot be captured by lyrics, chord changes, melody lines, arrangements, or even song titles. To the extent McCartney has any one single secret sauce, they may be it. To the extent age might have diminished the suppleness of McCartney’s vocal cords, you’d need an ear, nose, and throat specialist to say how. 

On the flip side, McCartney demonstrated he can still scream and yowl almost as convincingly as when he was 17, trying to invoke the spirit of Little Richard, one of the more outrageously outrageous of the R&B shouters who inspired him. On “Helter Skelter” — angry, desperate, and way more turbo-charged than when originally recorded — McCartney’s voice had a more frantic edge than a closet full of steak knives. It could tear and shred, and his band joined in on the attack, just blowing shit up with orchestrated abandon. So, yes, Paul was “the cute Beatle” who always played all the pretty songs, but Friday night, McCartney showed he can still get nasty.

Most, but not all, of the sold-out crowd was of the Beatles-era demographic, which meant, presumably, they could afford the unusually high ticket prices this particular Bowl show required. When it came to singing along with the Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” — an exuberant silly song celebration of life — most of the audience already knew the words and needed no coaxing to join in. Even more so with “Let It Be” — a song inspired by a line delivered by McCartney’s then-deceased mother (in a dream) at a time when Paul’s life was seriously frazzled. When it came time to join in, there was no holding the crowd back. The women, it should be noted, joined a lot harder.

Where I was sitting, no one got up to go to the bathroom. That’s unusual. Or to buy any wine or beer. That’s even more unusual. But even more unusual still — truly exceptional, actually — was the total lack of selfies. McCartney apparently insisted on this, and his people and the Bowl successfully engineered a total lockdown on selfies. All cell phone owners were asked to disarm their phones’ ring tones before gaining access to their seats; the phones were then slipped into special carrying bags that locked magnetically. These bags could not be manually unlocked until after the show concluded and then only with help from staff equipped with the proper gizmo.

I saw no evidence of logjams on the way out. In fact, it all seemed to go seamlessly. Given how inherently intrusive concert selfies are — and how irresistible the impulse to take them is — I’d strongly encourage the Bowl to adopt this measure for all its shows. “Nobody’s got a phone, “ McCartney declared at one point. “Really, it’s better.”  He got that right.

The play list ran from old songs to new ones to a few in-between, as McCartney promised early on. Many were from the Beatles, but not all. (Only one — Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” — he didn’t have anything to do with writing.) He started off the show — the maiden voyage for his new tour — with “Help!,” released in 1965 and the name of a Beatles’ movie by the same name. McCartney was 23 when the song came out, and he reportedly hadn’t sung it publicly for 35 years. So why “Help!?” Why now? Was this some kind of subliminal political message?

While McCartney doesn’t shy away from message songs, he doesn’t like to be too obvious about it. Who knew — or could have known — that “Got to Get You Into My Life” — his third song of the night — was a subliminal ode to the joys of smoking pot, which McCartney took to with considerable gusto. When you consider how prolific a musical life McCartney has enjoyed — more than 60 years and still going strong, even though he claims he can’t read a note — it’s easy to get fixated on the immense ingenuity of his craft and the utter enormity of his musical gift. But after two hours of hearing the old, the new, and the in-between, what shines through most is the emotional core of the music. Over 60 years, it’s always the same thing. Love. Positivity. Celebration. Yes, things get hard, but people survive. And then, always, more love.

No wonder everyone was smiling on the way out.