Paul McCartney - The US Tour 2005

08.10.2005, Washington, DC; "MCI Center"

 

 
Setlist

Magical Mystery Tour (back from 1993)

Too Many People (new addition!!!)
Flaming Pie
She Came In Through The Bathroom Window (new addition!)
Jet
Good Day Sunshine (back from 1993)
I'll Get You (new)
Band on the Run
Drive My Car
Penny Lane
Till There Was You (new)
I've Got A Feeling
Let Me Roll It; Coda: ´Foxy Lady´
Back in the USSR
Got to Get You In My Life
Hey Jude
Fine Line (new song)
Live and Let Die
Maybe I'm Amazed
 
Long and Winding Road
 
 
Acoustic:
Encore 1:
In Spite of All The Danger
Yesterday
I Will (new addition)
Get Back
Jenny Wren (new song)
Helter Skelter
 
Piano:
Encore 2:
For No One

Please Please Me (new addition)

Fixing A Hole (back from 1993)
Let it Be

English Tea (band comes back) (new song)

Sgt. Pepper´s Reprise

 

I'll Follow The Sun (with reprise: 3x)

 

Follow Me (new song)

 
Bach's 'Bouree' (from the LUTE SUITE NO. 1 in E minor)
which he uses to describe the guitar chords on Blackbird....
 
Blackbird
 
Eleanor Rigby
 
   
   

 

The Fab One

At MCI, Paul McCartney Gets Back

By Dave McKenna
Monday, October 10, 2005; Page C01
Paul McCartney's audience is like the crowd at the Louvre: A small percentage knows about and appreciates the contemporary works, but most folks come for the old stuff. At MCI Center on Saturday night, McCartney unveiled enough of his vintage art to keep the Mona Lisa smiling.

And so long as he emphasizes the familiar, the task of picking a set list for a McCartney show, even one lasting about three hours, seems about as difficult as choosing the starting lineup of an NBA all-star game: There really isn't much chance of a noticeable mistake. His genius as a youngster was so complete that many of the Beatles tunes rendered on this night -- "The End," "Eleanor Rigby," "For No One," "Let It Be," "Yesterday" and "The Long and Winding Road" among them -- would have made just as many listeners cry had he taken away either the lyrics or the music. During the naah-naah-naah-nahnahnahnaaah portion of "Hey Jude," for example, a baby boomer in the front section looked away from the young girl beside him as if to hide the tears pouring down his cheeks.

McCartney, however, only rarely got overtly maudlin. He sang "Happy Birthday" to John Lennon, who might have turned 65 this weekend had he not been assassinated 25 years ago, and also requested an ovation for George Harrison and ex-wife Linda McCartney, who both died of cancer in recent years.

While introducing the 1963 single, "I'll Get You," McCartney reminded the crowd that Washington had hosted the first Beatles gig in the States. "If you remember this one, you weren't there," he said of the February 1964 show at the Washington Coliseum, a sad building about a mile from MCI Center that still stands, thoroughly underappreciated by the locals for its role in the cultural earthquake inspired by the Fab Four's American invasion. (Top tickets to McCartney's MCI appearance had a face value of $253, while tickets to the Coliseum show went for $2-$4, or much less than the per-ticket service charge vendors get today.)

Unlike at, say, a Beach Boys or Elton John show or any concert where fans know the material as well as they know their adolescence, the crowd didn't appear eager to sing along. Folks came to hear McCartney sing, in a voice still strong enough to leave listeners awestruck. He had to ask the audience to join him on the fadeout to "Hey Jude." His musicianship hasn't flagged even a half-step, either: The fretwork on his hollow-body Hofner during "Penny Lane" served to remind folks that McCartney pretty much single-handedly -- with his right hand -- changed the way pop bass players approached their craft.

The few new songs McCartney delivered from his latest CD, "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard," had obvious nods to the Beatles catalogue: "English Tea" recalled "Piggies," while "Jenny Wren" hinted at "Honey Pie." There are worse places to steal from.

There was a noticeable difference between the original and live versions of Wings songs ("Let Me Roll It," "Live and Let Die" and "Band on the Run" among them), which McCartney and his four-piece backing band reproduced with fabulous hard-rock -- or, as the bandleader might call them, "naked" -- arrangements, providing more evidence that overproduction ruined more '70s rock than booze or cocaine did.

McCartney looked as wonderful as he sounded. At 63, he has aged at a slower pace than his audience. The artificial glow he had about him during his appearance at the last Super Bowl was gone; he's grown into whatever facelift he'd had. But this night brought out the kid in a lot of people: Just before showtime a female fan old enough to have a daughter old enough to know better appeared to be trying to talk her way backstage while dressed in a too-revealing T-shirt that read "I'm Jill I Will." She didn't get back.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/09/AR2005100901562.html

 
 
From Sir, with love
By Daniel Wattenberg
October 11, 2005

John Lennon loved humanity. Paul McCartney loves people. Over three hours at the MCI Center Saturday night, an avuncular Sir Paul told stories and jokes, waxed nostalgic and led the sell-out crowd in choir practice. Oh, and he played his songs -- from pre-Beatles juvenilia to a worthy sampling from his warmly received new all-Paul album, "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard."
Shifting effortlessly from his signature Hofner violin bass to an assortment of acoustic and electric guitars and a grand piano -- with a last-minute cameo by an upright painted in psychedelic swirls -- the pop polymath had his way with his adoring, multigenerational audience.
Exuberantly abetted by the same four whippersnappers that backed him on his last tour, the elder statesman brought the crowd to its feet with the opening chords of "Magical Mystery Tour." And kept them there for much of the show. They were still standing when he finished his final extended encore with the peacey-lovey parting advice of "The End." In between, he had them singing and swaying -- and reliving their youths. And, strikingly for such a lighthearted performer, he had a good many of them in tears.
It's hard to think of a major star who enjoys an easier rapport with his audience. He bathes in crowd approval after almost every well-worn hit -- neither bored by his golden oldies, nor embarrassed. He pumps his fists, prowls the stage with hands clasped aloft in triumph, performs an endearingly ungainly little shimmy dance -- anything to milk a few more squirts of affection from his fans-for-life.
He not only reads aloud from the homemade signs bobbing in the houselights, he claims to find them so diverting he's apt to lose his place in the song he's playing.
Before "Good Day Sunshine," he proudly related how NASA chose it to wake up last summer's Discovery crew on their last day in space. He returned to the atmospheric theme with a funny anecdote about the Russian authorities making cryptic guarantees that it would not rain on his 2003 open-air concert in Red Square. Sir Paul surmises they send the MiGs up -- and that's why you never saw rain on a Soviet military parade. Then, he and his adrenalized young sidemen tore into "Back in the USSR."
He led the crowd in two singalongs -- on one of the first songs he ever wrote, "In Spite of All the Danger," and one of his most beloved, "Hey Jude," by now a mass catharsis that McCartney audiences have come to expect as an entitlement.
He reminisces. Does he ever. Mr. McCartney has grown more sentimental and nostalgic with age. That may sound like a frightening thought. He is, after all, the man who wrote "Yesterday" in his early 20s.
But now he's 63. That's what a man that age is supposed do when he gets together with old friends. And that's how this most haimish and accessible-seeming of pop legends seems to view his audience -- as 20,000 of his dearest old friends.
Saturday night he asked the crowd for a moment of silence in appreciation of "our" (not "my") "departed loved ones -- John, George and Linda." (He played "Happy Birthday" for John after one fan reminded him of the date.)
He introduced "Blackbird" by sweetly recalling how he adapted its delicate guitar intro from a Bach piece that he and George Harrison used to duet on as teenagers in Liverpool. The nostalgia flowed without restraint: how he selected "Till There was You" for the early Beatles so the bar band could snag some "sophisticated" cabaret bookings; how he wrote "I'll Follow the Sun" in the "parlor" of his boyhood home. And, of course, he recalled that the Beatles' first performance in North America was in D.C. 41 years ago.
If he weren't Paul McCartney, you might say Sir Paul has developed excellent taste in Paul McCartney music. For his current set list, he has reached into the middle depths of his Beatles-era repertoire for some unexpected and unassuming gems that would make many a McCartney connoisseur's list of favorite tunes, even if they're not certified standards.

His cozy, mid-show solo acoustic suite, for example, included "For No One," a fragile after-the-shouting ballad from "Revolver," and "I Will," an infectious avowal of undying love from the "White Album."
During this Paul-by-myself interlude, he played "Jenny Wren" and "English Tea" from his new album, confirming what many have suspected: They fit comfortably alongside his patented hearthstone classics. The former echoes "Blackbird's" intricate acoustic guitar figures but sounds like a survival from some older bardic tradition: It would sound great on a lute. The latter is one of those toasty McCartney music hall novelties: Add a pipe organ to it and it might as well be from side two of "Magical Mystery Tour."
Of course, Paul McCartney is Paul McCartney, and he would not be permitted to leave an arena under his own powers unless he offered a generous selection of his soundtrack-of-a-generation standards. Saturday's menu included the propulsive bubble-gum of "Jet," the Stevie Wonderish "Got to Get You Into My Life" and probably his best post-Beatles piano ballad, the soulful "Maybe I'm Amazed."
The concentration of megahits grew denser as the set's momentum built to a climax with the crowd-pleasing spectacle and winking grandiosity of "Live and Let Die," with its percussive blasts, jets of fire and rising puffs of smoke in Kool-Aid colors.
He came back alone for a perfunctory "Yesterday" before winding the crowd up all over again with full band on "Get Back" and his claim to being a forefather of heavy metal, "Helter Skelter."
He came back again and just kept playing. By the time the show approached the three-hour mark, it was clear: The old boy didn't want to leave.
Hanging around playing Beatles songs on guitars all night is a lot of fun. Generations of buskers and bar bands and campfire guitarists have known it. Why wouldn't Paul McCartney?
The only thing bad about listening to Paul McCartney play his songs for three hours is that sooner or later it reminds you that you will never spend an evening listening to John Lennon play his.

http://washingtontimes.com/entertainment/20051010-101233-2084r_page2.htm