Paul McCartney - The US Tour 2005

17.09.2005, Tampa, FL; "St Pete Times Forum"

Magical Mystery Tour (back from 1993)

Please Please Me (new addition)

English Tea (band comes back) (new song)

Yellow Submarine (short version)

I'll Follow The Sun (with reprise)

Follow Me (new song)

A section of the stage floor retracted in order for McCartney's grand piano to rise from below. McCartney stepped back a bit too soon and found himself sprawled a few feet beneath the stage. But Paul survived his fall, high spirits intact.

(If McCartney missed an opportunity all night it was here -- he could have moved up "Fixing a Hole" from its slot later in the set.)

The thing about a show this precise and so guaranteed to please is the little gaffes make it even more memorable.

Like McCartney flubbing a chord change in "I Will" -- "It's a long time since I wrote this," he protested with mock defensiveness.

Needless to say, most of the show was spot-on.

Newer tunes such as "Flaming Pie" and "Fine Line" seemed to benefit from the exalted company of such cherished gems as "Jet" and "Maybe I'm Amazed."

Perhaps the most pleasing element of the show was the less-often-heard treasures from the Beatles catalog.

Opening with "Magical Mystery Tour," McCartney dusted off such back-catalog glories as "I'll Get You," "For No One," "I'll Follow the Sun" and "I've Got a Feeling."

He even broke out "Till There Was You" (from 1963's "With the Beatles," originally from "The King and I") and "In Spite of All the Danger," his, John Lennon and George Harrison's first recording, unheard until "Anthology 1" was released in 1995.

Of course, the word "obscurity" hardly applies to anything McCartney played Saturday night, the second date of his "Us" tour.

"Let Me Roll It" may never have topped the charts, but the rocker had plenty of the crowd singing along.

McCartney's band was excellent. Keyboardist Paul "Wix" Wickens added familiar horn and string parts on synthesizer while Abe Laboriel Jr. provided thunderous drumming and stick-twirling showmanship.

http://news.tbo.com/news/MGBG59CTQDE.html

The still-cute ex-Beatle took a scary tumble early in his concert Saturday at the St. Pete Times Forum, then brushed himself off, cracked a couple of Beatle-esque one-liners and played another two hours or so.

McCartney, 63, was responding to applause from a packed house after "Got to Get You Into My Life" when he stepped backward into an opening in the floor where his grand piano was rising from beneath the stage. A crew member helped him out.

"There's a big hole in the stage, and I just fell into it," explained McCartney, joking that "we've been expecting this to happen." A few minutes later, he milked it for more laughs, telling the crew: "I want a big fence around here tomorrow!"

Despite that one literal misstep, and a brief memory lapse on the lyrics to the White Album's "I Will,'' McCartney's performance was brilliant. If anything, the bumps added to the sense of intimacy the singer conveyed all night.

Compared with his mammoth stadium concerts, the arena better showcased McCartney's showmanship and musical skills, which are still solid after so many years. He moved from bass to electric and acoustic guitars to piano and covered his vast repertoire of classics in a voice invulnerable to aging.

He dipped back to an old Quarrymen song and explained how Bach influenced the guitar part on "Blackbird." He went from Beatlemania to Wings and beyond with easy charm.

With high-end ticket prices at more than $250, one would expect as much -- if not a Ringo reunion. A cynic would say that this nostalgia is overpriced, but none of them showed up.

McCartney was accompanied by the four-piece band that has become a tour fixture: Keyboardist Paul "Wix" Wickens, guitarists Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray, and drummer Abe Laboriel Jr. The instrumentation was lean but expanded enough to reproduce the Beatles' signature studio hits.

Wickens used his keyboards to produce the familiar strings on "Eleanor Rigby," the jazzy horns on "Good Day Sunshine" and the Baroque trumpet solo on "Penny Lane." McCartney knows enough to go heavy on the hits, offering only a relative handful of songs from his new Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.

That left plenty of time for "Drive My Car,'' "Hey Jude," "Maybe I'm Amazed," "Back in the U.S.S.R.," "The Long and Winding Road," "Please, Please Me,'' "Band on the Run" (it's hard to believe now that some people hated Wings so much) and other gems.

McCartney delivered them faithfully, sticking to the original arrangements and resisting the temptation to reinvent. A candlelit "Let It Be" in the second encore was lovely and powerful.

At the same time, he offered enough surprises to avoid becoming a human jukebox: An acoustic version of "I'll Follow the Sun" segued seamlessly into the new "Follow Me,'' showing that the guy hasn't forgotten how to write sweet ballads. It also was nice to hear him go beyond the obvious hits for "I've Got a Feeling," "For No One" and "Fixing a Hole."

The music was embellished by beautiful lighting and effects that ranged from videos and kaleidoscopic graphics on the giant screen behind the band to moving banks of spotlights that hovered above like alien spaceships. "Live and Let Die" was bolstered by pyrotechnics and indoor fireworks that exploded when the band dropped the hammer on the chorus.

And, in the end, there was McCartney singing that "the love you take is equal to the love you make.'' On Saturday, he made that equation work again.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/orl-mccartney20_105sep20,0,5116645.story?coll=orl-caltop&track=rss