Paul McCartney - The US Tour 2005

30.09.2005, New York, NY; "Madison Square Garden"

Early wednesday morning I had to drive back from Boston to NY by bus and I arrived at about noon in New York, China Town. At 1.00am I was at the hotel; unfortunately my room wasn´t ready yet and so I had to wait for about one hour.

The rest of the day and complete next day (thursday) I visited a lot of record-shops in Manhattan. I wasn´t able to find that much ´promotion-stuff´ for the new Macca-album; the only thing what I´ve seen was a big sign for ´Chaos´ in a Virgin Mega Store. Unfortunately they wouldn´t give it away ;-)

What surprised me was the fact that I couldn´t find the ´Fine Line´ CD-Single in any store, expect in one Borders-bookshop. So, no suprise that the single didn´t got into the charts when you weren´t able to buy it at all.... I´ve watched the US-single charts until now and I havn´t found any entry so far (see here). Even I think it now also won´t go into the charts anyway...

On the second day I also walked first time to the Madison Square Garden. On my way there I came along the ´Radio City Music Hall´ where I already saw the first signs for the forthcoming event...

Friday morning I walked at about 11.00am from the hotel to the garden as I had a appointment with another Macca-friend. I was at the garden a few minutes before noon and phoned him. He just had arrived at his hotel near the garden and had to check in. We then met about 12.30pm.

After a short speech we decided, because there was so much time left, to take a walk to the MPL office building, about 15 blocks away from the garden. We not really had expected to see Paul there but you´ll never know and I think if you´re in NY you have to take a walk to the office....

I have to say that this was not a really nice experience. If maybe someone from the McCartney team will also read these lines (what I don´t think, but you´ll never know) I will let you know that it´s not that nice to impend with the police directly. We were standing on a public sitewalk, which is not private at all. Yes, I knew what happend with John and I understand that there has to be a security team to protect Paul and they have to do their work for damn good. But sometimes it really feels like shooting with elephants on birds. On the other side I also could understand that if there are two waiting fans, maybe in five minutes there are 10 waiting fans and so on.... So it is really a two-edges sword. But you don´t have to threaten in your first sentence with the police.... I think every real fan would respect when someone from the security team says something. And maybe you Mrs. O´Linn remember my face from the 2nd day Boston arrival of the band. You said to me: "You have to stay there" and I did.....

So, we walked back to the Madison Square Garden but we really were pissed off a little ;-( We were again near the garden; just about 2 blocks away (it was about 1.25pm), as my friend noticed one of the black Lexus cars which stood before the MPL building before. Fortunately for us there was a lot of traffic and also the next traffic light had been changed to red so that they had to wait. We first walked slowly beside the car but as we had left it we run further to the garden. I think we had been there 2 minutes before the car. It drove past the street at the backentrance of the garden and we could recognise Paul and Heather sitting at the back. But they didn´t drove inside the garden as it was much to early for soundcheck. They drove further the street and at the next crossing we lost them.

It seemed that we had a very good timing; better to say much luck. So I think if we only have been able to stay a few minutes longer at the MPL building we had been able to take some picture from Paul and maybe get a ´hello´ from him but it also was a big thrill without seeing him there..

Afterwards we had some lunch and take a look inside the garden, where the Lexus RX400 signature edition was standing. We made some pictures, even here inside the garden there was no space for the huge turntable which they had in Boston.

Then we waited for Paul´s arrival at the back. I´m not sure anymore which time it was but I think about 5.00pm as Brian Riddle of the security team came out and so we thought that there should happen anything during the next hour. At about 5.20pm one of the black Lexus cars came through the back entrance but the window was closed. It might be that in this first car only Brian were sitting at the back. A few minutes later (about 5.22pm) a second car arrived and they also didn´t opened the window. I think it was Rusty at the back and Abe in the front.

Afterwards a fourth car arrived (it was not a Lexus; it was something like a small van) I could see Wix clearly from my side and he was sitting at the back and he was filming the waiting people on the right side of the street but he also didn´t open the window...

Because we thought that Paul was sitting at the left side of the car as they drove past us a few hours before coming from the MPL-building, I stood at the left side of the entrance and my friend on the right. Paul arrived at about 5.35pm and he opened the window; he was sitting at the left side but opened the window on the right side. So the waiting fans on the right could only see him for a very few seconds and then the car drove directly inside the arena...

There had been some contest in Germay and first price was flight from Germany to NY incl. tickets for the friday show and what´s even better also tickets for the soundcheck. The following informations have been posted on a german mailinglist...

"We were 14 people from germany that afternoon. We were told that Paul was very busy and it won´t be possible to meet him. The security was very straight. Beside us there only have been about 20 technicians during the soundcheck. As we came to the garden we were welcomed by Brian and Abe. Short after that Paul came on stage and welcomed us with `Herzlich Willkommen unsere Deutschen Freunde´ (´welcome our gemany friends´)"

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: 3x)

Follow Me (new song)

The concert begun about 8.15am. Same as in Boston, even the audience was relative quite during the part of the DJ.

The show was as good as the shows before, even I had expected that the audience would be much more enthusiastic. Man, we were in the garden...!! A guy sitting at the back of me had a little transportable TV with him. At this evening the Boston Red Sox were playing against the NY Yankees and it was one of the playoffs for the baseball championships. He was looking most of the time his game. During a lot of songs many people were standing and enjoying. As Paul began with "Too Many People" I also couldn´t sit on my butt; even I was the only one in my block... After about one minute the guy with the telly told me to sit down... This was really unbelievable. No words!!

There had been no ´Yellow Submarine´ and no ´Foxy Lady´ after ´Let Me Roll It´. The announcement of Wix was fun. He told that his family would be sitting in the audience and also his little daugther. He then asked the audience to greet her all together with ´Hello ...´ (Sorry I forgot her name). He counted 1, 2, 3 and the audience sent her some greetings ;-)

After the show Paul again signed a couple of items on stage. I think he did about 5 items, from which one was a white towel what was a little strange!!!

After Paul had left and also the people were getting outside I again took some confetti for my concert-confetti collection ;-) and then tried to find some used ticket-stubs but I couldn´t find really that much. Later on as I was outside I tried again to win a t-shirt at the ´Fidelity Investments´ counter but I failed again. I then met with my friend, then I got my things from his hotel-room and then left to my hotel.

McCartney Stage Show is Pleasant Surprise

By Roger Friedman

The first of Paul McCartney’s four shows at Madison Square Garden turned out to be an unexpected hit, and one of the best solo shows of his career.

It was unexpected because, thanks to McCartney’s publicist, it was a hard show to get into. Special VIP forms offered a chance to buy $300 tickets. Hello! Concentrated foraging on eBay finally produced excellent seats at less than half that price. And there seem to be many more for each show.

Ticket dilemma aside, another McCartney show reeked of ambivalence. Even though his new album is excellent, would McCartney live be anything more than a way to top previous fireworks displays in "Live and Let Die"? You see what I mean.

So what a surprise when McCartney’s show quickly became an interesting mix of intimate actual solo performances by the forever-Beatle and robust rock and roll turns of some of his best known work. He also introduced several songs he’d never performed before in concert. (If he has, my apologies to the die-hard fans.) But it was a pleasure to hear "Too Many People" from Ram, "I’ll Get You" from The Beatles’ Second Album, "Til There Was You" from With the Beatles and "I’ve Got a Feeling” from Let it Be." He even smartly rescued the group’s earliest recording, "In Spite of All the Danger." Still no sign of "Another Day," his mini-soap opera masterpiece, but the others made up for it.

After playing an unnecessary promotional film (it seemed like something you’d find at a corporate
dinner), McCartney, unbelievably 63 years old, took the stage with his band and rocked through “Flaming Pie,” “Jet,” “Drive My Car,” and a couple more standards with aplomb. Right away though it was easy to see this would be different than the Rolling Stones’ show earlier this month. McCartney’s show was stage directed, organized, really, and though through. It wasn’t just, please help us pay for help in Mustique. There was something else at work here.

For a good chunk of this show, McCartney either sits at the piano by himself or strums a guitar. The result was that over-played anthems that in the past have felt forced or turged—"Maybe I’m Amazed," "Let it Be," "Eleanor Rigby"—got a new life last night.

Melodic gems from the Lennon-McCartney songbook, like "For No One," "Fixing a Hole," and the magnificent, underrated "I Will," were showcased to their greatest value.
Played by McCartney just on acoustic guitar with a loping stride, the latter shone especially in the lines "And when at last I find you/ Your song will fill the air."

Every performer has good nights and bad, and McCartney’s had all of them. Even last night his voice cracked occasionally, and he missed a few notes on the guitar. Toward the end of a very soulful reading of "Let it Be," he seemed to forget the lyrics and dropped a couple of words. It didn’t matter. Overall, it was one of those nights when even the mistakes were okay because the achievements were so brilliant.

He talked a lot, too (and so did the band—a little too much.) That led to the intimacy, especially when he reminisced about his father and the punch line pretty much had meaning just for him. For McCartney, the richest performer in the world, it was one of many pleasant, disarming moments. There was also a nice moment dedicated to the memories of John Lennon and
George Harrison, And McCartney revealed something you never hear from rock stars: that those signs fans hold up can be distracting because he reads them and forgets what he’s doing. Who knew?

Still, the real pleasure of the night was McCartney the musician. He does not move like the unreal Mick Jagger, and, no matter what, cannot rock like The Who.
But listening to him play boogie woogie piano riffs—as he did quite a lot—and all those rolling solo’s was absolutely gigantic. Little Richard and Fats Domino can take a lot of pride in their "student" by absentia. McCartney’s contribution to the Beatles is often derogated in light of Lennon’s caustic wit or Harrison’s guitar technique. But McCartney was the engine that drove those songs, and he’s not about to give up now.

One quibble, though: hire a horn section, Paul. Even the Fab Faux, the famous Beatle tribute band, has one. "Penny Lane" and "For No One" need woodwinds. "Eleanor Rigby" requires violins. The artificial sweetening is bad for your health.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,170971,00.html

All right, yes, up to a point.

Beatleography is awash with references to Mr. McCartney's being spooked by one thing or another and needing to take a run at it, whether a Motown song, a Brian Wilson vocal arrangement, or a Who detonation.

His concert at Madison Square Garden on Friday night bulged with reminders of his competitiveness, and rendered him properly complex. No amount of rationalizing about music-hall songs and Merseybeat really explains how a song like his new "English Tea" - a twee reverie about hollyhocks and roses that actually uses the word twee, as well as the King James archaism "peradventure" - exists in relation to the arrant screamer "Helter Skelter," its polar opposite.

He performed both of those, amid a generous number of new tracks and songs he hasn't performed live before, in a 2-hour-40-minute show complete with a 10-minute biographical video.

This was detail work, carefully executed, and engineered to exercise memories.

The guitarists Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray, the keyboardist Paul Wickens and the drummer Abe Laboriel reproduced most of the fills and solos from the songs' original versions, whether by the Beatles, or Wings, or Mr. McCartney himself - as in "Too Many People," from the 1971 album "Ram," full of the shaggy inspiration that is only hinted at on his new album, "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard."

Mr. McCartney, if you're just tuning into the subject of popular music, likes a certain amount of order.

The semi-creative shamble of the current Rolling Stones, who played on the same stage last month, holds little interest for him.

Although there was a dispiriting corniness about the moments when Mr. Wickens's synthesizer copied other instrumental tones just for the sake of staying true to holy writ - the strings from "Yesterday," or the piccolo trumpet solo from "Penny Lane" - these were in the service of a long and well-chosen retrospective.

It encompassed the bombastic "Live and Let Die," with explosions and flame-pots shooting red and green; the country ballad "In Spite of All the Danger," from 1958, one of the earliest tracks Mr. McCartney recorded with the pre-Beatles quintet the Quarrymen; "I'll Get You," a relative rarity from 1963 with signature "oh yeahs"; the droning, biting Wings track "Let Me Roll It"; and a lot of Mr. McCartney alone with either guitar or piano, as on "I Will," "Fixing a Hole," "Blackbird" and that song's cousin, the new "Jenny Wren."

Ever on the up-and-up, he kept returning, cheerily waving his guitars aloft and praising New York. (At one juncture he waved an American flag on a long pole.)

He ended up delivering encores from two Beatles albums: the reprise version of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "The End," from "Abbey Road."

But of all the heavyweights he saved for the end, it took "Hey Jude" to get a serious commotion: the song's moral atmosphere, its singalong section, its mantralike repetition, hit the aging parents and their children where they lived.

Paul McCartney's tour continues Tuesday and Wednesday at Madison Square Garden, Saturday at the MCI Center in Washington, Oct. 10 at the Air Canada Center in Toronto, and Oct. 14 and 15 at the Palace of Auburn Hills, near Detroit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/arts/music/02mccartney.html

When people ask me "how was the McCartney concert" the answer is simple "he started with 'Magical Mystery Tour' and ended with 'Sgt Pepper' and it was classics sandwiched in between". It just could not go wrong.

All the obvious songs were there but the fans wouldn't have it any other way. To really gauge the impact of this brilliance of this gig, look at the songs in the middle. When tracks like 'The Long and Winding Road', 'Eleanor Rigby' and 'Penny Lane' are relegated to the center of the set-list you realize the caliber of the show.

But McCartney also threw some curve balls for the die-hard fans. The inclusion of "I'll Get You' was a surprise because it was mainly a John Lennon song. 'I've Got A Feeling' was certainly more Lennon than McCartney when it first appeared in 'Let It Be' but also made the set.

Macca went right back to 1958 and his pre-Beatles band The Quarrymen for 'In Spite of all the Danger'. He told the audience that it was the first song they ever recorded. The Quarrymen was John Lennon, George Harrison, McCartney with Colin Hanton and John 'Duff' Lowe. "We all shared the recording. I had it for a week, John then had it for a week, then George had it for a week, then Colin had it for a week then Duff had it for 25 years" he said.

'Yesterday' was played with the same guitar he used on the Ed Sullivan show 40 years ago this year and 'Good Day Sunshine' was dedicated to the crew of the last space shuttle who were woken up one day with that song.

Macca's only failing moment was when he announced 'Too Man People' as a Wings song. It was actually from your Ram album, Paul. That was Paul and Linda McCartney.

That one thing aside, check out this set-list:

Magical Mystery Tour (from The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour, 1967)
Flaming Pie (from Flaming Pie, 1997)
Jet (from Wings Band on the Run, 1973)
I'll Get You (b-side, 1963)
Drive My Car (from Rubber Soul, 1967)
Till There Was You (from With The Beatles, 1963)
Let Me Roll It (from Wings Band on the Run, 1973)
Got To Get You Into My Life (from Revolver, 1966)
Fine Line (from Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, 2005)
Maybe I'm Amazed (from McCartney, 1970)
The Long and Winding Road (from The Beatles, Let It Be, 1970)
In Spite of all the Danger (The Quarrymen, 1958)
I Will (from The Beatles, 1968)
Jenny Wren (from Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, 2005)
For No One (from Revolver, 1966)
Fixing A Hole (from The Beatles, Sgt Pepper, 1967)
English Tea (from Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, 2005)
I'll Follow The Sun (from Beatles for Sale, 1964)
Blackbird (from The Beatles, 1968)
Eleanor Rigby (from Revolver, 1966)
Too Many People (from Ram, 1971)
She Came In Through the Bathroom Window (from Abbey Road, 1969)
Good Day Sunshine (from Revolver, 1966)
Band On The Run (from Wings Band on the Run, 1973)
Penny Lane (single, 1967)
I've Got A Feeling (from The Beatles, Let It Be, 1970)
Back In The USSR (from The Beatles, 1968)
Hey Jude (single, 1968)
Live and Let Die (single, 1973)
Yesterday (from Help, 1965) (guitar he played on the Ed Sullivan show)
Get Back (from The Beatles, Let It Be, 1970)
Helter Skelter (from The Beatles, 1968)
Let It Be (from The Beatles, Let It Be, 1970)
Please Please Me (from The Beatles Please Please Me, 1963)
Sgt Pepper/The End (from The Beatles Sgt Pepper, 1967/Abbey Road, 1969)

Yet any technical chinks in McCartney's vocal armor only made him mine more honest emotion to compensate. And the strategy wound up adding a humanity and vulnerability that helped make this show a more immediate, deep, and satisfying display than the star's more rote road shows.

On recent tours, McCartney could come off like a human jukebox, cranking out the classics with a skilled but dutiful distance. He was Robo-Paul, doing it all for you, but leaving the core of himself back at the hotel. At the Garden, several factors helped McCartney seem more stoked and engaged.

For one, it's a more stripped-down show than we've seen the ex-Beatle give. An uncommon portion of the two-hour-and-35-minute performance was given over to acoustic, solo pieces. No fewer than 16 of the night's astonishing 37 numbers found McCartney strumming the guitar or plunking the piano by himself - or aided by minimal accompaniment from the band.

The pared-down set worked particularly well in songs like "I Will" or "I'll Follow The Sun," where McCartney's voice made the most of the intimacy. His slightly less full tone made those songs seem like paternal lullabies. Though McCartney made fun of "'Til There Was You," as a "smoochy number," his delivery could make you swoon.

McCartney's numbers with the full band worked equally well. He's got a taut and tight unit, with just four players backing the star bassist. They're the perfect power pop combo for charging numbers like "Jet," "Band On The Run," or an especially rhythmic "I've Got A Feeling."

While McCartney offered no fewer than 24 Beatles classics, he also included four numbers from his new CD, "Chaos and Creation In The Backyard," his best-reviewed work in years. The flinty "Jenny Wren" fared best, but even an aural crumpet like "English Tea" had its charms.

As usual, McCartney didn't mess around with the arrangements of his songs, or allow much instrumental embellishment, except in the hard rock jam that ended the "Abbey Road" segment.

That meant the only way the songs could seem fresh was for the singer to be more present in the performances. Given McCartney's often blandly happy demeanor, that's no small feat. He can't lean on the edginess, coolness, or myth of other towering '60s figures, like Dylan or Keith Richards.

Yet here McCartney won us over by giving something more than his usual, technically perfect performance. Finally, he seemed to be giving himself.

Cartney returns to the Garden Tuesday and Wednesday.

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/352047p-300093c.html