McCartney: A Lot More Than Nostalgia

To get the most accurate sense of a concert’s worth, it’s normally wise to discount about 25% of a fan’s enthusiastic report in the days after the show. They are, after all, fans, and besides, they don’t want you to think they wasted their money.

No matter how much co-workers rave over the water cooler today about Paul McCartney’s concert Saturday at Staples Center, however, you should add 25%.

It’s far easier to underestimate McCartney’s level of accomplishment in this triumphant tour, his first in nine years, than to overstate it.

That’s because it’s easy to assume that the warm, uplifting tone of the 21/2-hour concert was inevitable given the massive affection for everything Beatles, 32 years after the quartet broke up.

How hard can it be, many may ask, to wow a crowd when you have “Hey Jude,” “Yesterday” and all those other McCartney hits in your set list?

There’s also the trap of writing off the impact of the show to simple nostalgia.

Everything that happened on stage Saturday was certainly enhanced for the mostly over-40 crowd by the memories associated with the songs--and the fact that this could be the last time around for McCartney, who rarely tours and will be 60 next month.

On the other hand, all that fan devotion and immense expectation level could be too heavy a weight, one that could amplify any concert misstep. McCartney could have gone wrong in any of several ways, including spending too much time on new material or wrapping the Beatles and Wings tunes together in a careless way that felt predictable and uncaring.

Most of all, the audience could have been disheartened by an obvious decline in McCartney’s vocal skills. Stars as great as Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley suffered through that humiliation in their later years.

McCartney avoided all the potential problems. He may have forgotten lyrics in a couple of places and told a few corny jokes, but he was a stylish, gracious host who seemed respectful of the Beatles’ legacy and the audience’s role as part of that extended family.

Following the same song list that he used in the tour’s April 1 opening in Oakland, McCartney stepped away from the Beatles/Wings catalog only five times--including for the Oscar-nominated “Vanilla Sky” and the underwhelming Sept.11 tribute number, “Freedom.”

The evening, thus, was a virtual feast of priceless memories.

He played the expected hits, including “Let It Be” and “Band on the Run,” as well as some tasty side numbers, including the socially conscious “Blackbird,” and high-energy ones such as “Back in the USSR” and “Jet.”

Besides his own tasteful bass, acoustic guitar and keyboard work, McCartney’s four-piece band ( Abe Laboriel Jr. on drums, Wix Wickens on keyboards, and Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray on guitars) played with razor-sharp execution.

Most commanding were McCartney’s vocals, which retain an everyman, crooner charm on ballads such as “My Love” as well as a raw intensity on “Maybe I’m Amazed” and “I Saw Her Standing There.”

The most uplifting feature of the tour, which included a stop Sunday at the Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim, is its warmth--and nothing captured that more Saturday than two companion moments.

As McCartney went into the 1964 hit, “All My Loving,” early in the set, the images on the video screens above the stage took us back to the innocence of the famous Beatles airport arrival scenes from the ‘60s. We see mobs of shrieking teenage girls, one holding a sign, “We Love You, Never Leave Us.”

It’s an especially poignant moment, given the deaths of two of the Beatles, John Lennon in 1980 and George Harrison last year, as well as the 1998 death of McCartney’s wife, Linda.

(As in Oakland, McCartney, who with drummer Ringo Starr, is the only surviving member of the band, dedicated songs to both Lennon and Harrison, “Here Today” and “Something,” respectively, during a 40-minute acoustic section. He later played “My Love” for Linda.)

Some two hours later, McCartney employed the video screens to show the much older, but emotional Staples crowd, including L.A.’s omnipresent celebrity-fan Jack Nicholson, as Saturday’s fans sang along on “Hey Jude.”

It was an inspired touch that could serve as a perfect bookend to the earlier airport scene in a family photo album--as well as an endearing symbol of the emotional intensity of the evening.