Right before “Jet,” he caught the scent of the prehistoric-smelling joint being passed to my left. “Somebody’s having themselves a good time,” he joked, pointing to Brian Ray, a member of his touring band for over two decades: “Brian’s been sober for a long time, he’s going to have to call his sponsor.”
After “From Me to You,” he mused how the early Beatles “were all about the fans, really,” full of first-person pronouns: “Love Me Do,” “She Loves You.” He demonstrated with winning self-deprecation how the G-minor in the bridge of “From Me to You” expanded their songwriting palette: “I thought, Come on, now we’re going somewhere.”
Everyone in the small crowd looked at everyone else as if we had made it onto the lifeboat. There were no famous people evident, either in general admission or the rafters, just weathered Boomer faces and cherubic Gen Z ones, often in enthusiastic conversation. A diminutive woman held up her senior citizen ID impertinently to a college-aged kid next to her, right before “Golden Slumbers” started and her face crumpled. “Now, I’m going to cry,” she announced.
Behind me, I met an 18-year-old named Rowan who plays in a shoegaze band. I sat at a girl-free lunch table with my own version of this kid during the second Clinton Administration, debating the merits of Beatles solo albums. Now he bobbed his floppy-haired head next to me during “Let Me Roll It.” (When Sir Paul came out, this kid shouted “he’s real!”)
During “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” a beetle-browed man I could easily imagine yelling about the Kansas City Chiefs 48 hours earlier was demonstratively, unnecessarily generous with an Altoids can that, as far as I can tell, contained just Altoids. Sir Paul finished off “I’ve Just Seen a Face” with a “yee-haw.” A 20-something girl in a vinyl catsuit fluttered her hands overhead, eyes closed, for the “hey-hos” of “Mrs. Vandebilt.” “I can’t quite believe you’re here, doing this,” McCartney mused.
We were fantastic, he told us. What a crowd we were. (”He’s 82,” whispered Rowan, to no one.) “Some of us have to get some sleep, you know,” McCartney said, after “Let It Be.” But he didn’t look like an old man in need of sleep. He looked like Paul McCartney. Forever returning for another curtain call, another formal bow before the crowd, a man soaking in the energy emitted by fans like a cat in the sun.
