{"id":2054761,"date":"2025-09-27T21:28:03","date_gmt":"2025-09-27T21:28:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2054761"},"modified":"2025-09-27T21:28:03","modified_gmt":"2025-09-27T21:28:03","slug":"paul-mccartney-warms-up-before-getting-back-in-santa-barbara","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/paul-mccartney-warms-up-before-getting-back-in-santa-barbara\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul McCartney warms up before getting back in Santa Barbara"},"content":{"rendered":"

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SANTA BARBARA \u2014 \u201cIn this next song,\u201d said Paul McCartney, \u201cwe\u2019d like you to sing along.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oh, this<\/i> was the one?<\/p>\n

By an hour or so into his concert Friday night at the Santa Barbara Bowl \u2014 basically somebody\u2019s backyard by the standards of the former Beatle \u2014 McCartney had already gotten the capacity crowd to join in on a bunch of all-timers including \u201cI\u2019ve Just Seen a Face,\u201d \u201cLove Me Do,\u201d \u201cJet,\u201d \u201cGetting Better,\u201d \u201cLady Madonna,\u201d \u201cLet Me Roll It\u201d and \u201cGot to Get You Into My Life.\u201d<\/p>\n

But for Sir Paul, even (or especially) at age 83, there\u2019s always a way to take an audience higher.<\/p>\n

So as his keyboard player plunked out the song\u2019s lovably lopsided lick, McCartney and his band cranked through a fast and jumpy rendition of \u201cOb-La-Di, Ob-La-Da\u201d that left nobody any choice but to hop up and holler about the sweet certainty of life\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n

\n
<\/picture>\n
\n

Paul McCartney and his band.<\/p>\n

(Michael Owen Baker \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

A sellout pretty much as soon as it was announced, Friday\u2019s show was a kind of warm-up gig ahead of the launch next week of the latest leg of McCartney\u2019s Got Back world tour, which began criss-crossing the globe in 2022 and will resume Monday night in Palm Desert after a nine-month break.<\/p>\n

On the road he\u2019s playing arenas and stadiums, but this hillside amphitheater seats only 4,500 or so; to make the evening even more intimate, fans had to lock their phones in little pouches on the way into the venue. (The presence of several cameras swooping around on cranes suggested that McCartney was filming the concert for some unstated purpose.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s our wardrobe change of the evening,\u201d he said at one point after taking off his jacket, and indeed this was a slightly trimmed-down version of the flashy multimedia production that he brought to SoFi Stadium<\/a> three years ago. That night in 2022, he played three dozen tunes over two and a half hours; on Friday he did a dozen fewer \u2014 no \u201cMaybe I\u2019m Amazed,\u201d no \u201cBand on the Run\u201d \u2014 in about an hour and 45 minutes.<\/p>\n

The advantage of the smallness, of course, was that you could really hear<\/i> what McCartney and his longtime backup band were doing up there: the folky campfire vocal harmonies in \u201cI\u2019ve Just Seen a Face,\u201d the propulsive groove driving \u201cGet Back,\u201d the barely organized chaos of a downright raunchy \u201cHelter Skelter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then again, that assumes that tracking those details is why anybody turned up in Santa Barbara.<\/p>\n

Though he dropped an album of new solo songs in 2020, McCartney has been pretty deep in nostalgia mode since the 2021 release of Peter Jackson\u2019s widely adored \u201cGet Back<\/a>\u201d docuseries. He\u2019ll tend the machine this fall with a new book about his years with Wings and an expanded edition of the Beatles\u2019 mid-\u201990s \u201cAnthology\u201d series; next year, a documentary about the Wings era is due from director Morgan Neville; in 2028, director Sam Mendes will unveil the four separate biopics he\u2019s making about each Beatle, with Paul Mescal in the role of McCartney.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Paul <\/picture>\n
\n

Paul McCartney takes the stage. <\/p>\n

(Michael Owen Baker \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

All that looking back can make it hard for even a devoted fan to take in the legend standing before them in the flesh; instead of overwriting memories with fresh information, the mind steeped in myth can train itself to do the opposite (especially when the owner of that mind has shelled out hundreds of bucks for a concert ticket).<\/p>\n

Yet you have to hand it to McCartney, whose face bore a dusting of silvery stubble on Friday: As predetermined as this audience was to have a good time, he was tapped into the energy of a musician making minute-to-minute decisions.<\/p>\n

He opened the show with a zesty take on the Beatles\u2019 \u201cHelp!,\u201d which experts on the internet say he hadn\u2019t played in concert since 1990, then followed it up with one of his quirkiest solo tunes in the disco-punk \u201cComing Up,\u201d which he juiced with a bit of Henry Mancini\u2019s \u201cPeter Gunn\u201d theme.<\/p>\n

After a flirty \u201cLove Me Do,\u201d he asked the women in the crowd to \u201cgimme a Beatles scream,\u201d then nodded approvingly at the sound. \u201cImagine trying to play through that,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

\u201cJet\u201d had a nasty swagger and \u201cI\u2019ve Got a Feeling\u201d a sexy strut; \u201cLive and Let Die,\u201d meanwhile, was just as trashy as you\u2019d hope.<\/p>\n

McCartney told moving if familiar stories about meeting Jimi Hendrix and about his mother coming to him in the dream that inspired \u201cLet It Be\u201d; he also told one I\u2019d never heard about screwing up a performance of \u201cBlackbird\u201d \u2014 \u201cLot of changes,\u201d he said of the song\u2019s complicated guitar part \u2014 in front of Meryl Streep. Because his wife Nancy was in the house, he said, he played \u201cMy Valentine,\u201d a weepy piano ballad anyone but Nancy probably would\u2019ve gladly exchanged for \u201cJunior\u2019s Farm\u201d or \u201cDrive My Car.\u201d<\/p>\n

But then what was that choice if not a commitment to the circumstances of the moment?<\/p>\n

\n
\"Paul <\/picture>\n
\n

Paul McCartney arrives at the Santa Barbara Bowl.<\/p>\n

(Michael Owen Baker \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div><\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.latimes.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SANTA BARBARA \u2014 \u201cIn this next song,\u201d said Paul McCartney, \u201cwe\u2019d like you to sing along.\u201d Oh, this was the one? By an hour or so into his concert Friday night at the Santa Barbara Bowl \u2014 basically somebody\u2019s backyard by the standards of the former Beatle \u2014 McCartney had already gotten the capacity crowd […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2054762,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2054761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Paul-McCartney-warms-up-before-getting-back-in-Santa-Barbara.com2F9c2Ff72Ff54abff74458b2264cb8e236.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2054761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054761\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2054762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2054761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2054761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2054761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}