Paul McCartney took the Fonda Theater stage, surveyed the 1,200 faces before him (“I can see the whites of their eyes,” he said), and then offered a brief history lesson about where we had gathered on Friday night.
La Fonda, he told us, opened 100 years ago; Back then, he added, it was called Music Box.
“Cool little place, right?”
At 83 years old, McCartney has already entered his cool little place era.
Last year, the rock legend played a series of concerts at New York's tiny Bowery Ballroom while in town for the 50th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live”; A few months after that, he hit the Santa Barbara Bowl as a sort of warm-up for the final leg of his Got Back world tour.
Paul McCartney and his band during soundcheck for Friday's show.
(MJ Kim)
Friday's scandal, the first of two instant sell-outs at the Fonda, came as McCartney is drumming up interest in a new studio album he will release in May. Outside the venue, a double-decker bus was parked with posters advertising the LP, which is named “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” after a street in their hometown of Liverpool.
But that didn't seem to be the purpose of the show itself, which lasted about an hour and 40 minutes and didn't even include a performance of the album's lead single. The truth is that Sir Paul really seems to enjoy these intimate concerts: standing in front of a crowd and doing the magic trick that is a song like “Get Back” or “Jet” or “Got to Get You Into My Life.”
And why wouldn't it?
If a Paul McCartney concert in an arena or stadium is a finely honed spectacle of boomer nostalgia and industrial-strength charm, one of his shows in a club or theater is an opportunity to play. musicwhich after six and a half decades is still clearly spinning.
You wouldn't think the shows remind McCartney that he's a normal guy. (Those six and a half decades have turned him into quite the opposite.) What they could do, however, is remind him why he came to be so adored: valuable self-knowledge for an artist whose great theme has always been the transformative power of love.
Here, as in Santa Barbara, he and his seven-piece band (which included three trumpet players) did a stripped-down version of Got Back's most recent set, opening with a deadly double whammy: “Help!” on “Coming Up” – that alone said a lot about McCartney’s range and stamina.
“Let Me Roll It” had a funky swagger, while “Getting Better” chugged with joyful insistence; “I've Just Seen a Face” showcased the group's crisp harmonies and “Lady Madonna” their close rhythmic interplay. After “Let 'Em In,” McCartney asked his band member Brian Ray to demonstrate the song's important bass line: a single note struck over and over again.
Friday's show was the first of two at the Fonda.
(MJ Kim)
He did a few other comedic bits, including a flashback to Tony Bennett singing without a microphone as a way to demonstrate the excellent acoustics of a concert hall (the joke was that he later saw Bennett do the same thing at the Beverly Hilton) and some gentle banter from people sitting in the “fancy seats” on the Fonda's balcony. Among them, McCartney noted, was Morgan Neville, director of the recent documentary “Man on the Run” about McCartney's life after the Beatles broke up.
He also noted that his wife, Nancy Shevell, was in the house and dedicated “My Valentine” to her; Truth be told, that one was a bit boring, as was “Now and Then,” the so-called last Beatles song released in 2023 that used machine learning to fill in a rough demo left by John Lennon.
“Thank you, John, for writing that beautiful song,” McCartney said afterwards, which made it a little harder to dislike it.
In any case, there were more classics to come, including a rollicking “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and a “Let It Be”/“Hey Jude” duet that inspired a song so vigorous that McCartney probably could have gotten away with lip-syncing it if he wanted to.
But of course he didn't want to, that was the point.
