Paul McCartney Rocks Palm Springs

The emotional climax of Paul McCartney’s tour opener in Palm Springs: right at the start, when he sang “Help!” It was his full show, after a short warm-up dress rehearsal last week in a small Santa Barbara venue. But he set the stakes high with “Help!,” John Lennon’s personal cry of desperation, and a song he hasn’t sung since the Beatles broke up. Paul sang the John part, as his guitarists sang the vocal counterpoint that Paul wrote 60 years ago. For the acoustic breakdown, Paul sang alone, with his voice cracking just every so slightly on “So much younger than todaaaaay.” It was a knockout moment in a show full of them.

“It’s the first night of the tour, so we’re young and fresh and reckless,” he told the crowd before leaping into a euphoric “Drive My Car.” But as always, he’s a man on the run, driven to keep topping himself on the road. Paul made the whole night more than just the start of his U.S. fall run — he made it a statement of purpose, and a challenge to the audience to keep up with him, in a celebration of how far he’s traveled over the years.

The audience was more than up to the task — the Ariscure Arena was packed 11,000 fans. Part of the challenge at a McCartney show is to have more fun than he’s having — but it’s not clear whether it can be done, since his superhuman enthusiasm is almost terrifying to behold at 83. Paul has never been the kind of fool who plays it cool, but that sense of emotional urgency is what always sets McCartney apart, and it makes him the greatest of rock & roll live performers — that ability to take a familiar song and make it seethe with now-now-now energy. And tonight, he was feeling that down to his bootlace. Let him roll it? As if anything could stop him.

“We’re going to do some old songs and some new songs and some in-between songs,” he announced early on. “This song is not new. I’ll give you a clue.” Then he ripped right into “Got To Get You Into My Life,” electrifying thousands of another-kind-of minds. He reveled in the audience screams — a sound he’s been basking in nonstop since his teens, yet a sound that just makes him openly crave more.“This is so great,” he said. “I’m going to take a minute here just to drink it all in for myself.”

As always, McCartney defiantly refuses to coast — he plays nearly three hours without a pause, hopping from instrument to instrument because he can’t wait to start the next song. The last time I saw him was in a tiny rock club, New York’s Bowery Ballroom; the time before that was in a stadium on the eve of his 80th birthday. But wherever he is, he’s out to fill the room, re-earning his legend from scratch every night.

The Palm Springs area is famous for its older population — to get the Acrisure Arena, just take Frank Sinatra Drive via Ginger Rogers Road, crossing the Sonny Bono Memorial Expressway. But tonight, the “desert world” didn’t even begin to settle down. Like his friend Bob Dylan, who he resembles in so many curious ways these days, he’s spending his eighties on a Never-Ending Tour. It’s the “Got Back” tour, the name he’s been using for his show since returning from the pandemic. You could say he keeps defying his age, but that raises the question of who else of any age can puts on a show like this man. 

He busted out his 1980 hit “Coming Up,” enhanced by the Hot City Horns working it into Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn Theme.” It’s also a song with a John connection — the Paul song he randomly heard on the radio in his limo, started enjoying, then suddenly recognized, shouting, “Fuck a pig, it’s Paul!” 

“This next song is kind of relatively new,” he said before “Come On To Me,” from 2018’s Egypt Station. “When I say they’re ‘new,’ they’re probably like about ten years old. That’s new-ish.” (For a vision, fans might have let visions of “Queenie Eye” or “Dominoes” dance in their heads, given the abundance of great songs he’s dropped in the past dozen years.)

He sang a tender “My Valentine,” his 2012 ballad for his wife Nancy Shevell, adding, “This one is for you, Nance.” He belted “Maybe I’m Amazed” as a soulful vocal powerhouse, with a video montage of Linda McCartney’s photos from the Scottish farm where he wrote it, in their early days together. “How time flies,” he said. “That baby in my jacket? She’s a grown-up now with four kids of her own — that’s my daughter Mary.” He added that tonight was the birthday of another Mary—his mother. “Mind you, she would have been 116,”  he said. “Marys all the way.” It was impossible not to think of Mary McCartney later in the show, when he sang “Let It Be.”

He keeps the pace brisk — just his long-running band of fellow travelers, who’ve been together twice as long as the Beatles by now: guitarist Rusty Anderson, guitarist Brian Ray, keyboardist Paul “Wix” Wickens, and on drums, the mighty Abe Laboriel Jr. (Only three drummers can do justice to “Hey Jude”: Abe, Ringo, and the late Roger Hawkins of Muscle Shoals.) 

“Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da” sounds timelier than ever these days — an ode to a West Indian immigrant family in London, recorded during a summer when right-wing British political Enoch Powell was whipping up anti-immigrant hysteria. He ripped through bangers like “Jet,” “Get Back,” and “Band on the Run.” In the 1970s, “Let Me Roll It” might have sounded like a ode to the pleasures of rolling joints, making out, playing guitar—and maybe also throwing a scare into Lennon. But now it sounds like a mission statement, especially when he sings “I want to tell you, and now’s the time” — a line that slipped past everyone in his thirties, but hits harder than ever in his eighties.

“Something” was a heartfelt tribute to George Harrison, played on a ukulele that his old friend gave him. Paul added, “A shout-out to someone special who’s in the audience tonight — George’s wife Olivia,” which brought everyone to their feet.” 

He did his acoustic interlude with “Blackbird,” his civil rights tribute, and “Here Today,” his Lennon elegy. “We never told each other, ‘I love you, man,” he confessed as he began “Here Today,” hitting his falsetto for the impassioned final notes. It led into “Now and Then,” the final Beatles song from 2023, an unfinished John demo that he was obsessed with finishing. Some folks foolishly slept on “Now and Then” just because McCartney called it “A.I.” in a careless moment, leading people to wrongly think it was some kind of deepfake. But it’s Paul keeping faith with his friend on the most intimate level — a song that nobody else heard much potential in, but a song that Paul felt driven to finish, simply refusing to let it go until it became the Beatles song he always knew it deserved to be. As in “Help,” he sang his old mate’s words, words he must have often heard as sung to him. He added, “Thank you John for writing that beautiful song.”

“Hey Jude” came on like a benediction transforming the audience into a massive tantric na-na-na-na swarm. (A fan a few rows in front of me held her sign saying “Hi I’m Jude” — but then aren’t we all?) When he divides the sing-along into male and female showcases, there’s no pretense at all he’s interested in listening to the men sing — he does it just to get to the female voices, pleading, “I love that sound—come on, girls, one more time.”

“This next one is special to me, and you’ll see why,” he said for the encore, introducing “I’ve Got a Feeling,” his video and audio duet with John. A favorite moment: the footage makes sense to get a close-up capturing Lennon’s“fuck yeah” in the final minute. Paul added, “Always glad to do that one and sing with John again.” As always, he bristled when he finally had to say goodnight — we should all be so lucky in our lives to hate anything the way Paul McCartney hates abandoning an audience. But he sent everyone home deliriously happy with the Abbey Road “Golden Slumbers” medley, with all three axemen facing off as in the original’s Paul/George/John guitar battle.

One of the night’s highlights came at the very end, after the band took their final bows, waved, and left the stage. Paul was almost offstage before he suddenly darted back to the microphone. There was something else he wanted to say. “See you next time,” he told the crowd. It was a real “did I tell you I need you?” moment. 

In the past couple of months, I’ve seen astonishing shows from performers in their 80s: Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Willie Nelson. These are the relentless lifers who have it in their blood—the ones who can’t NOT do it. Unlike Bob or Neil, but like Willie, Paul doesn’t throw many curveballs into the set. (As he told Rolling Stone in 2014, “It’s not like I’m Phish, you know.”) But like all of them, he doesn’t shy away from the cracks and creaks in his voice — these artists don’t seek to turn back time (are you kidding?) or to deny it, but to change along with it. Why does he push himself so brutally, night after night, when absolutely everybody in the crowd would be overjoyed with so much less? It’s a mystery nobody can comprehend, yet it’s amazing to behold — and maybe Paul is amazed, along with the rest of us.

Set List:

“Help!”
“Coming Up”
“Got to Get You Into My Life”
“Letting Go”
“Drive My Car”
“Come On to Me”
“Let Me Roll It”
“Getting Better”
“Let ‘Em In”
“My Valentine”
“Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five”
“Maybe I’m Amazed”
“I’ve Just Seen A Face”
“In Spite of All The Danger”
“Love Me Do”
“Dance Tonight”
“Blackbird”
“Here Today”
“Now and Then”
“Lady Madonna”
“Jet”
“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”
“Something”
“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”
“Band on the Run”
“Get Back”
“Let It Be”
“Live and Let Die”
“Hey Jude”

Encore:

“I’ve Got a Feeling”
“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)”
“Helter Skelter”
“Golden Slumbers”
“Carry That Weight”
“The End”