Paul McCartney: A Day in the Life
If you’re curious what Beatlemania looks like in the year 2013 – dubious, perhaps, about whether it looks like much of anything at all – watch what happens when Paul McCartney throws a free concert on the street in Los Angeles. Hours before he’s even due to take the stage, check out the mob of sweaty people jammed shoulder to shoulder on the second-story balcony at the Sun Taco on Hollywood Boulevard. Look higher, at the heads dotting every rooftop and window in sight; even higher, at the news chopper thrumming its blades in a low hover over the boulevard; and higher still, at the three small planes slowly circling – gawkers with pilot’s licenses, gate-crashing from on high. Down on the street, scan the tall swaths of cyclone fence lining the sidewalk, draped with black vinyl sheeting, which mark the perimeter of a two-block audience enclosure that will contain 10,000 screaming people tonight.
McCartney’s performance, outside the El Capitan Theatre, will cap the season premiere of Jimmy Kimmel Live! McCartney is here to promote his 24th post-Beatles album, New. When Live! originally contacted the city about shutting down Hollywood Boulevard for this premiere, the musician attached to perform was Justin Timberlake – and officials rejected the request. When the show asked again, this time floating McCartney’s name instead, the no became a yes. (Timberlake ended up playing the next night.) But there are still regulations to meet. Kimmel’s music booker, Scott Igoe, is out front awaiting the fire marshal, who needs to give his sign-off on McCartney’s pyro rig. Igoe approaches McCartney’s longtime production manager, Mark Spring, to remind him of the marshal’s visit. “That’s fine,” Spring says, “though I’m not sure we’re even using pyro tonight. It’s here in case Paul shows up and decides he wants it.”
Just past 3 p.m., McCartney exits a car behind the theater and falls into step with a security crew led by his bodyguard Mike, an oak-chested fiftysomething who could pass for one of the Expendables. McCartney’s in a tailored indigo button-down and a pair of skinny jeans that he wears with more panache than a 71-year-old man has any right to. His physique is long and trim, the result of decades of vegetarianism and a regimen of yoga and strength training he adheres to even on tour, doing handstands in hotel gyms with his security dudes posted nearby keeping oglers at bay. His hair, dyed a rich auburn, fans jauntily across his collar, his age squaring neither with his appearance nor with the spry, impish pleasure he still clearly derives from the fact that he is Paul Motherfucking McCartney. Spotting fans camped out at either end of a back alley, he busts out some elaborately hammy air-guitar moves for them.
He snakes through the show’s downstairs corridors, accumulating an entourage as he goes, passing through a room where quinoa wraps and tofu sandwiches spill from Whole Foods bags marked “Paul McCrew” – at McCartney gigs, his employees are free to eat all the bacon cheeseburgers they like, provided they do it elsewhere. He takes a staircase up to street level, climbs the stage and, acknowledging the shrieks sailing down from Sun Taco, waves and shimmies in that direction, doubling the fans’ volume. “He gives everyone their moment,” Chris Holmes, McCartney’s touring DJ, says. “When we’re on the road, he’ll come up to the stage manager and dance with him a little bit, and for the rest of that guy’s life he can say, ‘This one time I danced with Paul McCartney.’ That’s just who Paul is. It’s not something he turns on for the cameras.”
Onstage, the band launches into “Matchbox,” a roaring blues number that McCartney has been covering since 1962. A few weeks ago, he was fighting a cold, and he got nervous about his voice, but he mainlined vitamin C and used a throat remedy that Little Richard, whose scream inspired McCartney’s own, taught him ages ago. “You get a boiling pot of water, you put Olbas Oil in it” – leaning over, he mimes putting a towel over his head – “and sniffff – gahhh! It knocks the back of your head off,” McCartney says. “I first saw him do it in Hamburg, and he’d come up from in haling, look in the mirror and go, ‘Richard, you’re so beautiful!'” Today, McCartney’s baritone is sounding weathered but strong, his howl still startlingly sharp. He keeps dreading the day when he’ll reach into his vocal arsenal for a long-beloved weapon and come up empty, “but it hasn’t happened yet,” McCartney says. “I just recently met Billy Joel. He said, ‘Are you still singing em in the same key?’ I said yes. He said, ‘I’ve had to drop mine by, like, a half-tone.'”
After a slashing New track called “Save Us,” McCartney frowns; the rhythm section sounds significantly more monstrous than usual. “The danger when it’s all loud and crazy is that you’re fooling yourself, and it’s going to come through on telly like shit,” he says. He turns and calls out to his drummer. “Abe, let’s just do a drum and bass thing to make sure we’re not distorting the hell out of this.” They lock into a groove until McCartney nods. Turns out he just forgot what a stage this small sounds like: “I’m closer to my amp than usual,” he says.
McCartney’s band members are seasoned industry pros, and they know him as an exacting bandleader. “There are no mistakes when you’re working with Paul – no mistakes,” says Barrie Marshall, McCartney’s tour promoter since 1989. “Or rather, you can make a mistake, but if you do, you have to own up. Raise your hand, look him in the eye and tell him, ‘I fucked up.’ And then don’t ever do it again!”
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