“Cool little place, this, isn’t it?” Paul McCartney said to the some 1,200 people sitting and standing and dancing all around the Fonda Theatre. I don’t visit Hollywood Boulevard very much, despite my place being just two miles away. It’s a tourist trap, and quite a plastic one at that. These days I am not as taken by the jewelry salesmen, Spider-Man cosplayers, sketchy 7-11 parking lots, gimmick restaurants, and vape shops, nor the historical film and stage theaters situated among them. It’s the proverbial armpit of tinseltown, full of people who only look up. But I do like the Fonda, even if the sound isn’t always good there. My best friend has played gigs there, so how special it was then that the most beloved musician alive took that stage too, standing 75 feet away from me, delivering a performance that felt just as important as any other show in town Friday night.
Seeing McCartney in a venue this small requires a little luck. If you’re not press or guestlist, then you’re at the mercy of a lottery system. I’d reckon the number of people who tried getting into the lottery ticked well into the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. If you were selected, you had to pony up $200 for a GA ticket. Or, you could take the VIP route and pay significantly more for a balcony seat and merch bag. A bit of a 180 from the Fonda’s usual $40-$60 ticket cost, hence all the beggars outside hounding for a spare ticket at a theatre usually reserved for indie-rockers and viral TikTokers. McCartney, scanning the whole crowd early in his set, noted this. “Hello, you people upstairs, in the posh seats,” he laughed. “You poor people down here have got to stand up.” The VIPs didn’t rattle their jewelry, but attendees on the ground floor quickly learned that the higher up the pit ramp they stood, the better the view was. Such a discovery proved to be a headache for security, who kept waving flashlights at patrons blocking the fire lane or crowding the ADA seats.
Throughout the show, the ADA section squabbled with the barflies leaning on the wall ledge behind them. They were younger folks, knocking back cupped beers, talking a mile a minute, and fiddling with their Yondr pouch-encased cellphones. The seated lot—folding chair, wheelchair, or otherwise—weren’t too happy with the nearby chatter that all but drowned out McCartney’s stage banter. I didn’t blame them. There were the occasional “shut the fuck up” exclamations and more than enough dagger looks. Eventually, a man who seemed to have become the paternal figure of the ADA group, always checking on everyone to make sure they could see or had enough legroom, turned around and said, disappointedly, “What is wrong with you?” Not another peep.
After an opening triptych of “Help!,” “Coming Up,” and “Got to Get You Into My Life,” McCartney settled into the night, doling out Beatles hits, Wings fan-favorites, and ditties that were either his own personal favorites or obligatory inclusions. His wife Nancy was in the audience for “My Valentine,” and “Now and Then,” the Beatles’ Grammy-winning final single, was slotted right between “Blackbird” and “Lady Madonna.” Man on the Run director Morgan Neville was somewhere in the balcony and McCartney made sure to wave hello from below (“What a story,” Macca joked). He and his longtime backing band—keyboardist Paul “Wixy” Wickens, guitarist Rusty Anderson, drummer Abe Laboriel Jr., and bassist Brian Ray—tore through a slick, loudly-applauded rendition of “Let Me Roll It” before ascending into a white-hot instrumental jam of Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady.” Anderson, Ray, and McCartney later flexed together in a triplet solo during “The End,” mirroring the same two-bar scorcher McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison peeled off at the conclusion of Abbey Road. I can appreciate that Macca’s band plays faithful to the source material, never putting too obvious a personal spin on the music. It’s sometimes frustrating, especially when the solo part in “Get Back” is screaming for some impromptu finesse, but it’s mostly fair. Even at 83 years old, not too many folks can keep up with McCartney anyways.
The setlist didn’t stray from what McCartney played at his similarly intimate Santa Barbara Bowl gig last September, though “Flaming Pie” snuck into this concert’s final act, opening the door for a rousing back-to-back-to-back of “Jet,” “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” and “Get Back.” McCartney, even when he’s in good humor, holds his cards close. Rarely did he seem taken aback by the smallness of the venue, nor did his band ever feel cramped on the Fonda’s tight stage layout, nor did he engage heavily with the repeated “We love you, Paul!” shouts thrown at him. But, when speaking out about the “little gigs” he’s been doing, he flashed a room-spanning grin. “It’s lovely for us to see the whites of your eyes.” This is not the tiniest SoCal venue McCartney has shown up to. Pappy and Harriet’s and Amoeba Records have welcomed him into their rooms over the last ten years, and the Fonda’s capacity is twice the size of the Bowery Ballroom’s in Lower Manhattan, where Macca played three shows last winter.
McCartney is a showman, not a script-reader. His banter Friday night was fresh, off the cuff. Sure, he preluded “Let It Be” with the well-known story about his mother visiting him in a dream, but he also recalled the time he watched Tony Bennett sing for a small crowd, a story I’d never heard him tell before. “He said, ‘You’ve got a beautiful acoustic in this room. Let me prove it to you. Mr. Sound Man, turn off the mic.’ There’s no mics or anything, and it’s so great because you’re in the room with him. It went down great. I said, ‘Wow, love it,’” McCartney remembered. “Then I saw him at a charity thing in the Beverly Hilton Hotel, and he said, ‘You know, you’ve got a great acoustic in this room. Let me prove it to you. Mr. Sound Man, turn off the mic…’ I believed it, you know.” I have to note that McCartney’s impression of the “Rags to Riches” singer was impressive, reminding me of that “switching accents” bit he did with Fallon 12 years ago.
McCartney didn’t sing off-mic like Bennett, but he did do his best to not dupe his fans with a song-and-dance like the crooner had. He interacted with the crowd regularly, exchanging peace signs and “W” hand gestures for the Wings devout. Mid-set, he directed everyone’s attention to a man in the front row whose sign said he’d been to 146 shows. “It’s a little obsessive, but we love it,” McCartney quipped. The lightest moment of the night came before its heaviest, when Macca began “Blackbird” but screwed up a lyric, singing “take these sunken eyes and learn to fly” instead of “take these sunken eyes and learn to see.” The Beatle was quick on his feet, pointing a finger of blame at the man who’d been to 146 shows. “Let’s start that again. Oh, God.”
Before Friday night, I’d never seen McCartney perform my favorite Beatles song of his. Granted, I haven’t watched him play in ten years, not since he stopped by the Rocket Arena (FKA Quicken Loans Arena) in Cleveland, when the key-change in “Band on the Run” made me cry ugly. It’s probably for the best that “Band on the Run” wasn’t played night one at the Fonda (it was saved for night two, along with “Maybe I’m Amazed”). I’d have ugly cried again. Instead, McCartney pulled out “I’ve Just Seen a Face” from Help! and, unsurprisingly, I ugly cried to that too. The song also received the loudest ovation of the evening. Some notable exclusions from the setlist included “Live and Let Die,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Yesterday,” “Hi, Hi, Hi,” and “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” among a few hundred others that all of us Apple Scruffs were hoping might make a surprise appearance. Personally, I spent the day manifesting “My Brave Face” and “The Back Seat of My Car” to no avail. McCartney’s recent single “Days We Left Behind,” from the forthcoming The Boys of Dungeon Lane, was mentioned but not played. “We’re in the process of learning it, so don’t ask us to do it,” he told the crowd. “And it’s in B, but I wrote it in C, but for some reason it’s in B.” But he laughed off his troubles and thanked everyone for receiving it so warmly. In the absence of new material, McCartney made sure to bring along that green laser effect he likes so much. Still, he was nearly as unplugged as the rest of us. I quite liked how stripped-back the visuals were, because any show without goofy video montages is okay in my book.
Because of a bum knee and the crutches I’m on, I lingered around the back of the room for the show. Turns out, that was the best place to be. Not a soul loitered in the lobby. The crowd spilled all over the place, but never away from McCartney. When the band vibrated along to “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” the bartenders quit serving patrons so they could dance and drink to the tale of Desmond and Molly. Young kids wearing earmuffs rocked out to “Jet.” A bearded chap puffed on his vape pen, stomped his foot, and slapped his knee to “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five.” Somebody hugging the barricade held a copy of Ram high all night.
When “Golden Slumbers” started, a kind woman next to me, who went bananas when “Getting Better” played earlier, held hands with her son and swayed sweetly together. “We’ve got to go now,” McCartney told us after “The End.” “You’ve got to go, too.” The show, just a hair above 90 minutes long, was as much about the people as it was the music, because kindness and good odds do make a neat tandem, even if you’re sharing a room with a Beatle. After McCartney finished “Love Me Do,” he admitted that it’s “been pretty good ever since then.” His 1,200 closest friends immediately concurred. Maybe these thumb-sized shows remain one-offs in-between world tour legs, or maybe they get a long run of their own dates, in non-coastal cities. I do hope that one of us bought a Powerball ticket after leaving the Fonda.
Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.
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