If any musician has had the opportunity to hone his onstage banter to a razored gleam, it’s Paul McCartney—he of the iconic, ‘60s-era press conference rapport (goofy and absurd with the Beatles where Dylan was aloof and eviscerating); he of the decades of interviews; he of the 40 years of looking out at crowds and filling the silence between songs with words.
And so it was a surprise, during the first hour of his set last night at Boston’s Fenway Park, to find the interstitials so … Unfocused? Rambling? Noncommittal? He told a long story about Jimi Hendrix that went nowhere. He told a story about screaming teen fans. “By the way,” he noted, pointing at video screens towering behind him, “those big images back there are from the new Beatles Rock Band thing,” punctuating this with a twiddle of the thumbs, as though that’s a gesture anyone makes when they’re playing Rock Band.
There was a sense of distraction or doddering, and it carried over to the first handful of songs, augmented by a blow-dried, Sunset Strip-looking backup band, which tried to overcompensate with volume and wanky guitar fireworks for what it couldn’t deliver in genuine thrill. (The Boston police on hand could have done a great public service by ordering them to step away from “Day In The Life,” lest they smother it.) Fenway is home to the Green Monster, but for a while it seemed as though this night was brought to us by that other green monster, the one that contractually obligates you, for instance, to hit the road in support of a new high-ticket video game bearing your likeness.
Then McCartney broke out a ukelele for ” Something ” and everything started to change. As Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters famously proved in The Jerk , the emotive properties of that midget guitar shouldn’t be underestimated. In McCartney’s hands, the performance was dinky, tender, surprising, playful: the first great point of the night, the one where McCartney seemed to come off autopilot (even if he does the same bit at the same moment on every night of this tour).
In between more blustery, not ineffective runs through beefed-up beefy hits like “Back in the USSR,” “Get Back,” and “Helter Skelter,” there were other moments of weird intimacy: a solo acoustic rendition of the exquisitely sweet “Blackbird,” prefaced by a few revelatory (to me, at least) words about the song’s roots in the civil rights era: “I wrote the song imagining a young black girl and the troubles she went through.” It was well-meaning, a bit cringe-worthy, and might have torn the wings off a lesser song.
It was true what they say on the Internet. He
does look like an aging lesbian
. But when things took off, he played with the winningness and verve of a lesbian at least half his age.
