Paul McCartney at Yankee Stadium

Note: This was written for a Chicago publication on the above date.

When The Beatles’ tour of major league baseball parks invented stadium rock in 1965, the sound equipment was primitive. Fifty 100-watt amplifiers, useful mostly for a bit of at-bat organ music, were muddy and easily outmatched by the screeching of fifty thousand kids. Settling into my seat at Yankee Stadium on Saturday night, I thought of this as my eyes ran up and down the tall speaker towers suspended over the enormous stage’s corners, powerful digital sound monitors calibrated to long perfected specifications. I thought of the practiced crowd outside the stadium, the efficient security rollout, the fact that every protocol of the Rock Concert had been fine-tuned and beatified (Beatified?) in the minds of music lovers since those first, wild shows. To consider that the act I was about to see had incepted all of this, something which became an enormous cultural substrate unto itself, I felt like Lao Tzu shaking hands with the Tao.

Three hours later, Lao Tzu’s socks were blown off. If you are debating going through the effort to catch Paul McCartney at Wrigley, the answer is that if you’re wondering, you must. McCartney was stellar on this second night of his 2011 tour, and he will be stellar on July 31st and August 1st at the Friendly Confines. There will not be a bad seat in the house. He will be taking over for Marlon Byrd in center, and the crowd will be in base-hit territory just past the infield. The sound and lights will be perfect. And the Cute One will be so on point in every way that you’ll wonder if this wasn’t the Ron Santo era.

As Paul McCartney came onstage to a dutifully thunderous ovation and paced through “Magical Mystery Tour,” the pre-show historicism that had gotten me so primed sublimated into magic with the opening plunks of the set’s third song, “All My Loving.” It was chilling; we’re so accustomed to knowing this music from its perch in the public domain, or from its role as the simultaneous base and pinnacle of the rock pyramid, that to then comprehend that this belonged to the guy in front of us made the distance between me and the man himself disappear, and it became Paul fucking McCartney! before my eyes. It was like watching Paul of Tarsus do a table reading of Corinthians.

From there on it was completely rockin'. The evening never felt like a tribute to vestigial grandeur. The songs were performed flawlessly and energetically. Even now the setlist looks comically perfect, the template for what every rock concert might be if there were no such thing as self-awareness. By the time “Live and Let Die” had me headbanging like an idiot, the scale of the occasion had melted into euphoria.

His musicianship, his showmanship, and his durability all play into the phenomenon Paul McCartney has never stopped being, the perfect blend of back-end talent and front-end pizzazz that have endeared him to reporters, aficionados, and fans for his entire career. (The publicity-weary Beatles notoriously resented him for it.) He’s still an unrepentant ham. He asked if we were having a good time often enough to put a teenager losing his virginity to shame. Some stage banter fell flat, but come on, the guy is almost 70. His famously ageless voice—one of the best in rock—absolutely soared on “I’m Looking Through You” and “Helter Skelter.” He trilled his voice between songs to show off his range, he darted around the stage to show off his fitness, he rubbed his still-full hair constantly; I was afraid he might pop a boner just to show what else never left.

The real star of the night, however, was McCartney’s songwriting. I need add nothing to the oceanic praise of this particular legacy of the Beatles but to comment that McCartney lives up to his own hype simply by owning this preternaturally powerful music as no one of lesser talent could. This alone justifies the admission. Add to the top of that a concert of supreme passion, hosted by one of the great showmen of the past century in top form, and a different sort of historical merit suddenly arises. We only have Paul McCartney for another few years, but we do have him now. This was one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen, and believe me; it was in spite of the size of Yankee Stadium. Wrigley Field is going to feel like the Cavern Club.