Has Paul McCartney been borrowing Bruce Springsteen’s trainer? At 67, the former Beatle seems determined to suddenly turn his gigs into E Street-style marathons. When McCartney did an American mini-tour last spring and summer, fans (and, at the Coachella Festival, some curious acolytes) were astonished by shows that stretched out to the two-and-a-half hour mark. Returning to U.S. shores with a slightly revamped revue that he’s dubbed the “Up and Coming Tour,” McCartney now has an even longer set list that brings his concerts up to a plentiful two hours and 45 minutes. In other words, Rosalita ain’t got nothing on Eleanor Rigby.
Look back at McCartney’s history with the Beatles in photos.
After a kickoff show in Arizona, McCartney chose to bring his 2010 tour to the Hollywood Bowl, site of the Beatles’ legendary 1964 and 1965 appearances. He’d been back to the Bowl once as a solo artist, in 1993, but naturally got ruminative about this latest return Tuesday night, in the first of two shows at the historic venue. “The first time we came here, we were little kids,” he told the crowd. “It looks like that now. Then, we thought we were great big men… You couldn’t hear anything we were singing because of the girls screaming.” If he was fishing for a swell of girlish screams, he got it. “Yeah, like that! But nowadays, we are louder.”
And longer. The Beatles’ sets in the mid-’60s usually lasted barely a half-hour and consisted of just over a dozen songs. At Tuesday night’s Bowl show, out of 38 songs that were played in full or (in a few cases) in part, no fewer than 22 were Beatles songs — almost twice as many as the screaming girls would have heard (or at least seen) at the Fabs’ own shows back in the day.
The essentials of the set list were familiar to any southern Californians who made the trek to Coachella a year ago, o...
Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily