When it comes to Sir Paul McCartney, who packed in just shy of 45,000 fans of all ages to his Alamodome concert on Saturday, the numbers and Father Time don’t lie.

It’s been nearly 70 years since he befriended John Lennon.
Big screens give fans throughout the 'dome a close-up look at what was happening onstage.

Big screens give fans throughout the 'dome a close-up look at what was happening onstage.
Marvin Pfeiffer/San Antonio Express-News

It’s been 60 years since the Beatles released the albums “Help!” and “Rubber Soul.” The following year, the Fab Four stop touring.

Article continues below this ad

It’s been nearly 50 years since his “Wings Over America” tour launched in Texas and marked the first time McCartney had performed in the U.S. since 1966 with the Beatles.

It’s been more than 30 years since he became the first act to play the Alamodome in May 1993.

And it’s been almost 20 years since Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone that he was in awe of Paul McCartney.

No need to stop counting: The 83-year-old McCartney is still awesome.

Article continues below this ad
People record video on their phones anticipating the start of the Paul McCartney concert at the Alamodome.

People record video on their phones anticipating the start of the Paul McCartney concert at the Alamodome.
Marvin Pfeiffer/San Antonio Express-News

The audience was multigenerational, if largely gray and graying. There were grandkids wearing ear protection headphones and kooky Gen-Z cosplay fans holding signs with messages including “Marry us, Paul.”

In the crowd were musicians like Austin’s Britt Daniel of Spoon and Joe Reyes of Buttercup, as well as former KISS-FM radio personality Brian Kendall and Richard Turner, who hosts “The Best of the Beatles” on KSYM.

Asked before the show if he thought this might be McCartney’s last rodeo, Turner said, “Probably – but if not, we’ll be here again.”

That summed up the joyous loyalty McCartney inspires. The screams are still deafening. The music still absolutely rocks, and the nostalgic photos and colorful animated videos on giant, towering screens flanking the stage and behind it, enhanced the time-traveling set list of 35 songs.

For die-hard fans, there were likely few surprises in the nearly three-hour show, counting the encore. But there were plenty of moments.
McCartney's band included a horn section, which punched up songs such as "Coming Up."

McCartney's band included a horn section, which punched up songs such as "Coming Up."
Marvin Pfeiffer/San Antonio Express-News

McCartney, dressed in a dapper double-breasted black suit with peak lapels, opened with “Help!” He quickly moved on to funkier stuff, bringing out the Hot City Horns — a London-based horn trio who dance and look as good as they play – for “Coming Up” and “Got to Get You Into My Life.”

McCartney was in strong voice. True, his once velvety midrange is now a much gruffer warble, but his ability to scream in higher registers and to hit the high-note “oohs” is remarkably intact.

For good measure, there were some relatively newer songs including “Come On to Me,” a fun unplugged “Dance Tonight” and “My Valentine.” McCartney's wife and valentine, Nancy Shevell, was in the audience, as were two of his grandsons.

“Imagine that, watching your granddad rockin’,” McCartney quipped after belting out “Maybe I’m Amazed.”  During the night, McCartney played his iconic Hofner violin bass, a Gibson Les Paul electric guitar, a Martin acoustic guitar, a ukulele, mandolin and upright and grand piano.

It’s hard to tell when he’s having the most fun. He ripped up on electric guitar with the savage riff on “Let Me Roll It,” the echo-laden homage to Lennon’s later rock style.

He hammed it up on “In Spite of All the Danger,” the first demo recorded by the Quarrymen, that band that would become the Beatles. It's an Everly Brothers homage that turned into a sing-along. Then he kicked the air at the cymbal crash of “Love Me Do,” the first song the Beatles recorded at Abbey Road with producer George Martin.

The quieter “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “Blackbird” were poignant and vulnerable, but none more so than his emotional, almost tearful Lennon love note, “Here Today,” and the somber “Now and Then.”

McCartney moved on from what he joked was “the depth of despair” to a rollicking “Lady Madonna,” “Jet” and “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite.”

Source: Hector Saldana/expressnews.com

Read More>>>

The humility that Ringo Starr has always promoted in his public persona belies the fact that this guy is a hitmaker. For a while in the early to mid-70s, Starr proved more reliable than his Beatle bandmates when it came to denting the charts.

His biggest hits are contained within a relatively short period of time. Here are the five songs released by Ringo that did the best on the US pop charts.
5. “Oh My My” – No. 5 in 1974

Ringo Starr grabbed the world’s collective ear and held it tight on his 1973 album Ringo. The LP was notable for having the other three Beatles all contributing to it. Even beyond that, a slew of top session men eagerly helped. It’s a testament to the goodwill Ringo had fostered among musicians. On “Oh My My”, that included Billy Preston and Klaus Voorman, both members of the Fab 4 extended family, as well as Jim Keltner doubling up the drums with Starr. Vini Poncia, who’d go on to collaborate with Starr often throughout the years, co-wrote the boisterous track.
4. “It Don’t Come Easy” – No. 4 in 1971

Instead of jumping right into the pop music wars in the wake of The Beatles’ breakup, Ringo Starr wisely slow-played it a little. He released two solo albums in 1970 dedicated to covering songs from his favorite genres (the Great American Songbook and country). When he finally struck with “It Don’t Come Easy”, the public was anxious to hear what he had to say. The crisp rock track, which included George Harrison as a clandestine co-writer, features an all-time opening couplet: “Got to pay your dues/If you want to sing the blues.”
3. “No No Song” – No. 3 in 1975

Ringo Starr wouldn’t achieve sobriety for good until the late 80s, so many of his pronouncements in “No No Song” have to be taken with a grain of salt. By all accounts, the making of Starr’s albums in the mid-70s included all kinds of wild antics spurred on by excess. Even within that atmosphere, however, he was keeping his eye on the pop music prize. This song, written by Hoyt Axton and David Jackson, was Starr’s second Top 10 hit from his 1974 album Goodnight Vienna, following his cover of The Platters’ “Only You (And You Alone)”.

Source: Jim Beviglia/americansongwriter.com

Read More<<<

The Beatles legend Ringo Starr is looking back on his incredible career in a new episode of "On The Red Carpet: ICONS."

"Every generation listens to our music," he said.  The 85-year-old drummer and singer has been a superstar since the 1960s, when he and bandmates John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison became one of the most successful and influential bands of all time.

This year, 55 years after The Beatles broke up, they won their latest Grammy for the song, "Now and Then." "We have sold records and streams now, a billion streams a week or whatever, forever!" Ringo told On The Red Carpet. "It still carries on."

All of his success is even more amazing when you consider Ringo had to overcome childhood illnesses that nearly killed him. "Three times they told me, I'll be dead in the morning," Ringo explained. "So, I think the universe had some sort of plan for me."

Recently, that plan has included an ongoing tour with his popular supergroup, "Ringo Starr & His All-Star Band," and this year, a number one country album, "Look Up."  "I love the atmosphere of 'Look Up,'" Ringo said. "We're not looking down all the time. Let's look up. It's much better for you."

On The Red Carpet's George Pennacchio also asked Ringo about the phrase "peace and love," which has become like a mantra.  "We were around the '60s and so was flower power and that's really where it came from," Ringo explained. "And it was such a great time to be around."

In recent years, Ringo has made his birthday an annual celebration of peace and love after someone asked him what he wanted from his fans.  "And I don't know where it came from," he said. "I'd like them to go, 'peace and love,' and we did."

In this special episode of "On The Red Carpet," Ringo also talks about his artwork that benefits his charity, The Lotus Foundation, what he told Prince William when he was knighted, his thoughts on reuniting with Paul McCartney, his advice for Barry Keoghan who's playing him in an upcoming movie and more!

Source: Joe Maxfield/abc7.com

Sam Mendes’s quartet of Beatles biopics are the cinematic equivalent of a distant asteroid headed steadily towards Earth. They’re a few years from impact—a 2028 release date is pencilled in—but when they hit, they’ll be big. Legendary playwright Jez Butterworth and Adolescence creator Jack Thorne are among the writers. Mendes, who is directing all four films, each told from the point of view of one of the Fab Four, has full rights to their life stories and the all-important song catalog. And he has a crack team of young stars playing the leads: Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison.

What about everyone else in the Beatles Cinematic Universe—the friends, lovers and collaborators? The band’s story has loomed over pop culture from the 1960s to the present; read any Beatles biography, and you’ll see they have Kevin Bacon-like powers of ubiquity.

Some of the supporting roles have been confirmed, or almost confirmed. As per reporting from Variety, Saoirse Ronan is playing Linda McCartney, Macca’s first wife; How to Have Sex’s Mia McKenna-Bruce will be Starr’s first wife, Maureen Starkey; while Shogun star Anna Sawai and The White Lotus’s Aimee Lou Wood are “circling” the respective roles of Yoko Ono and Harrison’s first wife, Pattie Boyd.

And James Norton, according to Deadline, is our first locked-in actor for all those “fifth Beatles” indispensable to the band’s success: he’s to play Brian Epstein, the band’s manager during their rise to fame until his death by overdose in 1967. That still leaves a lot of famous (sometimes very famous) faces to cast for. Here’s who we think Mendes should be ringing up.

Source: Josiah Gogarty/gq.com

Read More<<<

There’s eating crow, and then there’s the Swedish music critic who once claimed The Beatles were a band of “no musical importance whatsoever” in 1963. A pop reviewer for Karlstad newspaper, Nya Wemlands Tidning, attended an early Fab Four concert in a secondary school hall in 1963. This show predated the band’s historic television debut in the States by several months. The young quartet was still cutting their teeth around Europe, hardly at the level of fame they would come to enjoy in the next several years. And as they learned the day after their Karlstad show, part of cutting one’s teeth in the entertainment industry is getting a lousy review.

And the Nya Wemlands Tidning review was lousy. According to Mark Lewisohn’s Complete Beatles Chronicle, the reviewer “thought the Beatles terrible, their music corny, and their playing out of rhythm, adding that the group should have been grateful the fans’ screams helped drown out their awful performance, and then he concluded by stating that The Beatles were of no musical importance whatsoever and that their local support group, The Phantoms, decidedly outshone them.”

Of course, Beatlemanic Swedes would have disagreed with the music critic. Just days before, The Beatles attempted to sightsee in Stockholm but had to call it off after fans began swarming them. If their popularity with the general public wasn’t convincing enough evidence of their importance, the sales of the record they were working on in tandem with their tour certainly would be.

Source: Melanie Davis/americansongwriter.com

Read More>>>

Ahead of the highly-anticipated release of their forthcoming Anthology 4, The Beatles have shared a new version of their song “I’ve Just Seen A Face.

Released in 1965 and written by Paul McCartney, the track originally appeared on the group’s album Help—although in North America, it was first released on their record Rubber Soul. The ode to love at first sight has since been covered by the likes of Brandi Carlile, The Dillards, George Martin, Holly Cole and McCartney’s band Wings. In fact, it was among the first Beatles songs Wings played live, and appears on their 1976 live album Wings Over America.

This version of “I’ve Just Seen A Face” is just some of the new material set to appear on Anthology 4 upon its release on November 21st. Curated and remastered by Giles Martin, Anthology 4 will feature 13 unreleased demos, rare sessions from 1963-1969, and new mixes from their original producer Jeff Lynne. Earlier this year, they shared a new mix of “Free As A Bird,” alongside a restored music video. On October 14th, a 25th-anniversary edition of The Beatles Anthology was also released by Apple Corps Ltd. and Chronicle Books—it contains more than 1,300 photos, documents, artwork, and other memorabilia from the band’s archives.

Source: Sam Armstrong/udiscovermusic.com

Read More>>>