Now And Then: The Rapture Of Another Paul McCartney Valentine's Day Underplay 10 Years Later
Now And Then: The Rapture Of Another Paul McCartney Valentine’s Day Underplay 10 Years Later
At first it seemed completely random. A Tuesday in February, and Paul McCartney was, for some reason, playing a surprise show at the 575-capacity Manhattan venue Bowery Ballroom. Then there was a Wednesday show. And, finally, a Friday special edition, a Valentine’s Day finale to cap off a week of Macca taking over downtown Manhattan before joining in with this weekend’s SNL 50 festivities.
Somehow, this is not the first solo Valentine’s Day I’ve spent watching McCartney play a tiny Manhattan club. Ten years ago, he did something similar, a sneak attack Irving Plaza gig before SNL’s fortieth anniversary. These are the only two times I’ve seen McCartney, and back then it was the kind of once-in-a-lifetime experience I thought, reasonably, none of us would have again. Yet if a maybe slightly over capacity Irving Plaza felt intimate 10 years ago, this was a whole other thing. Bowery Ballroom is less than half the size of Irving. You couldn’t be anywhere in the room without having some sense of “Whoa, that’s Paul McCartney right there.”
While the decade-long gap might’ve had me thinking about where all the time had gone, the legend 50 years my senior didn’t show any of that. As far as I can recall, 82-year-old Paul was just as spry and boyishly excitable as 72-year-old Paul. The energy in the venue was, as you might expect, also a kind of childlike wonder, a disbelief that any of us had made it into that room. Somewhere along the line, McCartney compared it to his early days, playing the Cavern in Liverpool.
Source: stereogum.com/Ryan Leas
