Tampa • Thursday, April 12, 1990

About

From Tampa Bay Times, July 2, 2017:

To call it a big deal would be an understatment. When it was announced Paul McCartney would make his long-awaited Tampa debut at Tampa Stadium on April 12, 1990, all 60,000 tickets were snapped up in a day. The Tampa Tribune published an eight-page commemorative section previewing the gig, and another eight-page commemorative section the day after.

McCartney, then 47, was on his biggest North American tour in years, supporting his album Flowers in the Dirt. (Vendors outside were selling $20 T-shirts reading “Mac is Back.”) It was on this tour that McCartney in many ways started coming to grips with his legacy, playing more Beatles and Wings songs per night than he ever had before: Long and Winding Road, Fool on the Hill, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Eleanor Rigby, Hey Jude and Back in the U.S.S.R., among others.

“I’ve already done the thing where you go out and shun the Beatles,” McCartney told Rolling Stone before the tour. “That was Wings. Now I’ve done this whole thing. I recognize that I’m a composer and that those Beatles songs are a part of my material.”

In his review of the show, St. Petersburg Times critic Eric Snider called the show “huge but relatively Spartan,” with lasers, lights and video screens that “highlighted the action but didn’t dominate.”

“There were no shrieks or wails; women didn’t faint en masse like in the Beatlemania days,” Snider wrote. “In fact, the crowd response was mostly low-key and relaxed. McCartney and his tight five-piece band didn’t play the kind of show that induces a frenzy. And the audience didn’t seem to crave it. This was the kind of crowd that set the stadium aglow with lit matches during Let it Be without being asked. This was the kind of crowd that swayed and sang along lovingly to Hey Jude. This was the kind of crowd that smiled and stepped aside as you wedged through the aisles…

“It’s too simple to say that McCartney and the crowd communed in a nostalgic love-in. Calling up the past was certainly part of the show’s charm, but this performance was definitely living in the here and now.”

Wrote Phillip Booth in the Tampa Tribune: “McCartney, throughout, unfortunately felt obligated to buoy audience members’ spirits, more than once cajoling already-convinced fans to join along with his hoots and hollers. McCartney’s singing, though, seems back in shape after eight months on the road. And the group may be the tightest, most compatible McCartney has worked with since John, George and Ringo.”

In a 100-page tour booklet handed out to fans at the gate, McCartney spoke of the internal conflicts that kept him from performing all those Beatles hits for so long.

“The thing I find myself doing … is trying to justify myself against John. There are certain people who are starting to think he was The Beatles, (and that) there was nobody else.”

At the time, there were whispers this might be McCartney’s final tour of this magnitude. But the reception he got was apparently enough to keep him going — and it didn’t hurt that according to the Times, his Tampa show grossed an estimated $1.8 million. […]

Last updated on July 23, 2017

Tampa Stadium

This was the 1st and only concert played at Tampa Stadium.

Setlist for the soundcheck

The setlist for this soundcheck is incomplete, or we have not be able to confirm in an accurate way that this was the setlist. If you have any clue, pls let us know and leave a comment.

Setlist for the concert