Fort Worth • Tuesday, May 17, 2022

About

This was the seventh date of the “Got Back” tour.

From paulmccartney.com, June 6, 2022:

When you’ve lived, loved and rocked a life like Paul’s, you inevitably form relationships of special significance with multiple locales spanning the globe.  Some of these places might seem obvious (see previous entry’s notes on Los Angeles, Oakland and Seattle), and some less so.

Fort Worth, Texas is one of those places. As the archive-ologists specializing in Paul’s Wings era will attest, the city affectionately known as Funkytown (among other sobriquets) hosted Paul’s first-ever post-Beatles concert in the United States. It was in fact on May 3, 1976, at the Tarrant County Convention Center in Forth Worth, that Paul led Wings through the first night of the Wings Over America tour — a 21-city, 31-show extravaganza that marked Paul’s return to the road in North America, and utilized cutting edge audiovisual wizardry to create the template for the ‘70s arena rock experience.

Now for the first time since that historic 1976 Wings Over America tour opener, Paul finally GOT BACK to Fort Worth. With a setlist featuring such songs in common with that 1976 outing as ‘Let Me Roll It’, ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, ‘Lady Madonna’, ‘Live And Let Die’, ‘Blackbird’, ‘Letting Go’ and ‘Band On The Run’, Paul added another illustrious chapter to his history with Fort Worth.

Following a customarily thorough soundcheck — and the videotaping of a personal Platinum Jubilee message to her majesty Queen Elizabeth II, as well as a note to The British Book Awards, aka The Nibbies, graciously accepting Book of the Year: Non-Fiction Lifestyle honors for THE LYRICS… both shot from the stage — it was arena rock time for Fort Worth. The confines of the Dickies Arena were relatively intimate venue in comparison to L.A.’s sprawling SoFi Stadium, but the crowd that packed Dickies put forth a convincing impression of a throng two to three times its size. From those first careening notes of ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ through the bittersweet coda  of ‘The End’, Fort Worth raised its collective voice “like a de facto backing choir,” observed the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, adding “The sing-along nature of the evening was strong and powerful and provided more proof of how deep the man’s songs have resonated with the world.”

46 years between shows evaporated in the blink of an eye, as the capacity crowd was swept up in a sea of new memories being formed in real time: a supercharged ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’, a downright raucous ‘Get Back’, the eternally uplifting optimism of ‘We Can Work It Out’ and ‘Let It Be’, and a stripped down ‘Love Me Do’ were just a few of the classics receiving their first Fort Worth airings this night — not to mention the wealth of highlights written in the decades between Paul’s shows in the Queen City of the Prairie: The sublime minor chords of ‘My Valentine’, an Egypt Station double shot of ‘Fuh You’ and ‘Come On To Me’, McCartney III standout ‘Women and Wives’, the title track from 2013’s New, the choreography-enhanced ‘Dance Tonight’ from 2007’s Memory Almost Full, and the perennially tearjerking note to John Lennon that is ‘Here Today’ from 1982’s Tug Of War. 

At the close of a performance the Dallas Observer described as “a joyous revelry, a dazzling demonstration of craft as foundational to pop music as piano keys, guitar strings or drumsticks,” Paul promised “We’ll see you next time” and by the time that rain of confetti had cleared, GOT BACK was en route to…

Steve Martin – Paul McCartney’s US publicist 

Last updated on June 16, 2022

Dickies Arena

This was the 1st and only concert played at Dickies Arena.

Setlist for the soundcheck

Setlist for the concert