Hollywood • Wednesday, May 25, 2022

About

This was the ninth date of the “Got Back” tour and the smallest venue of the tour (with a capacity of 7,000).

From The Forty-Five, May 26, 2022:

Paul McCartney has no business trying this hard. Nearly five decades into the most storied career in pop music, and just four weeks shy of his 80th birthday, McCartney is still packing stadiums around the world with fans who would have bought tickets to see him even if he’d stopped writing songs when The Beatles split back in 1970. But the famously prolific singer-songwriter can’t seem to resign himself to a quiet retirement. Over the past decade, he’s released three well-received albums (including 2018’s ‘Egypt Station’, which became his first No. 1 album in the US in 36 years) and embarked on six world tours.

The ongoing pandemic threatened to derail that pace and force McCartney into what the elderly musician would have no doubt considered early retirement. But three years after he wrapped his Freshen Up tour in 2019, McCartney returned to the road last month on his Got Back tour, the name playing off of the recent success of Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, which followed the creation of The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ album and set off a residual wave of Beatlemania for the umpteenth time since the band’s debut in 1963.

Wednesday night’s stop in South Florida was a particular treat, with McCartney playing an unusually intimate set at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino’s Hard Rock Live, which seats just 7,000. McCartney typically plays venues with at least double — and up to ten times — that capacity. The combination between the rare opportunity to see McCartney in an atypically small venue and Ticketmaster’s controversial dynamic pricing model made the show a coveted ticket item for Macca die-hards. The handful of tickets left for sale before the show retailed for more than $700, with the closest seats selling on the resale market for thousands of dollars.

Those who did make it into the venue were well rewarded with an energetic two-and-a-half hour, nearly 40-song set spanning McCartney’s 50-year career, including the first song he ever wrote with The Quarrymen — the band that would later become The Beatles.

Rather than opting for the theatrics of an extravagant entrance befitting a knight, Sir Paul sauntered onto the stage with his band shortly after 8 p.m., said a quick hello, and launched straight into ‘Can’t Buy Me Love.’ He followed with Wings’ ‘Junior’s Farm’ and a sublime ‘Letting Go’ punctuated with sax, trombone, and trumpet. He didn’t stray from The Beatles catalogue for too long, returning to it with ‘Got to Get You Into My Life’ before sprinkling in a newer one, ‘Come On to Me,’ from Egypt Station.

A classic McCartney setlist, the songs touched upon every era of the musician’s career arc, from The Beatles, to Wings, to his solo albums. He diverted from his own songs once, on ‘Foxy Lady’, which he played in tribute to his late contemporary Jimi Hendrix. McCartney has played this tribute for years, and he always tells the same story about the time Hendrix played the title track off ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ at a party the weekend the record came out. By the end of the song, Hendrix was wildly out of tune. He called out for assistance from Eric Clapton, who was in the audience but declined to help re-tune the guitar.

If you’ve seen McCartney live over the last 15 years, you’ve heard these stories time and again. You’ve also memorised his jokes: “We know which songs you like because when we play them, the whole place lights up like a galaxy of stars. And when we play a new one, it’s like a black hole.” There’s no doubt some elements of the show are rote and have been for years. There’s one moving moment at each show when McCartney pauses to look at the crowd and just “take it all in.” It’s always impressive in an arena or stadium, but in a venue this small, the moment felt forced and its significance was diminished.

But McCartney’s pandemic slowdown allowed him some time to introduce surprising elements into the show. Most notable was his virtual duet with John Lennon on ‘I’ve Got a Feeling,’ made possible after Jackson isolated Lennon’s vocals from the Get Back footage. Downright giddy at the opportunity to sing with his former songwriting partner again, McCartney turned his back to the audience and watched as Lennon sang “everybody had a hard year.” Indeed, we all did. But we finally got back.

From paulmccartney.com, June 6, 2022:

Next stop would be the most intimate venue by far to host a GOT BACK show, the 7000-capacity Hard Rock Live in the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood, Florida.

Those lucky enough to score tickets to see Paul in this room a fraction of the size he’d usually play in the region — Miami’s Sun Life Stadium in 2010 and American Airlines Arena in 2017 come to mind as recent examples — would soon be making a racket to rival the crowds that filled those venues (especially the general admission floor crowd). But first, it was time for a reunion of a rather unique sort. As Paul’s motorcade rolled up to the back entrance of the Hard Rock, they were greeted by a vision from 50+ years ago: the Magical Mystery Tour bus. Accessorized with a “Remember Me?” sign and featuring its original blue and gold paint job, rainbow logo and shooting star details, the actual bus from The Beatles’ 1967 movie had been transported from the Hard Rock memorabilia archive (and through the very mists of time) to be reunited with Paul, kicking off a momentous evening with a bonus bit of history.

Speaking of history, there’s always an additional jolt of electrification that comes with hearing Beatles numbers like ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ or ‘Love Me Do’ played in a room the size they might have been played in during the ‘60s. But the evening Paul spent with 7000 of his most vocal fans in the Hollywood FL area (and quite a few from out of town, to whom Paul welcomed on behalf of the local tourism board) was one with highlights as varied as they were unforgettable. There was a rendition of ‘Blackbird’ that “dazzled in the song’s utter simplicity” per the Miami New Times, emphasizing the intimacy of the small arena /large theater environs—and on the absolute other end of the spectrum there were the pyrotechnic salvos of ‘Live And Let Die’ that, while undoubtedly adjusted for scale, nevertheless seemed to threaten to turn the Hard Rock Live into an open air venue. 

Going off the uniformly ecstatic reaction of the entire crowd, from the GA floor to the not-so-distant-as-usual upper balconies, you’d think Paul was personally serenading each and every audience member. And in a way, he was—the physical proximity couldn’t help but to have that effect. Whether dashing off a deceptively breezy ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’, working the pulsating piano rhythms of ‘Let ‘Em In’ in sync with those marching on the video backdrop, howling with an elemental fury through a rambunctious ‘Helter Skelter’, the kaleidoscopic range of emotions stirred by Paul’s stagecraft was amplified a thousandfold… or make that 7000-fold.

Nowhere in the evening was this more apparent, according to Boca Raton Magazine, than ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’. Of this most up close and personal performance of the Paul and John virtual reunion, the magazine’s reviewer remarked, “If you closed your eyes, you’d think Lennon was in the room with his former partner of the greatest songbook in pop history… it certainly worked its magic on me, as did the entire transportive evening.”

Steve Martin – Paul McCartney’s US publicist 

Last updated on December 26, 2022

Hard Rock Live

This was the 1st and only concert played at Hard Rock Live.

Setlist for the soundcheck

Setlist for the concert