A holiday, a song title and a free night before a TV appearance were pretext enough for Paul
to book a sudden show on Saturday night at Irving Plaza; its capacity,
about 1,000, is an order of magnitude smaller than the arenas he usually
headlines. The audience, he said joshingly, was “so close you can see
my dental work.” On Sunday, Paul was scheduled to perform on
“Saturday Night Live’s” 40th-anniversary prime-time special. But Saturday was also Valentine’s Day, and Paul announced, “Tonight it’s all about love.”
Paul performing at Irving Plaza. “Tonight it’s all about love,” he announced to the crowd gathered on Valentine’s Day.
Midway through the set, he came to “the point of this evening.” He dedicated “My Valentine,”
a minor-key ballad from his 2012 album “Kisses on the Bottom,” to his
wife, Nancy Shevell, and red confetti petals showered down on the
sold-out crowd. “That’s the big spectacular production number of this
evening,” he said afterward.
The
concert, about 100 minutes long, was mostly an abridged version of the
set Paul had been performing last year on his world tour of
arenas. He slipped in a few 1950s oldies he clearly admires: the
Crickets’ “It’s So Easy” and, even better, Carl Perkins’s “Matchbox,”
which gave him a chance to belt the blues and show off some pointed,
rockabilly-rooted lead guitar.
Although
Kanye West,Paul’s recent collaborator, is also performing on
the “Saturday Night Live” special, he didn’t share the stage with Paul as he did at the Grammy Awards.
It might have been jarring; this audience was not a hip-hop crowd, and
it sang along loudest on Beatles songs from the 1960s. The Irving Plaza
show was Mr. McCartney’s domain. He drew on every decade of his long
career — including a few recent songs, like “Save Us” and “New” from his
2013 album “New” — and he casually moved from instrument to instrument,
though he never got around to the drums.
The
set was filled — as is Paul’s huge songwriting catalog — with
love songs that fuse musical ingenuity with pure, guileless romance: “I
know this love of mine will never die / And I love her.”
By now, Paul’s graceful melodies are a shared cultural heritage. Among his
gifts, as songwriter and singer, is the ability to make songs like “And I
Love Her” come across — even in their umpteenth performance — as
sweetly sincere yet never saccharine.
Paul’s musical cleverness shows up in songs like “Another Day,” which shifts between rocker and waltz; he followed it with “We Can Work It Out,” which does the same trick. Unlike most ballad auteurs, Paul is also a rocker, schooled on rockabilly and Little Richard, ready to rasp whether it was in “Matchbox,” in the Beatles’ brilliant Beach Boys parody “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” or over the gnarled guitar riff of his “Let Me Roll It,” which segued into an instrumental of Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxey Lady.”
In
the club, Paul and his band weren’t intent on being as
polished as they might be in a studio or stadium.
They let Abe Laboriel
Jr.’s drum flourishes erupt; they plowed ahead when Paul’s
voice grew ragged in “Jet.”
The songs, so familiar but still eagerly
awaited, lived up to decades of memories; there was no question about
everyone joining in on “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” or “Hey Jude.” The encore,
the grand finale of “Abbey Road,” summed up much of Mr. McCartney’s
songwriting in its quick-changing suite: ballad, rocker, anthem,
benediction. “In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you
make,” he declared. It was, after all, Valentine’s Day.
Before the show: Paul arriving at the Irving Plaza
Rehearsal
At nigh-before the show
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