" August 17, 2009 -- Live Journal
Saturday in the park with Paul
By Bill King (Beatlefan Magazine)
Saturday's Green Concert benefit featuring Paul McCartney at Atlanta's Piedmont Park had a lot going against it and yet proved an artistic triumph and fantastic entertainment despite the many obstacles.
To start with, the meadow at Atlanta's intown park is a less than ideal venue for a concert. There were rather formidable transportation challenges, with little parking in the area and everyone urged to use MARTA, the city's easily overwhelmed rail system. (We avoided the MARTA crush by parking for free about 10 minutes away in a middle school parking lot and then walking to the park.)
There was lots of confusion, with the sponsor, the Piedmont Park Conservancy, issued conflicting instructions via the newspaper and the official Web site as to what concertgoers would be allowed to carry into the show.
There were not enough gates - on reaching the area of the gate we were supposed to enter, we were told by one of the event staffers that there was a "logjam" of people trying to get in. We were directed to head back in the opposite direction on a 15-minute trek to an unpublicized gate on the other side of the park.
The merchandising booths were understocked and drastically understaffed (at the one nearest us there were NO small or medium shirts by 6:30 p.m.) The merchandise was, of course, wildly overpriced, but that's the norm at rock shows these days.
Finally, let's face it, mid-August in Atlanta is not a great time for an outdoor concert of any type, with the hot afternoon giving way to a fairly heavy midconcert thunderstorm during the evening.
And yet I have to agree with my 15-year-old daughter Olivia, who couldn't wait to get on Facebook when we got home and update her status to announce that despite our getting soaked, the show was "awesome!"
If you wanted to sit up front, where the crowd was rather densely packed, you had to get there well before the 4 p.m. admittance time for pre-sale and VIP tickets (everyone else was let in starting at 5 p.m.). A friend got there about 3:30 and landed a spot for his family about 150 feet from the stage. We decided "significant eye contact" with Macca wouldn't be worth a few more hours of discomfort in the sunny meadow, so we didn't get there until shortly after 6 p.m. By that time, the meadow was about half full but rather than join the back of the pack down there, where it was still quite hot, we decided to set up on a gentle hill at the back of the meadow, near where we'd come in. We figured the giant video screens would suffice for us. Plus, back there the portable toilets featured no lines at all while down on the meadow the wait appeared to be quite lengthy.
In the end, the only real downside to our location was the slight delay between what we saw on the video screen and when the sound reached our ears. My 24-year-old son Bill, who'd flown down from D.C. for the show, also found it a bit too "quiet" back there and watched most of the show with a couple of friends from the midfield vicinity of the sound towers. But for the rest of us, it was fine.
I noted that the recorded pre-show music included Al Green's version of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and Macca's duet with the late Michael Jackson on "Say Say Say," as well as various Twin Freaks-style mashups and remixes of McCartney music.
The opening act, the Dublin-based trio the Script, proved a good choice. While many people ignored them, those who paid attention heard a tuneful, melodic, high-energy 45-minute set that wasn't all that foreign to fans of Macca music. You could see why McCartney picked them.
The crowd had quite a mix of age groups, with lots of folks 55-plus but many families with young children and a sizable number of teens and 20-somethings, many of whom sang along to just about all the songs except the latterday solo material. The crowd in the meadow stood for the entire McCartney show while the folks on the hill generally sat or reclined until the latter portion of the show (after the rain), when many took to their feet for the remainder of the concert, dancing or swaying to the music as well as clapping and singing along. I saw a few couples also dancing together down on the track around the field.
Paul took the stage at 8:39 p.m. and the set list was the standard one for the U.S. dates on this summer's not-quite-a-tour, opening with "Drive My Car" and "Jet" before taking the first venture into territory unfamiliar to many of the concertgoers with "Only Mama Knows." Young Bill, who had already seen McCartney in D.C. (meaning he saw two shows to my one on this tour), said he warned his pal, who hadn't seen Macca in concert before, that for the first half the show would alternate "songs you know" with "songs you don't know."
For a casual concertgoer - and they made up the majority of the 40,000 in attendance - that sort of pacing might not have been ideal, but it provided the hardcore fans with some more recent material, including two numbers from "Electric Arguments," last year's avant garde Fireman album: "Highway" and "Sing the Changes," the latter drawing a stronger response from the audience. It's not only a catchier song, but some might have been familiar with it from Macca's recent Letterman appearance. At any rate, the inclusion of that stuff might end up selling a few discs, as I heard folks walking out after the concert discussing "that 'Electric Fireman' album."
Macca was in quite a chatty, ebullient mood and noted that the show was taking place on the anniversary of Woodstock and also the anniversary of The Beatles' first Shea Stadium concert. He recycled the bit from his Citi Field shows earlier this summer getting women in the audience to re-create the "screaming girls" from the original Shea show and in fact sparked a second round of screaming later in the evening that visibly amused him.
The midshow acoustic segment was mostly a blur to us (quite literally for those of us wearing glasses) as it coincided with the 20-minute rain, which was quite heavy at times. We had decided to chance it without bringing rain gear since the forecast had called for only a 10 percent chance of precip, but my brother Tim had brought a couple of disposable plastic ponchos and he tossed me one, so I was able to keep my pricey poster and program from getting soaked. By the time Paul reached a song I'd been really anticipating, Wings' "Mrs. Vanderbilt" with its jaunty "ho, hey-ho" chorus, the rain had pretty much let up, though we were still dripping. I still got a kick out of the number, though.
As my son had noted after the D.C. show, whatever pacing problems the first half of the concert might have, one of the most notable aspects of this set list is that Macca owns the crowd from "Band on the Run" on, with an unbroken string of classics and broad-based favorites that no other artist could possibly match. Heavy on The Beatles, of course. A particular highlight was "I'm Down" from the Fab Four's '65 set list. And for some reason I found this year's performance of George Harrison's "Something," starting out with the Macca solo ukulele version and then moving into the full band version, as at the 2002 Concert for George, especially moving.
"I've Got a Feeling" really cooked and I noticed Paul seemed to make the most of his opportunities to shed the old Hofner bass and play guitar, as in the jam coda added to the end of "I've Got a Feeling" and the new extended arrangement of "Paperback Writer." Another real treat was "Day Tripper" kicking off the first batch of encores.
McCartney was in great voice the entire night, unlike some shows toward the end of the 2005 tour. I think perhaps a schedule of fewer shows more spaced out helps in this regard. But the most amazing thing about McCartney in concert is that the 67-year-old performs pretty much nonstop for two and a half hours! As my daughter observed, when we saw the much younger Coldplay in concert last year, "they only did an hour and a half."
While I know we would have been physically more comfortable in a proper stadium than sitting on a quilt on the ground, I have to admit the sight in front of me of thousands spread out in front of the stage, like a mini-Woodstock, was quite impressive. And while the meadow setting meant that the crowd response never reached the decibel level you'd get in an enclosed venue, the relaxed vibe out in the audience was kind of nice.
Like you'd expect from a relaxed summer evening in the park. "
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