There aren’t very many shows where you can reasonably claim that if it ended after the first number, you’d have gone home happy. And maybe even in the case of Paul McCartney’s concert Friday night at the Santa Barbara Bowl, it would count as hyperbolic. An audience that paid $300-600 for tickets to see him in an uncharacteristically smallish venue would have expected — and got — a little more for their money than that. Even so, let’s just go with that slightly exaggerated feeling and emphasize what a major kick it was to see McCartney open his 2025 tour by singing the John Lennon-associated Beatles song “Help!” in full in public for the first time in his career.
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It was a you had to be there moment, but a lot more people will be there in the weeks to come, and presuming this stays as the opener for all the shows to come, the joy will be spread around to considerably more than just the roughly 4,900 people who got to see it in Friday’s underplay gig. The tour continues Monday night on a different end of southern California, at Palm Springs’ Acrisure Arena, where it will have what was initially set to be (and may still count as) its official opening, and will definitely count as the first truly representative show of the tour, with no staging or curfew restrictions…