Photo by MJ Kim
Music Features Paul McCartney
“Cool little place, this, isn’t it?” Paul McCartney said to the some 1,200 people sitting and standing and dancing all around the Fonda Theatre. I don’t visit Hollywood Boulevard very much, despite my place being just two miles away. It’s a tourist trap, and quite a plastic one at that. These days I am not as taken by the jewelry salesmen, Spider-Man cosplayers, sketchy 7-11 parking lots, gimmick restaurants, and vape shops, nor the historical film and stage theaters situated among them. It’s the proverbial armpit of tinseltown, full of people who only look up. But I do like the Fonda, even if the sound isn’t always good there. My best friend has played gigs there, so how special it was then that the most beloved musician alive took that stage too, standing 75 feet away from me, delivering a performance that felt just as important as any other show in town Friday night.
Seeing McCartney in a venue this small requires a little luck. If you’re not press or guestlist, then you’re at the mercy of a lottery system. I’d reckon the number of people who tried getting into the lottery ticked well into the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. If you were selected, you had to pony up $200 for a GA ticket. Or, you could take the VIP route and pay significantly more for a balcony seat and merch bag. A bit of a 180 from the Fonda’s usual $40-$60 ticket cost, hence all the beggars outside hounding for a spare ticket at a theatre usually reserved for indie-rockers and viral TikTokers. McCartney, scanning the whole crowd early in his set, noted this. “Hello, you people upstairs, in the posh seats,” he laughed. “You poor people down here have got to stand up.” The VIPs didn’t rattle their jewelry, but attendees on the ground floor quickly learned that the higher up the pit ramp they stood, the better the view was. Such a discovery proved to be a headache for security, who kept waving flashlights at patrons blocking the fire lane or crowding the ADA seats…