February 22, 2025

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic, having lucked into the hottest ticket in NYC, finds that a rock and roll legend still has lessons for fans of all ages.

Paul McCartney performs at the Bowery Ballroom in New York.

Photographer: MJ Kim / © MPL Communications Ltd

Dear music maniacs,

I recently spent a long weekend in New York that unexpectedly included one of the best rock shows of my life. Thanks to lucky timing (I was on my way to NYC already when he announced the first of three surprise shows), last Friday I found myself dancing like a teenager on the floor of Manhattan’s Bowery Ballroom to the music of my very first crush.

I’m a lot older than 11 now, and Paul McCartney is in his 80s; the childhood bedroom where I slept beneath a silver mylar poster of him in his early Wings years has long been shuttered. As for McCartney’s intervening years, he’s been through some stuff — a messy divorce, “Pretty Little Head” — but lately it’s been nothing but victory laps. The cute one has been widely acknowledged rock’s most lovable paterfamilias for decades, having survived the ups and downs of a post-Beatles career that once struck his own generation as silly (he wrote a song about that) only to be reclaimed by young fans of ornate pop rock in this century — a handful of whom camped out in sub-zero temperatures to attend these shows. They bopped harder than I did when he broke out “Junior’s Farm.”

Even when he's a little messy (it’s no shock he can no longer hit every high note) he's still armed with the croon that superseded Bing Crosby, a yelp that Little Richard himself endorsed, élan only ever matched by Prince and a songbook lodged in a billion people's memory banks. What McCartney does best as a live performer, though, is take care of his audience while appearing to do exactly as he pleases. At the Bowery, he had a ball. He may have been cracking jokes and sharing stories dating from before half the audience was born, but he still made everyone in the room feel that it’s all fresh and just for them. That’s true for him, whether the venue is a 50,000 seat stadium or this downtown club with a capacity of 575 people; he simply adjusts his enthusiasm to suit the circumstances. (McCartney was ostensibly in town to prepare for his closing performance at the SNL50 broadcast last Sunday — I wrote more about these performances here — but in all honesty the three Bowery shows felt like the point.)

The show I saw was tinged with nostalgia. “This takes me back, man, to the old days,” he said early on in the delightfully proficient two-hour Valentine’s Day set I caught, mentioning the Beatles’ legendary crib the Cavern Club and laying on his Scouse accent thick when a fan shouted that she, too, was from Liverpool. Maybe the way he and the band ripped through a mix of required hits and obscurities did raise thoughts of those grimy early days when Macca and his mates would incorporate slapstick and an inexhaustible array of covers into their offerings from a fledgling songbook. But in fact, the decades that have passed are what made this journey back exciting. He is far from the nerves and flubs and thrilling little wins a really gifted beginner experiences. What he knew, singing the best-known songs in rock to a crowd in ecstasy, is that those fans longed for the music and their love of it to be renewed. Only his commitment and skill could make that happen. So he locked in and made a set he must be sick of shine once again.

The magic trick The Beatles mastered before anyone else was to be pure showbiz and shockingly new at the same time, to know your own strengths completely and still, somehow, not be bored. To make genius look effortless, funny and fun. To find the unexpected in the familiar. At the Bowery, McCartney explained it with a G-minor chord. He was demonstrating how he and John Lennon would know they were really on to something, using 1963’s “From Me To You” as an example. They were writing a song that felt mundane, he said, until one of them hit on that odd progression. It threw things off. They didn’t change everything, just that one chord; adding just a bit of shock to the commonplace allowed them to upend listeners’ expectations. That’s why “From Me To You” is both so hooky and slightly unsettling. It feels like the first days of a new love.

McCartney’s craft is the source of his charisma. He builds songs as if they were Bayko model sets, the English kid’s Sunday diversion, red blocks plugging into white ones to create castles and warm homes. He played piano, bass, guitar and ukulele; he spun out indelible riffs without fuss or fanfare; when he rolled up his sleeves and leaned into the innuendo of “Let Me Roll It,” the years fell away and his hyper-competence turned into that swag, an unfaded allure. McCartney still likes to talk about his loves, Linda and Nancy (dedicating songs to both) and get a little sexy (yes, superfans, he played “Temporary Secretary.”) But his strongest emotions were reserved for the songs themselves, his hardy creations, as he delighted in their twists and turns and bursts of energy.

These precious hours with McCartney felt like a respite from the goings on in the world outside the Bowery Ballroom’s doors: the weather (freezing), the news (paralyzing), the daily toll of life lived on the edge of a perilous future. But they weren’t, really. What our hyper-competent hero offered was a coping mechanism. The jejune joys of Beatles faves like “From Me To You” or Wings stoner singalongs ike “Let ‘Em In” made a sonic argument for living in the moment of sensual bliss when it arises — and it can, however briefly, for those who have the resources and good fortune to make space for it.

When he dipped into his hymnal toward the end of the set, with “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be,” McCartney gestured at something more transcendent, even motivating. Yet this moment still felt removed from the strife of this century: We were not in a nostalgia chamber so much as a timeless capsule, a preserve of good taste and humor where competence and taste defeat bad luck and human ugliness.

Throughout the show, he occasionally ribbed fans peppering him with requests by calling them “Connoisseurs!” A connoisseur can turn off the world, absorbed in something that tastes great. It’s a fleeting pleasure. Should we ask more of culture right now — something more challenging, more incendiary? Maybe. Yes, I think we should. But hanging for a while with the maestro McCartney reminded me of the value in still making time to focus on those unpretentiously amazing things that make life just feel good, and in loving those things for a lifetime, whether you’re the maker, ever sharpening your skills, or the enthusiast, taking in the fruits of that labor. Return to what you love; shine it up, turn it around. Then you’ll begin, again, to make it better.

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All of these links are cute ones

An intriguing conversation on the London Review Bookshop podcast led me to Sarah Moss’s recent memoir My Good Bright Wolf. I wasn’t prepared for the intensity and absolute fearlessness of this book, which blends memoir with literary criticism to explore women’s relationships to their bodies and to food. Think that subject’s been covered before? Not like this. The courage Moss demonstrates in confronting her own struggles and family stories goes far beyond what most writers dare. (Trigger warning: This book is about disordered eating.)
I had the joy and honor of talking with the graceful, brilliant, daring Allison Russell for the keynote at Folk Alliance International this week. Having just completed her run as Persephone in Hadestown on Broadway, Allison was full of fire and ready to confront the big subjects.
I also FINALLY got to experience an hour of Christian Marclay’s video supercut masterpiece, The Clock, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It’s at MoMA through May 11, and if you’re anywhere near Gotham during that period, you must make time for it. A dream world that’s also a historical document and an artistic tour de force, The Clock will change your view of the world. Literally. If only for an afternoon. But the effect lingers in the most enriching way.

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