McCartney and Wings: A Soaring Sound of Celebration (Chicago 1976)

 

McCartney and Wings:  A Soaring Sound of Celebration

By Lynn Van Matre

Chicago Tribune

June 2, 1976

    Paul McCartney and Wings touched down in Chicago Monday night at the stadium, coming on in a swirl of fog, a flash of light, and a burst from a bubble machine, and leaving two hours later, tasting triumph. 

    The group's three-day tour here ends Wednesday night. The reception accorded to McCartney, who hasn't played Chicago since his Beatles days a decade ago, was nothing less than expected, of course. But the concert was far better than I anticipated. A bang-up celebration of rock and roll that included several old Beatles songs and some fairly striking and well-done special effects.

     For McCartney, now 33, the road from the Beatles to his current flight with Wings has been, as the song goes, a long and winding one. When the Beatles broke up, he was already at work on his first solo album, "McCartney", a Paul and Linda fair released in 1970, with Mr. McCartney handling all the songs and instruments and Mrs. McCartney chiming in on background vocals. 

    It was soon followed by the best-selling "Ram" album, then came "Wildlife" with Denny Laine on guitars and Denny Seiwell on drums, in addition to the McCartneys. And in 1973, Wings toured Britain for the first time. Later, the band produced several more albums, "Band on the Run", "Venus and Mars", and the latest Wings release, " At the Speed of Sound ". By this time, the Wings lineup had evolved into the current crew: Paul on his famous left-handed bass, lead vocals, and keyboards, Linda McCartney on keyboards, Joe English on drums, and Laine and Jimmy McCulloch on guitars, with a four-man horn section added for the United States tour. 

    So much for the academics. Monday night at the stadium, all that musical history came to life with McCartney's set, including songs from nearly every album and a few tunes from years back. The crowd anticipated a bit of the Beatles and went wild. "Well", McCartney said, "I don't think this is from that far back", but the band swung into "Lady Madonna" and for the first time during the evening, the audience started stamping and clapping along. Clowning a bit at the keyboard, McCartney waited for the applause to die down, then started in on "The Long and Winding Road", a beautiful old Beatles number, while the crowd breathed a collective sigh. Memories, you know.

     But the Beatles are gone, and for my money, McCartney has emerged as the best of the bunch. While many of his pleasant-enough recorded songs have been criticized for their unfortunate tendency to go in one ear and out the other, his live performance of them is something else. Again on stage, the tunes took on a real rock-and-roll edge, and his showmanship was competent and compelling enough. If he has a tendency to mug and camp it up a bit, posing at the piano, well, it goes over big. And what did you expect? 

    Besides the rock and roll, the set also featured a nifty change of pace in the way of an acoustic interlude with McCulloch, Laine, and Paul playing acoustic guitars and Linda chiming in on a couple of songs, including "Drink to Me", "Blue Bird", and an old Paul Simon tune, "Richard Cory". Then the band disappeared, except for Paul, who sang "Blackbird" from those long ago days, and "Let's see if you remember this one," he mused. By that time, though, the crowd had already recognized the opening chords of "Yesterday."

     The acoustic break followed Wings' big visual thriller of the evening, a rendition of "Live and Let Die", accompanied by a burst of flame from fire pots on stage, laser beams, and strobe lights -- gimmicky, yes, but smashing in effect. The song was introduced by Linda, whom McCartney referred to as "my friend and Mrs."  Up until then, she stayed pretty much in the background. 

    Linda, of course, has come in for a good deal of flak from the critics for her less-than-virtuoso playing and being generally all around unnecessary in the scheme of things. Monday night, she fit in well enough, although she still seems ill at ease when she's not behind the keyboards. When Paul traded his bass once again for keyboards, and Linda stood down front at the mic for "My Love", she looked uncomfortable, like a woman in search of something to do with her hands.

     The capacity crowd, of course, had no such problem. As the concert drew to an end, closing with "Band on the Run", an accompanying grainy film of that particular album cover, a bunch of people, including Wings, looking as though they were in the midst of a jailbreak, the audience turned deafening, matches were struck, sparklers were hauled out, Bicks flicked, and then finally McCartney and the band came back for more, choosing to end at last with "Hi, hi, hi", and the unrecorded song "Soily." It had been a long, long set, overly so, perhaps by some standards, but then McCartney has been a long time coming.