June 16, 1966
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Tuesday, June 16, 2026
Rookie Photographer Tests Living Legend (San Diego 1976)
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| Photos by Kirk Christ |
Rookie Photographer Test Living Legend
By Kirk Christ
Daily Times Advocate
June 27, 1976
The gate holding back an odd collection of press and spectators slammed shut as the Cadillac limos backed down the San Diego Sports Arena stage ramp. An occasional scream pierced the purr of the engines. Chauffeurs nervously chatting, waited to take Paul McCartney, his wife Linda, and the Wings entourage away from the 14,000 roaring fans and me, a wide-eyed, nervous, anything but cool photographer, more used to watching rock concerts than recording them on film.
The sounds from the arena were dying down as the audience, a strange blend of old Beatles fans and younger Wings fans, headed out to their cars for the beginning of the "Sports Arena 500." The race, famous to local hardcore rock fans, is a mad dash of nearly 10,000 cars vying for the 220-foot-wide exits. They call it the "500" because that's the usual number of fender benders that occur during the course of the event.
If that wasn't bad enough, most of the drivers had been smoking some self-rolled cigarettes, drinking, or both, while listening to ear-splitting music and wondering when their sun yogurt would curdle. It is beyond most humans' capability to adequately function after such an experience. As the San Diego police guided these glassy-eyed motorists on their merry way, I waited to get a glimpse of a legend.
By now, the backstage area was filled with workers busily disassembling equipment. McCartney himself was nowhere to be seen, a court of onlookers without its king. "I'm sorry, no one gets past here without authorization," shouted one older guard.
More and more people kept jamming into the small hallway as the exit became less and less visible. Someone suggested rushing the gate. It wasn't a bad idea, except for one thing: I was in front. It's not that I didn't want to lead these people on a mini Bastille day charge, but with my luck, if I didn't end up as a permanent ornament on the gate, I would face certain death at the hands of the two angry-looking 300-pound Samoan guards standing a short distance away.
I saw a faint light at the end of the tunnel (sorry Henry) and decided to get away fast onto the bar where John Denver had been spotted, and to have a few drinks. After a couple of rounds, it looked as if McCartney wasn't going to join the party. One of his agents, who had been keeping the press well in hand most of the evening, was the only one of the Wings group still visible.
But to get back to the beginning, being a rookie at first, I wasn't sure what was status quo. I found out soon enough -Nothing. Minutes before the show started, the photographers were led to an area in front of the stage. There we were threatened with expulsion if we stood higher than the partition separating the audience and the stage. While talking to one of the six-foot-three-inch Hells Angel-type standing guards, I asked him if, on occasion, I could stand for a better shot. He said that was all right, but if he caught me, he would have to smash me. That posed quite a dilemma. I wasn't sure which I preferred: getting smashed beyond recognition right away or trying to explain to the boss why I didn't get any pictures and then getting creamed.
In retrospect, I'm glad the guards were there. Being near the stage affords an unrestricted view of the audience. If that isn't frightening enough, it's unsettling to know that when a rock audience rushes the stage, which always happens, people will do anything to touch the star, including using a human body as a vaulting pole. Improvisation granted, but quite effective and deadly. The only somewhat pleasant aspect to this onslaught was that the guard, also known as Big Fist, would end up battling the fans to protect me.
About an hour after the concert ended, the crowd in the bar was thinning out. I was still waiting for the legend, but also losing count of my drinks. Time to call it quits. As I walked out of the arena, a giant roar came from near the stage entrance. McCartney's Cadillac procession was leaving, so Wings could catch a flight to Los Angeles, where there would be three more shows and possibly three more rookie photographers covering "rock and roll at the Hollywood Bowl."
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On the Tube with Paul
June 16, 1986
I love the video for "Press" because it shows Paul riding the Tube at St. John's Wood, mingling with people There must have been some fans that knew about this because look at the girl in the last picture in her Paul McCartney t-shirt.
Wings Covers America (San Diego 1976)
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Wings Cover America
By Jim Guthrie
Daily-Times Advocate
June 27, 1976
There he was all alone on the stage singing "Yesterday", and there I was in the last row with 14,000 people between us, trying to get the binoculars away from my wife. I'd had the binoculars when he started the song; they had basically been in my possession from the beginning of Paul McCartney's concert at the San Diego Sports Arena, which isn't exactly true. It wasn't just Paul McCartney's concert, it was one stop in the Wings Over America tour, and it was significant.
The group was addressed in the billing, which indicated a certain symbolism and understanding by one of pop music's most eminent superstars of the idioms' integral relationship between the individual and those around him. McCartney's name alone would have been enough to guarantee the tour's success, but by itself it wouldn't have reflected what, in purely musical terms, the tour was all about. Where the man was now musically.
There's a place in pop music for the solo performer, and time could be taken here to list a dozen or so names, any one of which, when placed upon a marquee, would be enough to sell out any auditorium in the country as fast as Wings sold out the Sports Arena. But after a while, every new Carole King or John Denver song sounds too much like the old ones, etc. etc.
The reigning solo performer at present is Elton John, but he really isn't a soloist in a variety of senses. His music needs Bernie Taupin's lyrics, and that just isn't old Elton up there in those funny glasses, banging away at the piano. There are some very talented musicians backing him up.
To be continually innovative and appealing, pop music requires an interplay of ideas. It has to be a cooperative effort to be truly great. Sure, Elvis was the single most important influence in pop music, but he was a style, an instrument through which the music of others flowed. He needed those others, just as they certainly needed him. And a guy named Dylan has been pretty important in pop music, too. But if he hadn't augmented himself with The Band, it's doubtful he could have gained superstar status as a performer.
The most important group in pop music has been the Beatles, but its members were human, and musically the Beatles broke up because John, Paul, George, and Ringo wanted to say their own musical things. They wanted to become Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr on their own terms, and they did for a couple of albums, a couple of years, but then what they were saying on their own wasn't all that important, or even all that entertaining. It became significant for its curiosity value, but tended to be disappointing musically.
McCartney, however, relearned the importance of interplay and cooperative effort, and so here it was six years after the breakup, and here was Paul, basically the lead singer in a new group, filling hall after hall, night after night, with both a single and an album number one on the charts. Of course, McCartney is more than a lead singer, and that is why I was trying to get the binoculars back. Through them, I had followed the trajectory of frisbees before the lights went out, and the four horn players mounted the stage in their glow-in-the-dark Wings T-shirts, followed by the five members of Wings themselves, illuminated by that shaft of shocking red spotlight.
I'd inspected the crowd carefully, noting a large part of it was made up of people as old as I was, and thus as old as McCartney. I searched in vain for braless teeny boppers boogying carefree in the aisles. While there was a younger element in attendance, I spied them looking curiously at my age group through the doorway of the crowded bar in the lobby, as we fortified ourselves with beer, scotch, and brandy before climbing to our seats. a burly guard informed us we were required to finish our drinks at the bar. We weren't allowed to take them out. Obviously, those kids staring in at us with those funny cigarettes in their hands needed to be protected from the likes of us.
I had been afraid of having to deal with a bunch of pimply-faced weirdos trying to steal my seat. I had even prepared a speech about the fact that I had more of a right than they had to be there, because in part McCartney was, after all, of my generation, and why didn't they buzz off and come back when Pink Floyd was in town?
But there wasn't any hassle. Everybody got along just fine, and the only tension between the generations occurred when a pre-teenage girl in the row in front of me looked at me funny while I tapped my feet during "Lady Madonna". We wound up smiling at each other, and later I noticed we were both clapping in time to "Band on the Run."
But now he was singing "Yesterday", perhaps the watershed song in pop music. The song that made the kind of music that produced it respectable and listened to by all segments of the public. After "Yesterday", pop music became a sociological influence, not just a category. And although he had more to do with "Yesterday" than anyone else, the song isn't known as just a McCartney song; it's a Beatles song, and I'm sure he wouldn't have it any other way.
Still, one night stands out in my memory when a musician friend of mine was playing "Yesterday"on his flute. He stopped and said, "You know, McCartney is a musical genius," and then he went back to proving it, so I regretted that I had given the binoculars to my wife. I guess I wanted to be able to say what she did when he finished the song. "I've always wanted to see him sing that, and now I can say that I have." But at least I could hear him in the 18th row of section 20 C, and I was glad I was there.
However, "Yesterday" wasn't the high point of the concert. Hearing it was nice enough, but somehow only in a nostalgic way. What made the concert memorable was the new McCartney sound. The sound of five musicians playing together as Wings.
Wings is still developing as a group, and it may never reach the Beatles' status or preeminence. Probably no group ever will, but I can't wait for its next tour. By that time, I'm sure the Sports Arena won't be nearly big enough to hold all the people of all ages waiting. Wings will be closer to getting it all together then, and the people in the back row will need higher powered binoculars.
Monday, June 15, 2026
The crazy concert
Here is another photo from the crazy San Francisco 1965 evening concert. I am not sure why the photographer chose to circle Paul and John but it is a great shot!
How to ask a Beatle fan out on a date....
Just have a Beatles record with you and ask her if she wants to listen to it. She might not be paying any attention to you because she is listening to the Beatles --- but you'd have yourself a date with her!
Beatles No Longer in Touch with Fans Critic Charges (1966)
Beatles No Longer In Touch with Fans Critic Charges
Associated Press
June 14, 1966
A British pop music critic accused The Beatles today of losing touch with their fans. "They have, to put it bluntly, goofed," wrote Mike Nevard in The Sun.
He said, "If their new record, 'Paperback Writer', had been recorded by another group, it would have gone into the junk heap. Since Christmas, the Beatles have made practically no personal appearances," he wrote, "and British audiences will be lucky to see them before next Christmas."
Next week, the Beatles go to Germany and Japan. In August, they return to the United States. "In the early days, the Beatles communicated," said the critic. "Their music was exciting and often emotional to get such effects. Musicians need to play together regularly in the hurly-burly of live shows."
Said Beatle Paul McCartney "'Paperback Writer' is not our best single, but we're satisfied with it. We are experimenting all the time with our sound. We cannot stay in the same rut."
It was the first time in 30 months that a Beatles record failed to reach the top of the record charts on its day of issue. Frank Sinatra held first place with his song "Strangers in the Night". The Beatles song was in second place.
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