Paul McCartney, ‘Oakland, Sunday, May 8th, 2022’ (Nanker Dog 005)
Disk One; Can’t Buy Me Love / Juniors Farm / Letting Go / Got To Get You Into My Life / Come On To Me / Let Me Roll It – Foxy Lady / Getting Better / Women And Wives / My Valentine / Nineteen Hundred And Eighty-Five / Maybe I’m Amazed / I’ve Just Seen A Face / In Spite Of All The Danger / Love Me Do / Dance Tonight / Blackbird / Here Today (79:02)
Disk two: Queenie Eye / Lady Madonna / Fun You / Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite / Something / Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da / You Never Give Me Your Money / She Came In Through The Bathroom Window / Get Back / Band On The Run / Let It Be / Live And Let Die / Hey Jude / I’ve Got A Feeling / Birthday / Helter Skelter / Golden Slumbers – Carry That Weight – The End (77:48)
Live at Oakland Arena, Oakland, CA, USA, May 8th, 2022.
Back on tour again after the pandemic had stifled all tour-planes for the past few years, the “Got Back” tour was both Paul McCartney’s tribute to the recently released “Get Back” movie of Peter Jackson’s and the first that would feature songs from his latest album, “McCartney III”.
The tour began in Spokane on the 28th of April, running through to East Rutherford on the 16th of June (That’s if we don’t count Glastonbury festival on the 25th, as a “contractual obligation” that was wanting to be fulfilled from two years earlier), this show, Oakland, May 8th, seemed to be the one that got most bootleg traction. Also released by Fab! Productions, Empress Valley, DAP, Uxbridge, Now Disk and Stargazers (Though some of these were CDRs and also DVDs), the tapers were out in force tonight and it seems to be at the venue it was generally agreed that it was the best place to get the best sound. No different a show to the rest of the (official) tour, no guest surprises, no detours for special, memorable occasions (Sorry, Mums! You do get a shout out, though), just a solid over two hour show for Macca and his band. It was added to the itinerary after the first show on the 6th sold out so quickly.
Reviews were favourable – Jarred Stossel of shameless promo.net wrote “It’s so hard to condense this down into a few paragraphs. I could talk about this show for days. All these songs carry such an importance not just in regards to structure of the show, but throughout musical history. There’s nothing like watching “Blackbird” being performed by the man himself, or “Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite”, or singing along to “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” with thousands of others. You can’t help but smile at what’s happening in front of you.”
While Greg Chow from Impose Magazine.com penned: “Rock and roll icon/pioneer/legend/member of Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Sir Paul McCartney played the second of two sold-out shows at Oakland Arena on mother’s day, May 8, 2022. The third stop on his Got Back tour, McCartney and his band kicked off the 36-song set with the Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and tore through a career-spanning set going back to his Quarrymen days (“In Spite of All the Danger”), and hit after hit from the Beatles, Wings, and a few new songs for good measure. There were tributes to his late bandmates, playing a ukulele version of the George Harrison song “Something,” and the song he wrote after the death of John Lennon, “Here Today.” The set crescendoed with a pyro-technic filled “Live and Let Die” followed by a arena-wide sing along of “Hey Jude,” before an encore that featured a virtual duet of “I’ve Got a Feeling” with a video of Lennon, and closed out, fittingly, with the Beatles’ “The End.”
This recording is a good, bit-distant audience recording. I found it a little odd like Paul’s playing a sound check – As opposed to playing a sold out stadium, he’s playing a echo-drenched theatre instead – Only when the band stop playing, does it actually sound like the concert is well attended. The performance itself is great – The space that the recording captures Paul well and his ‘old-man’ voice isn’t close enough for too much scrutiny to be paid to it, you can tune out of this a bit if you’re playing through speakers.
A good enough recording of this show – There are 70’s shows that I’d suggest are better fidelity, looking for 2022 Macca? Stick with the Glastonbury appearance where it’s better recorded and more of a spectacular.
File under ‘Concert Souvenir’.
