Though I did my best not to, as the July 2010 Paul McCartney concert in Charlotte kicked off, I already had in my head a couple of ideas I thought I’d use in my post-show summary. But besides putting on a great show, McCartney managed to be something I hadn’t expected: just slightly unpredictable.

Sure, I had a pretty good idea of what songs to expect, and in what order. And I knew that we’d be treated to an evening’s full of by-the-book McCartneyisms: the well-rehearsed off-the-cuff anecdotes, the homespun snippet of some ditty of supposed relevance to the town he’s playing in, the everybody-say-woo bit, the connecting with a specific audience member (in this case a guy woman waving a “MCCARTNY” [sic] auto license tag), and repeated observations of what a great time we’re all having.

Buying a ticket to a Paul McCartney concert is not about witnessing spontaneity. But it is about a bunch of other things, all good. The man is in his late sixties now, and remains one of the planet’s richest performers. In 2010 Paul McCartney hasn’t got anything to prove to the audience. He could get up there and phone it in, and plenty of people would be satisfied, and would likely queue up for tickets to the next tour.

More than most performers, McCartney has always been one who truly wants to make his fans happy. You hear plenty of songwriters say things like “I write songs to please myself” and such, and thank goodness they do, because that’s what makes it real. And there’s ample evidence to suggest that the same is true of Macca. But onstage it’s a different matter altogether. He’s there to put on a show. He knows it, we know it.

Even to someone who has grown up with the Beatles, Wings and solo McCartney catalog (including tangential projects like The Fireman, the Liverpool Oratorio and Standing Stone, and even the Percy “Thrills” Thrillington album), a McCartney concert can still provide some mild surprises.

One surprise was how much Paul relinquished bass playing duties to Brian Ray. When McCartney did play bass, he used his trademark Hofner, but for a good half of the show, Ray played a Gibson SG bass while McCartney displayed (with some subtlety) what an accomplished musician he actually is. And that’s not an insignificant point: while his skills as a composer, singer and performer in general are well established, all-around-crack-musician isn’t always the first phrase that comes to mind when thinking of McCartney. Of course that’s wrong: this is a man who played all of the instruments on his first solo album, and did so before it was practical or relatively common (see: Todd Rundgren, Mike Oldfield, Stevie Wonder, etc.) But on this tour Paul plays lead guitar, acoustic guitar, mandolin, ukulele and piano.

The pacing of the show was flawless. With a catalog as vast as his, McCartney has material that covers a wide range of styles and emotions. Putting together a set list is a high-wire act, especially for someone so focused on crowd-pleasing. There are the demands of the casual fans: they want to hear the mega-hits, and they want them played Just Like the Record. For those people, McCartney served up ditties like “Let ‘Em In” and the mini-suite “Band on the Run.” Some punters are hardcore: they want to witness Paul reach deep into his songbook and pull out some deep album cuts. For them (well, us, really) McCartney and band pulled out “Mrs Vandebilt,” “Letting Go” and the Beatles’ “I’ve Got a Feeling.” And to keep things a bit contemporary, the band cranked out the two most accessible tracks from the Fireman project.

One of my original premises, one of the things I was expecting to comment on at some length, was the critical role that keyboardist Paul “Wix” Wickens occupies in the band. Wix has been part of McCartney’s touring lineup for twenty years: it’s perhaps worth pointing out that his time with McCartney has vastly outlasted such musical collaborations as those with John Lennon (spanning 1957-1969) or Denny Laine (1971-1980). Only Paul’s wife Linda, who succumbed to cancer, could claim a longer musical association with Paul.

And beginning with McCartney’s 1989-90 world tour (the first time I saw him onstage, as it happens), Wickens was indeed a central component of the sound that came from the stage. By the late-late 1980s, keyboard technology had finally advanced to the point where it was possible to recreate the complex and distinctive sounds of the Beatles’ Baroque and Mannerist period works (Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, Abbey Road) in an authentic fashion. So it was left — in those days — to Wix to play the horn charts from “Magical Mystery Tour,” the orchestra in “A Day in the Life,” and so on. Fans delighted to these carefully faithful live renditions of Beatles and Wings hits of yore.

Wickens — the band’s onstage musical director — remains in that role. But in 2010 his delivery is much more subtle. The current band (him and McCartney plus guitarists Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray, and drummer Abe Laboriel Jr. — a stable lineup going on nine years now) is focused less on providing audio carbon copies of classic songs. They’re careful not to mess with the arrangements too much –  don’t nobody better mess with our Beatles — but on the 2010 tour, the audience is as likely as not to hear what used to be a horn chart part played instead by Rusty Anderson on slide guitar. Not only does this work, but this approach gives the band a more rock-oriented edge. It also provides a less “plastic” feeling, and I say this as a keyboard player myself.

This go-round there were no tunes from Magical Mystery Tour, only two from Sgt. Pepper, and only one from Abbey Road (unless you count a George Harrison song). Also notably absent were any of the early Beatles rockers. But overall the set was well balanced, with perhaps a bit more Wings material (about ten songs) than casual fans might have expected.

The nearly three-hour setlist was carefully sequenced. The segues were smooth. Thoughtful pieces — like an amazing “Eleanor Rigby” featuring Paul on acoustic guitar, Wix on virtual (and note-perfect) string octet plus Anderson and Laboriel on vocal harmonies — led seamlessly into other styles. Particularly effective was the ukulele-led George Harrison tribute of “Something.” It led into a powerful like-the-Beatles version for its second half, effectively bridging a mini-set of mellower numbers back into rock and roll without jarring the audience.

Hardcore fans will always find something to carp about, and in this reviewer’s case it was the lack of getting to hear “Two of Us.” But instead we got to hear “I’ve Just Seen a Face.” Nice, but McCartney did that one on the Wings Over America tour, and he’d never done “Two of Us” until this tour. But at three hours, nobody could realistically claim that McCartney didn’t offer value for money.

Like Paul sings in “Venus and Mars / Rock Show,” the experience of seeing him onstage in 2010 is “like a relic from a different age.” But it’s a welcome and unforgettable experience. Few performers have earned the stature of Paul McCartney, and fewer still consistently deliver onstage. Over the course of thirty-seven numbers, his energy didn’t visibly flag once, and he never lost the audience, not for as much as a second. You could learn a lot about performing by studying a McCartney concert. But it’s also fun to just go and enjoy the evening. I did both.

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To the Irish author Brendan Behan goes the attribution of a quote which reads in part, “There is no such thing as bad publicity…” In light of the possible status of this line as some sort of universal truth, I have serious misgivings about reviewing such a piece of irredeemable exploito-garbage as the new DVD Paul McCartney is Dead: the Last Testament of George Harrison.

If you’re a Beatles fan of any depth, you’re at least familiar with the broad-brush outlines of the premise. Because I’m walking a fine line here, trying to review product but not wishing to further a single one of the ludicrous assertions set forth within the film, I won’t even get into it other than to set the basic scene. In 1969 a Drake University student (a Des Moines IA institute of higher learning with the official motto “Veritas,” or, in English, “Truth”) penned an article in the school paper called “Is Paul McCartney Dead?” Times being what they were, and disc jockeys being desperate enough for ratings to perpetuate a manufactured story, the story caught fire and spread.

Subsequently, in between puffs on their joints, countless college students the world over scoured the Beatles LP covers and inner sleeves for the “clues” that the surviving Beatles left for them. People played their records backwards in hope of finding “backwards masked” messages from John, George and Ringo. While all this effort supposedly resulted in mounting evidence that Paul really was dead, the only real results were sales of (a) a lot of magazines on the subject and (b) replacement phonograph needles.

“Celebrated” attorney F. Lee Bailey even got in on the act, hosting a program that purported to examine and weigh the so-called evidence. (Here’s a shocker: The results were “inconclusive.”) And that was pretty much the end of the story. The next big Beatles-related hoax was centered around the 1976 album debut by a Canadian band called Klaatu. They were purported to be the Beatles in disguise. (They weren’t, but they did produce some worthwhile music. That’s another story.)

Fast forward to the 21st century, the era of fan fiction. Because that, in the end, is all Paul McCartney Really is Dead amounts to: some slapdash, shoddy fanfic that anyone with a working knowledge of the Beatles’ history could easily cobble together. The video was created by the production team at something calling itself called Highway 61 Entertainment. Run by a guy who fronts a Bob Dylan tribute band — I don’t wish to lend a shred of dignity to him by repeating his name — the production company’s facility exterior is shown briefly in the film, but what viewers see looks suspiciously like stock photo with a big logo Photoshopped across it. Which would make sense: why a big building for a team of roughly six to eight people, total? (Yes, I watched all the way through to the final credits-roll, and this product is the fruit of the labor of a minivan-full of people.)

The director of this film (who, natch, also wrote it) has a spotty track record already, with a barrel-scraping series of Dylan biopics, and some right-wing propaganda films that made him a darling of the Conservative Political Action Conference. CPAC, of course, are the folks who give a platform to such luminaries of rationality as Pat Buchanan (Nazi apologist), Newt Gingrich (serial adulterer), Sarah Palin (failed half-term governor and teabaggers’ stalking horse), Ron Paul (darling of the I’ve-got-mine-screw-you crowd), and Glenn Beck (dangerously insane TV/radio personality) to greater prominence. The cynicism necessary to espouse a worldview compatible with that sort of rogues’ gallery is, one supposes, a prerequisite for embarking on a project such as this. Said director and his crew have (pardon the expression) exhumed this long-dead fake controversy and added so many “new clues” that anyone who subjects themselves to the hour and a half viewing will end up with eyes sore from constant rolling.

Put quite bluntly, this film is a piece of shit. I could go on and cite specific examples where basic facts (upon which myriad laughable assertions are built) are misstated, fabricated or just plain wrong. But that sort of thoughtful treatment of the film, its creators and its subject would bestow undeserved credibility. This 95-minute sleazefest is beneath contempt. Not merely a crass, opportunistic cash-in, the DVD betrays undisguised contempt for all of the Beatles and people in their orbit. To call it disrespectful to the memories of John and George doesn’t begin to get to the heart of the matter. And it should go without saying that the voice on tape purported to be George Harrison…well, it ain’t.

Note: You may notice that I’ve obscured the director’s name in the DVD packaging image. He deserves such treatment. And I did notice something interesting: the “official” cover art from which I sourced the image has added a question mark (”?”) after George Harrison’s name. My copy has no such punctuation. Perhaps the lawyers weighed in.

Paul McCartney Really is Dead is to be avoided with extreme prejudice. I feel dirty even having viewed it. Totally without merit on any level, this DVD is in shockingly bad taste, is amateurishly produced, and represents cynicism of the lowest order.

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DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION:

At age 67, Paul McCartney has nothing to prove. As the world’s most successful songwriter, with a vast back catalog of Beatles, Wings and solo albums, he could easily (a) retire without recrimination or (b) put together an oldies package and tour on the strength of his older material. He’d be well within his rights to do either, and there’s plenty of precedent for doing so.

Regarding the former, two of his former bandmates both stepped out of the limelight for extended periods (though both did return with excellent albums right before their untimely deaths: John and Yoko’s 1980 Double Fantasy and George Harrison’s Brainwashed). As far as the latter, the Moody Blues — owners of an impressive back catalog of their own — haven’t released an album of new material in a decade, barring their Christmas album December. Yet they tour regularly to packed houses, and remain an engaging onstage presence.

Yet McCartney — that’s Sir Paul to you — is that curious mix of restless artist and born entertainer. Not to beat the dead horse of the John vs. Paul dialectic, but McCartney would never chew gum onstage. His lot in life as a performer is to make audiences happy: to, as Ray Davies put it, give the people what they want.

McCartney is also on quite a creative roll. Beginning with 1997’s Flaming Pie (though as far back as 1989’s Flowers in the Dirt there were hints that there was plenty of creativity left in Macca), Paul McCartney hasn’t released a less-than-very-good studio album. While he may not have to prove anything to us, he makes music to express the themes that matter to him, and the result is quality music — and often rock music at that — from a man in his 60s.

Still, one can argue that the world doesn’t need another McCartney live album. Starting with Wings Over America in 1976, the man has released live sets in 1990, 1991, 1993, 2002, and now 2009’s Good Evening New York City. Each has served up a mix of solo and Beatles material, played well and recorded clearly. So why should anyone care about this latest set?

First of all, for long-time McCartney fans, there are some real gems here. Songs that McCartney has never performed live make their appearance on this set: “Mrs Vandebilt” from Band on the Run, and two Beatles songs: Let it Be’s “I’ve Got a Feeling” and the “Help!” B-side “I’m Down.” And along with the requisite number of newer tracks, there are heartfelt (not maudlin) musical tributes to Lennon and Harrison. And there are even live versions of not one but two tracks from the latest Fireman album.

“I’m Down” is a sentimental favorite, and of particular relevance at this set of shows. As every Beatles fan knows, the group played Shea Stadium. McCartney was chosen to do a set of inaugural dates at NYC’s Citi Field, site of that now-demolished venue.

Yes, plenty of songs that we’ve heard McCartney and his band do over and over are still in the set: “Sgt. Pepper”, “The End”, “Live and Let Die”, “My Love”. The current band — the same one heard on 2002’s Back in the U.S. — is superb in their recreation of the sound and feel of the studio versions. And not to downplay the contributions of those players, it should be noted that the Paul McCartney/Paul “Wix” Wickens relationship now ranks as Paul’s longest musical collaboration (well, it actually ties roughly with the Paul/Linda collaboration, but still): while it’s perhaps making too much of it to point out that the timeline of McCartney’s critical ascendancy does pretty well correspond to his bringing Wix on board, the fact remains that Wix is the unsung hero of McCartney’s live shows. Wickens faithfully recreates all of those little sonic cues one expects to hear in the songs, and he does so in as organic a fashion as can be managed under the circumstances.

Good Evening New York City is available in a few different configurations. This reviewer’s copy comes with a DVD of the 33-song entire concert, two audio CDs covering the same material, and a bonus DVD of material from a Letterman show performance. The whole set is beautifully packaged in a (plastic-free, natch) hardbound book that resembles nothing so much as an old Hardy Boys (or Nancy Drew) book. If you’re a fan of McCartney or the Beatles, watching this DVD might actually choke you up a bit. As live sets go, one could put this on the shelf alongside Wings Over America and Unplugged and safely ignore the others.

With this set evoking memories of the Beatles’ historic 1965 Shea Stadium concert, let’s hope that there’s an ulterior motive for this set: to whet the public’s appetite for the long-delayed legitimate release of The Beatles at Shea Stadium on DVD. I mean, my bootleg copy is nice and all, but the lack of an official version — digitially restored, if you don’t mind — is a serious crime of omission.

Disclosure of Material Connection: