Head Tale

It’s weird being a blogger sometimes because it affects how you think about things (there are theories that social media sites like Facebook have the same effect where you can’t just enjoy experiences because you’re always thinking how to spin them/frame them/present them to your online audience.)

With that in mind, I’ll admit that I had half-jokingly thought about my first post after the McCartney concert being that it was great but that my favourite concert of all-time was still an intimate little show by Hawksley Workman in an artsy cafe in Waterloo, Ontario.

But although that Hawksley show will always be a cherished memory, the reality is that last night, I saw the most successful, most influential, bestselling songwriter of all-time. And at age 71, he absolutely KICKED ASS!

To steal a line posted by a friend on Facebook after the show:

WOW! Paul McCartney was unbelievable! Its almost sad because now I must go the rest of my life knowing I will never see a better concert. It was an extreme honour to see a true legend like him play. Thank You Paul for playing Regina

Here are some random thoughts about various aspects of the entire experience…

– spent the afternoon with my dad who helped with a couple things around the house (as he always does) while mom was off running a couple errands. Reminded me of one of the many under-rated McCartney songs.

– went to Northgate Mall around 4pm to have supper with Shea and the kids before mom, dad and I caught the shuttle to the show – the first of which was scheduled to leave at 5:45pm. Shea had decided not to go – she’s still breastfeeding so leaving Sasha with a sitter wasn’t an option and we didn’t want to make a four month old sit through what would likely end up being a 6+ hour concert “experience”. Shea wasn’t too disappointed – she’s not as big of a music fan as I am so spending $250 for a ticket to this concert, even if it was Sir Paul, didn’t sway her.

– went to shuttle bus stop in the mall parking lot quite early and there were already maybe ~150 people in front of us. There didn’t seem to be many buses coming but eventually, things seemed to pick up and we got on in relatively quick fashion. It also helped that they had a worker directing us as to where to stand, which bus to get on, cutting off the line as buses got full, etc. (more on that later!)

– riding on the yellow school bus (was expecting city buses), I thought about trying to start the crowd in a rousing version of “Yellow Submarine” but decided to save my embarrassment for the singing and dancing I’d be doing at the concert later! 😉

– got to the stadium (well, our drop-off spot a few blocks from the stadium) and made our way through the car-less streets that had been blocked off to facilitate the crowds for the concert. (Shea had a good question I couldn’t answer – this concert got somewhere around 40,000 – 44,000 attendees and an average Riders home game gets 35,000 so why was this one so much more of a big deal in terms of getting people in and out of the venue requiring the shutting down of streets/traffic cops at all intersections/etc. Anybody have an idea?)

– proper washroom etiquette is “eyes forward/no talking” at the urinals but that rule has some flexibility in certain circumstances and I’d say a huge concert is one such occasion. So as I was doing my business when we first got into the stadium, I asked the only other guy at the urinals if he was excited for the big show. He looked over and, I swear to god, goes “Yeah, I’m really excited…hey, aren’t you that guy that got interviewed on the news?” Hilarious – I watch the news every night and would probably still have trouble recognizing some of the reporters if I saw them out of context at a mall or restaurant or whatever. But this guy recognized me from a five second blurb in a random news story? (The more I think about it, that’s probably because after he watched it, he was probably thinking – “Beatles super fan? That guy sounded clueless in that interview!”)

– got to our seats and we were in Section 25 – what would be about the 35 yard line if the stage was at the goal line of a standard football field maybe and up about twenty rows? Pretty decent seats anyhow but definitely a toss-up as to whether floor seats (straight on view but harder to see over people in front of you) or bleachers (angled view looking down towards stage instead of straight at it) is better.

– lots of time to kill before the show (especially since McCartney started an hour late – rumoured to be because of delays with the bussing) but the time flew – visiting with mom and dad, people watching (fun spotting people we knew in the crowd) and taking in the whole set-up (as amazing as everything about the concert was, perhaps the single most amazing thing was ruminating on how humans are capable of even doing this – setting up this huge meld of construction/electronics/sound/light in such a short time and having it work flawlessly then tearing it all down so that (hopefully) no one will know a concert occurred only a couple days later when the Riders take to the field on Saturday!)

– went to look at merchandise but even as a “super-fan”, I couldn’t justify $40 for a t-shirt. Thought a program would be fitting addition to my “Beatle books” collection but again, $30 for a glorified glossy magazine felt a bit rich for my blood. The $250/ticket plus not being allowed to even bring water and having to buy a bottle for $4 kinda sealed the deal for me. I know that’s how it works – you pay through the nose for tickets for a concert like this then get ripped off for everything else after that. But I was having what Shea and I call “a broke day” so didn’t splash out for anything else. I’m sure I’ll regret not buying a program at some point but not so far.

– I can’t remember if it was mom or dad but one of them made the astute observation that Taylor Field has probably never had such a rainbow-coloured crowd – any other time you go to Taylor Field, it’s usually full of people wearing Rider green!

– another good observation by a friend on Facebook punched a perfect hole in one of the big arguments being made by supporters about why Regina needs a new stadium:

Good thing we have a brand new stadium so we can host big name acts like Paul McCartney.

– it’s funny how concerts have changed. They used to ban all recording devices (so I used to freak myself out by sneaking in a mini-tape recorder to some shows) but now, everybody has a video camera/still camera/audio recorder/etc. in their pocket so now it’s “no professional cameras or video recording equipment.”

– in completely unrelated news, I can report that the iPhone’s Voice Memo app can handle a four hour long recording without crashing or otherwise choking. 😉

– the couple behind us had traveled from London, Ontario, have attended 14 McCartney concerts including Winnipeg on Monday and Regina last night and they observed that this show was the best for crowd interaction they’d ever seen. I don’t know – I thought our crowd seemed pretty typical – sing-along at some points, hold up smart phones during slow songs, laugh at all the right places – but it was nice to hear anyhow. (Maybe it was the crowd doing the wave before the show started that made us more “interactive”? It *was* really cool to see the wave continue *across* the field level seats instead of going around the bleacher seats like it normally would.) And imagine the reaction in Saskatchewan if “Junior’s Farm” had been a bigger hit? 😉

– just have to comment on the weather and how much it made for a perfect night. We’ve had a crazy long winter, a wet and wild spring and not really much of a summer (eg. +30 days) in Saskatchewan. So having a nice hot day with a slight breeze made for a perfect prairie evening.

– I had scribbled a note to myself when I got home from the concert that said “age thing” – I have no idea what that means. Oh wait, yes I do. Like I said above, McCartney KICKS ASS at 71 and ironically (in the Alanis Morrisette sense), you’re probably getting a better show in some ways now than you would’ve twenty years ago. That’s because I’ve heard that back then, McCartney used to focus a lot on his Wings/solo material and almost disregard his Beatles stuff as if trying to move out from that big shadow. Then he slowly worked a few of his own best known Beatles songs into his sets and later yet, he would bring in more and more Beatles stuff – rarities and even the occasional song that one of the others wrote (“Something” in tribute to George who wrote it, occasionally adding Lennon’s “Give Peace A Chance” to the end of “A Day in the Life”

– earlier today, I (quickly) created a YouTube playlist of the set list McCartney had in Regina. Right now, it features all of the songs he played (again made quickly so may be errors or omissions) but not all from the Regina show. Instead, I’ve picked random versions from various “Out There” concerts in the last year or so that have been uploaded to YouTube. Also haven’t reviewed the clips I picked so these may not be the best/clearest/most complete version in all cases. But it’s a quick way to re-live the concert anyhow. I’ll likely try to sub in actual Regina clips of different songs as they start to appear in the next few days and weeks.

– I talked earlier about how blogging makes you think about experiences differently. The Internet also changes your concert experience in other ways. I kept thinking about how many fans worry about spoilers for their favourite TV shows and movies and the same thing applies to concerts like this. I’d read so much about the concert that I knew everything from the setlist to which song would have pyrotechnics to the stories and quips that McCartney would tell at various points in the show. Not sure if this is better or worse than seeing the show completely unprepared. Probably like the debate about floor seats versus bleachers, there are advantages and disadvantages to both.

– I’m probably over-thinking this considering it was a five second blurb in a throw-away news story (although, as I said, it did get me recognized in the urinal so, uhm, that’s something?) but I wish I’d been a bit more on the ball and not just gone along with the TV station’s narrative – “what’s wrong with McCartney/Regina/the world if this show doesn’t sell out?” and instead been a bit more media savvy about refuting their entire storyline as pretty silly and meaningless. Like I said in a revision to my original post about why the concert didn’t “sell out”, I’m sure selling 40,000 to 44,000 tickets in a city of 200,000 but not “selling out” is preferable to everyone involved, including other big names looking for fertile new areas to visit, over selling 32,000 tickets as a “sell out” in a city that’s 4x as big like Winnipeg. (Not to mention that with McCartney playing Edmonton last fall and Winnipeg two nights earlier, odds are we were drawing mostly from Saskatchewan and the northern US without relying on our neighbours to fill the stadium.)

– I don’t know if I had a single highlight. As I said before, yes, it’s “just” Paul McCartney but this was going to be the closest I ever get to attending a Beatles concert so every Beatles song was a highlight. I guess “Paperback Writer” has always been a bit of a personal favourite that’s not one of the usual Top 10 for most people. Dad’s highlight was “Get Back”, mom’s was “Mull of Kintyre” (the bagpipes do it to her every time. Her mom/my grandma was from Campbelton, Scotland which is near where McCartney has a farm that inspired that song.)

– songs that brought tears to my eyes included” “No More Lonely Nights” (in the opening video montage), “Silly Love Songs” (believe it or not) also in the opening montage, “Maybe I’m Amazed”, “Here Today”, “Lady Madonna”, “Get Back” (dad’s favourite song did it for me), “Mull of Kintyre”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “Hey Jude”, “Yesterday”, “Golden Slumbers” (which I regularly sing to my own kids). No full-on waterworks but I thought “Mull of Kintyre” would do it. But since mom was crying, I figured that was enough tears for our family! 😉

– best sing-along songs included “Eight Days a Week” when he hit the stage, “Hey Jude”, “Helter Skelter”, “All My Loving”..okay, let’s make it easy and just say “Every Beatles song!” 😉

– surprisingly, given what I just said, I actually woke up with a non-Beatles song (“Hi Hi Hi”) going through my head this morning

– in my younger days, I’ll admit that I’ve done it too. But never at a show that I paid hundreds of dollars to see and so I’ll observe that the few idiots around me (luckily not in my row or I’d have tripped one of them “accidentally* as they made their way past) who kept going in and out for beer and piss breaks to the point they probably don’t even remember the show and should probably be barred from concerts for life.)

– Sir Paul said we should love each other and be kind. That feeling lasted until…oh, about thirty minutes after the concert when we realised what a clusterfuck getting a bus home was going to be. Our experience after the concert was horrible and we weren’t alone in feeling this way. We knew there’d be a difference from before the show, when people had a two hour window to catch a bus to the concert and after when thousands of people would all be wanting to get on a bus at the same time. But even then, it was a disaster – our driver had told us we’d get picked up at the place she dropped us off. What she didn’t tell us was that meant anywhere along the city block where we’d been dropped off. Making it worse, unlike at our pick-up spot, there were no reps of the City/Evraz/SGI or whoever else was involved in this aspect of the concert guiding people to where the buses would stop. They didn’t even have temporary stands that said “Northgate Mall Line Starts Here” or anything so people just clumped anywhere they could along this block and hoped for the best. The bus drivers seemed confused – some stopped at the far north end of the block, some stopped at the far south end and some stopped in the middle! There also didn’t seem to be enough buses for our route so it was frustrating to watch three or four buses go by with signs for other malls in the time it took us to see only one bus for our destination. Concert organizers *strongly* encouraged attendees to take the free transit but I suspect a lot of people will take a chance on driving to the concert, the next time a big show comes to town. I know that would be my inclination.

– Don’t want to end on a negative note – the buses after weren’t great but hey, I saw Paul McCartney and then got some extra time to talk to people about the show afterwards so why complain about something that’s relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things? The ultimate take-away is that I had one of the greatest experiences of my life, I got to share it with my parents who bought the LP’s that were the first Beatles records I ever heard, I got to see one of my personal heroes live and in person – something that you don’t ever expect when you grow up in the middle of the sparsely populated Canadian prairies (at least without the significant expense of traveling elsewhere to do so). Hell, due to the magic of the Internet (it’s not just for making my brain think about everything as a potential blog post or ruining concert “quips” in advance) I even got to hear a really cool radio interview with the man himself which I originally had to miss because we were already on our way to the show and I’ll get to read stories and tweets and look at pictures and videos and blog posts to re-live the concert anytime I want in a way that was impossible even ten or so years ago. (Er, there’s also the matter of that unnamed four hour iPhone Voice Memo I found on my phone this morning!) 😉

– No idea where to end this post so I’ll end it like McCartney did – with “The End”! 😉