“This is the biggest gig we’ve ever played!” said Paul in mock-seriousness as the band fired up. I’m thinking it was more likely among the smallest gigs he’s played since he and The Beatles left Hamburg.
That’s me, second from the left, my hand hanging over the rail, much, much closer to Paul McCartney than this amazing picture makes it seem. [source] I was close enough to touch Paul, which I did a couple of times when we slapped palms!!!
I’ve been a Beatlemaniac for over 50 years, and I still can’t believe that this happened. You may have heard tell of this event around the web, but here’s my slice of the story.
PAPPY & HARRIET’S, PIONEERTOWN CA
Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace is a long way from almost anything, 40 minutes or so from the already-remote Palm Springs, California, on the way to the even more remote Joshua Tree National Park. Pioneertown itself was built as a movie and TV set in the 40s, and still looks the part.
The saloon set was converted into a working biker bar by Harriet’s mother in 1972, and taken over by Harriet and her late husband Pappy in 1982.
And yes, it’s high enough up in the mountains above the very hot Coachella Valley (just over 4000 ft) that it snows a couple of times a year. [x]
“Coachella” is the magic word. In addition to supporting a thriving local music scene in the high desert, with regular touring guests from virtually every genre, Pappy & Harriet’s has become semi-famous for hosting folks who are playing the Coachella Festival every April, especially now that it’s gone to the two-weekend format. Robert Plant, The Pixies, and Neutral Milk Hotel are just a few of many, many examples.
Well, this time, it was Macca of a mind to mix things up, between the two weekends of Desert Trip (aka Oldchella) in October, held on the same grounds as the Coachella Festival, an hour back down the mountain in Indio, on the valley floor.
My wife is the Facebooker of the family, saw this soon after it went up, and said, “I think you need to go to this.”
I had a crazy day ahead of me at work, and it didn’t register with me AT ALL that THIS WAS ACTUALLY GOING TO HAPPEN, so I started thinking, “Okay, if I’m gonna line up at 3, it’ll take me most of an hour to get there once I pick up some cash, so maybe leave a little earlier, maybe at 1….”
….and then my wife said, “Why are you still here?” Of course! She was right! I needed to get gone, and figure out the rest when I got up there.
Note that I’m a man in my late 50s. The one thing I knew is that if I was gonna get there early enough to actually pull this off, I sure wasn’t gonna let myself get pushed out of my spot because I had to pee. LOL A quick sip of water as I stepped out the door, and then I was committed to not another drop until this was done.
(Below, another pic of Pappy & Harriet’s in the snow, from their website. Out front, to the right of the sign: an unusually tall Joshua tree.)
The word went up on Facebook just after 10, I got there a little after 11, and wandered around with some other folks, none of whom was exactly sure what to do. Neither were the folks from Pappy & Harriet’s, who clearly weren’t expecting this many of us this soon. Their only guidance was, “You can’t line up on the property until 3.” Okay.
As it started to get close to noon, I felt like if we didn’t start to pull ourselves together on our own, things were about to get complicated. A handful of us who’d wandered over to talk to the Pappy & Harriet’s gents with the walkie talkies simply walked back across the property line together, then right there between an abandoned bowling alley and a barn being converted to a wedding chapel a couple of hundred yards from the front door of the bar, formed a line. Another hundred people or so who’d also been wandering around fell in behind us, and things grew from there.
Zero cell reception, zero shade, zero water, zero bathrooms, and 100 degrees with close to seven hours on our feet ahead of us outdoors, followed by another couple of hours waiting inside.
And me refusing to drink any water for fear of having to pee at exactly the wrong time.
At 3pm sharp, they paraded us in our long line (with VERY stern warnings for anyone who tried to run ahead), past a couple of other shorter lines that had formed elsewhere long after ours had, to what was now THE line at the door, to wait for another three and a half hours before they’d let us in, with another two hours after that until the show.
Some press was there by then, including the local High Desert Star, which got a picture of (and some quotes from) the 5 of us at the front of the line. I’m in the middle (Nate and Ryan on the left, Jim and Kelly on the right), wearing the McCartney shirt, the rainbow unicorn hat, and the stupid grin you’ve already seen. Photo source and story here: [x]
The line by then was up to well over 1000 people hoping for one of the 300 spots inside. Hundreds more drove by, did the math, and kept driving. [x]
I’d been there over seven hours by the time they started taking our $50 (IT WAS ONLY $50!!!) at 6:30. I was 4th through the door, and made a beeline to the front of the stage. I did, however, slow down to take this picture. A little blurry because I didn’t want to actually stop. LOL
And once I got to the stage, I took this one with Kelly, Ryan, and Nate.
I took off my hat right after that. I WAS NOT going to have hat hair when I was face to face with Paul McCartney, dammit. I just wasn’t.
Because 2 hours later, yeah, I was face to face with Paul McCartney.
Below is my clip of Paul’s entrance. Not much music, just the entrance. Once he was there, I stopped recording to just LOOK.
I shot vertically because there was no other way to get Paul’s whole body in the shot. He was THAT CLOSE, at pretty much eye level. You can see in the pic at the top of the article that there’s not really a stage, just a platform maybe 5 inches high.
This clip will give you some idea of how fit and bouncy Paul is. I swear to god, he looks more like 60 than 74. No matter how good he looks in any pictures you’ve seen, he looks even better in person.
And yes, he’s even cuter in person, too.
LOOK AT HIS BEATLE BOOTS!!!
(In case the embed breaks, here’s the direct link.)
This was not the first time Paul has played a surprise show in a small venue of course. In 2007, he not only performed at Amoeba Records in Hollywood, he recorded a live album there – but that place is massive, easily 20 times the size of Pappy & Harriet’s bar (one of the largest record stores in the world), with soaring ceilings, and a crowd of around 1000. Small by Paul McCartney standards, yes, but not Pappy & Harriet’s small.
There have also been a couple of impromptu outdoor gigs along the way, including one in Covent Garden in 2013, and another one on a London rooftop in 1969 that you may have heard of. The man loves to play.
Below is one of the few pics that I took. As you can see, HE’S CLOSE. In fact, he was so close to us that he was standing UNDER the stage lights, which made for suboptimum photo conditions (lots of top- and back-lighting) BUT WHO CARES.
A bit of horizontal crop to square it up for tumblr, but no vertical crop, and no zoom. Really. This is what it looked like, for real.
I also took a couple of pics mid-stage, but it was dim, and the man never stops moving, so they’re all crazy blurry, but you get the idea. Even halfway to the back wall, he was still too close for me to get him in the frame head to toe with the camera held horizontally.
Below was the only other video clip I got after his entrance, two segments of “A Hard Day’s Night” that I edited together, his second song of the night.
I wasn’t looking at my phone – I WAS WATCHING PAUL – so I was just kinda guessing where my phone was pointed, and fortunately, I mostly guessed right.
But you can also totally tell where I looked down at one point, saw that I was no longer very close at all, and tried to make some adjustments without taking my eyes off Paul. LOL A mess, but a fun one, and I managed to get most of the song.
(Again, in case the embed breaks, here’s the direct link.)
After that, I was about done with pictures for the night. The main thing was to catch my breath after a long day, and take in that THIS IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. I still couldn’t believe it.
See, I’ve been telling you the facts, and sounding nice and calm about it, but I was practically jumping out of my skin. I’ve loved these songs for as many as 50 years or more: “A Hard Day’s Night”, “Band on the Run”, “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “Hey Jude”, “Love Me Do”, “Lady Madonna”, “Nineteen Hundred Eighty Five”, “Day Tripper”, “We Can Work It Out”, “Back in the USSR”, on and on – 23 songs in 100 minutes, and it was as wonderful as you’d hope it would be. (Here’s the whole setlist.)
AND HE WAS RIGHT THERE!!!! A COUPLE OF FEET AWAY!!!!!
btw, this is the nature of a Paul McCartney setlist: he played “A Hard Day’s Night” at all 41 of his 2016 shows, but before that, hadn’t played it since August 1965!!! Far from a greatest hit or “golden oldie” from a performance perspective: it was a rare deep track that hadn’t been played in over 50 years! He hadn’t played “Love Me Do” for even longer – since 1963!
Even for “recent” Wings and solo songs, here’s just one example: he’s played “Nineteen Hundred Eighty Five” fairly regularly of late, but before 2010, hadn’t played it live even once since he wrote it in 1973! Soooo many amazing songs to choose from, there’s no way he could get to them all, no matter how long the show.
This was in fact a short show by Paul standards. They typically run nearly 40 songs over a full 3 hours. I got to see one of those amazing full sets the week before with my 78 yr old father (a major Macca fan), as well as at Desert Trip two nights after this, but those are stories for another day.
(btw, I got some nice pictures of Paul at Desert Trip Weekend 2 that you can find on my Instagram. Here’s one of my favorites.)
The fact is that one of my lifelong dreams has been to thank Paul.
What I WANTED to say was “I’ve listened to your music every day of my life for over 50 years. Thank you for filling my heart with music, peace, beauty, a vision of the possibilities of true love, the self-sustaining joy of creativity, for all those nights when you quieted the screaming voices in my head long enough for me to sleep, the fears you’ve eased, the comfort you’ve given, and all the rest I still haven’t found words for.”
What I DID say, when he stepped aside from the mic between songs to tune his bass, in a regular speaking voice because we really were that close to each other, was simply, “Thank you.”
Without looking up, still tuning, he replied with a little smile, also in a regular speaking voice off-mic that I don’t know that anyone else heard, “It’s my pleasure.”
He surely had no idea exactly what I was thanking him for (maybe just the show in general or something), but I likewise have no doubt that even if he knew how very much I was thanking him for, that it has indeed been his pleasure. Has anybody ever taken so much pleasure, for so long, in being who he is, and doing what he does, than Paul McCartney?
So, literally, a dream come true for me.
There are a lot of other stories to tell from this night, and it’s kind of crazy to me that I’ve barely talked about the music at all. This is already too long, but somebody I told this story to asked me which song performance was my favorite. Here are my SIX favorites, because you can’t spell TIM without TMI. LOL
– “A Hard Day’s Night” (one of my all-time favorite songs by anyone for reasons I can tell you in ANOTHER thousand words) and “Can’t Buy Me Love”. INSANE vocals, even at age 74, on two songs from my all-time favorite movie by anyone, Beatle or otherwise.
– The three-fer of “Letting Go”, “Day Tripper”, and (especially) “Band On The Run” in a row nearly blew the top of my skull off. Not the songs as much as the performances: Band on FIRE is more like it. They’ve been together since 2001, by far the longest of any of Paul’s bands, and are razor-sharp.
“Band on the Run” also has the line “the night was falling as the desert world / began to settle down”– which of course got a huge cheer, even though we weren’t settling down in the least!
– “Let Me Roll It” is a nifty Wings song. I wouldn’t call it one of his pinnacles, but it’s really really good, and the band clearly has a blast playing it, including fantastic lead guitar from Paul, who’s incredibly under-rated in this regard.
But here’s why “Let Me Roll It” makes my list of favorites this particular night. It’s got a short, sharp guitar lick that repeats. Paul’s hitting that lick over and over in the intro, and I’m loving it – when he looks me straight in the eye, then tosses back his head, crouches down, and gives me a little “Hey man, check this out” look – then he hops STRAIGHT AT ME as he bangs that lick one more time while he jumps up to the mic to start singing.
Talk about nearly blowing the top of my skull off!
I’m still a little overwhelmed by the whole experience, tbh, even having taken a couple of months trying to get my thoughts – and time – together to write about it. The YouTube clips (tons more from other folks, btw, look ‘em up), the setlist, and your imagination will have to fill in the gaps.
If you have any questions, ask ‘em. No need to be on Anon if you want to keep our conversation private. Just let me know that you’d like to keep it between us, and I’m happy to.
Paul ended the show by saying, “I think I’m going to wander off into the desert to find myself.”
I’m not worried about him finding himself, but I do hope he got to do a little wandering. The desert at night is magical. This evening certainly was.
AND I got a cool t-shirt!
tl;dr: SO, YEAH, THAT HAPPENED. ME AND 300 FRIENDS, FACE TO FACE WITH PAUL McCARTNEY PLAYING IN A REMOTE MOUNTAIN BAR.
PS. I know that you’ve been hanging on the edge of your seat since I first mentioned it, but YES, I managed 11 hours on my feet, with no more than a couple of sips of water to drink, without either fainting in the sun or going to the bathroom. Take THAT middle age! LOL
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