He’s sold millions of albums, headlined nearly every major music festival, and turned stadiums into massive sing-alongs. So, it was quite the surprise to hear that Paul McCartney was doing a very last-minute, very casual show at the 575-capacity Bowery Ballroom in New York on Tuesday night.
Perhaps he was simply around for the upcoming Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary concert this Friday and wanted a warmup gig, but when Sir Paul comes to town for a rare club show, it’s a precious opportunity. Hundreds lined up outside the Bowery Ballroom when the show was announced, and it ended up selling out 20 minutes later. A select few super fans and attentive Lower East Side dwellers (plus, some press dorks like me) secured tickets for the set, which was apparently going to begin promptly at 6:30 p.m. — a bit early for the usual Bowery Ballroom concert, but then again, McCartney is 82-years-old.
We piled into the Ballroom on Tuesday evening as handfuls of cops guarded the entryways outside. While it doesn’t rival the old ‘Beatlemania’ days, there was quite the fanfare around the venue for McCartney. Tickets were sold-out, but a line stretched all the way around the block, and I even spotted some paparazzi on the curb poised to capture any entering celebrities. But aside from some industry professionals (I watched the whole show next to Apple Music presenter Zane Lowe), I didn’t spot any A-listers in the room last night.
Paul McCartney, photo by MJ Kim/MPL Communications Ltd
In fact, as is typical for an NYC club show, it was a proper mix of young and old. There were buzzing Millennials, pockets of O.G. Beatles fans in their 70s, and a large swath of Gen-Xers. There would be no openers, no emcee or event host, and as we would eventually find out, no special guests: Just McCartney and his band playing whatever they wanted for as long as they wanted. No phones, audio, or video allowed.
Regardless of our respective ages in the crowd, we were all young when McCartney finally took the stage and started running through “A Hard Days Night.” I wouldn’t go so far as to say it evoked the rampant energy of McCartney’s ’60s heyday, but with not a single phone in the air recording his entrance and opener, it definitely felt like going back in time a little bit.
McCartney’s whole MO for this set was “casual rockstar.” He seemed to be in as much disbelief to find himself at such a small show as the rest of us, literally telling the crowd multiple times in his signature Liverpudlian mutter, “Here we are… I know, I can’t believe it either.” McCartney even mentioned to us that they had just one single rehearsal the day before the show, almost as an apology to us if he and the band were a little rusty. After all, this was McCartney’s first show of 2025, and it’d be easy to forgive him if he, say, played a wrong note on his bass or forgot a line or two.