Culture
Beatlemania lives: McCartney’s ‘Got Back’ tour brings Columbus to its feet
By: Emily Votaw
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COLUMBUS, Ohio (WOUB) – When the house lights dropped Saturday night at Nationwide Arena (200 West Nationwide Blvd.), the enormous screens flanking the stage were ablaze with an animation of a bass guitar—spinning lazily at first, then faster and faster as digital fireworks exploded behind it.
Typically, I’d have rolled my eyes. Not this time.
Instead, I was electrified, hit by a force elemental and shared, one that crackled through the entirety of the packed arena. This, dear reader, is what the legendary, madness-making, red-hot embrace of Beatlemania feels like.
The crowd erupted in roars as Paul McCartney—83 years old and impossibly buoyant—bounded onstage and launched straight into Help!
Instantly, everyone was on their feet, lifted as though by some invisible current.
If I were describing any other concert, all of the above would be hyperbole.
However, this is a Beatle we are talking about.
The screams, the tears (mine included), weren’t for celebrity; they were for a voice that has soundtracked weddings, heartbreaks, and countless moments of internal struggle we all must experience alone.
Around me was a vast, multigenerational sea of Beatlemaniacs. A middle-aged man in a faded McCartney tour T-shirt confidently (and, for the most part, correctly) predicted each song on the setlist before it happened. A young woman in seafoam-colored tights and a ’60s mini dress held up a sign that read, “They say it’s my 21st birthday!” In the arena hallway, a toddler in noise-canceling headphones tottered around in a powder-blue Sgt. Pepper’s uniform, his parent kneeling to adjust his tiny epaulets. All around were families—parents, children, grandparents.
I went with my father, the person who introduced me to The Beatles—the first band I ever truly loved. There’s no gift quite like introducing someone to The Beatles, but bringing him as my plus-one to a Paul McCartney show felt about as close as I’ll ever get.
McCartney’s Got Back tour is career-spanning. The set list wove together Beatles classics (Got to Get You Into My Life, Drive My Car), Wings anthems (Jet, Band on the Run), and solo songs (Coming Up, Dance Tonight) into a seamless, two-and-a-half-hour-plus high energy performance.
After Help!, came the infectious Coming Up. In the music video for the song, McCartney famously impersonates every member of a fake band. On Saturday night, though, we got the real thing: Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray on guitars, Paul “Wix” Wickens on keys, Abe Laboriel Jr. on drums, and the indefatigable Hot City Horns—six musicians channeling six decades of pop invention.
Onstage, McCartney radiates the kind of warmth that suggests he’s still slightly amused by his own myth.
Between songs, he told stories.
Playing Blackbird from a rising platform, he explained how he wrote it to offer strength to Black Americans during the Civil Rights Movement, connecting that intention to The Beatles’ refusal to perform for segregated audiences. He slipped a few bars of Jimi Hendrix’s Foxy Lady into Wings’ Let Me Roll It, recalling the awe he felt the first time he heard Hendrix play.
At one point, McCartney read some (of the many) fan signs aloud: “Sign my butt,” to which he deadpanned, “We’ll have to see it,” and another from a man who’d attended 143 shows—“It’s a bit obsessive, but you know we love you.”
You can’t think “Paul McCartney” without thinking “John Lennon.”
McCartney introduced Here Today, his elegy for Lennon, with quiet sincerity, and followed it with Now and Then, the so-called “final” Beatles song, built from Lennon’s extracted demo vocal. The accompanying footage of McCartney and Ringo as older men alongside young George Harrison and John Lennon was uncanny, true, but it was also a legitimately tender gesture. Next, McCartney played Something, performed on ukulele in tribute to Harrison.
From there, the show exploded with the goofy buoyancy of Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, the cathartic lift of Band on the Run, the communal transcendence of Let It Be.
During Live and Let Die, the pyrotechnics were so fierce I could feel the heat on my face. I felt protective—should someone this precious really stand that close to explosions? I may never look at concert pyrotechnics the same way. Regardless, McCartney seemed unfazed.
Hey Jude closed the main set with a singalong, the song’s “na-na-na” chorus stretched out, conducted by McCartney like a patient teacher. For those few minutes, thousands of people—though not my father or me, both of us too shy—sang in ragged but adorable unison.
After just enough suspense to make us restless, he and the band reemerged, launching into I’ve Got a Feeling. Thanks to Peter Jackson’s Get Back restoration, Lennon’s isolated rooftop vocals joined McCartney in a “virtual duet.”
The night concluded much the same way Abbey Road does—Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight, The End. Sure, it would have been cool if we’d gotten a snippet of Her Majesty to round things out just like we do on the album, but everything was lined up so that when McCartney sang, “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make,” confetti suitably rained down from the rafters.
As my fellow Beatlemaniacs and I spilled into the cold night, it was clear: McCartney had reminded us—vividly— how powerful his “silly love songs” will always be.