The Beatles icon Paul McCartney has an official tour blog and revealed that Leonardo DiCaprio surprised him backstage by attending his recent show at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. McCartney made a painful Ringo Starr revelation earlier this week. His blog also wrote about doing an interview with Al Roker:
Our day at San Jose’s SAP Center began with the surprising sighting of a face familiar to touring and local crew members alike. NBC Today Show host Al Roker had rolled into the venue early, with a crew in tow, who would later build a makeshift interview set onstage to film a chat about Paul’s upcoming children’s book Hey Grandude!. Members of our own crew were suitably impressed with the speed and efficiency with which the Today Show folks operated, literally building their set, filming the interview and striking the set all in the tight interval between the end of soundcheck and the opening of the venue’s doors.
With that bit of business–pleasant though it was—out of the way, it was once again showtime. To the surprise of no one and the delight of all, Paul “barreled through decades of hits from every phase of his career” (SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE) on this, his first San Jose appearance since his two-nighter at the HP Pavilion on The US Tour in 2005.
The Bay Area holds a special place in Paul’s performing history. Aside from the glaringly obvious—the bookends of The Beatles final show at Candlestick Park in 1966 and Paul playing the last ever show at the now-decommissioned Candlestick in 2014—Paul’s more recent landmark gigs in the region include 2010 at AT&T Park and his 2013 first ever headline at the Outside Lands Festival in Golden Gate Park (both featuring Paul’s rarely played (other than at soundcheck) cover of Jesse Fuller’s ‘San Francisco Bay Blues’ dedicated as ever to our dear departed MFTQ Shelley Lazar).
What distinguished this night in the South Bay from those previous unforgettable near-three-hour experiences was another unexpected appearance, this one from someone decidedly less famous than Al Rocker—but not for long. Paul McCartney is charging kids a surprising amount of money to meet him.
