This week, Sir Paul McCartney made his long awaited stop in Tampa for the first time in 12 years. But the other living Beatle is also headed for the Sunshine State.
Ringo Starr and the All-Starr Band will already be making a stop in Florida this tour, just in Ft. Lauderdale for two nights at the Parker Playhouse. But sometime before or after those shows, he will play Clearwater. But it won’t be a ticketed performance. Ruth Eckerd Hall has a very exclusive “Friends Of Music” club that you must be invited to pay to get in, and only special people who have paid roughly $5,000+ get full access to exclusively private concerts by big name artists that do not take place at Ruth Eckerd Hall. Artists through the years have included Hall & Oates, Foreigner, Styx, and Toby Keith.
Ringo’s last time in Clearwater was in October of 2014 with his beloved All-Starr Band. It probably won’t happen, but in the meantime, here’s hoping that the performance will be made public. If not, maybe Ringo will drop by Tampa for at least one more public show before retiring to his octopus’s garden.
Paul Simon playing for a sold-out crowd of old and young at the St. Augustine Amphitheater.
Paul Simon hasn’t played Florida since his 2014 tour with Sting, and he hasn’t been as a solo artist since late 2011. It seems like an eternity ago to some fans such as myself. Last year when he announced that there would be a massive US tour promoting a new album Stranger To Stranger, he totally snubbed Florida. The lowest in the southeast Paul played in was Atlanta. I would have gone, and still would go to Georgia for certain artists, Paul Simon topping that list, had my leg not been cooped up in a cast.
But in March, we Floridians learned of a miracle: The Kodachrome singer would be doing a summer tour, and where else would he start but St. Augustine, FL?
On Thursday night, the St. Augustine Amphitheater doors opened at promptly 6:00, and members of the sold-out crowd began to worry that one of Florida’s famous rainstorms from a few hours prior would start up again. The worst that happened was the show being postponed by ten minutes. “The rain came, and the rain…cooled us off!” Paul observed early on.
The turnout was enormous, quite like a class act you see at a sports stadium or arena. And this was not just a bunch of old folks who were fans of Simon’s days recording with his former partner, Art Garfunkel: There were actually quite a lot of fans who enjoyed his solo works, like his 1986 Grammy Album Of The Year winner, the South-African inspired “Graceland.” Most of those fans were in their thirties or forties. I’m fifteen, which is a bit young to have Paul Simon in your top 10, top 5, and top 3 these days, and I saw other people there that were my age – Most of them had been dragged there by their parents because they were just trying to be totally awesome parents. I mean, how many of today’s children will get the chance to say that they experienced this man live? But no matter, I was probably the only much younger fan who actually understood that this was Paul Simon for God’s sake, a twice Rock and Roll Hall Of Famer, a Songwriter’s Hall Of Famer, and the first recipient of the Gershwin Prize For Popular Song.
The theater itself filled relatively quickly with over 4,000 fans, and at 7:40, Paul’s backing band came out and played a breathtaking instrumental version of Gumboots off of Graceland. Three minutes later, their boss walked out onstage waving in a grey t-shirt with a dark blue overcoat. His ecstatic audience had an unusual but great amount of energy; more people were cheering than just plain applauding. Within seconds, he picked up one of his many acoustic guitars and ripped into Graceland’s exhilarating opening track, The Boy in the Bubble. Through the night, Paul really mixed up some of the songs by either changing their keys, giving them new rhythms during certain parts, or simply adding in more time for his band to play solos. He gave his fans two and a half hours of almost the entire first side of Graceland, some of his greatest hits old and new, and some deep cuts, including One Man’s Ceiling Is Another Man’s Floor.
Six songs from his days in Simon & Garfunkel were played as well, most notably an instrumental edition of El Condor Pasa (If I Could), Mrs. Robinson, a song that has been played only once per tour since 2009, and a tear jerking version of The Boxer. And that wasn’t an exaggeration. I never cry at concerts, but when Paul strummed the first chord of The Boxer, I just lost my goddamn mind. I bawled my eyes out for the first time in a very long time.
Early on, Paul gave a brief but amped up cover of Mystery Train, and later, during Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard, the entire audience actually got up and danced, clapped, or at least sang along, because apparently, it is a much bigger hit than most of the songs he played before. Paul’s backing band was much larger than a typical rock and roll backing band. It was about the size of Brian Wilson’s backing band – about eight other gentlemen onstage, one of which performed on Graceland in 1986. Guitarist Vincent Nguini even stepped up to Paul’s microphone to introduce The Cool, Cool River, “a very powerful tune that we haven’t done in a very, very long time,” of which they actually started playing again on the 2016 tour.
He wrapped up his main set with back to back songs from Graceland, starting with a beautiful rendition of Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes, and ending with a frenetic ride through You Can Call Me Al, which also had everybody standing up and dancing. After his band took a bow, they came back out for two generous encores, and then after everybody was offstage and it was just Paul and his guitar, he strummed the recognizable chords, and sang the magic words:
“Hello, darkness my old friend.”
Paul mentioned many times how all of the profits from this tour would be donated to the E.O Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, which is involved in saving the Earth and the human species. In fact, he’s so dedicated to it, the book that inspired him to do it was for sale at his merchandise stands, entitled Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight For Life by Edward Wilson.
But you know, regardless of what charity Paul chose, he sure as heck would continue to save at least the music world, long as he keeps playing those sold out shows for years to come.
Josh Bradley Live 