The Paul McCartney concert where the crowd began “making love”
From his first performance with The Beatles at The Jacaranda to recently dancing in the standing area at Taylor Swift’s Wembley gig, it’s safe to say that Paul McCartney has his share of anecdotes. Long after the band split, he continued to experience all the weird and wonderful exchanges with fans and energy on stage, with moments that have shaped his legacy for the better.
Perhaps McCartney’s enduring appeal can be tied to the fact that he himself was never really your conventional rock star. While other musicians throughout the 1960s pandered to rock ‘n’ roll both in lifestyle and music, McCartney, as himself and through the music of The Beatles, appeared far more modest, even during the band’s more experimental years.
For the musician, being seduced by “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” was never really an issue, and while he dabbled from time to time and likely learned a lot of spiritual teachings under the influence of substances like LSD, it never defined him as much as other rockstars, who in extreme cases let it consume them to the point where they could no longer continue their musical path.
McCartney, on the other hand, always seemed to enjoy a healthy dose of spontaneity, which hasn’t waned to this day. Even as he stands among fans, enjoying music by other people, there’s a freewheelin’ nature about the musician, the kind that knows he has probably lived and seen it all but is constantly enjoying new experiences all the same.
Many of these memories emerged during his monumental Paul McCartney World Tour, a circuit that saw him also breaking the record for the largest paying stadium audience in history: 184,000 at the Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Before this extraordinary performance, many were worried that the weather wouldn’t be on the former Beatle’s side, that it would start raining and ruin the atmosphere entirely.
This continued all day—speculation about what was going to happen—so, during one interview before the show, McCartney decided to take matters into his own hands, no matter the consequences, and claim that it wasn’t going to rain at all. Of course, he had no idea whether that would be true or not, but he issued it with such confidence and clarity that he willed it into existence, and, one hour before the show, the rain stopped.
As a result, the show itself was “magical”, according to the star. “I think we still hold the record,” he reflected, “There was a lot of people. What I liked was that there were some people of mine who went into the crowd, watching, [and] said there were people making love in the crowd,” after a beat, “I missed that. I would have liked to see that.”
The show was one for the history books for many reasons, but arguably even more memorable and monumental than the expanse of the crowd was McCartney’s energy. To many, it was the first time he had ever appeared with such raw happiness and energy on stage, electrifying in his ability to take it all in, knowing that everybody shared the same moment of enjoyment and clarity, fleeting as it may, but free from any haze that threatened to take over by the rain.
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