Paul McCartney announces 2nd surprise NYC show, immediately sells out
NEW YORK — Paul McCartney announced a second surprise show at the Bowery Ballroom slated for Wednesday night, but tickets were quickly snapped up.
The East Village venue was completely sold out by 11 a.m.
McCartney, 82, shocked New Yorkers on Tuesday afternoon when he announced plans to play the theater that night, making tickets only available in person at the box office. That show almost immediately sold out as well.
By Wednesday morning, people were more prepared, with lines outside the venue all morning in anticipation of a possible announcement, according to the music blog Brooklyn Vegan. The concert was set to begin at 6:30 p.m.
McCartney is expected to be in town all week, as he is scheduled to be part of a 50th anniversary celebration on 'Saturday Night Live' this weekend.
Tuesday night's show in the tiny Bowery Ballroom, with hardly more than 550 people in attendance, included a full 22-song setlist from McCartney, along with plenty of chatter.
'So, here we are,' McCartney said at the beginning with a grin. 'Some little gig. New York. Why not?'
McCartney is famously no stranger to a surprise performance. In addition to the famous Beatles rooftop concert, he appeared on top of Ed Sullivan Theatre marquee in 2009 and set up a performance at Grand Central Terminal in 2018.
When he announced the Tuesday concert, New Yorkers within a reasonable distance of the Bowery Ballroom flocked to snag tickets.
'I thought: I can do this,' Amy Jaffe, who lives about 30 blocks north, told The Associated Press. 'I put on jeans, grabbed a coat, called a Lyft.'
Jaffe, 69, was one of the lucky few in attendance Tuesday. McCartney played a full show, ranging from Beatles classics like 'Hey Jude' to solo efforts such as 'Maybe I'm Amazed.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Ramy Youssef on Juggling ‘Mountainhead,' ‘#1 Happy Family USA,' ‘Mo,' ‘The Studio' and Perhaps — Eventually — a Baby
Ramy Youssef seems to have a banner year every year. The last time he appeared on Variety's Awards Circuit Podcast, he was promoting his HBO standup special 'More Feelings' and a hosting stint on 'Saturday Night Live,' having just come off of a press campaign for his first movie role in 'Poor Things' — plus Netflix had just set a comedy series co-created by Youssef and Will Ferrell. More from Variety 'Bridget Jones' Director Michael Morris on the Emmy Longform Conundrum: What's The Difference Between a Film and a TV Movie? Emmy Voters: Don't Forget About Zahn McClarnon and 'Dark Winds': He's Your Next Leading Man Short and Sweet: From 'Adolescence' to 'Sirens,' This Season's Best New Shows Are Barely Longer Than a Movie This time around, he's outdone himself with four projects to promote simultaneously: The animated Amazon Prime Video series '#1 Happy Family USA'; the second and final season of Netflix's 'Mo,' which he co-created with Mo Amer; his role in Jesse Armstrong's HBO movie 'Mountainhead'; and his guest appearance in 'The Studio' on Apple TV+. He's also doing stand-up again, on a tour called 'Love Beam 4000.' We talk all about that and more on the latest edition of the Awards Circuit Podcast — listen below! The next time Youssef joins the podcast, he jokes, he may only have one thing to promote: 'If I have a baby, could we just have a podcast where I talk to you about my baby? Could we do an FYC for my baby? And there'd be no project, because I'll just be home with my wife and the baby.' That one has yet to be greenlit — 'We're in development on 'Baby,'' Youssef jokes — but there's plenty on his mind until then. If there's a throughline between the disparate things he's working on, it's that each one feels urgent, deeply connected to an of-the-moment struggle. Take 'Mountainhead,' for example. The film examines the complicated and even violent friendships between a group of tech billionaires who are wading through real-life, apocalyptic consequences of AI. 'I write a lot about man versus system, and [Armstrong's] version of it, and his entry points to it, are different than the ones that I gravitate towards as a writer,' Youssef says. 'But as an actor, it all made so much sense to me the second I read it.' Later in the conversation, Youssef relates that idea to 'Mo,' which follows an undocumented Palestinian refugee who tries, fails and tries again to get his green card in the U.S. 'With 'Mo,' we looked at man versus system in an on-the-nose way,' he says. 'You're watching him go through these courts, and through these double standards […] I felt compelled that this thing has to exist, because there is no humanization — of not just Palestinians, but even refugees. People think 'refugee' and they just see a random CNN image of people displaced on a boat near a shore. And those images need to be tethered to real families and real stories and things that you can understand.' Youssef expanded on his thoughts from a previous Variety interview, where he and Amer shared why they chose not to reference the current war in Gaza in 'Mo' Season 2, emphasizing that they wanted to be timely while still making sure the show would hold up years after the war's eventual end. This is a skill Youssef first honed by observing his comedy idols. 'I love watching old specials. Pop on an old Eddie Murphy, pop on an old George Carlin,' he says. 'Carlin's great at this, because he'll talk really topically about the time, but it always has this core emotional thing that's actually the bedrock of the joke. I don't know the senator he's talking about from the '90s, but I know exactly what he's feeling.' In '#1 Happy Family USA,' Youssef applies the Carlin treatment to 9/11. More than 20 years on, he's still meditating on how Americans at large responded to the terrorist attacks, and how that response impacted Muslim families like his own. To him, the emotional truth that still resonates today is the way he was taught to 'code switch,' or present a version of himself in public that was different from the person he truly was at home. So in the series, the Hussein family goes to absurd lengths to make the white people they meet in public more comfortable. 'Everyone has this part of themselves that they go, 'I gotta hide this now that I'm going outside.' In a way, it's the premise of 'Severance' — that thing of, 'I gotta be somebody else when I'm not home,'' Youssef says. 'With that being at the bedrock of it, we can get super wild and crazy and really go at this with a satire that that period of time has never really gotten from the perspective that we show.' He continues: 'There were so many people who were really sidelined from having their own experience for a really long time in this country. And that time is back and even worse. Anyone who lived through the early 2000s as an adult, who is Muslim, will tell you that it's worse now. This idea of needing to prove your patriotism. It's why the show is called '#1 Happy Family USA.' It's this idea that you gotta get out there on that front lawn and shout it to everybody in order to be deemed safe and worthy of living in the neighborhood.' And while the stakes of the headlines referenced in 'The Studio' are less life-and-death, the Seth Rogen-led comedy is still cut from the same 'man versus system' cloth. Even though Youssef only appears once, as the host of the Golden Globes in Episode 8, it was a logical addition to his rolodex of timely and prescient projects — though he didn't need much convincing, considering he got to bring his dog to the shoot. Also on this episode of the Awards Circuit Podcast: Variety's Clayton Davis talked this spring to star/EP Forest Whitaker about MGM+'s 'Godfather of Harlem,' now in its Season 4. The show picked up in Season 4 with Bumpy Johnson, played by Whitaker, as he continued his bloody war for control of Harlem against New York's mafia families, while contending with the emergence of a potential rival in newly arrived Black gangster Frank Lucas. Variety's 'Awards Circuit' podcast, hosted by Clayton Davis, Jazz Tangcay, Emily Longeretta, Jenelle Riley and Michael Schneider, who also produces, is your one-stop source for lively conversations about the best in film and television. Each episode, 'Awards Circuit' features interviews with top film and TV talent and creatives, discussions and debates about awards races and industry headlines, and much more. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or anywhere you download podcasts. Best of Variety 'Harry Potter' TV Show Cast Guide: Who's Who in Hogwarts? Emmy Predictions: Documentary Programs — Nonfiction Races Spotlight Pee-wee Herman, Simone Biles and YouTube Creators 25 Hollywood Legends Who Deserve an Honorary Oscar
5 hours ago
Two musical revolutionaries, Sly Stone and Brian Wilson, leave life's stage nearly simultaneously
Sometimes there are strange symmetries in death, as in life. The twin passings of Sly Stone and Brian Wilson this week brought that into sharp relief. Both were musical geniuses who paid a high price for their gifts. They burned bright, with art they created at their peaks that became more moving and meaningful with time, only to see their creative lights extinguished suddenly through mental health and addiction issues. Both were 82 when they died — Stone on Monday and Wilson on Wednesday. 'It's such an unsettling coincidence,' said Anthony DeCurtis, contributing editor at Rolling Stone. 'These two figures, they were very different and massively influential, and each ran into a wall of their own problems in many ways. As much as they achieved, it's hard not to think that they could have done more.' With his late brothers Carl and Dennis, Beach Boys co-founder Wilson was the architect of the California sound that captured surfing and sun, beaches and girls. Yet for all the 'Fun, Fun, Fun,' there was something much deeper and darker in Brian's abilities as a composer. It was more than disposable music for teen-agers. He had an unparalleled melodic sense, hearing sounds in his mind that others couldn't. He could worm his way into your head and then break your heart with songs like 'In My Room' and 'God Only Knows.' The tour de force 'Good Vibrations' —- had anyone ever heard of the theremin before he employed its unearthly wail? — is a symphony both complex and easily accessible. 'He was our American Mozart,' musician Sean Ono Lennon wrote on social media. The 1966 album 'Pet Sounds' was a peak. Wilson felt a keen sense of competition with the Beatles. But they had three writers, including Sean's dad, John Lennon. Wilson was largely alone, and he heard impatience and doubt from other Beach Boys, whose music he provided. He felt the pressure in trying to follow up 'Pet Sounds,' and 'Smile' became music's most famous unfinished album. Wilson, a damaged soul to begin with because of an abusive father, never reached the heights again. He descended into a well-chronicled period of darkness. Stone's skills came in creating a musical world that others only dreamed of at the time. The Family Stone was an integrated world — Black and white, men and women — and the music they created was a potent mixture of rock, soul and funk. It made you move, it made you think. For a period of time from 1967 to 1973, their music was inescapable — 'Dance to the Music,' 'Everybody is a Star,' 'Higher,' 'Hot Fun in the Summertime,' 'Sing a s Simple Song,' 'Family Affair,' 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).' Their performance at Woodstock was a milestone. 'His songs weren't just about fighting injustice, they were about transforming the self to transform the world,' musician and documentarian Questlove, who lovingly tended to Stone's legacy, wrote this week. 'He dared to be simple in the most complex ways — using childlike joy, wordless cries and nursery rhyme cadences to express adult truths. His work looked straight at the brightest and darkest parts of life and demanded we do the same.' From his peak, the fall was hard. Years of drug abuse took its toll. Periodic comeback attempts deepened a sense of bewilderment and pity. Music is littered with stories of sudden, untimely and early deaths. Yet until this week, both men lived on, somewhat improbably passing average life expectancies. Wilson, by many measures, achieved some level of peace late in life. He had a happy marriage. He was able to see how his music was revered and appreciated and spent several years performing it again with a younger band that clearly worshiped him. It was a postscript not many knew, said journalist Jason Fine, who befriended Wilson and made the 2021 documentary, 'Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road.' 'That sort of simple message he really wanted to give people through his music going back to the '60s — a sense of warmth, a sense that it's going to be OK in the same way that music lifted him up from his darkness, he'd try to do for other people,' Fine told The Associated Press in an interview then. 'I think now, more than earlier in his career, he accepts that he does that and that's a great comfort to him.' Stone emerged to write an autobiography in 2023. But less is known about his later years, whether he found peace or died without the full knowledge of what his music meant to others. 'Yes, Sly battled addiction,' Questlove wrote. 'Yes, he disappeared from the spotlight. But he lived long enough to outlast many of his disciples, to feel the ripples of his genius return through hip-hop samples, documentaries and his memoir. Still, none of that replaces the raw beauty of his original work.' Did Sly Stone and Brian Wilson live lives of tragedy or triumph? It's hard to say now. One suspects it will become easier with the passage of time, when only the work remains. That sometimes brings clarity. 'Millions of people had their lives changed by their music,' DeCurtis said. 'Not just enjoyed it, but had their lives transformed. That's quite an accomplishment.'
Boston Globe
7 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Two musical revolutionaries, Sly Stone and Brian Wilson, leave life's stage nearly simultaneously
Advertisement Brian Wilson captured the California sound With his late brothers Carl and Dennis, Beach Boys co-founder Wilson was the architect of the California sound that captured surfing and sun, beaches and girls. Yet for all the 'Fun, Fun, Fun,' there was something much deeper and darker in Brian's abilities as a composer. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up It was more than disposable music for teen-agers. He had an unparalleled melodic sense, hearing sounds in his mind that others couldn't. He could worm his way into your head and then break your heart with songs like 'In My Room' and 'God Only Knows.' The tour de force 'Good Vibrations' —- had anyone ever heard of the theremin before he employed its unearthly wail? — is a symphony both complex and easily accessible. 'He was our American Mozart,' musician Sean Ono Lennon wrote on social media. Advertisement The 1966 album 'Pet Sounds' was a peak. Wilson felt a keen sense of competition with the Beatles. But they had three writers, including Sean's dad, John Lennon. Wilson was largely alone, and he heard impatience and doubt from other Beach Boys, whose music he provided. He felt the pressure in trying to follow up 'Pet Sounds,' and 'Smile' became music's most famous unfinished album. Wilson, a damaged soul to begin with because of an abusive father, never reached the heights again. He descended into a well-chronicled period of darkness. Sly Stone helped assemble a new kind of musical landscape Rock star Sylvester "Sly" Stone of Sly and the Family Stone appears in April 1972. Uncredited/Associated Press Stone's skills came in creating a musical world that others only dreamed of at the time. The Family Stone was an integrated world — Black and white, men and women — and the music they created was a potent mixture of rock, soul and funk. It made you move, it made you think. For a period of time from 1967 to 1973, their music was inescapable — 'Dance to the Music,' 'Everybody is a Star,' 'Higher,' 'Hot Fun in the Summertime,' 'Sing a s Simple Song,' 'Family Affair,' 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).' Their performance at Woodstock was a milestone. 'His songs weren't just about fighting injustice, they were about transforming the self to transform the world,' musician and documentarian Questlove, who lovingly tended to Stone's legacy, wrote this week. 'He dared to be simple in the most complex ways — using childlike joy, wordless cries and nursery rhyme cadences to express adult truths. His work looked straight at the brightest and darkest parts of life and demanded we do the same.' From his peak, the fall was hard. Years of drug abuse took its toll. Periodic comeback attempts deepened a sense of bewilderment and pity. Advertisement In a world where many musical icons died young, each endured Music is littered with stories of sudden, untimely and early deaths. Yet until this week, both men lived on, somewhat improbably passing average life expectancies. Wilson, by many measures, achieved some level of peace late in life. He had a happy marriage. He was able to see how his music was revered and appreciated and spent several years performing it again with a younger band that clearly worshiped him. It was a postscript not many knew, said journalist Jason Fine, who befriended Wilson and made the 2021 documentary, 'Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road.' 'That sort of simple message he really wanted to give people through his music going back to the '60s — a sense of warmth, a sense that it's going to be OK in the same way that music lifted him up from his darkness, he'd try to do for other people,' Fine told The Associated Press in an interview then. 'I think now, more than earlier in his career, he accepts that he does that and that's a great comfort to him.' Stone emerged to write an autobiography in 2023. But less is known about his later years, whether he found peace or died without the full knowledge of what his music meant to others. 'Yes, Sly battled addiction,' Questlove wrote. 'Yes, he disappeared from the spotlight. But he lived long enough to outlast many of his disciples, to feel the ripples of his genius return through hip-hop samples, documentaries and his memoir. Still, none of that replaces the raw beauty of his original work.' Did Sly Stone and Brian Wilson live lives of tragedy or triumph? It's hard to say now. One suspects it will become easier with the passage of time, when only the work remains. That sometimes brings clarity. Advertisement 'Millions of people had their lives changed by their music,' DeCurtis said. 'Not just enjoyed it, but had their lives transformed. That's quite an accomplishment.'
