Paul McCartney at Oakland Arena

Rock and roll icon/pioneer/legend/member of Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Sir Paul McCartney played the second of two sold-out shows at Oakland Arena on mother’s day, May 8, 2022. The third stop on his Got Back tour, McCartney and his band kicked off the 36-song set with the Beatles’ “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and tore through a career-spanning set going back to his Quarrymen days (“In Spite of All the Danger”), and hit after hit from the Beatles, Wings, and a few new songs for good measure. There were tributes to his late bandmates, playing a ukulele version of the George Harrison song “Something,” and the song he wrote after the death of John Lennon, “Here Today.” The set crescendoed with a pyro-technic filled “Live and Let Die” followed by a arena-wide sing along of “Hey Jude,” before an encore that featured a virtual duet of “I’ve Got a Feeling” with a video of Lennon, and closed out, fittingly, with the Beatles’ “The End.”