Ryan's Journal

"My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?" — David Mitchell

Tag: Concerts

I Saw a Beatle

Posted from Culver City, California at 12:08 pm, March 28th, 2026

Audrey likes to say that I have especially good karma when it comes to concerts. A few years ago I somehow won tickets from KLOS to see Rush’s final-ever show when they played at the Forum (Rush is her absolute favorite band), I’ve been lucky grabbing cheap seats in good locations at the last-minute to a few other shows, and as a teenager at a Billy Joel concert, a member of the concert staff approached our group and asked if we wanted to be closer to the stage and then swapped our nosebleed seats for second row tickets. That backstory is prelude for last night’s experience, which tops them all.

As Beatles fans go I’m definitely far from “Beatlemaniac” territory – I don’t own all of their albums, and I don’t have any Beatles memorabilia in the house – but I like their songs and I appreciate that we live in a world made much richer by having had John, Paul, George and Ringo in it. Lately I’ve been thinking it would be nice to see Paul perform while he’s still touring, but the idea of paying $500 for upper deck seats in a stadium wasn’t appealing. Ten days ago I got an email with the subject “Paul McCartney Rocks the Fonda”, announcing two shows at an old art deco theater in Hollywood that holds 1200 people. I figured the odds of getting a ticket were probably about 1 in 10,000, and that prices would be astronomical, but I still signed up for the ticket lottery. Four days ago I got a “You’ve been invited to purchase tickets” notification, but with the on-sale date listed for the next day and a disclaimer that “inventory is sold on a first-come, first-served basis”, I figured they must have sent this email to thousands of people and my odds were still slim.

The next morning, just before the on-sale time, I joined the ticket queue, and much to my amazement was shown a fairly reasonable ticket price and a purchase link. And just like that, Audrey and I had tickets to see a Beatle.

The concert had a no-phone policy so I don’t have my own pictures, but an email arrived this morning from paulmccartney.com with pictures to share, and the shot below gives an idea of the experience – it was standing-room, general admission, so you filed in, picked a spot, and spent two hours with Paul McCartney playing a mix of maybe 50% Beatles songs and 50% of his solo/Wings songs (setlist). Every time he would launch into a song like Love Me Do, Hey Jude, Blackbird, Get Back, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da or Let It Be I’d get butterflies thinking that I’d heard that song a thousand times, but no one ever would have heard it were it not for the guy 100 feet away singing it now. It was also neat seeing him interacting with the crowd. At one point someone yelled “George!” and Paul responded with a comment about how his former bandmate’s ghost must be haunting the theater, followed by someone yelling “Ringo!” to which Paul snarkily shot back “Get out of here with that nonsense!”. He also told the story behind Let It Be, saying he was overwhelmed and “doing a bit too much of everything back in the 60s” and then had a dream where his mother, who had died of cancer when he was 14, came to him and told him it would all be OK, thus inspiring the song; I assume that’s a well-known story, but it was touching hearing it told by the man himself.

Today I’m still buzzing from seeing this show. I haven’t been able to figure out why McCartney did a tiny show in Hollywood – he’s 83, he didn’t play any new songs so it wasn’t an album launch party, and they weren’t recording it for a TV special or anything like that – but my best guess is that he must just like performing, and playing a small theater has its own charm for someone used to playing in front of a crowd fifty times larger. It was an incredibly special evening, and whatever concert karma I’ve earned that let me attend I can only hope to pay back for the next round.

Paul McCartney at the Fonda Theater

Phones weren’t allowed so this photo was sent out afterwards as “something to remember the evening by”. Audrey and I were somewhere by the wall to the left, enjoying a very intimate show with a guy who normally ends his shows waving to 50,000 people instead of just 1200.

Paul McCartney at the Fonda Theater

Another photo sent out for sharing on social media. This picture is apparently from the soundcheck rather than the actual show (he wasn’t wearing that outfit during the main show), but this was almost exactly our view for the two hour show, albeit from floor level instead of the balcony, and far enough to the right that we couldn’t see the horns.

The Sound of Music

Posted from Culver City, California at 6:01 pm, July 15th, 2018

While there hasn’t been a ton of journal-worthy excitement lately (obviously), the past month was notable for a number of incredible musical events.

When I was a kid, Paul Simon’s Graceland album was one of the very first albums I remember thinking was my own personal musical discovery – not something I bought because it was on the radio or because everyone else was listening to it, but that I owned and listened to on repeat because it was music that appealed to me. When it was announced that this year’s tour was Paul Simon’s farewell tour I snagged two tickets, and on May 23 Audrey and I sat down to say goodbye to a singer who had shaped my taste in music since I was a kid. At 76 years of age he still had plenty of energy, and the program covered 50 years of music in a way that reminded you of how much of an influence he’s had on our culture. When he came out for the final encore with a single spotlight and an acoustic guitar to play “Sounds of Silence”, it was one of those rare goosebump-inducing moments with the realization that that guy is singing that song and you are lucky enough to be there and hear it. All in all a very special night.

Six weeks later we trekked up to one of our favorite venues, the Mountain Winery in the hills overlooking the San Francisco Bay. You can’t go wrong with a pre-show dinner in a winery, a 2400 seat venue with views of the Bay, and a stage set in front of a historic winery cellar. The first of the two shows we saw was the Indigo Girls, one of the few groups where Audrey’s musical tastes and my own overlap. There’s something special about seeing singer-songwriters in a small venue – the energy in the crowd is different, and the feeling takes you back to singalongs around the fire at summer camp – and this show did not disappoint, with audience members occasionally yelling out requests, and the ladies on stage more often than not going “yeah, let’s do that” and then launching into the requested song. Despite Emily apparently having a bit of a cold that caused her to lose a few notes, this was another very memorable evening.

Night two at the Mountain Winery featured Steve Martin and Martin Short, which the pre-show marquis jokingly advertised as “See them before they’re dead”. We’d seen Steve Martin’s musical act with Edie Brickell and the Steep Canyon Rangers twice before, but this was more of a comedy show, with a couple of musical interludes. Our seats were probably within a hundred feet of the stage, so obviously it was amazing to see a couple of comedy legends in person, but as good as the comedy was, I think the music Steve Martin is creating is even better – a performance by the Steep Canyon Rangers brought the house down, and Steve Martin on banjo is a sight to behold.

These shows were all a reminder of how lucky I am to be living a life filled with incredible experiences – many days pass by and are quickly forgotten, but seeing Paul Simon in the Hollywood Bowl, or Steve Martin under the stars in a winery, are those rare special occasions that get etched into the memory banks for all time.

Paul Simon at the Hollywood Bowl
Saying goodbye to Paul Simon at the Hollywood Bowl.
Audrey, me and the Indigo Girls at the Mountain Winery
Audrey, me and the Indigo Girls at the Mountain Winery. Oddly, in a venue that seats 2400, our seats for the Indigo girls were in the same row and section, and were in fact immediately adjacent to, our seats the following night for Steve Martin.

Kraftwerk

Posted from Culver City, California at 8:59 pm, March 24th, 2014

As part of my ongoing arts and culture education, Audrey took me to see Kraftwerk at Disney Hall last week. I know nothing about electronic music, but apparently for someone who is a fan of the genre seeing Kraftwerk is like an engineer meeting Nikola Tesla or Wernher von Braun, i.e. you bow down while chanting “we’re not worthy” when they appear. The band was doing eight shows over four nights, each show featuring a different album played in full along with a “best of” set, and tickets had sold out in a matter of minutes.

I went in knowing nothing about what was going to happen, beyond the fact that it might be weird. Those suspicions were confirmed after my ticket was taken and I was handed a pair of 3-D glasses, and I settled in for a fun evening. The lights went down, the curtain dropped, and there on the stage were four 60-something Germans, each standing at a lighted console, all in front of a giant screen, with nothing else on stage. Also, they were wearing unitards, because when you’re a 67 year old German electronica legend, why not?

The show was bizarre in a very fun way. The girl was extraordinarily happy, I was entertained, the Germans were very German, and – surprisingly – I thought the music was all right; I even grabbed a copy of Autobahn from iTunes to add to the music collection. Even better, afterwards I read a bit about the band and discovered the following fun tidbit:

The band is notoriously reclusive, providing rare and enigmatic interviews, using life-size mannequins and robots to conduct official photo shoots, refusing to accept mail and not allowing visitors at Kling Klang Studio, whose precise location they used to keep secret. Another notable example of this eccentric behavior was reported to Johnny Marr of the Smiths by Karl Bartos, who explained that anyone trying to contact the band for collaboration would be told the studio telephone did not have a ringer, since during recording, the band did not like to hear any kind of noise pollution. Instead, callers were instructed to phone the studio precisely at a certain time, whereupon the phone would be answered by Ralf Hütter, despite never hearing the phone ring.

Good times, although I will never again be able to go to a concert without feeling slightly let down when I don’t get a pair of 3-D glasses after passing through the gates.

Kraftwerk at Disney Hall

Kraftwerk on stage at Disney Hall. Photo from the LA Weekly.