Great fun at the Paul McCartney show last night. What a set list - a ton of Beatles tunes (something like twenty) for one thing, and not just the ones you might expect, but some from off the beaten track (although even lesser known Beatles songs are still famous by most standards), such as "I Got a Feeling" with its intricate inner-voice harmonies in the guitar parts, "Things We Said Today", an under-appreciated pop masterpiece, "The Night Before", "I Will" (ditto for both). A lot of great Wings stuff too, including one of my favourites, the mighty "Let Me Roll It". Also excellent versions of "A Day in the Life", "Give Peace a Chance", and "Something", tributes to John and George, of course. And he's still in terrific voice, as powerful versions of "Got to Get You into My Life", "Band on the Run" and "Golden Slumbers" demonstrated. He's got an excellent band too - lots of great guitar stuff (with many contributions from McCartney), excellent backing vocals, strong grooves, and just the right attitude in terms of how to back a legend. Here's a song that he didn't play last night, but which I find is sort of his quintessential statement regarding how he sees his place in the world, in which he has always shown, as Auden put it, "an affirming flame": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2udwmwNBwbs.

A little over a week until my first ex-Beatle concert, and I'm thinking about the songs that I'd really like to hear at the show. In the past, I've had good luck a few times with this kind of wishful thinking: Dylan doing probably my favourite of his tunes (it certainly was at the time, anyway), "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" early in a concert a few years back and Lindsey Buckingham doing "Trouble" second in a very memorable set at the Metropolis in 2007 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXTr3e0VPNc). Anyway, among the great McCartney tunes from his solo years, I'd really like to hear "Rock Show" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_UtHHS8xWM) and this one, which was co-written with Elvis Costello, if I'm not mistaken: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h85OGkCaKIg. And of course, anything from Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, which is up there with his greatest stuff in my opinion. I'll post some more requests in the days ahead, including a list of my favourite McCartney tunes from the Beatles.

A question: What exactly is a blues ballad? Can anyone out there help me with this? I first heard the term some years ago during the terrific video that Donald Fagen did about the influence of blues on his songwriting, when he compared his use of major seven chords in a blues form to "blues ballads done by Bobby 'Blue' Bland". I'll have to find the video (that's right - I have it on VHS) before I can double-check the accuracy of the quotation I just gave or provide the correct title of the video, but I think that was the gist of it. And the Wikipedia entry was OK, but not entirely convincing. However it did hip me to an amazing Fats Domino song that I hadn't heard before, called "Every Night About This Time", which you have to check out (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZpJmHldX0s).

And the quandary also got me thinking about other possible examples, such as the hugely under-appreciated Stones tune, "I Got the Blues" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgF-PRY96Is&playnext=1&list=PLFCC93639C9A06912). The song is also a good example of what happens when Jagger and Richards really get down to working together. Here's hoping they do it again soon.

In retrospect, much as I enjoyed Keith's autobiography (Life), certain things about his thinking keep on bugging me, particularly the way he sort of treats Mick as if he was a by-stander while they were making their great albums of the early seventies. Of course, you know that there's an underlying respect there, but for whatever reason he does slag him pretty hard throughout the book. My point in this post is this: what Keith was to rock and roll guitar, Mick was to rock and roll singing, no more or less. And people that don't think that his contribution to the band (and music, in general) was the equivalent of Keith's (or Charlie's) are not hearing things accurately. Try singing along with "Ventilator Blues" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l0X1w8a7D8) or "Let It Loose" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrCiKD-cBvo) if you don't believe me. Mick's experience as a serious blues student and instrumentalist (Keith does give credit to his harmonica playing - but he's an excellent guitarist as well) allowed him to find melodic material and phrasings that were much more sophisticated than most people (including Keith, apparently) realize. Here are the lyrics to the album, arguably the greatest in rock 'n' roll history, that contains the classic tracks mentioned above: http://dougscripts.com/itunes/pdf/examplepdf.pdf. (You'll need them to sing along. Try it. Seriously.)