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Music

Paul McCartney Schooled the Youth of Lollapalooza Day One

The former Beatle held his own on a night of excellent performances by Flying Lotus and the Weeknd

Sir Paul McCartney, photo by Getty Images

Lollapalooza is aggressively normal. There are no campsites, no burning men, no polyamorous tents or dystopian barter systems. All those Native American prints you see are Blackhawks jerseys. Even the molly is more or less cordoned off in one corner of Chicago’s Grant Park, the beautiful grounds where the festival has been held for more than ten years now. (Thursday night, before festivities kick off, my friend who lives here tells me the city will spend the next 11 months trying to scrub the park of this year’s festival and prepare it for 2016.) Sure, there’s neon, and there are rompers, and Camelback is somehow still in business—but I was only handed two mixtapes on my way inside. This is the brighter tomorrow.

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Maybe it was a demographic thing. Day One was, without a doubt, about Paul McCartney and Paul McCartney alone. There were parents who thought they had dragged their kids and, in turn, kids who had gotten their dads to pay for wristbands under the guise of “learning about music.” These families spent most of the afternoon and early evening on picnic blanket islands near the Samsung stage, politely ignoring the weed smoke. It paid off: Macca’s set was one of the better ones I’ve ever seen, not last night, not this year, not at festivals, but in my entire memory. Paul didn’t delay his start (in fact, he didn’t even walk out after his band); he ambled up to the front and launched into “Magical Mystery Tour,” and the main event was underway.

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You expect someone who’s been playing stadiums longer than most attendees have been alive to know what he’s doing. What you don’t expect is the energy—by the time Paul got to “Helter Skelter” in the middle of his encore, some of us were doubled over just from watching, and we’re not 73. The world’s most famous living left-handed human played just over thirty songs, roughly two-thirds of those being Beatles numbers. Paul has the unique ability to be funny, earnest, self-effacing and poetic, all in fractured bits of between-song banter. He quipped that the sound and light coming over from Kaskade was a planned mash-up “between me and whatever shit they're playing”; he also talked about meeting Jimi Hendrix and a Russian defense secretary who was a fan.

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Highlights of Paul’s set included “Live and Let Die,” pre-encore closer “Hey Jude,” and “Blackbird,” after which he taunted the legions of people who told him they had tried and failed to learn the song. He brought out Alabama Shakes frontwoman Brittany Howard for “Get Back,” even passing lead vocal duties to her at one point. And though there was no Kanye West appearance, it might have been for the best, as “FourFiveSeconds” plays infinitely better as a solo cut.

Flying Lotus, photo by Daniel Patlán

As for the rest of the night: The aforementioned Kaskade set was fun, if rote. I spotted not one, not two, but four bros in matching “AMERICA: BACK-TO-BACK WORLD WAR CHAMPS” tank tops, making for the second-worst bastardization of that phrase this week. It’s clear to see why EDM lends itself so well to a festival environment: even when it’s segregated off to one stage, there are more ecstatic fans, more bizarrely legal water guns, and, yes, more EMTs than anywhere else on the grounds.

A few hundred feet down from Kaskade, there was an electronic-tinged set that could have stolen the evening were it not for a certain Beatle. Flying Lotus, the revered producer and instrumentalist who was born out of L.A.’s Low End Theory, put on a master class of a live show at the Pepsi stage. Pulling from his massive pool of unreleased cuts and from his most recent LP, You’re Dead!, the set flitted back and forth between feeling claustrophobic and expansive. FlyLo set himself up in the middle of his light show, on a raised platform, so that it at times looked (and sounded) as if he was falling down a vast tunnel. Though the one-time Stones Throw intern has gone from his city’s premier avant-garde beatsmiths to someone interested in incorporating live elements into his work, at times, the development has proved a roadblock for his live show. For the time being, it seems as if the kinks have been worked out.

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The Weeknd, photo by Daniel Patlán

Then there was the Weeknd. Much has been made about the Toronto native angling himself for pop superstardom, but his headlining set at the Bud Light stage might be an indication he’s not ready for primetime. Abel was trafficking in fan service last night, which is great for a festival crowd, but even the biggest hits (“Earned It” was positioned as the climax) lacked the sleaze and negative space that make them enticing on wax. That said, opener “High for This,” a sans-Ariana Grande “Love Me Harder,” and encore “Wicked Games” went over well. “Or Nah” sorely missed Ty Dolla $ign. Any Weeknd crowd is probably bound to be a young crowd, but the effect was stratified with McCartney playing on the other end of the park.

Highlight from the smaller stages: Earlier this month, Young Thug was charged with a litany of gun and drug offenses after an incident with a mall cop was trumped up enough for authorities to issue a search warrant of his Georgia home. Making the situation worse, the idiosyncratic rapper was also implicated in an alleged murder plot to kill Lil Wayne, largely because of his song “Halftime,” which the courts argue is a clear threat against Wayne’s life. Well, at about 7:15 p.m., he rapped the song, finished, cackled into the microphone and dropped “About the Money,” his collaboration with T.I. From there, he ran through “Check” from this spring’s Barter 6, “Lifestyle,” his massive hit with Rich Homie Quan, and his new single “Pacifier.”

As Thug sauntered off the stage, three kids from the crowd in front of me introduced themselves to one another, after deducing via t-shirt and drawstring backpack that they’d be starting at DePaul in September. It was probably a metaphor.

Watch a live stream of Lollapalooza here. Follow Paul on Twitter.