McCartney Plays to a Reverent Crowd at Bonnaroo

Wade Payne/Invision, via Associated Press Paul McCartney played a tight and polished headlining show Friday at the Bonnaroo festival.

MANCHESTER, Tenn. - I can't remember seeing a show - of music or really anything else - with so much privileged space and veneration around it as Paul McCartney's two-and-a-half-hour concert here, on the second night of the Bonnaroo festival.

He entered the concert site at around 6:30, during Wilco's set, by motorcade, in an SUV preceded by state troopers with their sirens on, which held everybody trying to exit or leave the grounds for about 20 minutes. (He rolled down his window and waved.) There were no other sets on the four other stages during his.

The show began with a D.J. set of reworked Beatles and McCartney songs, or covers thereof, while a visual montage of photos and paintings scrolled slowly up two screens on either side of the stage for a full 40 minutes; it portrayed him in all stages of his life and career.

And his set, closing with fireworks, worked through the same long time-frame, starting with “Eight Days A Week” and moving forward to some of the most recent songs he's written. He sounded strong and energized; this was much like his recent large-scale shows of the last 10 years or so -  same band, many of the same songs - but with some new ones, or new-old ones, songs he hasn't played live before until his current tour, including “Lovely Rita” and “Your Mother Should Know.”

And for “Your Mother Should Know,” the screen behind the stage showed various famous mothers with their children, including the spouses of heads of state: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Michelle Obama.

For practically anyone else, invoking presidential families might seem grandiose, but for Mr. McCartney's set the gesture was about right. It was a bit like a performance from a head of state, and the enormous crowd held its respect through nearly all of it: walking against the flow of faces, you saw a remarkable kind of quiet concentration.

The tight and polished Paul McCartney show, into a slow and greasy (and pretty magnificent, though late-starting) one by ZZ Top, into a strobing and episodic one by Animal Collective, ending at 4 a.m. -  with a shorter detour through the churchlike minimalist pop of the XX - may have been the strangest and strongest sequence of sets I've heard at Bonnaroo, a pop festival that gets broader every year, and harder to contain with any sort of narrative.

Otherwise, on Friday, I spent a lot of time listening to live rhythm sections and thinking about drummers. An idea I've heard attributed to the improviser, composer and educator Karl Berger is that drummers either play up or play down - which is to say they either pull the beats out of their instrument and release them into the audience, or hold them back and contain them within the composition or the arrangement.

To play to tens of thousands of people in an outdoor festival you almost have to play down, for the sake of power and evenness. But a few drummers - including Jean-Alain Hohy, who played an afternoon set with the Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara, and Glenn Kotche, who played with Wilco - were playing up, hitting lightly and finding a greater range of dynamics, making their rhythms bubble.

In a scene where music from different stages is always competing in the air, sometimes aggressively, your ear gravitates toward these kinds of musicians, who seem to be giving you something rather than selling it.