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MY MCCARTNEY ADVENTURE - Highway 101 at golden hour has its own key. Two hours north from Studio City it hums in G major—past the strawberry fields of Oxnard, past Carpinteria’s sea-salt haze. I’ve driven it for a wedding, for work, for the pure dare of adventure. But the drive that floated up while I steered this night wasn’t coastal at all. It was decades back, early morning on the Boston Post Road, my mother and I heading to look at colleges the year John Lennon was shot. We listened to the radio announce a murder that made the world feel suddenly breakable. I was young enough to think great artists were immune to lunatics.
Friday night I made the trip again, Mary riding shotgun, a veteran of a thousand music stories. On the way up she talked herself into a trance and scrolled through her phone—photos of McCartney’s 2007 Amoeba gig with Ringo in the crowd, another where she looked effortlessly glamorous, hobnobbing with Elton John in the early 2000s. She told me about filming Moby here for a news outlet—how he was gracious, serving vegan food. “It’s the little things,” she said.
The last twenty-five minutes were pure crawl. A modest twenty bucks to park at the high-school lot—cheap when you’ve paid downtown or SoFi rates—but then a line that snaked like a myth: down the road, around a corner, up a hill, then another. Fifteen minutes of zero movement. Locals blamed phone-locking pouches, but security was the real bottleneck. After fifty slow minutes a will-call clerk glanced at our envelope and said, “Artist entrance.” I nodded as if this were routine. Rusty Anderson—traffic-cone-as-hat legend turned McCartney guitarist—had come through. A handler waved us forward and we cut to the front of security, and that’s when it happened: as we climbed the final hill and moved into position at the Bowl, the unmistakable chords of “Help!” drifted over us. First time since 1990—and we were hearing it, not seeing it. A perfect, frustrating grace note.
Inside, Section N, aisle seats. McCartney was exactly what you hope for: kind, generous, funny. He talked about being a kid from Liverpool, about his new wife and his late wife, Linda—Mary leaned over and whispered that Linda had died in Santa Barbara. Maybe that’s why he chose to launch the tour here. Maybe not. Either way, it landed.
He moved from Wings swagger to Beatles heartache, even Now and Then with a ghostly Lennon on screen. When the footage rolled—John young and strong, voice stitched into Paul’s live harmony—I thought again of that cold morning on the Boston Post Road, radio crackling with the news of Lennon’s death. Cool and a little eerie, the past and present sharing a mic.
Then Blackbird. No tricks, no spectacle—just a man with a guitar, hands and voice carrying a song that Paul once explained was inspired by the civil-rights struggle in the American South. Simple, direct, luminous. In that hush the crowd ceased to be a crowd; it was one instrument, one heartbeat.
The drive home brought it full circle. Highway 101 was half-closed for construction—10:45 p.m., really?—and Mary finally drifted off, head back, mouth open, after reliving a lifetime of shows and passing me her Amoeba photos one more time. I took the detour, Lennon in my head, McCartney in my ears, grateful for every gate I’ve slipped through and every song that still finds a way to get back.
Setlist — Santa Barbara Bowl, September 26, 2025
1) Help! (The Beatles song) (First time since 1990)
2) Coming Up
3) Got to Get You Into My Life (The Beatles song)
4) Let Me Roll It (Wings song)
5) Getting Better (The Beatles song)
6) Let ’Em In (Wings song)
7) My Valentine
8) Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five (Wings song)
9) I’ve Just Seen a Face (The Beatles song)
10) Love Me Do (The Beatles song)
11) Dance Tonight
12) Blackbird (The Beatles song)
13) Now and Then (The Beatles song)
14) Lady Madonna (The Beatles song)
15) Jet (Wings song)
16) Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (The Beatles song)
17) Get Back (The Beatles song)
18) Let It Be (The Beatles song)
19) Live and Let Die (Wings song)
20) Hey Jude (The Beatles song)
21) Encore: I’ve Got a Feeling (The Beatles song) (with virtual John Lennon duet)
22) Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise) (The Beatles song)
23) Helter Skelter (The Beatles song)
24) Golden Slumbers (The Beatles song)
25) Carry That Weight (The Beatles song)
26) The End (The Beatles song)
(Eric Preven is a Studio City-based television writer-producer, award-winning journalist, and longtime community activist. He is known for his sharp commentary on transparency and accountability in local government. Eric successfully brought and won two landmark open government cases in California, reinforcing the public’s right to know. A regular contributor to CityWatch, he combines investigative insight with grassroots advocacy to shine a light on civic issues across Los Angeles.)
