Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Sour’ First Anniversary Tour Was Something to Scream About

Olivia Rodrigo probably isn’t begging to be compared to Paul McCartney. No one would wish that on a superstar — we can call her that now, right? — who just turned 19 years three months ago. But with Rodrigo’s two very sold-out appearances at the Greek this week following so closely on the heels of the last major concert event in the L.A. market, Paul McCartney’s SoFi Stadium show two weeks ago, it was hard for the admittedly small subset of those of us who attended both not to come up with at least a couple of correlations. Starting with the high dB levels among their respective crowds. McCartney, for his part, has to do a bit of encouraging to really turn the dull roar into something more pitched: “C’mon, girls, give us a Beatles scream!” he coyly implored at one point, as he does every night on this tour. But Rodrigo’s crowd didn’t need any encouragement to scare the tar out of any mountain lions that might be lurking in the nearby Griffith Park hills. They use their words when they scream, too: Imagine if all those early Beatles fans had been able to channel their cacophony into ear-piercing but picture-perfect recitations of “Things We Said Today.”

With Rodrigo, it’s “Brutal”-mania — not a simulation, but the real thing (to twist an old theatrical tagline).

Having established a point of commonality, we can acknowledge how hilariously opposite these two engagements were in some other pretty obvious ways. Every time McCartney hits the road nowadays, he is faced with boiling down hundreds of songs from a six-decade career into a set that will last a generous 160 minutes. The shows on Rodrigo’s first tour ever, meanwhile, will top out at 60 … and that’s with some choice padding (a couple of covers; an intermediary costume change and some band vamping) to nudge it there from the 35 it would last if she only did a straight run-through of her debut album, “Sour.” It took some of us longer to get out of the Greek’s hillside parking lots and down to Los Feliz Blvd. afterward than it did to experience her performance.

Olivia Rodrigo performs onstage during her “Sour” tour at The Greek Theatre on May 24, 2022 in Los Angeles, California.Christopher Polk for PMC

But as any punk-rock veteran can tell you — or probably anyone who caught the Beatles’ blink-and-you’ll-miss-it performances back in the day! — quick can be good, awfully good, when it’s quick and intense. You wouldn’t call all of Rodrigo’s show fast and furious, not when the pop-punky opener, “Brutal,” and closer, “Good 4 U,” served to bookend a lot of slow ballads and acoustic numbers and even a gosh-darn waltz. Nor did the grin that was plastered on her face bely a grim determination of spirit, exactly. Let’s talk about Rodrigo’s touring fashion sense, too: Plaid —it just doesn’t seem angry. Smiles aside, though, this is a crowd that isn’t just emptily mouthing the words at the top of its lungs: It’s a congregation of 90% girls — a Greek chorus — that you can feel literalizing the words, thinking back to their first heartbreak, which may have been a month ago, or aspiring toward a first one, and saying “eff you” to The Man, even if that has come in the form of a dumb boy.

When you have almost 6,000 girls (and a few hundred guys, probably, sure, and pockets of sympathetic elders old enough to be their ancestors) bellowing the words to a credibly disaffected, post-Disney, teen-riot-grrl anthem like “Brutal,” how does that not warm your rock ‘n’ roll heart? But to the credit of Rodrigo’s fan base, they knew their way around an actual melody, too. The loveliest moment of Wednesday night’s show came when the star brought out “Sour’s” co-writer/producer, Dan Nigro, to perform the plaintive “Favorite Crime” with her as an acoustic two-hander. The audience got less shouty and, without losing a lot in the way of volume, followed the intricacies of the tune’s prettier turns, even in the section near the end where the rush of words quickens and Rodrigo starts singing in a sort of double-time. So give this crowd under contract, already.

Read more: https://variety.com/2022/music/opinion/olivia-rodrigo-tour-sour-column-1235279542/