50 years ago today: Paul McCartney and Wings rocked Seattle’s brand-new Kingdome

Fifty years ago today, a skinny 15-year-old squeezed onto the floor of Seattle’s brand-new Kingdome to see Paul McCartney and Wings and watched rock history made in the process.

The June 10, 1976 concert was the first rock show ever staged at the Kingdome, drawing 67,000 fans to the freshly opened domed stadium. It also marked McCartney’s first Seattle appearance since The Beatles’ final tour in 1966.

Among the crowd that night was KIRO Newsradio’s Corwin Haeck, who had just finished his sophomore year at Sammamish High School in Bellevue.

“It was the last day of school,” Haeck recalled. “We showed up early, and my pals and I got out of there as soon as we could, and booked it on down to the dome. I’d never even been inside the place, and now I was going to see this massive rock show.”

By 1976, The Beatles had been broken up for six years, and Wings — McCartney’s follow-up band — was riding a string of glam-tinged hits dominating FM radio. For younger fans, the former Beatle was almost a bonus.

“The joke is, ‘Oh, you mean Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?'” Haeck said. “Some of the kids might have thought that. But certainly a lot of the folks were there to see the icon.”

Tickets in that era didn’t come with assigned seats. General admission, festival-style, meant getting in line early and staying there.

“There were throngs — the long hairs, the jeans, the t-shirts,” Haeck said. “We were settling in for the long haul, which was going to be eight hours, maybe six hours before the doors actually opened.”

The wait produced an unexpected moment. Haeck said McCartney himself, along with wife Linda and the rest of Wings, appeared on one of the Kingdome’s outdoor concourses to wave to fans below.

“There they were,” Haeck said. “I hadn’t seen many rock shows, but never seen anything like that before. Showing up before the show, just to say hi to the crowd.”

The Kingdome concert experience

Inside, Haeck pushed through the crowd to within roughly 50 yards of the stage. The Kingdome’s notoriously rough acoustics held up better than expected, he said. The bigger problem was sightlines.

“I’m just a skinny kid, and you really had to do this to look above all the people who were in front of you,” he said. “But the sound system overcame it. It was really loud, and we were fine with it.”

The Wings stage production was state-of-the-art for the era, including one of the first large video screens used at an arena rock show. The standout moment, Haeck said, was the band’s pyrotechnic-heavy performance of “Live and Let Die.”

“Explosions, lasers. Lasers at a show were something kind of new and cool,” he said. “Linda McCartney introduces the song. She gets up there and says, ‘This next song is about a secret agent called 007.’ A lot of people thought, ‘Linda, what are you even doing in this band?’ But Paul wanted her there. What a great moment.”

The set leaned heavily on Wings material, with only a handful of Beatles songs — “Yesterday,” “Lady Madonna” and “The Long and Winding Road” among them.

“He was at that time still trying to separate himself from the Beatles legacy,” Haeck said. “Later on in McCartney’s solo career, he did begin to lean heavily on those songs. Back then, though — Wings, baby.”

The Kingdome was demolished in 2000, replaced by Lumen Field and T-Mobile Park. But for Haeck, who has seen McCartney perform five more times since, the night stands alone.

“It’s just unrivaled,” he said. “It was one of the greatest nights of my young life.”

Manda Factor is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. Follow Manda on X and email her here. 

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