Paul McCart­ney, Coachella Music and Arts Fes­ti­val, Fri­day, April 17, 2009.

My back was about to col­lapse on itself and my heels felt like the bones were slowly mash­ing together into jelly, and I was slightly dizzy from dehy­dra­tion, heat, and hunger, but I was not about to give up my spot 100 feet from the stage. The Black Keys had shred­ded their speaker cones with sweet feed­back, Franz Fer­di­nand had lay down ener­getic, melodic dance grooves, and Mor­ris­sey had sung beau­ti­fully through a gri­mace induced by the aroma of bar­be­cued meat from across the fes­ti­val lawn. It had been five hours, and Ben, Mia and I were damned if we were going to budge.

After that long, you have to occa­sion­ally crouch down or even sit, if you have enough space, to relieve pres­sure on your back and joints. I’d say that at 29 I’m finally, or already, start­ing to give in to the frail­ties of approach­ing mid­dle age, but I recall it being the same way when I was 19, and any­way I’m in much bet­ter shape these days than I was back then.

But then it lifted as Sir James Paul McCart­ney MBE, the sur­viv­ing half of the rock song­writ­ing team before which all oth­ers should rightly bow and scrape, strode onstage, ful­fill­ing the best chance I will likely ever have to see pop genius in per­son, in all its glory. I mean … he was a Bea­tle. (Just a warn­ing: Very soon, I lose any sense of objec­tiv­ity and you’re about to read the biggest load of soppy gush­ing I’m likely to ever pub­lish here. If that last sen­tence doesn’t mean to you what it does to me, or if you want some­thing with more emo­tional vari­ety, skip to a cou­ple posts ago, when I gripe about sports.)

That’s not to say I expected the best con­cert I will have ever wit­nessed. After all, I fig­ured, the man is 66 years old, and he’s surely lost some of the power and range in his voice, hired some tech­ni­cally vir­tu­osic yet clin­i­cal tour­ing musi­cians to back him up, and moves with, let’s say, a bit more leisure than he used to. He might not even play a whole lot of Bea­t­les music.

But then he did.

He started off with some solo music, almost none of which I know very well, or at all. But just a cou­ple of songs in, he played “Drive My Car,” fol­lowed soon by “Got To Get You Into My Life,” and shortly there­after by “The Long And Wind­ing Road” and “Black­bird.” (“Black­bird” was a huge deal to me; that song is one of the friend­liest, home-iest things in my life, as my dad’s been play­ing it since I was a lit­tle kid and prob­a­bly before than, too. Some­time in my twen­ties, I fig­ured out that he played it a lit­tle dif­fer­ently from the record, and now I’m the one show­ing him how to play music.)

For the first half of his set, he played mostly solo stuff; then came “Eleanor Rigby,” one more solo song, “Band On The Run,” and then a jet engine fired up over the speak­ers and it was “Back to the U.S.S.R.” From then on, it was all Beatles.

Toward the end of the set, he played “A Day In The Life,” prob­a­bly my favorite pop song ever writ­ten. Unfor­tu­nately, he scrapped the final John Lennon-sung move­ment in favor of a round of “Give Peace A Chance,” totally ruin­ing the song’s bal­ance and struc­ture. But then he played “Let It Be,” which is right now the most affect­ing and ful­fill­ing song in my life, and I got a lit­tle snif­fley, and it wasn’t even my aller­gies or the dust. Even if his lead gui­tarist got too flashy with the solo.

The encores! It’s like he put his arm around my shoul­ders and said “You know, I know it’d mean a lot to you if I played this song and this one and that one over there, and I feel like being nice, Rick, so I’m gonna play just what you want to hear.” I mean, I already know every note to these songs. What could I pos­si­bly learn from hear­ing them one more time?

Well, by watch­ing Paul sing them in per­son, I could real­ize once again the sim­ple and breath­tak­ing fact that all these songs were com­posed by a cou­ple of guys younger then than I am now (daaaaang), in a few years in the mid-to-late 1960s. After all, there he was, the mas­ter­mind, singing them. And they’re still so good. And so is he: he has lost some range, but the voice is still strong, he can still howl “Hel­ter Skel­ter,” he moves like a guy 25 years younger. He’s like­able, and mel­low, and still cool even though we know he once did “The Girl Is Mine.”

I was even sur­prised how much I liked most of his solo songs. I have never been a huge fan of the McCart­ney radio hits, but I think I’m going to have to inves­ti­gate, now.

I’m not sure how many peo­ple remem­bered that it was the anniver­sary of Linda McCartney’s death. But then he men­tioned it, and I remem­bered where I was when she died, and all these things flooded back from that spring when I was about to grad­u­ate high school, leave home for the first time, go to school in the town she died in (coin­ci­den­tally), start liv­ing some­thing new. And I felt for him, as I think most every­one there did, and I was impressed that rather than spend a quiet evening in and request Sat­ur­day instead (I’m sure they would’ve accom­mo­dated him), he shared it with an audi­ence. The crowd was warm, and appre­ci­ated it.

He played for almost three hours, I think. For a full set list, see this.

In the end, we stood in the same spot for eight hours or so and Ben didn’t get home until around 4 a.m. I camped, and I slept like the dead until the sun and heat woke me the next day at around 7:30. I spent Sat­ur­day in an exhausted, sore fugue, except for the Amanda Palmer show (see pre­vi­ous post). But it was com­pletely worth it; after all, I recov­ered, and I will for­ever remem­ber hav­ing seen a Bea­tle play the Beatles.