McCartney: Sir Paul shows how it’s done

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.