Wednesday, May 30, 2012

The McCartney Conundrum

Paul McCartney is my least favorite Beatle.
When I was a kid he was my favorite Beatle. Then I began to mature and reason and John became the man. His raw honesty and intense emotion expressed so openly in his songs knocked me out. Later on I realized how impressive George was. Contemplative, intelligent, a crafter of beautiful, insightful songs with an overlooked  wicked sense of humor. John and George remain equal in my mind forever. Ringo is cool. Laid back, funny; I like a lot of his songs and I like him as a person.
McCartney is superficial. Choose any interview and you'll notice he never says anything deep. Nothing inspirational. He seems full of himself, an impression confirmed by something I read many years ago that said he tried to reverse the song writing credits on a Beatles greatest hits collection.
However..................
I got home Monday night and immediately vegetated my sunburned, tired, satisfied ass onto my recliner. Punched up Palladia and waltzed right into a McCartney concert from 2007.
The audience always cracks me up. The guys all look like nerds. They look like business guys trying not to look like business guys, trying to look cool and failing miserably. Rocking out of time to the music.
The women look good. Maybe the camera guys focus only on the pretty ones, as camera guys tend to do. (Check out a Red Sox game if you don't believe me). You don't see 380 pound women rocking out to Paul.
Women are naturally more rhythmic, more fluid; they rock in time with the music. They are more natural and they don't look stupid grooving to the tunes.
McCartney sings Hey Jude and the whole place goes crazy singing along to the na na na na part. Belting it out with power and emotion. This is to be expected.
Then he sings Let It Be and the audience sings every word. Every f***ing word. This is not a mindless chant, this is reverence. This is connection. This reflects how much Paul McCartney and his music means to these people.
Let It Be is one of my favorite Beatles songs. It sparks a deeply emotional response in me. The phrase was his mother's, she used to say it all the time. The Mother Mary in the song was his mother. The song almost has religious overtones to it.
So this is my eternal dilemma. He IS Paul McCartney. No matter how hard I try to intellectualize him as the least significant Beatle, I am in awe of him. Always will be. Had I been in that audience I would have been singing every word to Let It Be. And every word to every other song too. I am obnoxious that way. If you are not of my generation you cannot understand this. You cannot understand the impact, the power, the meaningfulness.
I can say with confidence that there will never be another phenomenon like The Beatles. And I was right there to drink it in and make it a part of my DNA, my emotional makeup, my outlook on life.
I was looking at him on that stage and thought how bizarre it was that he was surrounded by musicians that I could not name. Not John, not George, not Ringo. And yet there was still an aura. As a Beatle his aura is powerful enough to dominate any stage, no matter who else is on it.
That audience wasn't singing Let It Be just because they like the song. They were singing it because they remember being blown away by The Beatles, they remember how that made them feel, what it did to their minds and their way of thinking. The song brought them back and they were basking in the emotion.
It was a cool way for me to slide back to reality. My brain was sunburned, but Paul McCartney managed to spark some life into it, got my emotions stewing, made me feel alive and awake.
The expressions on the audiences' faces said it all to me. They looked like kids seeing and hearing Paul McCartney for the first time. Radiant and reverent. But there was experience reflected there as well, an understanding of how life doesn't go the way you expect it to, undeniable physical aging fifty years down the road.
It was like his music brought the kid in them to the surface without wiping out the adult, like both those phases of life were merged together in their faces.
I criticize Mr. McCartney a lot but goddamn it, he is a Beatle.
That is a truth that I can never escape.
Nor do I wish to.

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