McCartney and me

Paul McCartney at the Coachella music festival in Indio, California, earlier this year. (Myles McNutt Photo)

It took a pilgrimage to the desert to find the elusive Beatle.

I was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with 160,000 concertgoers on a massive polo field in the town of Indio, California, about 200 kilometres east of Los Angeles. It had been an exhausting first day of the Coachella music festival as I frantically rushed from stage to stage, hoping to catch as many hipster-approved artists as possible, artists such as Franz Ferdinand, Conor Oberst and the Hold Steady. But as Morrissey left the main stage and the crowd condensed, all the collected exhaustion seemed to dissipate into the cooling California night. The buzz began to grow for what would become, for almost everyone, the defining performance of the weekend.

That’s when Sir Paul McCartney walked onto stage and blasted into Jet. 

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Being a younger music fan in the 21st century sometimes feels like an endless search for a party that’s already come and gone. We’re constantly told about a mythical “golden age” of rock and roll that we missed out on, canonized in best-of lists and classic rock radio stations. Making matters worse is that so few of those iconic figureheads are still with us for my generation to experience first-hand. Like so many others, I had the music of The Beatles passed down to me by my parents, but I grew up in a world without John Lennon. I now live in a world without George Harrison.

But Paul’s still here.

Quite literally ‘here,’ in fact, as for the first time McCartney is heading to our shores for a blockbuster concert this Saturday on the Halifax Common. Organizers expect 60,000 concertgoers to crowd the stage (or sit back in their promoter-approved “fold-in-a-bag” chairs) for a chance to see the Beatle with their own eyes and ears…or, at the very least, projected onto a very large screen.

Steve Baur wouldn’t miss it. “I want my seven-year-old daughter to tell her children that she saw a Beatle,” explains the Dal music professor, who coincidentally was actually wearing a Fab Four T-shirt when I dropped by his office to chat with him. Given that Dr. Baur teaches courses in popular music and has edited a book on the philosophy of the Beatles, you could say he is something of a professional Beatlemaniac.

“McCartney is really the master of absorbing all kinds of great songwriting traditions, from British musical to Bob Dylan folk style to classical, and synthesizing them into something that really helped make the Beatles so unique,” he explains.

His favourite McCartney compositions?  “Hey Jude,” he says without much hesitation. “I remember the first time I heard it – it hit me like I had always known it, like it had always been there. It’s one of the all-time great song compositions. There’s also Let It Be…that was my senior quote in my yearbook. “Though we may be parted, there is still a chance that we may see, there will be an answer, let it be.” Somewhat optimistic, I guess!”

Math professor Jason Brown has garnered international attention by using mathematical theory to decode the Beatles’ iconic songs. He also cites Hey Jude first when asked about the most memorable McCartney song. “I don’t know if there’s a better living songwriter in terms of melody,” he says. “In his songs there are such clever musical tricks that he uses, what he does to both set up expectations and to break them, to surprise you. I think the best songwriters like Paul are gifted in knowing the balance between the two.”

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No argument from me. If anything, I sometimes find myself having to defend McCartney’s legacy when conversations about the Beatles come up. With John Lennon’s untimely passing and the rightful reassessment of George Harrison’s contributions to the band after his death, it feels like we’ve collectively wrestled with their shortcomings and ultimately decided that their brilliance is what’s worth remembering. With McCartney, though, we all too often dwell on the shortcomings: the saccharine tone of many of his songs, the hit-or-miss nature of his later works, his heart-on-sleeve activism that has got him into trouble several times, most recently with supporters of the Canadian seal hunt.

But we’re talking about the guy who wrote Eleanor Rigby. The man who, along with producer George Martin, curated the second side of Abbey Road, which I contend is still perhaps the most amazing 22 minutes of pop music ever recorded. A performer whose solo career highlights – such as the Band on the Run album – would stand tall even without the Beatles legacy propping them up. But it’s almost as if we punish McCartney because he’s chosen to keep recording and to stay in the spotlight – for better and for worse.

Perhaps it’s just that he’s attempting a near-impossible feat: continuing to make music in the shadow of his former band. “What a legacy to live up to,” says Dr. Baur. “Every record you put out, the bar is so high. People wonder if the next Hey Jude is on the new record. You can’t write Hey Jude every time, and even if what he’s doing is equal to or better than what his contemporaries now are doing, people will still compare to his classic work.”

“John and Paul were both brilliant in different ways, and that’s why their partnership was so amazing,” adds Dr. Brown. “[McCartney’s] written some very good songs since then, but it is difficult to make up for that kind of partnership. You know, you see those kinds of partnerships in research too. There are some very famous pairs of mathematicians who tend to work together – von Neumann and Morgenstern come to mind – and the sum is more than the individual parts.”

So just how does the McCartney of 2009 add up on his own?

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As I stood in the California desert this past April, I confess that I was unsure how McCartney would encompass such a long and complicated career – and an equally-complicated legacy – into one performance. In particular, I was nervous that I was about to witness a museum piece: a stale, static run-through of classic tracks, a once-great performer going through the motions to appease a conservative fan base.

I admit that sounds a bit condescending; it’s probably just the punk rock side of my brain screaming out its last indignation before I leave my 20s. But there’s something that’s always troubled me about the number of Baby Boom bands seemingly content to feed their back catalogue to their fans time and time again. Even those that still sell records – Black Ice was a pretty big hit for AC/DC – are content to stick to the classics live, and their fans are more than happy to sit back and soak them in. Wasn’t rock and roll supposed to be challenging? About sticking it to The Man, not just taking his money?

And yet, there I was, one of thousands who had handed over our money to witness a Beatle play the classics. And I’ll be damned if McCartney didn’t deliver beyond my wildest expectations.

In part, it was the sheer volume of material: almost three hours, 35 songs, nearly anything and everything I had ever wanted to hear Paul McCartney play from both the Beatles catalogue and his solo career. It was so overwhelming that I was forgetting songs as the show went along; when he opened the second encore with Yesterday, maybe his most famous composition, I hadn’t even realized it was absent from the show thus far.

But it was also that that the performance felt as natural as it was calculated, like there was a weight still carried in every note in spite of how many times they had played through my stereo. He paid tribute to his fallen brothers not only by playing their songs – I won’t spoil which ones, lest he do the same in Halifax – but by delivering a captivating version of Here Today that left all 160,000 of us silent. And when McCartney confided to the crowd that it was the anniversary of his wife Linda’s passing, it gave an emotional edge to My Love that I never expected the “silly love song” to ever have.

Both of the Beatles experts I spoke with will be at the Halifax Common concert. While Dr. Baur experienced McCartney live in concert back in the late 1980s, Dr. Brown has never seen him in person. I can safely say that both are in for a treat this Saturday.

As for me, I wasn’t originally planning on attending the show, since I suspect it will be largely the same experience that I had in California this April. But the more I think about it as, the fewer issues I have with hearing those same songs one last time, straight from the mouth of the man who made them magical in the first place.