Standing in the shadow of the world's greatest songwriter

We should appreciate Paul McCartney while we still have him as an active performer

Providence smiles on Paul McCartney as much as his legions of fans apparently. Costa Rica is washed by Biblical rains every day at this time of year - but not when the former Beatle played to 30,000 devotees on November 5th in San José.

I saw one guy holding a sign that said: “Your music has saved my life.” I knew what he meant. The concert offered a three hour respite from U.S. politics. 

The San José leg is one of the final concerts in McCartney’s Got Back tour that started in April 2022 and will end in London on December 19th. Could that be his last ever performance? He has said retiring is a prelude to expiring but he’ll be 83 next June. 

Still, while the voice exhibits vulnerabilities, he and his bandmates - collaborators for far longer than the time he spent in the Beatles - were full of charm and energy, playing a juke-box of hits from more than 60 years of writing good, and often great, songs. His enthusiasm onstage seems undimmed from the world’s first ever major stadium concert that featured the Beatles at Shea Stadium, New York, nearly six decades ago.

(Interesting factoid for music geeks: McCartney spent much of the evening playing the Höfner violin bass he bought in Hamburg in 1961, which also featured in the gig at Shea Stadium. It was stolen in 1972 but returned to its owner last year after after going missing for more than half a century. )

At one point, the band segued from Let Me Roll It into Foxy Lady. “That was a tribute to the late, great Jimi Hendrix - a great guy,” McCartney said, a reminder that he has known every star of note over the past half century.

Those songs are as familiar as nursery rhymes - and no wonder. Early in the set, he played Got to Get You Into My Life, which was on the Revolver album that was released a month after I was born in 1966. The melodies were absorbed subliminally in childhood with mothers’ milk, bonding people all over the world to the Fab Four like family members. 

My eldest son inherited my love of the Beatles and my vinyl collection. On the last visit to Edinburgh he boasted proudly of spending his last £20 on an original copy of Rubber Soul, replete with an authentic scratch right through Norwegian Wood. 

For three generations of music lovers, McCartney has been a constant presence in their lives and when he goes the sense of loss will be profound all over the world. 

The people in the crowd around me sang along in English for nearly three hours, even though only 10 percent of Ticos speak the language. 

The most affecting moments - genuinely moving - were McCartney’s tribute to John Lennon, Here Today from the Tug of War album, where the two are holding a hypothetical conversation, and then his version of George Harrison’s Something, which began with him playing a ukelele that Harrison had given him. 

Lennon’s Now and Then released a flood of nostalgia, with its video of four men we’ve never met but who feel as familiar as our closest friends.

I can go for years without tearing up, depending on the football results, but I was choked to be there. 

Were we witnessing history? Maybe. Greatness? Undoubtedly. Genius? Quite possibly. 

Nobody else could close out the regular set with songs as good as Let It Be, Live and Let Die and Hey Jude, before concluding the encore with the medley from side two of Abbey Road, regularly rated in the top three of the best albums ever made. 

McCartney is enjoying a renaissance, proof of playwright Alan Bennett’s contention that if you survive all is forgiven. “If you eat a boiled egg at 90, they think you deserve a Nobel Prize,” Bennett said. 

It wasn’t always thus. McCartney got the blame for breaking up the Beatles and it was the owl-glasses figure of John Lennon, the working-class hero, whose poster was on teenage walls in the 1970s and 80s.

McCartney, meanwhile, was blotting his copybook by singing about the frog chorus, and ebony and ivory living in perfect harmony on his keyboard. 

It was a cutting comment on his lack of cool before the turn of the Millennium that the perennially unfashionable comedy character, Alan Partridge, once said: “Wings - the band the Beatles could have been”. 

But as Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary made clear - showing as it did, McCartney sitting at a piano writing Let It Be in front of his semi-detached bandmates - it was the more conventional Beatle who was the driving force. 

Musicologists consider McCartney to be a natural melodist, who developed into a focused musician, with perfect pitch, an expansive vocal range and an ear for counterpoint. 

By comparison, Lennon is viewed as an undisciplined artist, whose melodies cling to the rhythms and cadence of speech. 

There’s no doubt that in combination they pushed each other into realms of experimentation and excellence they would not have reached on their own. “Everything had to be different,” McCartney said of the Sgt. Pepper recording sessions. They seldom scaled those heights in their solo careers. 

The crass reason for this long overdue retrospective approach to McCartney is that we know we are going to lose him soon - if not physically, then musically. 

That sense of indebtedness received a jolt with the 2019 musical comedy Yesterday, which imagined a world in which the Beatles had never existed. It was a colder, darker place.

It has taken a long time for McCartney to be bestowed with “national treasure” status, in much the same way as elderly royalty eventually ripens beyond criticism.

What will be his legacy? Will people in 50 or 100 years still be listening to McCartney’s songs when he will be as remote in time from that audience as the Victorians are from us? 

Marcus Aurelius reminds us that mortal life is a little thing, “lived in a little corner of the earth”, and that fame is little too, since it is dependent on “fast-perishing little men who have no knowledge of their own selves, much less of one long dead and gone.” 

But McCartney’s influence reached far beyond his little corner of north-west England, and his wonderful songs will endure long after we are all gone.

Meantime, let’s relish the 20th century’s greatest songwriter while he is still treading the boards and spreading joy in a troubled world.

 

Photo by IJ Portwine on Unsplash