Despite what we’ve all been used to for the past fifty years, Paul McCartney won’t be around forever, and during his past few tours, I’ve thought of trying to catch a show, but it never worked out. I didn’t want to miss another opportunity, so this week, I drove up to Albany to catch the opening night of the American leg of his “Out There” tour.
I drove up in the afternoon, met an Amherst friend for dinner, and made it to the Times Union Center just before McCartney took the stage, in front of thousands of very enthusiastic fans. I was in a section on the floor, pretty decent seats, thanks to a last-minute StubHub purchase.
I was torn between thinking of the show as very good Beatles karaoke – in fact, the best possible Beatles karaoke there could be – and then every once in awhile realizing that Paul was really one of them, and that when he talked about “the Sixties,” he was part of the group that, more than anyone, defined what “the Sixties” mean.
I didn’t really grow up listening to the Beatles, but I’ve always been interested in their music, at least as far back as early days at CTY when I started seeing more of their songs performed by kids my age (how did you learn to play the guitar?) and began learning the mythology. I’m no superfan, but I had the later albums, I watched the ANTHOLOGY series, and loved reading Revolution in the Head a few years back, a terrific book about how the Beatles recorded their music.
I picked up the Mono Box in 2009, and listened to all the albums once through, but didn’t really delve too deeply into it. A HARD DAY’S NIGHT is one of my all-time favorite films, and their connection to Peter Sellers, to Richard Lester, and that era of English filmmaking has always been interesting.
Last year, though, I picked up the first volume of Mark Lewisohn’s planned three-volume biography of the band, a book with the unfortunate name of The Beatles: All These Years, Volume 1: Tune In – the only thing worse than the name is the book’s UK cover – and over the last few months, I’ve been slowly making my way through it. Many times in the last ten years, especially when talking to Brent back in Anchorage, who was always the Beatles fan in my life, I had hoped and told myself I’d see Paul McCartney one day. He seemed to be touring fairly constantly, and was always appearing on the Tonight Show, SNL, and in benefit concerts. But the combination of reading this book and the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ first trip to America made it clear that I should really try to make it happen, and soon.
The book covers the Beatles’ early years, a period which is least known to me (and to most, I’d think), and listening to their earliest songs while reading about how the band and their music came to be shed a whole new light on this part of their output. I knew that the band was special in part because of their ability to master the two-minute pop gem as well as the experimental, ground-breaking sonic collage, but I’d never really explored their early albums.
Covers? Simple songs I’d heard a million times? The Mono Box really helped make this music fascinating again: they sound so good, and so present, that it’s hard not to appreciate them anew. Lewisohn’s book, however stiffly written – it reads like someone’s notes for a book, rather than the book itself – provides the background and tells the story of what led to these early recordings, and shows them for what they were: songs just as groundbreaking in their time as anything on “Sgt. Pepper’s.” I find these early albums more interesting than the later ones, now, mostly because the songs are new, or at least newer, to me, and having Lewisohn’s back story in my head makes them so much more interesting, each imbued with a significance I wouldn’t otherwise know. Grace is now obsessed with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and requests it in its English and German versions on our rides to school in the morning.
The concert was a great experience. I appreciated hearing the classic Beatles songs, as well as his quite good new material, though it was hard to escape the feeling that he had to be a bit on auto-pilot at this point. That feeling didn’t take away from the fact that here was Paul McCartney, child of the ’40s, inventor of the ’60s, now way past the ’80s, way beyond age 64, still rocking and playing these timeless songs for us. A pretty amazing night.
