sarcastic line in a duet dialogue, it would
be, like, ‘Hold on a minute, I’ve seen
this movie before,’ and we’d laugh and
change it around.”
The desire to change things around
has sometimes led McCartney to make
curious decisions; and critics have, at
times, suggested that he stay in his lane.
When McCartney’s classical foray
“Liverpool Oratorio” made its Ameri-
can début, in 1991, Edward Rothstein,
of the Times, ended his review by recall-
ing the story of George Gershwin ap-
proaching Arnold Schoenberg for les-
sons in composition. “Why do you want
to be an Arnold Schoenberg?” Schoen-
berg supposedly asked. “You’re such a
good Gershwin already.” Yet McCartney,
while being a well-compensated conser-
vationist and travelling performer of the
Beatle past, is intent on exploring what-
ever moves him. When he’s living in the
English countryside, as he often is, he
will work out in the morning and then
head for his studio to write and record.
As a musician and a performer on-
stage, McCartney remains phenome-
nal, playing three-hour concerts—five
or six times longer than the Beatles’
shows in their heyday—to enormous
crowds. He sings Beatles songs in their
original keys and at the top of his reg-
ister: “I can’t be bothered to transpose
them.” He seems eager never to disap-
point. As his daughter Mary told me,
“Look, he’s an entertainer! You’ll see
him play ‘Live and Let Die’ and he’s
surrounded at the piano by all these
pyrotechnics, all these flames, and I’m,
like, ‘Dad, I can feel the heat from those
flames! Do you have to do that?’ But he
says the audience loves it. I say, ‘Don’t
do that to yourself, it’s a huge risk!’ But
he won’t be told.”W
hen I watch McCartney per-
form, I can’t help thinking about
that Newport Jazz concert my father
and I attended in 1973. When we were
backstage, Gene Krupa, the drummerfor Benny Goodman’s band, sat slumped
in a chair, silent, staring at a space in
the carpet between his shoes. He seemed
racked with dread and very old. Then,
onstage, he shook off whatever weighed
on him and came alive to the sound of
his old friends: Goodman’s sinuous clar-
inet, Hampton’s glowing vibes, Wilson’s
liquid runs on the piano. Just before
“Avalon,” the customary closer, Krupa
had his moment, beating his mother-
of-pearl tomtom to open “Sing, Sing,
Sing,” a standard that Goodman and
Krupa had made into an extended im-
provisational set piece. Krupa was a run-
away train. The hall throbbed to his
foot at the bass drum. There was some-
thing ominous, even frightening, about
the spectacle of this sickly man, now
come dangerously alive, at the edge of
abandon. When Krupa was done, and
the applause rained over him, you could
see that his shirt was drenched.
After the show, we waited by the
stage door on Fifty-sixth Street, hop-
ing to see Teddy Wilson and thank him.
The door banged open and an immense
security guard burst onto the sidewalk.
He was carrying an old man, seemingly
unconscious, in his arms. It was Krupa,
wrapped in towels. A cab pulled up, and
the guard funnelled him into the back
seat. Less than four months later, we
read in the paper that Krupa had died,
after struggling for years with leukemia.
He was sixty-four.
For a time, the melodies just seemed
to pour forth from McCartney, as if he
were a vessel for something unearthly.
He is still able to locate the magic oc-
casionally. “McCartney III” is not “The
White Album,” but there is a home-
made, easygoing quality to his music,
the work of a contented family man, a
grandfather many times over. On songs
like “Long Tailed Winter Bird” and
“Find My Way,” he is a craftsman who
comes across with infectious, play-all-
the-instruments zest. He knows as well
as any critic that the essential songs were
almost all done with the Beatles. But
why bang on about “Bip Bop”? Who
among the living has brought more de-
light into the world?
Paul Muldoon, McCartney’s col-
laborator on “The Lyrics,” observes, “For
every Yeats, who did pretty well into old
age, there are a hundred Wordsworths.
Most poets and songwriters fade as they“Hey, got your message. Just wanted to let you know
you spelled ‘desperately’ wrong.”