THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER18, 2021 51
continue. Look at the Stones or the Kinks
or Pink Floyd. It’s very hard to keep on
doing it. But Paul is kind of engineered
to do it, to keep going.”
And maybe there are other factors.
Stevie Van Zandt, who has been play-
ing guitar in Springsteen’s E Street Band
since the early seventies, said, “The rock
generation has changed the concept of
chronological time. I personally know
seven artists in their eighties still work-
ing. And the entire British Invasion is
turning eighty in the next few years.
Nobody’s grandparents made it past
their sixties when we grew up.” He sees
“the birth of something I call ‘wisdom
art’—art that the artist could not have
created when they were young... so
there is a legitimate justification for con-
tinuing to create. You perform as much
of your latest work as you feel like. Then
you play ‘Hey Jude’ so everyone goes
home happy.”
It’s a good deal: McCartney contin-
ues to explore his creativity in the stu-
dio, but, when it comes time to perform,
he knows that his magic trick is to reach
across time and put the coin into the
jukebox. The melancholy of age and the
power of memory have always been cen-
tral themes for McCartney. He wrote
the tune for “When I’m Sixty-four” at
the age of sixteen. “Yesterday,” one of
the most covered songs of all time, is a
melody that came to him almost six de-
cades ago, in a dream.
T
he morning after the party, I re-
turned to McCartney’s house on
the beach. He’d been up late. Once the
film was over, there was dancing to a
string of boomer hits—“Hey Jude,” “We
Will Rock You,” “Miss You”—and he
occupied the center of the floor, shim-
mying for all he was worth. Also, he’d
had a few drinks.
“I’m a bit knackered,” he admitted,
greeting me at the door. His complex-
ion was pale, his eyes droopy. As we
walked into the kitchen, he said in a
comic stage whisper, “Coffee! Coffee!”
Nancy Shevell came by, dressed in a
bathrobe and reading texts on her phone.
For a few minutes, they did a post-party
rundown, assessing the thank-yous from
their guests. Outside, workers were load-
ing up the glassware and the folding
chairs. Shevell went to inspect their
progress. McCartney smiled. “Nancy
loves it,” he said. “She’s a little sad that
it’s over, I think.”
Stella McCartney was in tears when
she watched the film with her father. “It
did occur to me, watching it, that we
spent a lot of our childhood with Dad
recovering from the turmoil and the
breakup,” she told me. “Can you imag-
ine being such a critical part of that cre-
ation and then having it crumble? And,
as children, we were part of
a process in which our dad
was mourning. It was not
an easy thing for Dad, and
it lasted for a lot longer than
we probably knew.”
Sean Lennon, who was
five when his father was
killed and who now, with
Yoko Ono’s having with-
drawn from public life, rep-
resents the family’s interests
in the Beatles business, told me, “Time
has sort of made us all grow to soften
our edges and appreciate each other much
more. Paul is a hero to me, on the same
shelf as my dad. My mom loves Paul,
too, she really appreciates him. They’ve
had tensions in the past, and no one is
trying to deny it. But all the tension we
ever had, hyperbolized or not, makes it
a real story about real human beings.”
McCartney sat down to talk on a
screened porch. Projects lay ahead, some
of which he’d be completing as he hit
eighty. There’s a new children’s book just
out: “Grandude’s Green Submarine.” He’s
collaborating with the scriptwriter Lee
Hall, known for “Billy Elliot,” on a mu-
sical version of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
There’s even a quasi-Beatles song to fin-
ish. After Lennon died, Ono gave the
surviving members demos that he’d re-
corded at home. McCartney, Starr, and
Harrison worked on three, but added
tracks only to “Free as a Bird” and “Real
Love.” Now McCartney wants to fill out
the last of them, “Now and Then,” even
though Harrison had declared the song
“fucking rubbish.” McCartney also wants
to go back on the road, a life that he
finds invigorating. “I’ve been doing this
for a long time,” he said. “So another
me takes over: Professional Performing
Paul—the triple ‘P’!” If the question is
“Why do you keep at it?,” the answer is
plain: “I plan to continue living. That’s
the central idea.”
But the pandemic has been persistent,and McCartney was immersed in the
business of the past, with getting the
narrative right. The screening had been
emotional. He watched images of Linda
as a beautiful young woman, pregnant
with Mary, who was now sitting beside
him. And he saw himself with his friends,
at the end of the film, performing not
at a Syrian amphitheatre or in a Lon-
don park but on the roof of the Apple
building, running through
sublime takes of songs they’d
been working on, nailing
them at last. Forty-odd min-
utes of music that ended
with Lennon’s immortal an-
nouncement: “I’d like to say
thank you on behalf of the
group and ourselves, and I
hope we’ve passed the au-
dition.” Down on the street,
people heading out to lunch
stared up in wonder, unaware that they
were hearing the Beatles play together
in public for the last time.
The performer was now the specta-
tor, the observer of his younger self and
his “fallen heroes.” Amid that footage of
the Beatles, dressed in woolly winter
getups, playing with pace and precision,
all the bad stuff seemed to melt away.
Even for McCartney, there’s been a shift
in perspective—in part, a literal one.
“Whenever I was in the band, playing
live, I’d be facing out,” he said. “John was
to the left or to the right of me, so I
never got to sort of see him perform so
much. Except in the film. And there he
is in massive closeup. I can study every-
thing about him.”
Here and there, as McCartney watched,
he got a flash of the “old feeling”—Why
is Yoko sitting on that amp!—but time,
coupled with a new framing of the past,
has allowed him, and the audience, a
more benign view of things. They were
a gang, a unit, even a family, and happy
families are a bore, if they exist at all.
“The elder brother does shout at the
younger brother, and then they have fist-
icuffs, or whatever,” McCartney said. “It’s
all very natural.” He raised his voice above
the sound of workmen outside packing
up the tents. “Buying into this myth
that I was the bad one, it bothered me
for years. But I sort of feel like it doesn’t
bother me now, because I feel like a lot
of people sort of get it.” If he’s not entirely
over it, it’s because he’s still in it.