A production team was busy preparing for the night's concert, an all-star charity event, and a few dozen lucky VIPs were loitering in the back and craning their necks to see the stage. There, loose-limbed and cheery in the spotlight, stood Paul McCartney, a performer who has been in the ear of the world so famously and for so long that it's a bit startling to see him in a quiet moment and realize that he is in fact an actual human being, not just a songbook with a voice and a name.
After playing the brassy Beatles classic “Got to Get You Into My Life," McCartney sat at a piano and, without looking down, his fingers found the familiar first notes to “Let It Be." It's a song that could make a bare cinder-block building feel like a cathedral, but there, echoing in the regal hall's empty corners, it had witnesses dabbing their eyes. After the church-steeple finale, a cheer went up and McCartney acknowledged what might be one of the smaller ovations of his career: “Thank you for that ripple of kindness pouring down the red-velvet rows. . . . “
Less than an hour later, sitting backstage, McCartney mentioned that “Let It Be" sounds very different to him now than when he recorded it in 1969. “In truth, a lot of them mean new things to me, I hear stuff I didn't hear in the past," said the 66-year-old singer. Like a man thumbing through a box of old love letters, he sees unexpected between-the-lines messages, such as hints of mysticism he now detects in the simple lyrics of “Got to Get You Into My Life."
“I remember roughly what I meant when I wrote them and sometimes they surprise me," said McCartney, who was relaxed and munching grapes with a gently puffing humidifier at his feet.
McCartney certainly has the old songs close at hand; he and the other gatekeepers of the Beatles industrial complex signed off on a series of legacy projects in recent years that put the classics in new contexts on film, television and the stage. There's more coming this September when the entire Beatles catalog will be reissued in remastered form and also featured in a new video game, “Rock Band: Beatles," a venture that has him especially excited (even though, he confessed, he's “not a video game guy and probably won't be any good at playing it").
Friday, McCartney will bring the Beatles songs to the California low desert as the headliner for the opening night of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, a franchise usually defined by alt-rock heroes, not knighted senior citizens. It's not an entirely foreign sector to McCartney -- he played England's massive and muddy Glastonbury Festival in 2004, for instance -- but he seemed intrigued by the challenge of finding more young listeners and new meanings.
