Maybe I'm Amazingly Angsty

...and why I can't just sit back and enjoy an amazing McCartney show.

Disclaimer: I'm about to crank the blowhard factor up pretty high. That is, when I talk about anything remotely emotional, I feel like a total blowhard trying to be deep, because I'm actually "Die Hard" deep on a good day, not even "Gladiator" deep. Is it more or less blowhard-y if I announce it first? In any case...

Seeing McCartney live is an emotionally confusing experience for me. Last Friday was show #6 for me. I can't say whether one show was better or worse than another, because, as per Paul's reputation, every show is flawless. He'll stop touring when he starts missing notes. The only mistake I've ever heard him make was forgetting the lyrics to You Never Give Me Your Money... on purpose, at every show on the tour, which encapsulates everything good and bad about his reputation as a perfectionist. The Seattle show was far and away the "biggest" show I've seen him do, so it goes down as my #1: it was the first show ever at Safeco, so there were actual fireworks (not just stage pyrotechnics), the living members of Nirvana reunited on stage (Seattle's favorite musical child helping to open the doors to our new largest concert venue), and it was definitely the hardest-rocking of the shows I've seen. And the weather was spectacular: a little sun for the earlier, lighter part of the show, then lights-and-explosions-in-the-dark for the *pounding* encores. Almost like he drew it up that way... Paul can afford to rent weather, right? There was plenty of Yesterday, but overall this was a rock show. "Special treats" that I hadn't heard before included Another Day, Ob-La-Di, and - most surprisingly - Mr. Kite. But highlights have not changed for me in six shows: down the line, it's Maybe I'm Amazed and Live and Let Die. I'm so fired up at the end of Live and Let Die that I literally have to fight the urge to run circles around the stadium (which would risk significant personal injury, and more importantly would have caused me to miss Hey Jude).

Here comes the blowhard-y part. For some reason, seeing (or sometimes even reading about) McCartney makes me marvel, usually not in an entirely happy way, at how much this person who is nominally from the same species as me has seen and accomplished in his life. He probably wrote 50 of the 1000 greatest songs of the recorded music era, played on another 50, and has met/toured-with/jammed-with everyone who recorded the other 900. For my money, he's *easily* the most "complete" musician of the 20th century; I have him down as the greatest songwriter, but any way you spin it he's in the top 50 as a songwriter, singer, multi-instrumentalist, live performer, and studio genius, and I can't put anyone else in the top 50 in all those categories. Beyond that, he's met presidents and prime ministers, played in front of possibly *billions* of eyes, and he's raised seven gazillion dollars for charity (not an exact figure, but if a gazillion were a real number, no matter what number it was, this would be a low estimate).

So all of that comes down somewhere between awe and self-pity for me. Some combination of (a) being or approaching "middle-aged" and (b) starting with moderate-at-best self-esteem, it's somewhat hard to just sit there and appreciate all that is McCartney without thinking "he does twelve things better than I do any one thing".

But that's maybe 30% of why I feel oddly conflicted at what should be a purely upbeat experience, or usually the day after. The other 70% has more to do with the fact that every show starts with grainy black and white clips of the Beatles in the studio, John and Paul hovering over a piano somewhere, the Beatles meeting x and y and z, the Beatles slowly growing up. If these are supposed to strike an emotional note with the audience, it works. Paul is 71 now, and has watched nearly all the other geniuses with whom he created modern music pass away, and no matter how much scrutiny has gone into documenting the Beatles' every step, he's the only one now who knows what was really happening when all those clips were captured, and the only one who knows what it felt like to be at the pinnacle of creativity that was Lennon/McCartney. The good and the bad of it: the moments of inspiration, and the telling each other to fuck-off-I'll-record-it-myself, all of which were part of the magic that we might never see again. In fact, the odds have it way against us seeing that magic again in my lifetime (I'm a computer scientist, so I have the authority to make up probabilities). And there's definitely a little hint of "holy crap, mortality and what not" and "even Paul can't take it with him" that factors in.

I know there are lots of "people who have done a lot of stuff and been around a while", but for some reason I don't get this strange wispy feeling when I think about what Henry Kissinger has seen and accomplished, or Bill Gates, or Dan Rather, or any living or non-living dignitaries or geniuses. This *only* happens with McCartney. It's not that I'm the biggest Beatles fan in the universe. I'm not. I probably know the words to 60% of the Beatles discography. I don't remember Beatles birthdays or who Ringo's wife is or how many kids Paul has or what guitar George played on Your Mother Should Know (also a surprise treat at this concert, BTW). Maybe it was being introduced to the Beatles at a formative place when I was just starting to play music (the first song my high school band played was Day Tripper... also a surprise treat at this concert, BTW). Or maybe I'm less angsty than I think, and there's no secret trigger in my past, and all 45,000 people at Safeco felt the same thing.

But to conclude my blowhardiness, I'll thank Paul for another spectacular show, for a reason to start picking up my guitar more often (the awe outweighs the self-pity, when push comes to shove, and I dug in yesterday for a good long round with this), and - though he didn't cook it himself - for the awesome veggie dog I ate before the show (that was just to make sure I concluded with something not-very-serious and more in keeping with my use of social media).

Here's the best review I found of the show. Good review, but why isn't he more angst-ridden?