Интервью с Полом (10 апреля 2002)

Интервью с Полом:
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http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer...7496921&call_pagepath=Entertainment/Music
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'I can still do it'

Paul McCartney talks life and love
Greg Quill
Quill Inquiries

LAS VEGAS - He's gonna carry that weight a long time.

The weight of legend and myth, the weight of being the wealthiest composer in the history of pop music, the weight of outliving two of the other Fab Four, the weight of losing a wife after 30 years from whom he had never been separated for more than a few hours, the weight of the adulation of half the world's population, the weight of the meaning his music has brought to millions during 40 of his 60 years, the weight of comparisons to Mozart, Bach and Beethoven.

"Well, that's a load of rubbish, isn't it?" says Paul McCartney, as he throws himself down on a black velvet-covered sofa in a backstage lounge at the 15,000-seat MGM Grand Garden Arena. "I take all that with a pinch of salt. It's very nice of them to say all that, but I must say ...

"I like Cole Porter, but I'm not sure I want to go up against him, or Beethoven, Gershwin, whoever. People suggest I'm in that league, but I don't think of myself that way. I just try and do well. When I write a song, I always try for something great, and if I get lucky, it works. But I don't really analyze what makes it work. It's intuition.

"I'm not clever like them. I write to please myself. I've caught myself sometimes trying to be clever, and I think, `What if it just got simple?' And I always surprise myself."

McCartney has just finished a sound check for the first of two shows that have brought him back to Sin City. He was here once before, during The Beatles' first American tour in 1964. They were too famous then to be let loose in these gilded palaces, and had slot machines installed in their hotel rooms so they could get a taste of the place. This time around, Vegas is just another arena on what some say may be his final tour.

"Well, I never use that word," he says. "I never think that far ahead."

Here, in the excess-obsessed dark heart of the American imagination, ticket prices for the Driving USA concert range between $100 and $350 (U.S.). When it rolls into Toronto's Air Canada Centre Saturday, McCartney's show С an expansive and joyful exploration of the best of his life's work, performed by the same band that helped him record his most recent album, the not-so best-selling Driving Rain - will be more reasonably priced, with tickets, if you can get them from anyone but a scalper, between $57 and $250 Canadian.

Though he's entitled to the sobriquet, having been elevated to knighted status in 1997, "Sir Paul" would hang on this small man like a bad suit, not unlike the outfit he's wearing, in fact - rumpled, off-white linen jacket and trousers, a khaki T-shirt and white socks. The canvas shoes were dispensed with the minute McCartney sat down. Chewing nuts from a cup he has carried into the room, McCartney looks perfectly at home. "And about the future and how posterity will address me, I don't care, really," he continues, his Liverpool accent as warm and chummy as it was in 1964, when Americans were first charmed by it.

"I'm pleased with what's happening to me right now. It feels good, and that's about as far as I can take it.

"If I was worried about protecting my legacy, I'd have retired years ago. People have actually suggested that - 'Paul, you've done so much, why not rest on your laurels?'

"And I tell them I wouldn't like that. What would I do? It would make me unhappy. I like playing music. It's that simple."

Later that night, before a sold-out crowd, he proves how happy he is to play again. It has been nine years since the last tour. He could easily have faded from the public eye and indulged his newfound passion for painting and poetry, written memoirs, enjoyed, with his new girlfriend, 34-year-old amputee rights activist Heather Mills, the kind of quietly extravagant life that his accumulated wealth - $2 billion - could buy.

He could have continued lobbying for animal rights and the environment, as he did with his first wife, Linda, and landmine clearance, as he does now with Mills, whom he'll marry in June. No one would hold it against him. McCartney's part of the past, anyway. He has given his best. Sterling service. Dismissed with honours.

Besides, the demands of a three-month, 19-city tour, of 2 1/2-hour concerts every other night, are enough to make a man half McCartney's age wither.

But here he is, weeks shy of 60, roaring through more than three dozen songs, reinvesting body, heart and soul in music that spans a lifetime and two generations, singing in the same keys he sang in at age 19, rocking and rolling as if there were no tomorrow.

"I can still do it, touch wood," he says, incredulously. "I don't know how. It's ridiculous. If I think about it too much, I frighten myself. I really don't get tired. I don't even like talking about it for fear tomorrow I'll be struck down.

"At the moment I feel blessed. I feel very energetic I have this great new relationship and that has given me a new lease on life."

He's up to his neck in new work. Last year he published his first collection of poems, Blackbird Singing. His paintings are being exhibited in important galleries. He oversaw the production of the enormous The Beatles Anthology and Wingspan CD and video sets, and is thinking about putting together a sequel to last year's monster collection of Beatles singles, Beatles 1.

And suddenly, McCartney's cheerful, wistful and sentimental music seems utterly wholesome, appropriate and necessary again. As The Beatles did in 1964, when Americans needed distraction, energy, and a tonic after the assassination of John Kennedy, McCartney fits the bill in the aftermath of Sept. 11. This is healing music, buoyant, frivolous, resonant with memories of good times, and ringing with hope.
And McCartney holds nothing back. The show, put together, he explains, "to give the people what they want to hear" rather than to promote the new, sales-challenged album, is generous and satisfying on every level and a collection of some of the brightest and most comforting musical gems of the 20th century.

"Something has happened here in America since Sept. 11 that no one could have planned," McCartney says. "I just happened to be in America recording, happened to be asked to do the Madison Square concert (for victims of the terrorist attacks on New York), and wrote a song, `Freedom,' because I thought that would be appropriate, since it's what those firemen and policemen value most.

"Now that song has become a very big part of our act and has sort of cemented our relationship with Americans all over again. The next thing was the Super Bowl, which wasn't planned, either - a billion in the (television) audience - and The Oscars. And since I had this great band (longtime keyboards player Paul `Wix' Wickens, drummer Abe Laboriel Jr., young Los Angeles session guitarist Rusty Anderson, and veteran bassist/guitarist Brian Ray) already together for the album, it seemed the time was right to do some more concerts."
As for the rigours of the road - it was the clamour and noise of touring that forced The Beatles off the stage and into the studio for the second half of their short career - McCartney says technological advances and seasoned handlers make performing much more pleasant these days.


"All it comes down to is me and music and the band - as long as we really enjoy playing is all that matters," McCartney says of his rediscovery of the joys of live performance.
He stops for a minute, as if about to correct himself.

"The thing is, I'm at a really good point in my life. I've had a lot of tragedy in the last few years, with Linda passing, then George. And now I'm over that particular hurdle, and it's a blessing."

There were times when he wondered if his own time was up.

"I didn't just wonder if I'd ever play again," he continues. "I wondered if I'd live.

"During that first year, after Linda died in 1998, I thought I might just conk out. It's been known to happen after the loss of a mate of over 30 years.

"We were very tight, never out of each other's sight. At the end of that year, and I hadn't conked out, I felt all right. At the end of the second year, I thought I saw light at the end of the tunnel, and that it wasn't the end of the world.

"And during that second year, I found my new girlfriend. She's great. I didn't think I could be that lucky twice.

"This is turning out to be a huge year," he says, suddenly cheerful again.

"I'm touring America, I've got an exhibition of paintings opening in Liverpool, and in June, the same month I'm getting married, we're playing for the Queen!"
He speaks of Her Majesty's Jubilee - he's performing alongside other Windsor family favourites Elton John, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins and Tom Jones - with the deference and awe of a working-class lad given a special dispensation.

"Like I said, I didn't plan any of this. (Beatles record producer) George Martin's involved with the Queen's jubilee, and he's such a great guy, that if he asks you, you do it.

"He's like a father figure, George, a great gentleman, and he puts it to you so civilly: `Paul, would there be any possibility of your playing for Her Majesty?'

"`Yes!' sez I.

"It was always like that. We never planned anything from The Beatles through Wings till now. The original idea was to form a really great band, and that happened.

"Then, Wings was a way of continuing after The Beatles, and that happened. Now, back on the road, I'm aware that all the good baggage that has accumulated has nothing to do with me. I didn't make it happen. It's not my fault."
Whatever McCartney has become - through talent, providence or smarts - he remains somehow stoically innocent. He answers questions on the most basic level, as if it would be presumptuous of him to suspect a deeper meaning. He's polite and familiar with people he meets, often appears a little too eager to please. He has always, it seems, wanted to be liked, to be one of the blokes. He's humble to a fault, self-deprecating, the first to mock his own pretensions. This is fundamental McCartney behaviour, no act. And it has served him well in the face of temptations to excess.

"There was a time when I didn't avoid them, at the end of the 1960s," he says. "I think it's something to do with my family. I come from a very level headed, working class family in Liverpool, and the worst thing they do is drink to excess. When I started smoking pot, my Aunty Gin was sent down to talk to me. I sent her back up north with a joint. Cheeky."
He laughs, and the drooped eyes sparkle like a child's. The years slip off his face, I remark.

"That's okay. But call it `child-like,' not `child-ish'. That gets a bit on me wick," he says.

"My family wouldn't take any nonsense from me. They're the kinds of people who keep your feet on the ground, very good people, honest people. I had a gut feeling that heroin and too much cocaine would burn you out. I sort of tried it, like everyone else, and I got fed up with it. I remember thinking, `This isn't really going anywhere.' I was supposed to be having fun, getting high, and I was only getting low."

His good nature sometimes gets the better of him, McCartney admits.

"Being a Gemini, I like to do all kinds of things. I've even got stamps being issued on the Isle of Man. It was another one of those things you wouldn't think of turning down. They wrote to me, saying they heard I painted, and would I like to send off some designs for stamps. And I said, `What? Yeah!' It's very simple - just pictures of little flowers, very rough. But nice colours. They wrote back to thank me when they arrived. `It was like Christmas this morning,' they said, `We're calling them The Happy Stamps.'

"Well, that's what I like in life. That's why I do a lot of things when I'm asked. I respond to enthusiasm. That's why I did that symphony (The Liverpool Oratorio, which he composed, orchestrated and conducted) at Liverpool Auditorium. It just sounded so exciting.

"Sometimes I agree to things before I think of the deeper significance of them. Luckily, my question is no longer how much does it pay, but how much enthusiasm is there, how much fun can I have with this?"

There's not much he hasn't seen, not many things he hasn't done. There's no place in the world he can go without being recognized, but he has learned to cope with most forms of public exposure - except paparazzi, who, he says, "violate" him constantly - with a polite refusal to sign autographs and a handshake.

"The list of things I want to do and see gets more complete," he says. "There have been so many great things that have happened to me. It's too difficult to single out the greatest.

"But some of the best are the first American tour with The Beatles. America, to us, was the land of the free, of Elvis and Little Richard, of all our idols, all those black blues and r'n'b musicians, and here we were, massive in America - arriving at the airport, Ed Sullivan, they were massive. Meeting the Queen the first time and playing for her, that was pretty massive. Recording Sgt. Pepper is something I'll never forget."

When it comes to naming regrets, McCartney hesitates. At the centre of his show, in a solo segment with just acoustic guitar, he pays tribute to his lost bandmates. To John Lennon he dedicates the ballad "Here Today," about the feelings he wishes they'd shared, and in memory of George Harrison, he plays the guitarist's masterpiece, "Something," on ukulele, в la George Formby. He used to amuse Harrison with this party trick, he explains.

"I used to say I'd never have any regrets. But as you go on, eventually you must have some, probably in relationships with people. I'm now in a more stable and secure point in the development of my character, when I feel like I'm all right. Not much more than that. So, now, if John was around, I'd want to spend more time with him, be more communicative with him. I'd like to say to him, 'Do you know what a huge f......g character you are in my life?' Get all serious with him. Just let him know.

"But you don't do these things when you should. I didn't. I wish I had.

"I had a chance to do that with George. Before he died, I was able to hold his hand for three or four hours. When people are gone, there's no chance to have another word with them. So, whatever you said to them the last time you have to live with.

"I did get into regretting things for a while. These characters were so central to my life, so important to so many other people's lives, and I didn't say to them everything I wanted to say, I didn't spend a lot of time with them. Then I thought: That's the way The Beatles were. We didn't all go off to the bar together after the show. We split up and did our own things. That was in our characters, and it may have been the reason we were what we were as a band.

"So I've sort of let myself off that hook."

And acknowledging what The Beatles accomplished together gives him peace now.

"Playing a lot of the early Beatles songs again, I'm impressed by their simplicity. That's why they work. In retrospect, it's easy to see why they connected.

"I don't often listen to our compilations, but I do listen a lot to Beatles 1, and I can look back on those songs like a craftsman appreciating a piece of old furniture.

"After all this time I'm able to say, 'That's well made, that is.'"

Супер!
Все же МакКартни - лучший!! :)