Paul Is Not Dead

This week marks the peak of a new wave of Paul McCartney mania, as his new CD "Memory Almost Full" arrives at record stores ... including, for the first time for a Macca release, the iTunes Store ... and at Starbucks coffee emporiums worldwide, where the CD was being promoted by constant play yesterday.

The ex-Beatle turns 65 later in the year, and my happy ears tell me — I downloaded "Memory Almost Full" from iTunes yesterday — he can still rock.

He can also still write songs. MAF contains some of his best work ever. No one knows better than Paul how to combine all the elements of a song in a way that keeps you playing it over and over again without your getting sick of it. I imagine thousands of Starbucks employees were grateful for that yesterday.

A lot of that replay ability is because, beneath the deceptive simplicity of the CD's tracks, there is (as usual with Sir Paul) a lot of melodic and harmonic complexity. Combine that with exciting rhythms, piquant lyrics, a vocal capability that is still supple and multifaceted, and razor-sharp record production, and you have any number of pop-rock classics in the making on MAF.

This is a CD that, were it to have been issued by a young, unknown rock artist, would have all the critics lauding the second coming of ... well, of Paul McCartney.


Of course, McCartney is the past master at pop-rock classics. Which makes for a conundrum. After all, rock is supposed to be the iconoclastic antithesis of any sort of classic-oriented mentality. It is the bull in the china factory that breaks all the molds. The Beatles did exactly that, in fact, thanks in no small part to Paul's prodigious contributions.

Paul's work with Wings and as a solo act have added all kinds of welcome filigree and embroidery to his Beatles oeuvre, but nothing quite so groundbreaking as, say, "Paperback Writer" or "Penny Lane," "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" or the connected suite of great-song-after-great-song Paul wrote for the Beatles' "Abbey Road" album. "Hey Jude," "Let It Be," "Yesterday," "Michelle," "Lady Madonna," "Hello Goodbye," "We Can Work It Out" — there was a time when those songs and many others by Beatle Paul were the very soundtrack of our baby-boomer lives.

True, there are those a decade or two younger than I am, the formative moments of whose young lives replay to "Band on the Run" or "Maybe I'm Amazed" or "Ebony and Ivory" — all from the '70s Wings era, the time when Generation X was coming out of teeth braces and putting on training bras.

Still, you'd be hard-pressed to find a lot of Gen Y'ers, born after 1982, for whom a Paul-song is in their personal top ten ... even though much of his finest work has been done in the period during which that generation reached its teen and young adult years.


Again, the problem is not that Paul as a former Beatle hasn't lived up to expectations — though there are many people who will tell you that he hasn't. They're wrong; the problem is that he has, in spades. Which means, to so many, ho hum. "Paul does it again" is not a mantra for why-is-my-generation's-life- not-like-any-other, the way the initial surge of Beatlemania was for us boomers.

We stayed up nights looking for clues to prove "Paul Is Dead," back then. Now we have, in "Memory Almost Full," proof that Paul Is Most Certainly Not Dead. It is testament to his genius that MAF is at this moment the proud occupant of positions 3 and 5 on the Amazon.com top ten (it comes in standard and deluxe editions), with the "Sgt. Pepper" CD number 6 ... and his mate George Harrison's "Traveling Wilburys" retrospective at number 4.

But, back in the day, anything by Paul's original band would have been an instant number 1.