Ahead of Israel concert, McCartney shares with 'Post' his optimistic view of life

David Horovitz , THE JERUSALEM POST

A full half century after The Beatles began to take shape, Paul McCartney still sounds awed, modest and appreciative when discussing the lasting resonance of their music. Ahead of his Tel Aviv concert on Thursday, McCartney talks here to The Jerusalem Post about his beliefs, about how he copes with near-universal fame, about the puzzling, even "magical" inspiration for some of his songs, and about his abiding, insistently optimistic outlook on life.

Paul McCartney, just turned 15, was introduced to John Lennon, all of 16, at a church fete in Woolton, Liverpool, at which Lennon's skiffle group, The Quarrymen, was playing. The older boy, so legend has it, was impressed by McCartney's familiarity with rock and roll music and his facility with a guitar. For one thing, he knew how to tune it properly. The year was 1957.

McCartney, who had already started penning his own songs (he still sometimes plays his first ever composition, "I Lost My Little Girl"), soon joined Lennon's band, and the two began writing music together. As other Quarrymen came and went, they recruited a skilled 15-year-old guitarist, George Harrison. It was 1958 - 50 years ago - and, though they had not yet found their name, The Beatles were on their way.

Variants on The Beatles moniker were introduced in 1960 by Stuart Sutcliffe, an artist who reluctantly became their bass player but who died, of a brain hemorrhage, in 1962. With Pete Best on drums, the band honed its live skills at endless gigs in Liverpool and Hamburg, failed an audition at Decca Records in London in January 1962, made a better impression on producer George Martin at Parlophone a few weeks later, drafted the adept Liverpool drummer Richard Starkey in place of Best that August, recorded their first single, "Love Me Do," in September, and set off to change the course of musical history.

Somehow managing to survive a ban by the State of Israel (which probably did not block their appearance here in 1965 because it feared they might corrupt our nation's youth, but more likely because of protekzia in the shape of pressure by one concert promoter who was jealous of the rival who had signed them), they went on to sell more than a billion records worldwide and so dominate global culture that when Lennon remarked in a 1966 interview that they were "more popular than Jesus now," he was being matter-of-fact as well as provocative.

And now, finally, with Lennon dead (murdered outside his Manhattan apartment block in 1980), Harrison dead too (from cancer, seven years ago) and Ringo "otherwise engaged," McCartney, 66, is bringing their music, and his own, to Israel. Some here have called it the greatest cultural event in our 60-year history. He blokily describes it as an opportunity to come to a region he's been interested in visiting, to "see what's what."