Sitting in the middle of 50,000 people last night at Dodger Stadium, I started to understand why Paul McCartney is not just your everyday iconic musical legend. For almost three hours straight, I watched him give us a kick ass, totally committed, thoroughly entertaining performance. By the time he was rocking out Back in the USSR, I had forgotten his age and forgotten all caveats, and realized that he was purely and simply doing a terrific job at holding a sold out crowd totally in the palm of his hand. And executing absolute mastery over his art form with deep wells of energy and an utterly charming grace.
He sang all the old favorites, and some new songs, and the production values were incredible. His band was amazing, world class. And he was humble, and funny, and open. A great show.
I of course enjoyed it immensely, even though I could not ignore how my fatigued body resisted the stairs of the stadium, and my senses were on overload with the hordes of people and lights and sound. It was a rare thing for me to be out in the world attending a rock concert, and every time my body or energy levels came up short, I was reminded of the world I had temporarily escaped in order to be there. But the underworld doesn't disappear, just because you've managed to escape it. It is there, and it was present in the music... which touched me extremely deeply at times.
The underworld is the shadow side to any good art, and loss, and death, and broken friendships informed many parts of the music we heard last night. And much of it was created during some of the most turbulent decades in our recent history. Assassinations, riots, Kent State, civil rights, Vietnam -- the soundtrack for my growing up in the 60's was punctuated with the oddly whimsical Sgt Pepper and spacy acid flavored Magical Mystery Tour. I don't believe that's a coincidence. I don't believe that the brutal events I grew up with were at all separate from the incredibly creative music that flourished concurrently. With the Beatles leading the way, my youth was explosively rich with creative and trailblazing music.
Loss and death; the flip side to falling in love on a dance floor, living in a yellow submarine, being the walrus. Looking around the stadium, it suddenly became clear to me how everyone I could see was going to die someday. That we were all corpses. And that the death of each of us would break so many hearts. And those hearts would stop beating as well, causing further ripples of pain and sadness. So intertwined. So much sadness in this world. So many tears. So much pain.
And then suddenly we're singing Hey Jude together. All 50,001 of us. We are singing the "La la la's" with the person who wrote the song, and it's acapella, and suddenly it's just so wonderful. Amidst the pain, there are transcendent moments that emerge, simple moments, like singing a song. This particular song has survived history and transcended several generations. It's a relatively simple little work of art, that has nonetheless touched millions of people. And here we were, holding up our cell phones, singing the lalalalas in unison, a whole bunch of very different people united in this single place and time.
The act of creating art changes things. Perhaps the rock and roll of the '60s and '70s affected the course of our turbulent history, at least a little bit. It for sure gave it a backdrop. It for sure gave us a way to stick it to the man, with its anger and its visions of our generation's unique utopia. It for sure gave us an emotional breather, with the kooky Mr. Kite and Lovely Rita. And it gave us the empathic loneliness of Eleanor Rigby, and the hope that we would find a simple love someday in the unthinkably distant future, when we're sixty-four.
Holding up my cell phone with the flashlight on, tears started rolling down my cheeks. I was overcome by the
power of an artistic endeavor to change us, to get into the heart, to open it up and break it just a little bit... but only to heal it back up again.
The act of making music changes the pain, alchemizes it. I can think of no other magic as powerful. It doesn't change the reality that the price of admission to this life is ridiculously steep, even for rich songwriters who lose their wives to bad diseases. It doesn't change the entangled ripple of pain that the loss of each one of us will cause so many people. But it softens our souls. It expresses it all in a way that is not exactly precise, but is true beyond words.
So that's the point, of all our creative endeavors, of all the things we do that imparts our touch to the wounded psyche of our fellow creatures. We can't change the pain of being born into this world. We can't erase disease and wars and corruption. But we can take that whole sad song, and make it better.
La, la, la, lalala. Lalala. Hey Jude.
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