From the S&S archives: McCartney: Back to the '60s

SUDDENLY, it's 1964 again.

Black-and-white images of the world's most well-loved rock 'n' roll band projected across a three-paneled screen as panting fans chase them in hot pursuit.

Beatlemania lives, if only on a movie screen. But ex-Beatle Paul McCartney — who for years begged interviewers and fans to put his Beatle past behind them — is escorting 1989 concert audiences on a magical mystery tour back to the 1960s, when the music he and his three mates from Liverpool made was a cure for all that ailed the young and young-at-heart.

McCartney started a worldwide tour Sept. 25 in Oslo, fresh on the heels of releasing a sprightly new album, Flowers in the Dirt. After several dates in Scandinavia, the rock 'n' roller began a four-city assault on West Germany with scheduled dates in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Dortmund and Munich.

As his Oct. 7 show at the Frankfurt Festhalle revealed, 1989 finds McCartney in nearly top form with hits from his days with the Beatles, Wings and today's Flowers in the Dirt. The latest work, McCartney's most cohesive and satisfying collection of songs in a decade, features at least a half-dozen songs that become more irresistible at each listening.

If he's not in tip-top form, it's not that the musicianship is lacking. His new band, consisting of guitarists Robbie McIntosh (a former Pretender) and Hamish Stuart (late of the Average White Band) plus drummer Chris Whitten, keyboardist Paul "Wix" Wickens and the ubiquitous Linda McCartney, is a tighter unit than any edition of Wings.

It's a little nonplussing that McCartney sometimes forgets the words to his own songs. In the Frankfurt concert, he ran into trouble twice: once on Got to Get You Into My Life and once on Yesterday.

The show started off to the recorded tune of A Hard Day's Night with a film retrospective of McCartney's career and world events over the last 25 years. Directed by Richard Lester, who also directed the Beatles movies A Hard Day's Night and Help!, the 15-minute movie set a frenetic tone for the evening to come.

After a slightly slow start with Figure of Eight, a fine new song from Flowers in the Dirt, McCartney kicked into 2½ hours of rock 'n' roll, lasers, artistically conveyed sets and a good time that was heavy on the nostalgia but equally heavy on the rock. McCartney's insistence on keeping the show moving with up-tempo songs and special effects kept it from becoming mired knee-deep in corniness and tears too early.

The candles, sparklers and lighters turned on in force with The Long and Winding Road, which was nine songs into the concert. But most electrifying was an extended version of Sgt. Pepper, a rocker in the rough that finally, after 21 years, got the tough, dazzling treatment it deserved long ago.

(I thought I was the only person in the world to think it required better than as a segue into the wimpy Help From My Friends on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, but it's satisfying to know McCartney eventually agreed.)

What's amazing about McCartney is that he rocks so hard and so well when he chooses, as he did in Frankfurt. Numbers like Back in the USSR, I Saw Her Standing There, Get Back and those '50s classics 20-Flight Rock and Ain't That a Shame display his often-hidden talents so well, you wish he'd do a lot more of this and less of the incomplete pap that's dominated his records in recent years.

That's not to say, however, that he hasn't turned out memorable ballads and peppy pop songs since he left the Beatles and even since the demise of Wings. But he's better than he often lets us know.

Returning to the stage for an encore after a plaintive Hey Jude, in which he invited the audience to sing along, McCartney said he had time to do a few more songs before he and the band had to catch a bus (in reality, a private plane that ferries him and the missus back to England after most shows).

He turned up the memories with Yesterday, delivered a stinging Get Back and wound down with the closing medley from Abbey Road.

That's the medley of Golden Slumbers, You Never Give Me Your Money and a few bits and pieces that ends with the homily, "The love you take is equal to the love you make."

And then McCartney and the band were gone with an airy "See you next time!"

At the end of A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles take off in their helicopter for what we all know will be exciting adventures and good times with great music. It always left me feeling wistful, each of the 28 times I saw that movie, and I wanted to be able to go along. Twenty-five years later, I still wish I could go, too.