Paul McCartney and The Beatles’ ship that sees land | The North American Route | Culture | EUROtoday

Last Monday, throughout Paul McCartney’s live performance in Madrid, I could not cease fascinated with some phrases from John Lennon that I had heard only a week earlier than. These are the phrases that shut the entertaining documentary Beatles ‘64, just lately launched on Disney+. “It was always insisted that The Beatles led something,” mentioned Lennon, now out of the band. “Don’t know. And, in any case, they were only one face. What I didn’t like was the insistence on having led something. Now I see it as there was a ship that was going to discover the new world. The Beatles were in the lookout position of that ship. Maybe The Rolling Stones were there too. But let’s say it was The Beatles who were there. We just said: ‘Land in sight!’”

Surrounded by thousands of people at the WiZink, but especially next to my 12-year-old son, whom I took to see our first and, surely, last McCartney concert, I thought about that land. A place that I couldn’t describe, but that I think, after so much time, I could perfectly point my finger and say: “There it is.” Perhaps, for that reason, and after in the days before the concert I told my son on several occasions how important the event was, when McCartney jumped on stage, I blurted out to him: “There, look, it’s real.”

The land that The Beatles saw is the land I always wanted to live in. Well, the one I wanted to do since, locked in my room like in a cabin, I got hooked at the age of 14 on Bruce Springsteen’s songs. Nowadays, it seems like a lifetime to me. That land shone with its own light, like a bonfire on the abandoned beach. As Springsteen himself tells in his memoirs, he also wanted to live there ever since, like hundreds of thousands of American teenagers, he saw The Beatles in The Ed Sullivan Showjust the historical moment on which the documentary focuses Beatles ‘64. “From across the sea, the gods returned just in time,” Bruce writes in the chapter titled The second coming because the first is collected in a previous chapter entitled El big bang and refers to Elvis Presley’s appearance on the same television program in 1956.

Thinking about Lennon’s words was imagining the Liverpool four, described by Bruce as “the Mount Rushmore of rock”, as if they were those ‘Yellow Submarine’ cartoons on the lookout part of a large ship. Or as a black and white image of them, like the ones seen on the WiZink screens during McCartney’s concert. Because, to this day, at least for me, and I’m sure I’m not the only one, a black and white photo of The Beatles still means the whole world. It contains it, as only small gestures contain secrets that can make the world not always a maddening or inhospitable place.

If The Beatles were on board that ship, the same one that Elvis Presley set in motion with his movement of hips and his stratospheric voice and that Bob Dylan with his lyrics was in charge of straightening the course towards that land that was waiting on some horizon, all the The rest of us were going, like solitary fish, to chase the trail they left with him in the ocean of time. With their songs, we felt the same as they felt when they said: Land in sight!

Of the handful of times I got emotional during McCartney’s concert, there was one that was more than just a personal thing. It happened when the entire ward chanted ‘Hey, Jude’ at the top of their lungs, my son’s favorite song and the only anthem that excites me and that I believe in on a planet full of flags and borders. I glimpsed the land that, decades ago, Paul, John, George and Ringo had seen. Wrapped in the intensity of melancholic chords and those na-na-na-us heartbreaking, I remembered something that I sometimes forget: the land seen is better inhabited in company. As Springsteen sang, two hearts are better than one. And the human soul, as John Steinbeck wrote in The grapes of wrath, It is the result of the sum of many small human souls. Because, alone, one can end up talking to a bogeyman like Robinson Crusoe.

Today, it seems that the land seen, that new world, has become old. However, at this point, more than half a century after those black and white images of Liverpool in The Ed Shullivan Showit is much worse: sometimes, that land is as if it had been swallowed by the ocean. As if the seas had stirred so violently that they had swept away a territory to which The Beatles sang with joy, ease and hope. We live today in a world where the pirates of hate and unreason boldly and without scruples destroy everything that had meaning in that land seen. The meaning of that land had to do with coexistence between different people, a place for all different people to feel equal and believe in brotherhood and solidarity causes because in the name of freedom a vision was not imposed but rather it was treated to understand that of others. In short, that land was a proud and never-finished republic of ordinary people who had defeated the ideas of fascism and intolerance in the 20th century.

With Paul McCartney standing there, singing with dazzling dignity, at 82 years old and the 20th century behind him, The Beatles’ songs came to life and one thought stood out from the rest: The Beatles’ ship was not sunk. It never was, but maybe we let it beach after some storms. That ship is ours, as The Beatles’ songs are ours, and it is time to set course again. Paul McCartney took it upon himself to remind us. That’s why, on the way home, in the car, I wanted to have words to explain to my son things about that land in which I want to live still with the same passion with which I wanted to live since I first heard Bruce Springsteen and, after , to The Beatles, but it was late and the emotions of the concert were still very intense. As I put ‘Hey, Jude’ on the player, I felt deep inside that verse written by McCartney: “Take a sad song and make it better.” I went to talk, but my son said, “Dad, turn up the volume.” I listened, remained silent and imagined Paul, John, George and Ringo in the lookout position on the hood of my own car.

Life never stops offering glimpses.

I drove, feeling once again grateful to The Beatles and, furthermore, hopeful that my son and many like him could one day shout for themselves, “Land in sight!”