Paul said something interesting on Letterman the other night: "People know my history much better than I do." I suppose that is part of what it means to be a Beatle, to be famous beyond famous. Everyone knows who you are. Everyone's heard your music. People have made you their lifelong study, or at least their lifelong soundtrack.
They think they know you, but they've never met you. They've heard you singing about Yesterday and Hey Jude and Back in the U.S.S.R and A Day in the Life...and they think they know what you were thinking when you wrote that song. They think they understand their lives more clearly because you were singing that song for them, and that song hit so hard that it MUST be reciprocal. You, the Beatle, have to have been affected by that transformation, too, even though it wasn't yours and you didn't experience it, and it was someone else altogether who created that experience from your music.
Sometimes I wonder if the Beatles themselves wished they knew what it was like to discover the Beatles, years after they were initially popular, and make them their own, just as I did as a high school kid in the early nineties.
What would it be like to be asked the same questions about your past over and over? That was one of the surprising things about Letterman's questions to McCartney the other night. They were all about being a Beatle; nothing about his new album, very little about his current life. It seemed like Letterman was a bit starstruck even. Maybe he was. Maybe he saw that performance Paul gave back on February 9, 1964 in that very same theatre that Letterman himself works in, 45 (really? 45?) years later. Maybe he's in awe of the 73 million people who tuned in. He would've been about 17, and maybe he was one of those 73 million glued to the TV.
