POP MUSIC REVIEW : Paul McCartney--Back in the U.S.A.

Maybe I’m amazed at the way

You help me sing the song,

Right me when I’m wrong ...

Maybe I’m amazed at the way

I really need you.

--Lyrics by Paul McCartney

Maybe I’m amazed, too.

Who ever figured the Beatles--represented by Paul McCartney--and the Rolling Stones would still be the main contenders for the year’s top concert honors a quarter century after “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Satisfaction”?

Even more pointedly: Who ever imagined--in view of his uneven critical standing during the last decade--that McCartney would emerge on top?

But that’s what happened Thursday night at the sold-out Forum as the veteran singer-songwriter began his first U.S. tour in 13 years.

His show doesn’t offer the consistent high energy or spectacle of the Stones’ stops last month at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Yet McCartney--who returns to the Forum for concerts Monday through Wednesday--gives his audience a more emotionally satisfying experience.

Beginning with his selection of tunes (15 from the Beatles days and 12 from his solo career), McCartney conveys a wistful, almost sweet reflection on the values of family and community--an attitude echoed in his own warm, unpretentious manner.

It’s a classy and embracing performance which suggests that a Beatles reunion--something that once seemed the dumbest of wishes--might well have worked after all. The realization makes the tragedy of John Lennon’s death all the more heartbreaking.

The apprehension about a Beatles reunion was that John, Paul, George and Ringo would look hopelessly out of touch as they came back on stage in their 30s or 40s, merely grinding out the oldies for nostalgia value.

But that scenario underestimated both the quality of the Beatles’ work--which holds up as art, not just pop memories--and the capacity of the musicians to continue to grow.

As the band’s writers--McCartney, Lennon and Harrison--all have shown, artists don’t have to end up simply recycling themselves. The first two, especially, found new things to say and, as McCartney demonstrated Thursday, the best of the new songs stand up well alongside the standards.

Don’t take anything away from the Stones’ Coliseum dates--a triumphant blend of great material, near flawless musical execution and dynamic staging. There was, however, a vital concert element missing: point of view. There was nothing about the band’s selection of songs or manner that told you anything about what the five musicians feel or care about these days.

One advantage McCartney has over the Stones is stronger new material. The Stones’ “Steel Wheels” album is a wonderful salute to the band’s style, but its themes are unrevealing--which may be one reason the Stones only did three of the songs from the album at the Coliseum.

By contrast, McCartney did six songs at the Forum from his current “Flowers in the Dirt,” easily his best album since the mid-’70s and perhaps his best since the Beatles days.

Some of his new songs (noticeably “Rough Ride” and “We Got Married”) are of only passing interest, but the most affecting of them are modest, yet convincing statements of love--father to son in “Put It There” and husband to wife in “This One.”

McCartney has gone through the pressures of pop stardom as fully as anyone since Elvis Presley. Not only did he have to deal with Life After the Beatles, but he also took quite a battering in the ‘70s from John Lennon, who attacked his music--frequently justifiably--as wimpy.

The pressures made McCartney resentful in the early ‘70s of the Beatles legacy. Eager to establish his own identity, he refused to talk about the old days in interviews and he only did five Beatles songs on his 1976 world tour. But he has survived the tensions in a way that has given him and his music an engagingly human perspective.

He has enough self-confidence now to do silly things on stage--leading the audience through all sorts of goofy noises and playing around on stage with the other musicians in a way that breaks down the barrier that often exists between Legendary Star and the other five band members. (The line-up for this tour is singer-guitarist-bassist Hamish Stuart, guitarist Robbie McIntosh, drummer Chris Whitten and keyboardists Paul Wickens and wife Linda McCartney.)

This sense of basic values extends beyond McCartney’s music and manner. He is using the tour--which continues its first North American swing with concerts in Chicago, Toronto, Montreal and New York--to promote environmental concerns.

In both the 100-page program distributed free to the audience and in his brief remarks from the stage Thursday, he urged fans to look into the work of Friends of the Earth, an environmental advocacy organization, and to “vote for a clean world.”

There are moments of flash in the show (the piano McCartney plays during “The Fool on the Hill” actually spins slowly when he gets to the appropriate line in the song, and loud explosions greet the beginning of “Live and Let Die”). But the heart of the show is disarmingly intimate.

McCartney finds a way to share the celebration of the Beatles legacy with his former mates--both a toast before “The Fool on the Hill” and in a 15-minute film on his musical history that is shown before he takes the stage. In a conciliatory gesture, the latter begins with two John Lennon songs.

McCartney still exhibits his old schoolboy charm on stage, but, at 47, there is gray in his hair and his cheeks are noticeably pudgier. Vocally, he has trouble hitting certain notes, but this perhaps is simply being rusty from his years away from touring.

Yet, he bounces around during certain key numbers--including a show-stopping rendition of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”--with an energy and enthusiasm of someone thrilled to be back in front of audiences.

During the two hour-plus concert, he mixed the Beatles and solo material imaginatively, back and forth from “Got to Get You Into My Life” to “Band on the Run” at one point; his recent single, “My Brave Face,” to “Back in the U.S.S.R.” at another. The Beatles selections also ranged from such good-time exercises as “I Saw Her Standing There” to the more thoughtful “Eleanor Rigby,” “Let It Be” and “Hey Jude.”

At the end, he turned purposefully to the “Golden Slumbers”/”Carry That Weight” sequence that closed the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” album.

Coming from someone who has seemed so burdened by the weight of the Beatles’ legacy and the death of Lennon, it was all the more touching.

He paused dramatically before delivering the medley’s closing line--”And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” It turned the sequence into both a salute to the ‘60s idealism that the Beatles helped articulate for a generation and an expression of his continued belief.

Amazing. No maybe about it.