McCartney, Bennett shine in rain

The British knight showed up in jeans, but the grocer’s kid from Queens would never walk onstage without a tailored suit and perfectly knotted tie. In one of the more unusual concert billings in recent memory, Sir Paul McCartney and Tony Bennett shared a stage Saturday night with each other as well as Neil Young, Sonic Youth and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The two iconic pop music performers, playing on a rainy night to a soggy but jubilant crowd at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, had come together for Young’s 18th annual Bridge School Benefit Concert. The cause is an acclaimed school for developmentally disabled youngsters, and on Saturday its students lined the rear of the stage to hear a Beatle harmonize with Frank Sinatra’s favorite singer.

“It’s the honor of my life right now to introduce someone who is not only the nicest human being I’ve ever met but also the greatest musician who ever lived in this world,” Bennett said as he welcomed McCartney to the stage. Sir Paul may be 62, but the presence of Bennett, 78, put him in the singsong voice of a schoolboy allowed to stay up late as he said, “I get to sing with Tony Bennett.”

The pair brought the house down with their solo sets, but they sang only one song together: “The Very Thought of You,” a Bennett hit that McCartney used for the first dance at his wedding to Heather Mills in June 2002. McCartney didn’t look as comfortable as his stage elder during the number. The quiet spaces in the song and the lack of a guitar left him with a hand jammed in his pocket, his chin bobbing like a man waiting on a late bus. Bennett tried to add some swing by leading McCartney in a ballroom dance, but the youngster would have none of it. At the final note, he headed off stage with another lilting tease from over his shoulder. “I got to sing with Tony Bennett....”

The marathon show began before nightfall and ran until 1 a.m. and the last “nah-na-na-na” of “Hey Jude,” a McCartney-led finale that brought all the performers on stage. Well, all performers except Bennett, who left the building within minutes of his set -- no jokes about bedtimes, please.

It was another worthy page in the Bridge School benefit’s unique scrapbook. Neil and Peggy Young, parents of two sons with cerebral palsy, organized the first show in 1986, and the inaugural lineup included Bruce Springsteen, Don Henley and Tom Petty. The show is still under the radar of many pop fans. The artists invited are never asked to promote the event, and the show’s budget is never splurged on advertising. As with Thanksgiving dinner at Mom’s house, the usual faces come back every fall for the feast and rarely worry about the menu.

A Beatle in the house made this year’s something special, and McCartney offered a brisk set sprinkled with some surprises for fans who may have missed his recent tour and a strong block of Beatles hits to finish up. In a poignant moment he remembered the late John Lennon, expressed regret about their soured relationship, and serenaded their friendship with “Here Today.” Digging back, he played “Drive My Car,” “Michelle,” “Get Back,” “Let It Be” and “Yesterday,” which saw him strumming the same Gibson guitar he used on one of the Fab Four’s “Ed Sullivan Show” appearances.

Between the sets of Bennett and McCartney, Young played an acoustic set that included a haunting “Pocahontas,” given tribal thump with hand-slaps on the guitar and some new melancholy with its references to Marlon Brando, and the burnished country valentine “Harvest Moon,” which had backup vocals from wife Peggy and Eddie Vedder.

Young has shared the stage at Bridge with everyone from a scowling Billy Idol to a scowling Bob Dylan, but even he was giddy about the show’s inclusion of Bennett, the first performer to come to the show with a birth certificate dated in the Coolidge administration.

“So many walks of music here, from Sonic Youth to Tony Bennett,” Young told the crowd. “It’s a beautiful thing. I’m proud to be part of it.”

It’s hard to imagine the fans of Buffalo Springfield cheering “You da man!” at Bennett in 1968, but there they were doing just that Saturday night. Bennett looked deeply appreciative and stunned by the vigor of the adulation. After every uptempo number and minor soft-shoe maneuver, the crowd sprang to its feet and hooted like college football fans. For reasons both aesthetic and arthritic, this is not the standard crowd behavior Bennett sees every night.

Bennett was never a symbol of old-school pop standing its ground against rock ‘n’ roll -- that role was always left to Sinatra, who was more suited to those confrontations. Bennett was welcomed in Mountain View by the former flower children like a sharply dressed old uncle who doesn’t try to act young, and in doing so remains totally hip.

“I’ve been singing 50 years now,” Bennett said to mad applause. “I love it. I’ll be honest -- it’s been 60 years ... if I’m lucky enough I’ll sing for another 60 years.”

Eighteen is the voting age, so perhaps it’s appropriate that this 18th edition of the concert was also its most political. With the presidential election bearing down, more than half of the artists made reference to the contest and made it clear that, in rock music and in the Bay Area, there is no question about the bumper sticker of choice.

After finishing one of his Beatles classics, McCartney repeated its title a few times. “Let it be, let it be ... let it be Kerry,” he said, to thunderous applause. Earlier, Vedder, performing without his Pearl Jam compatriots, looked to the Vietnam years for his message. He played a fleeting paraphrase of Phil Ochs (“George W. go find yourself another country to be part of ...”) before an ominous essaying of “Masters of War,” Dylan’s letter bomb addressed to the military-industrial complex. Sonic Youth, whose set was as memorable as any on the night, chided Bush as well, but it was Bennett who had the least partisan and most memorable line.

The performer, who wore a uniform in World War II, looked out on a crowd with Vietnam-era memories and instead of protest offered a plea. “When will somebody, somewhere -- somebody -- figure out how we can stop killing each other?”