At Halftime, Yesterday Came Suddenly

The Boston Herald

Much of what we grew up with is irrelevant today. If you remember Arnie ``Woo Woo'' Ginsberg, “Wagon Train'' and ``At the Hop,'' you understand what I mean.

We didn't have color TV. We had only one car and one bathroom and one black phone that hung from a wall. If no one was home, you couldn't leave a message. There were no answering machines. If you needed to copy a poem for English, you had to hand-write it. There were no copiers. Dishwashers, clothes dryers, credit cards - no one had them. Cable TV, ATMs, cell phones, microwaves, digital cameras, Game Boys, CDs, VCRs, DVDs didn't exist.

Disneyland was on the other side of the country, which may as well have been the other side of the world, because no one but the rich ever went anywhere, except perhaps to a cottage for a week in the summer.

Life in the 1960s feels as remote and distanced from today as life in the 1860s.

Except for Sunday night when a piece of it slipped into the present.

Paul McCartney, Sir Paul now, performed at the Super Bowl and to those of us who first saw him on the ``Ed Sullivan Show'' on another Sunday night 41 years ago, the moment was unexpectedly warm, like feeling an old friend's hand on your shoulder. But it was a little sad, too, because where have they gone, so many old friends and all the years between then and now?

A funny thing happened while I watched the halftime show. There was Paul McCartney performing live, not lip synching, not overlaid by a montage of old clips and reduced to nostalgia. But Paul McCartney, the ex-Beatle, alone and center stage and for 12 beautiful minutes. And the moments were stunningly mellow.

In my head were other moments. It was Feb. 9, 1964, and McCartney and the rest of The Beatles were on the ``Ed Sullivan Show'' singing ``All My Lovin,'' ``Til There was You,'' ``She Loves You,'' ``I Saw Her Standing There'' and ``I Want to Hold Your Hand.'' The show was in black and white, the Beatles were lean and lanky, and the TV was small with rounded corners. I was 16 and my parents, who were sitting beside me, were years younger than I am now.

And the performance was anything but mellow. The Beatles were screaming. The audience was screaming. I was screaming. Even Ed Sullivan seemed a little animated.

Paul McCartney was the sound of the future then. The Beatles had no clue that they would change music forever. But they did. Now, at 62, the contrast is sharp because McCartney is the sound of the past.

“He's so old,'' a friend's daughter said. ``Justin Timberlake is so much better.’'

My friend and I smiled at her the way our parents had smiled at us.

Everything new gets old but not everything old is classic.