Happy Video Birthday to Sir Paul McCartney, Musician Extraordinaire!

by Robert Wilkinson

Today we send up a big Happy 65th Birthday to one of the world's treasures, Paul McCartney. He has given us some of the most memorable love songs in history (rockers too!), and is living proof that those who said the Beatles were a "flash in the pan" and would be forgotten within a few years were impossibly wrongheaded contrarians. And he's still rocking! Today I've dug up a few things that may entertain you, so enjoy! Thanks for everything, Sir Paul. You changed the world for the better, and that's a very good thing. (Keep going for more videos!)

Part of one of the greatest songwriting teams in history, he was central to the first global broadcast for peace, and even before that was one of the "godfathers" of the first pop festival in history, the legendary "Summer of Love" gathering at Monterrey filmed by the legendary D.A. Pennebaker of "Don't Look Back" fame. Without Sir Paul's input, we in America may never have had the magical tours of Jimi Hendrix and the Who in 1967-68, or heard of Ravi Shankar and so many other musical immortals of our times.

From his new album, "Memory Almost Full," comes a video of "Dance Tonight." From the same source, there are several more videos, including a great montage titled "Memory Almost Full EPK" and a video of "Nod Your Head." From another site, "artistdirect" you can get video and audio clips of him performing "Live and Let Die," "Jet," "My Love," and a bunch of others, but I had trouble with managing the plugins. Being Mercury retrograde, what else could I expect?

I found an amazing Beatle page of video links that is a real treat! For an even better set of different videos, check out this link to Beatles videos including performances of "She Loves You/I Want To Hold Your Hand," and "I'm Down," with a very interesting visual created for "Tomorrow Never Knows/Within You Without You."

Here's a special treat of a video piece editing several Beatle performances together in Sir Paul's early rock and roll masterpiece "I Saw Her Standing There, showing that he's been rocking since day one and never quit.

And of course, if you want to see more of this musical master when he was "the cute Beatle," you can always check out "A Hard Day's Night," still a brilliant piece of film work, and "Help," the follow-up Beatles' romp. And then there's "Yellow Submarine"....

Keep rocking, Sir Paul. You're still one of the greatest of all time. Thanks for the past, present, and future memories, which are never "almost full."

© Copyright 2007 Robert Wilkinson