McCartney relearning classics

Preparing for his latest tour Sir Paul McCartney had to reacquaint himself with Beatles and Wings songs he had forgotten how to play.

‘‘There’s too many,’’ he said in an interview for 60 Minutes on CBS. ‘‘Too many words, too many notes. They’re very hard.’’ Had he really forgotten them? ‘‘Yeah, it’s not like they’re all three chords.’’

The tour, to promote a new album, Egypt Station, began with a concert in Grand Central Station in New York last month, which he opened with A Hard Day’s Night. On Sunday night he played a three-hour set in Alberta that included Eleanor Rigby and Yesterday.

He listens to old tracks partly ‘‘to see what ones we’re going to do,’’ he said. ‘‘And to learn them.’’

McCartney has said in the past that recalling songs immediately after they were composed was a problem early in his collaboration with John Lennon, because ‘‘we didn’t have tape recorders’’. In the CBS interview he offered another reason: ‘‘I don’t read music or write music. None of us did in the Beatles. We did some good stuff though, but none of it was written down by us.’’

At the time he was beset by anxiety, he said. After recording Revolver, ‘‘I got the horrors one day, I thought it was out of tune. I thought the whole album was out of tune. I listened to it and for some reason, [thought], ‘Oh, my god!’ And I went to the guys and said, ’It’s out of tune.’ They got a bit worried and listened to it. They said, ‘No it isn’t’.’’

He said that when they were writing songs he and Lennon each had a veto. ‘‘The earliest example of that was, I had a song I Saw Her Standing There. He sang its original opening: ‘She was just seventeen, She’d never been a beauty queen’. John kind of [said], ’I’m not sure about that line. So we changed it: ‘She was just seventeen, You know what I mean’.’’

He said that Lennon felt insecure too. ‘‘I remember him once particularly strangely, out of the blue, saying, ‘I worry about how people are going to remember me.’ ‘‘

Looking at photographs taken at the recording of Abbey Road, he pointed to an image of the band sitting on the steps, in which Lennon looks glum. McCartney said that he had been giving Lennon a talk on taxes. ‘‘Someone had said to me, ‘You’d better warn him, because he doesn’t know what’s going on.’ He added: ‘‘I often have dreams about John or George ... people who aren’t here any more. I think that’s the great thing about dreams, because you get to remeet them, hang out with them. And it’s only when you wake up, you go, ‘Oh yeah, it was a dream’.’’

‘‘I don’t read music or write music. None of us did in the Beatles. We did some good stuff though, but none of it was written down by us.’’

Paul McCartney