All Together Now.(The Talk of the Town)(Paul McCartney)

It's one thing to expect, at the age of seven, that you would grow up to marry Paul McCartney, and it's another thing entirely to meet him in person, forty-five years later. Kidding! They're exactly the same thing. That early expectation and the latter-day encounter both involve the maximum amount of happiness that the human frame can take, and both feel perfectly natural and, at the same time, unreal and impossible. The marriage never took place; the meeting occurred last week, when McCartney was in New York rehearsing for a benefit concert that he was headlining on Saturday for the David Lynch Foundation. The film director founded the organization several years ago in order to spread the practice of Transcendental Meditation, particularly to schoolchildren who are under stress because of poverty or any number of other debilitating, brain-scrambling aspects of modern life; the goal of the benefit was to raise enough money to teach meditation to a million kids, as the skill appears to help them focus and be happier and more resilient. The Beatles became associated with TM in 1968, when they went to India to study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and two other sojourners from that time were on the bill on Saturday night as well: Mike Love, of the Beach Boys, and Donovan. And a third who also had some success in the music business, Ringo Starr. He and McCartney hadn't performed together since 2002, at a memorial concert for George Harrison.

McCartney was rehearsing with his band in a studio in the West Twenties. In the reception area, you could hear, coming from behind closed doors, "Drive My Car," and then "Got to Get You Into My Life." McCartney's publicist then opened the doors as the group began "Let It Be." If you'd been there, you'd have seen a woman's head actually snap back in the whiplash shock of catching sight of Paul, seated at the piano. (Lynch was in the room, too, sitting on a couch, wearing his usual white-shirt-and-black-jacket ensemble and his snazzy backswept hairdo. He was quiet and still as the group rehearsed, and just once reacted visibly to the performance, when he turned to a man next to him during "With a Little Help from My Friends," and made some chopping motions to try to manually express the way the drummer, Abe Laboriel, Jr., hit a series of beats that were so totally right and in there.) McCartney wore jeans and a flowered shirt, tucked in, and soft dark-brown shoes. He looked almost dewy (he will be sixty-seven in June), without any of the beef-jerky stringiness of some of his rock peers. The recognizable Paulisms were there: the mouth becoming an O when he sang certain sounds, the head moving side to side three or four times in a row during the faster numbers. He was doing a run-through of the concert, including practice versions of his between-song patter. After "Let It Be," he got up from the piano and said, self-consciously, "So we say welcome--'Welcome'--because that's what we do," and waved his hand in a circle, and then sat back down and played ...