Paul McCartney on Israel Show: "Music Can Help People Calm Down"

"Me and the band are really looking forward to this one," Paul McCartney says of his upcoming Tel Aviv concert, taking place 43 years after Israel banned the Beatles from performing there. "It's the first time I have ever been to Israel, or really that part of the world so I am very interested to look around and look at the situation, just personally. I am going to be interested as a tourist just to look around and meet the people." Despite outcry and even some threats from Palestinian groups, Macca promises the show will go on. Tel Aviv's "Friendship First" concert — as McCartney dubbed previous first-ever shows in Quebec and Kiev — specifically is about music and promoting friendship. "Music can help people to just calm them down. I also think it can be very interesting for change," McCartney says. "I always cite a John (Lennon) song 'Give Peace A Chance'; if you watch the footage from back then, about a million people outside the White House chanting that song to Nixon inside the White House, I think that had an effect." As for what Macca has in store for his first Israel show, "We've been rehearsing some songs we've not done for a while but that's all I'll tell you." McCartney and band will take the stage September 25th at Tel Aviv's Hayarkon Park.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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