(Originally published by the Daily News on December 10, 1989. This story was written by David Hinckley.)  ROTTERDAM — For a subatomic fraction of an instant, in a narrow gray cinderblock room so spartan that he must place his tea and biscuits on the middle cushion of the couch, Paul McCartney frowns.  So yes, those famous rising eyebrows move inward as well. The smiling mouth also turns down. How about that? A moment to remember, this, because for 25 years, in tiny gray rooms and on great floodlit soundstages, Paul McCartney has looked as unfailingly cheerful as one would expect from a man who once addressed a whimsical love song to his Old English Sheepdog.  But at this moment he’s preparing to shoo away something rather less pleasant: Paul, The Cute Beatle.  “I’m comfortable with people still seeing me as ‘The Beatle,’” he says. “It’s like, once Greta Garbo, always Greta Garbo. You want to be alone, you’re still Greta Garbo. Once Brigitte Bardot, always Brigitte Bardot, even when you’re saving baby seals.  “But I’m not comfortable with being ‘The Cute Beatle.’ I’ve never really thought I was ‘cute,’ though I guess some people think so.  “Maybe there were a few moments of cute, mostly in the early days. As you get older, the harder edges come out. I don’t think ‘Fool on the Hill’ is a cute song. ‘The Long and Winding Road’ isn’t cute. ‘Yesterday’ isn’t cute. ‘I’m not half the man I used to be’ — that’s pretty strong, and remember, I wrote it when I was 24.”  He runs his hand through his hair — graying but, like his face, an asset holding up strikingly well at 47. He glances at the room’s other decorative touch — a small plate of cheese cubes, each implanted with a toothpick holding a tiny Danish flag. Road crew joke. He laughs.  “You should really ask my wife. She’ll tell you I’m definitely not cute.”  The girl presses her nose to the ill-washed window at the Artists’ Entrance door of Rotterdam’s Ahoy Theater, the sort of 18,000-seat arena musicians refer to, always with a laugh, as a “barn” or “shed.” She has a British accent and long orange hair teased into ragged spikes. She wears black mid-calf tights with a black Bon Jovi T-shirt under several layers of black outerwear that look to have been randomly selected. She has a large silver ring through her right nostril.  She might be one of a million girls who have pressed nose to window over the past 25 years for a glimpse of Paul McCartney, except that she’s not looking in. She’s looking out. She’s a member of the crew and she’s waiting for her mother.  Mom arrives presently, a round, smiling woman who could have stepped of a Powdermilk Biscuits label. They kiss and the girl begins to chatter about life on the job, which is on the road, which this season is with Paul McCartney.  They pass a few dozen other staffers, dressed in black and smoking cigarets. Portable habit for a portable life. Some did the Bowie tour, then came over to Paul. You don’t get Paul, maybe you call the Stones. Or Aerosmith. From outside, The Road may still look to be a twilight world of freedom and excess; here, backstage, it’s a job and an industry, which for rock-’n’-roll purposes can largely be traced back to Paul and his buddies John, George and Ring. It was the Beatles, even more than Elvis, who showed the business community that rock ’n’ roll could, with proper marketing, pay long-terms dividends.  For instance: Paul McCartney has not played the U.S. in 13 years, yet some fans already have paid hundreds of dollars for single tickets tomorrow, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday at Madison Square Garden. Thus, this question for Paul: After 25 years in which your music has become a critical element on the balance sheets of multinational corporations, not to mention this week’s paycheck for the girl with the orange hair, is it still fun?  “Definitely,” says Paul, with a grin. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.”  That’s a point. Everything hasn’t broken perfectly for McCartney. There was John’s murder. A 20-year Beatle business fight. Nine days in a Japanese jail on a marijuana charge. Critics have called some of his work trivial. Sales have slowed in the ’80s, and as more rock history is written, Paul hasn’t always been portrayed flatteringly — or, he says, fairly.  But for all that, he needs to tour about as much as Donald Trump needs to clip food coupons. He’s a multimillionaire who could sit back and just watch the money roll in; he has a pastoral country homelife with Linda and their four kids; he’s generally considered a class act and a good guy. He could coast home as one of the great performers and creators in 20th-century popular music.  He doesn’t, cynics might say, because pop stars are fame junkies who need the applause and he realizes from his recent sales figures that if he doesn’t put himself out again, he may stop hearing it.  He says he just isn’t ready to hang up his rock-’n’-roll shoes.  “When I’m out there on stage,” he says, with a smile that reaches near-maniacal width, “I’m a kid with an air guitar. Except mine is a Les Paul and I’m surrounded by giant amplifiers and speakers that are turned up very, very loud. So here I am at 47, doing all this and traveling the world. It feels quite good, really.”  It also, a couple of times, has surprised him.  “When you hear the start of ‘Can’t Buy Me Love,’ even for us up on stage, it’s a kick in the stomach. I can’t think of any other song that gives away its hook that immediately. Not even a little guitar or drum intro, just one-two-three-four-one and there it is. Because you know it so well, it makes you sad, happy, nostalgic, a thousand emotions all at once. It was the same with the Beatles as it was with Ella Fitzgerald. She used that hook, too.”  One night in early 1987, John Fogerty, George Harrison and Bob Dylan joined an on-stage jam at a club in Los Angeles. At some point, someone suggested they play Fogerty’s “Proud Mary.”  Trouble was, Fogerty had not played that, or any other Creedence Clearwater Revival song, for more than 10 years, thanks a long-running mortal combat with his record company over song rights, money, etc. Then, Dylan, according to Fogerty, observed that if John never played “Proud Mary” again, a whole generation would assume it’s a Tina Turner song. A few months later, Fogerty broke out a whole Creedence set, one of the electrifying musical moments of the ’80s.  “One reason I decided to tour,” says McCartney, “is I realized I’d never performed a lot of my own songs. When I was touring with Wings, it wasn’t right yet. Too soon after the divorce. So ‘Pepper’ has only been performed once, the day we did it in the studio.  “Same with ‘Hey Jude.’ I was in the studio and Ringo was late. He was in the toilet, only I didn’t know it. I thought he was in the drum booth. So I started playing. And he comes out and starts creeping over to the drums, very quietly, because he sees I’ve started. Then, I looked up and it was ‘Oh ---, he’s not there… But I’d better keep going, this is a pretty good take.’ And that was ‘Hey Jude.’  “It’s odd that I’ve done wings songs more than Beatles songs. I’m much more bored with, say, ‘Jet’” — he stops and laughs — “I shouldn’t say ‘bored,’ should I? I’m not, honest.”  It’s all right. Really. John was not the only Beatle who could enliven a conversation by choice of words. Not two hours later, McCartney will follow “The Long and Winding Road” by leaning into the mike and shouting “Thank you very much, my little Dutchies!” The crowd will cheer.  Less booming is the sound when Paul leads the band on-stage a few minutes after 5 p.m. There isn’t any. This is soundcheck, for perhaps a hundred roadies.  Paul raises his hand. A guitar chord ricochets off the back wall like a shot from a .357 magnum. He steps to the microphone and starts to sing: “Well-a-well-a-well-a/ Just because you think…”  The song is “Just Because,” recorded by steel guitarist Cliff Carlisle in the ’30s and retooled by Shelton Brothers into a 1942 country hit, from which Elvis Presley did a version at Sun Records in 1955. Paul heard it from Elvis and recorded it from his 1988 Russian album, a great version that wisely uses the Elvis arrangement and lets Paul show off one of the few rock-’n’-roll voice in a league with the young Elvis himself.  Only here, the song is better. Without 15,000 bodies in the way, Paul’s voice, Hamish Stuart’s and Robbie McIntosh’s guitars and Wix Wickens’ keyboards bounce around the concrete and steel walls and echo back like a jet-propelled reincarnation of Sun Records itself. For a hundred roadies, this is another night at soundcheck. For the lucky civilian, it’s magic. If this isn’t fun, then God didn’t make Les Paul guitars and Old English Sheepdogs.  “I really don’t like being an industry,” muses McCartney. “And one of the ways you get away from that is to jam. Ideally, I’d like to be in a band that jammed all the time. You know, go out on stage and start singing ‘Well, you’re a writer and you work for a paper’ and go on for 50 minutes. The audience might find it a bit boring and indulgent, but I think I’d rather like it. I was watching one of the new bands on TV this summer — Sonic Youth or some such, I’ll watch anything to do with music — and after they’d been bashing around a while, someone asked, “Aren’t you out of tune?’ And they said, ‘We tune to a different standard.’  “I liked that. It’s been my excuse ever since. But there’s something appealing to me about the whole idea of not knowing where you’re going. An element of fear. I’m not sure why that’s so appealing, but it is.”  Do not fret, fans. There are no 50-minute jams in this show.  “In the end,” he says, “you pay attention to your fans. Most of them will see the show once, so they want from me what I wanted when I saw Bill Haley.”  At the Ahoy, this breaks down to 15 Beatles songs, six tracks from the 1989 “Flowers In The Dirt” album, three classics (“Ain’t That a Shame,” “Crackin’ Up,” “Twenty Flight Rock”), and five songs from the Wings and solo years. This may seem a slim figure from the longest stretch of time (1970-1986), but Paul’s aim is true. “Mull of Kintyre” may have been the biggest-selling record in U.K. history at one time, but how many fans would take it over “I Saw Her Standing There” or “Let It Be”?  It’s a relatively fixed playlist, a price artists and audiences pay for laser lights, dry-ice fog and an occasional explosion, most of it triggered by computers.  “With computers, it’s a lot harder to jam,” says Paul. It also would be a lot harder to put Martin Luther King’s voice behind the closing notes of “Fool On the Hill” and harder or impossible to do numbers like “Back In the USSR” and “Sgt. Pepper.”  “I remember when the Beatles came to Forest Hills in 1964” says promoter Ron Delsener. “They had these little amplifiers and we string up some lights on a pole. We didn’t know what we were doing. Today, you can sound in an arena like you sound on a record. It’s amazing what’s happened with technology.”  “I don’t think the ‘old days’ were any greater,” says McCartney. “I remember the days when we didn’t know anything. That wasn’t better. And you don’t have to submit to machines; almost every note you hear in this show, we play live. Besides, I like having fancy lights when I play, even if I can’t see them.”  “In a way, I did my career backwards anyway. I’m doing about two hours of singing now, whereas when the Beatles were popular, our shows were maybe 40 minutes. Or 20, if we were angry. We’d say ‘Screw ‘em,’ run out and do ‘Shelovesyouyeahyeahyeah,” then run off. Logically, I should have been doing two hours then and half an hour now.”  There’s always the tendency with McCartney, as with Lennon, to find subtext in each word and deed.  This show opens with a wide-screen movie, three side-by-side images plus musical soundtrack, tracing Paul McCartney from 1964 to the present. While the Beatles sing “All You Need Is Love” on the middle screen images of Richard Nixon flash on the side screens. When Paul sings this year’s “That Day Is Done,” the audience sees the man and the tank in China’s Tiananmen Square.  The easy one-liner here is that Paul has found a way to open for himself, a crack that would ring truer if the movie’s opening song were not “A Hard Day’s Night.” with John clearly singing lead.  A bit later, an image of a dog is flashed next to a picture of Yoko Ono. Oooh. But wait. During “Say Say Say,” Linda McCartney’s picture appears next to a picture of ET. Rough business, this Paul analysis.  “I used to think that someday, maybe after you died, people straightened everything out,” says McCartney, taking sugar and milk in his own tea and pouring milk into a visitor’s. “They would look at all your work and put it in perspective. You know, find things from my wilderness years,’ like ‘Daytime Nighttime Suffering.” Now, I’m not so sure. I was talking in an interview recently about my own avant-garde period, meeting Andy Warhol and all. I was doing that when John was a husband and father, living out by the country club. But no one knows about mine, because I’ve never broadcast it. Then, when I read this interview, I felt funny that I had. But maybe if you don’t talk about it, no one will know, even if it’s easy to find out. I think John understood that; he certainly broadcast his all over.”  He mimics a Paul Poster pose.  “If you’re photographed holding your thumb up to the camera, that’s the image you get and people don’t want to hear otherwise. I know I wasn’t always the ‘cute one’ and John wasn’t always the acerbic one. But it’s not convenient for some people to remember I wrote ‘Helter Skelter.’ Charles Manson is better known for that than I am. And John had a very sweet side, which the Albert Goldman’s overlook entirely.”  Now, there are those who say Paul knows the image game because he polishes his own like a Faberge Egg, and serious Paul analysts would no doubt note that during the Ahoy shows, he wasn’t introducing his band (something he has done in the past).  Sorry, he says. No message there. “One of my most satisfying moments in the show is ‘Ebony and Ivory,’ when Hamish does the Stevie Wonder vocal and gets applause. Obviously, things tend to center on me, but I’ve always liked the ‘team’ thing.  “In the very early days of the Beatles, one of our managers before Brian [EPSTEIN]suggested to me, very quietly of course, that we call ourselves Paul McCartney and the Beatles. Luckily for me, and the world, I decided against it.”  Another grin. “Not that John would have stood for it.”  There’s a certain historic grace to the Great ’60s Tours of 1989. The Who opened the show, followed by the Rolling Stones and now comes Paul McCartney, the single living person who best represents the decade’s best band.  “The danger with all of us pterodactyls on the road is that you don’t want to become a ’60s package show,” McCartney muses. “Or, if you aren’t careful with some songs, you can get a little lounge pianoish.”  He flexes his fingers, warming up from some air piano.  “Oh, the lo-o-ong and win-ding thank you, thank you very much, you’re a great audience ro-o-oad.”  One senses he’s heard this.  “I find now I want to do my songs as close to the originals as possible. If it’s getting away too much, I’ll listen to the record to bring it back.  “I’ve heard Bob Dylan, if a song gets too recognizable, throws it out. That’s great, for him. It’s not for me.”  Now, to be sure, the notion of Paul McCartney toying with his melodies is a little like Einstein saying, “Oh, let’s try E= MC3.” If you’re good enough to write’em like Paul, you’re also smart enough to play’em as they lay, not that it’s exactly that simple.  “It’s an adventure,” says a soundman over a plate of bean tacos at the crew’s pre-show dinner. (The vegetarian McCartney’s tour food gives both traveling chefs and vegetarianism a good name.) “The Stones have played ‘Satisfaction’ before. The Who have done farewell tour before. But how do you know what ‘Eleanor Rigby’ or ‘Back in the USSR’ should sound like in an arena? You have no point of reference, because no one’s ever heard it there before. Including Paul.”  Two days before this interview, it is announced the Beatles have resolved their legal disputes. This is nice in every sense except that it resurrects rock’s most exhausted rumor: The Beatle Reunion.  “It opens some exciting possibilities,” says Paul. “But I’m sure we’ll take thing very cautiously.”  Translation: Expect some nice archival video and audio. Do not bet your Butcher Cover on a concert.  At the end of the Ahoy show, Paul steps to Linda’s mike and hits the first notes of “Golden Slumbers,” after which he and the band — a lot of credit to Hamish here — finish out the “Abbey Road” medley. Note-perfect. It is the rarest of concert moments: Music heard a thousand times before sounds like the first time.  In fact, this performance is so good that passionate fans may delay applauding for a moment when it ends — because they half-expect to hear “Her Majesty,” the ditty Paul placed in the “Abbey Road” run-out groove that since he entered Beatle legend as a sort of whimsical coda.  No, Paul does not sing “Her Majesty” here. But did he ever consider it?  “No,” he says. “Well, actually, yes. Fleetingly. That’s a trouble you can get into with the Beatles. You do one thing and it can go on and on. I love it all, but at some point, you just have to decide to stop.”
The Daily News interviewed Paul McCartney before he played in the U.S. for the first time after 13 years of absence.