Live from Coachella - Paul McCartney burns up the desert night!

April 18, 3:55 PMPop Culture ExaminerDominic Patten

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It took a while to get there through the traffic but Day One of Coachella shows the decade old desert festival is hitting all the right notes in 2009

For Dominic Patten's Top Picks for Day One of Coachella 2009, click here 

Then, for Dominic Patten's Top Picks for Day Two of Coachella 2009, click here 

And, one more time for Dominic Patten's Top Picks for Day Three of Coachella 2009, click here  

If you want the full Coachella line-up and set times, click here

Franz Ferdinand tore through their set, Leonard Cohen seduced through his and the adrenaline surging Ghostland Observatory brought the Sahara stage house down in their electro-dance soul rock mash-up

The same cannot be said of Morrissey. 

Also a legend in his own time, Moz introduced himself with a snarled "Can I serenade you?" and set the tone for what was a halfhearted set of Smiths and solo material. Sure, the blue shirted buff singer surprisingly came on more like Motorhead - heavy, tough & fast. Unfortunately, the pacing was way off and the sound was just terrible, turning the well constructed songs into mush. By the third or fourth song, patches of the crowd were wandering off to take in set by Girl Talk, who had a great set and great sound over at the smaller tented Sahara stage, and others. 

Then the night got darker, as it only can in the desert, the temperature dropped, as it does out here and the Gods came to play among us. There'd been a lot of purist criticism, some by yours truly I might as well admit, about an act as Boomercentric and so mainstream as Paul McCartney headlining the first night of Coachella. The former Beatle and Wings frontman showed, as he repeatedly over the decades, that such criticism was nothing more than an exercise in redundancy. Starting off with "Jet" from 1975, Beatle Paul brought all the professionalism, the populism, and the passion to a 2 1/2 set that one a man who has written more hits than most of us have had hot breakfasts can. Sure, there were a couple of lags, like when he played songs off his Fireman project, the oldie "Honey Hush" and a few other more recent tunes, but when he pulled out a ukulele and launched into a building version of Beatle bandmate George Harrison's "Something" the entire field of thousands broke into song with him. His announcement that Harrison's widow Olivia was there cause a number of people to openly weep.  Dropping the well practiced banter of "feeling alright" McCartney also spoke about the emotion he was feeling on the 11th anniversary of the death of his first wife Linda. Moments like that displayed that the sentimentality he is so often mocked for often comes from a very real place from a man who truly has seen and done it all. 

If Morrissey & his tight but murky band of polite hooligans had musical muscle to draw on, Beatle Paul and his boys had legions. And they flexed his power, and power chords, from one huge hit to another.

Maybe I'm amazed? After an exhaustive set and two encores, including the stunning fireworks, musically and literally, of "Live and Let Die," Beatles hits like "Back in the USSR," which had the crowd going crazy, a Barack Obama dedicated version of "Blackbird," and the final tunes of "Helter Skelter," which prove the Beatles could rock as hard as any metal band, and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," I wasn't just amazed - I was blown away. 

Let the word go out, music fans, with his depth and historical and musical width, Paul McCartney was the perfect headliner for Day One of Coachella 2009 – after all, what better place, if you think about it, to hear all those classic Beatles songs actually sung by the Beatle who wrote them?

More from Day Two of Coachella, including Atmosphere, Drive-By Truckers, The Killers and off site events like the Ace Hotel’s poolside sets from The Cave Singers, Y La Bamba and the Thriftdstore AllStars coming up later.