It’s a weighty responsibility being the soundtrack to a generation.

Frank Sinatra knew that. Paul McCartney is probably the only other man in history who knows it, too.

Bob Dylan is the voice of a generation, but his songs don’t accompany a lifetime of memories for as many people as the songs of Sinatra and McCartney.

McCartney, like Sinatra, takes his responsibility as an inhabitant in the hearts and minds of tens of millions of people very seriously.

It would have been nice if he could have disregarded some of his lesser works in his headline set Friday at Coachella. Coachella is a festival about not making compromises. An artist does what he loves and if there’s an audience for it, fine. If not, there are four other music venues with something else to offer.

But McCartney is of the era in which entertainers felt they had to satisfy all of their fans all of the time because they were their life blood.

And there were enough people in that audience who bought Wings records to make McCartney believe he owed them an entertaining time.

I wish McCartney hadn’t opened his set with the Wings song, “Jet” -- even if it’s one of the better Wings songs. And I wish he hadn’t followed that with “Drive My Car” -- even if it is a Beatles song.

McCartney’s set got interesting on the seventh song when his band started playing Jimi Hendrix’ “Foxy Lady.” It was a good rendition and the surprise of McCartney playing Hendrix could have equaled the impact of Prince playing Radiohead last year.

But McCartney stopped. That wasn’t his soundtrack.

Then McCartney got off the main track again with a ‘50s song The Beatles used to sing in Liverpool called “Honey Hush.” This was cool and acceptable. This was McCartney at his most raw. His passion was contagious.

It prepared his audience for another sidetrack -- his side project, The Fireman. He performed “Highway” from his brilliant “Electric Arguments” CD.

Unfortunately, his road band didn’t have the technical facility to reproduce the studio sound he got with his Fireman colleague, Youth. It didn't have that cutting edge.

He did one other song by The Fireman, a song celebrating the election of Barack Obama called “Sing the Changes.” It was a valid inclusion because of its deeper meaning, but it was too bad we couldn’t have heard the most challenging songs by The Fireman. In “Nothing Too Much Just Out Of Sight,” McCartney channels Tom Waits. “Don’t Stop Running” runs 10-and-a-half minutes long.

The best McCartney songs at Coachella were the ones that meant as much to McCartney as they did to his fans. “Long and Winding Road” has taken on new meaning to him since the wind-down of The Beatles. He announced after he sang it that this was a very emotional evening for him because it was the anniversary of his wife, Linda’s death. Then he sang “My Love” -- “Don’t ever ask me why I never say good-bye to my love” – and a Wings song never sounded better.

.He talked about writing “Blackbird” in the middle of the civil rights struggle. “And now we have President Obama,” he said.

He talked about writing “Here Today” after John Lennon’s death. He gently sang, “I love you” to his slain co-writer as the screen filled with placards with Lennon’s picture on it.

Then he played mandolin on “Everybody Dance Tonight” from his excellent but modest-selling “Memory Almost Full” CD in 2007. It’s a simple song, but just far enough off the beaten track to be Coachella worthy.

McCartney’s concert, like his career, was inconsistent. But, like his career, it went so long and had so many great moments, it will go down as a great Coachella moment.
It wasn’t quite as great as Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails or Roger Waters, but it’s up there in the top 10.

When he could take “A Day in the Life,” which some critics have called the greatest rock song of all time, and make it better by segueing into Lennon’s “Give Peace A Chance,” and then top that time after time as his two-and-a-half-hour set wound down, you know this was a special Coachella moment.

From “Give Peace A Chance” he launched into “Let It Be” and it was a perfect fit. Then he went into his biggest extravaganza number, “Live and Let Die,” with amazing fireworks. Then he got the audience singing along to “Hey Jude,” one of the great crowd sing-alongs of all time. It’s also one of the ultimate get-off songs in rock history, but McCartney then came back for several encores.

“Yer Birthday,” had special meaning because of the placement of the song after learning of Linda’s anniversary. And the sound was suddenly clearer than ever.

After “Live and Let Die,” it was all Beatles material: “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Lady Madonna,” “Yesterday,” “Helter Skelter” and “Get Back.” He finally ended with the album-ending rendition of “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band,” which segued into “The End,” like the Cirque du Soleil production of “Love” version.

McCartney just scratched the surface of his amazing library of songs. He did very few early Beatles songs and he ignored (thankfully) some number one hits with Wings, such as “Silly Love Songs” and “Ebony and Ivory.”

But he gave so much of himself, and he had so much great stuff to give, that this concert will go down in the books as historic.