Paul McCartney to Attend Motown Museum Fundraiser

The Motown Museum needs some financial help and Paul McCartney is lending a hand and doing so in grand fashion.

Paul McCartney and Berry Gordy Jr. will be on hand for a Motown Museum fundraiser in New York City next month and the pair will be holding a special concert to unveil a Steinway grand piano from 1877 that Paul helped to restore.

According to Billboard, Paul and Berry Jr. will unveil the piano with a special ceremony and concert which is a thinly masked attempt at raising money for the Motown Museum. I say thinly masked because while formal invitations will be sent out, the public is "encouraged to attend" at a price of $10 thousand dollars per ticket. I guess when you sing about beauty and you sing about truth, you can charge ten thousand dollars per show.

The granddaughter of the late Motown Records founder Barry Gordy says she is glad to see the piano get a special concert of its own and thinks that it's "appropriate" that Paul be there because of what he did to bring the instrument back to life.

Last summer, Paul visited the museum and saw the condition the piano was in and took up the project on his own after he learned that it had been played by the likes of Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, but it was no longer playable because it was allowed to go into a state of such disrepair. Paul shipped the piano back to Steinway and asked their craftsmen to do what they could to restore it. He asked them to save what they could of the piano, but do whatever it took to keep it sounding its best. They did have to use some replacement parts on the piano, however they saved the original parts and they, along with the piano itself are being shipped back to the Motown Museum later this fall.

Appropriately, the special concert will take place at Steinway Hall September 18.