Brad Paisley, Keith Urban pay tribute to Beatles at ‘Grammy Salute’ concert

LOS ANGELES (AP) - There's an easy way to give pop music's most performance-hardened stars a case of the butterflies: Ask them to perform in front of The Beatles.   Many of today's top artists gathered Monday night to honor The Beatles' legacy, with Paul McCartney andRingo Starr in attendance and late members John Lennon and George Harrison always in mind, at The Recording Academy's taping of "The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute to The Beatles."   John Legend and Alicia Keys sang "Let It Be." Katy Perry performed "Yesterday," while her boyfriend, John Mayer, teamed with Keith Urban on "Don't Let Me Down." And Brad Paisley and Pharrell Williams took on the challenge of "Here Comes the Sun," a song well-known to millions of music fans.   It was until McCartney and Starr took the stage, turning what had been a fairly sedate affair into an arm-in-arm sing-a-long of hits "Hey, Jude," ''Sgt. Pepper" and "Yellow Submarine" that prompted movie stars and Grammy Award-winning musicians alike to sing along like giddy kids."We are honoring the most important band of all time, and trying to do justice to their song while two of them sit there," Paisley said in an interview before his performance. "We know, going in, we're not going to sing like them, and we're going to try to do our own thing with it. But ... there's reasons why people get blasted when they cover Beatles songs in any situation. But here we are, we're all doing that tonight. So, I guess it's an even playing field in that sense." The telecast will air Feb. 9, 50 years after The Fab Four made their first appearance in front of an American television audience on "The Ed Sullivan Show." It was a historic moment with more than 73 million Americans tuning in, changing pop culture in profound ways.