Paul McCartney: He's still got it
Published Saturday July 4th, 2009
Legendary performer has a huge body of work to pull from for Halifax concert
In recent years, Atlantic Canada has landed concerts by of the biggest names in music history in the Rolling Stones (twice), The Eagles, Bon Jovi and soon enough, KISS and AC/DC.
Next Saturday, July 11, arguably the most famous living musician joins those names as Paul McCartney, a former Beatle, the leader of Wings and a hugely successful solo artist, performs at the Halifax Commons.
It will be McCartney's only Canadian date this year and one of a small number of hand-picked dates the legendary singer and bass player is doing this summer.
McCartney is hand-picking his dates this summer, which has delighted fans and brought the singer to towns and cities he's never played before .
He headlined the Coachella Festival (his first U.S. festival appearance) this year and performed a show to mark the opening of The New Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, a gig which sold out in seven seconds, setting a new sales record as tickets went at a rate of 600 per second.
While many musicians who've reached his age (McCartney recently turned 67) tend to slow down, McCartney has done nothing of the sort.
Only two years ago, he released his latest solo album, Memory Almost Full, an album of pop rock that received rave reviews. The album came only two years after another solo outing, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.
Just last fall, McCartney's side project The Fireman (an electronica collaboration with UK record producer Youth) released its first album in a decade.
And live, McCartney is still leaving fans stunned.
Peter Trainor, a longtime McCartney fan and vice-principal of Hillcrest School in Moncton, travelled to Quebec City for its 400th birthday last year, an event capped off by hugely successful McCartney concert, which was seen live by hundreds of thousands of fans.
Peter says it was the greatest concert he's ever seen.
"When I saw him last summer in Quebec City, it was a real highlight," he says. "It was like a culmination of so many years of being a fan of this guy."
He says every music fan who hasn't seen McCartney simply has to go to the Halifax gig.
"He's still probably the greatest voice in rock 'n' roll," he says. "He could do anything with his voice. Absolutely anything."
Graduates from Riverview High School will have fond memories of 'Mr. Trainor' performing The Beatles' classic Hey Jude at RHS coffeehouses for many years while he taught there. The longtime teacher moved on to Hillcrest three years ago, but during his years at RHS, he organized coffeehouses, where students and teachers alike could perform music in a laid-back setting a few times a year.
Most of the RHS coffeehouses would end with Peter playing piano and singing lead on the famous Beatles' number, a handful of students joining him on stage to sing.
Peter has brought the coffeehouse tradition with him to Hillcrest and, to this day, he says there has never been a coffeehouse go by where someone didn't play at least one Beatles song.
He says it's a sign that McCartney's music has touched several generations of music fans.
"To be able to do what he did with Wings after The Beatles shows how much talent he has, to be able to produce as many memorable songs with them as he did with The Beatles."
One question on the mind of fans is, what kind of McCartney set will we get to see and hear next week? Will he rely mostly on Beatles material, cull tracks from his days in Wings or pull mostly from his more recent solo material?
Based on a recent setlist from the Coachella Festival in April, one has to assume fans can expect a bevy of Beatles tunes, some of Wings' biggest hits and a few gems from his solo outings.
Fans from Moncton are flocking to the show to see a legend with their own eyes.
Brandon Price, 25, of Riverview, is heading down with a group of friends for the weekend. A fan of all of McCartney's work, Price couldn't pass up the chance to see him live.
"This is pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," he says. "I always figured the closest I'd get to a McCartney concert would be in my home theatre, or at least if I was ever going to get to see him live it would have to be in a big city like Montreal or Toronto."
Price doesn't care what McCartney chooses to play at the show either.
"This may offend some people, but the early Beatles' material really doesn't do it for me. I think the really good stuff started with Revolver, so The Beatles' output from '66 to '70 is really when they started moving from simple rock 'n' roll songs to something that I think is a little more creative, and a lot of my favourites from this period are most certainly McCartney's."
While he says his favourite solo album from a Beatle is George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, Price says McCartney has had the most consistent post-Beatles career.
"I absolutely love Wings, particularly Band On The Run and Venus and Mars, and some of the more recent solo stuff like Flaming Pie and Chaos and Creation in the Backyard are really good too," he says. "Basically, he's got the kind of repertoire that I'm not really looking for any one particular song at the show. He could play pretty much whatever and it'll be great."
And there's little doubt that, no matter what he pulls out, McCartney will sound good.
"Paul's one of the few musicians I can think of that, at his age, can still play and sing as well as he could in his heyday," Price says. "Sometimes you miss seeing a band or artist in their prime, whether it's because you couldn't make it or because you weren't born yet. Then you see them 30 or 40 years after they hit it big and you're a little disappointed because they're only a fleeting glimpse of what they once were.
"You don't need to worry about any of that with McCartney because he's still got it."
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