Just ten days ago, Paul McCartney began rehearsals in Los Angeles for the shows of his Latin American leg A trip backwhich started last Tuesday in Montevideo and continues this Saturday, October 5, with the first of two concerts he will give at the Memorial Stadium. Supported by the band that has been with him for over 20 years, The former Beatle was seen as he always was: a man who lives to believe his age (82, turned last June 18), slim and agile, wearing the attractive Höfner 500/1 bass, ready for the twenty shows that will close who’s tour the final act will be on December 19 at the O2 in London.
The images – nothing out of this world, and still joy: Paul in different situations surrounded by wonderful Brian Ray, Rusty Anderson, Abe Laboriel Jr. and Wix Wickens– inspired in the Argentines an emotional memory that is divided into five generations, each of them falling freely towards the “Paul’s victory”, which caused several months before (many more have “desired to be” or expect too much now for almost anything) that The shows scheduled at River for October 5 and 6 will sell out in a few hours.
It will be the musician’s fifth visit to Argentina, with each visit releasing powerful and different sensations. In the first 1993, it was confirmed that the author of the soundtrack of the life of many of those who filled the Memorial (largely, the audience of the Beatles in their time) was real and extended a visible and visible hand; in 2010, again in the River and another certainty: the artist is not only back, but he did so in a high form. For the 2016 (Estadio Único de La Plata) and 2019 shows, the great musician, but also the legend, is known as always.
Now, five years later, The same vibe from that last show at the Argentine Polo Grounds will be in the air again, while the master of ceremonies promises to repeat his old magic shows: almost thirty songs by the Fab Four, the remnants of time with the most brilliant (and brightest) Wings, a handful of pearls from his own long career, and memorable moments for John Lennon and George Harrison, the absent Beatles, strategically positioned but capable of truly moving. Of all and for all.
Prophet in this world
“I want to go listen to that bass,” they say said Charly García when it was announced that McCartney had come to the country for the first time. It was the middle of 1993 (the shows in River were on the 9th and 10th of December) and on Rock and Pop there was a role playing that was a little big but effective: “The most important composer in history coming,” he said, greatly, the announcer Tha an rádio de Daniel Grinbank, The businessman who did the most important concerts of the decade in Argentina (Stones, Madonna, Jackson, Prince) and who was now having one of his full sessions with Paul, started to heat up the atmosphere, with an advertisement that used the winds intelligently. extended the second segment of “Band on the Run.”
Three decades have passed since the Beatles’ explosion in England, and almost 33 since then, after they returned to Liverpool after their last tour in Hamburg – that city where they grew them as a band and as men – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best (two years were needed before these last two left the scene, Paul would take the bass and Ringo Starr took over the drums) they tried to dress a consolidated group with their performance on 27 December 1960 at the Town Hall Litherland, in his native town. “Many consider this concert to be an important milestone in the Beatles’ career. Until then, they hadn’t played much in that part of the city (…) From the moment Paul started singing ‘Long Tall Sally’ at the top of his lungs, the audience was shocked, and then desperate,” he said. Barry Miles in the essential Paul McCartney. many years ago (Emecé, 1997). Today, the essence of that provocative teenager is still alive in this man who carries three hours of a show on his shoulders, in a concert where his dinner, however, does not an inevitable white shirt is an extra wrinkle.
That thread that unites them McCartney meeting John Lennon at Woolton Church on July 6, 1958 – showing him that he knew more than just how to play Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” or Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula” with the same guitar buttons ( and left-handed!) but also how he could sing them competently, in which he was an unexpected entrance test for The Quarrymen, the Teddy Boy’s ski band – with whom he will be today and tomorrow ‘ to court the people of Buenos Aires, always tense. A permanent artistic care which, of course, has its highest point in music, but which has never stopped disturbing other expressions. In 2020, for example, with photographs, when he published the book Paul McCartney Pictures 1963-64: Eyes of the Storma collection of unpublished photographs he took himself during Beatlemania; or (again his image as a complete artist inviting you to break space-time and travel between decades) at the time when nobody in England was talking about anything but the Beatles and Swinging London opened its arms to him for his work as an art admirer and collector at the Indica gallery, founded in 1965 by John Dunbar, Peter Asher (brother of his then-boyfriend, the model and actress Jane Asher) and Barry Miles. He has also shown gifts as a visual artist, author of books of poetry and children’s books.
Days of another life
The son of a worker and an amateur musician and a special nurse, the eldest of two brothers and a special student, James Paul McCartney grew up moving (Mary, his mother, was always on the way to a more comfortable home for the family) in Liverpool after the war, a city still devastated by more than 70 bombing raids by Hitler’s Luftwaffe to the heart of his port during the war. completed in 1945. At the age of 14, he was already paying attention to all American music that was crossing the ocean to be played on the radio and promoting a city that was under construction and social reconstruction. Harassment and echoes of sirens, symbols and misery followed, but Liverpool was the right place to be young: the Mersey Beat movement reared its head, looking in the mirror of Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and many others. Paul would be a part of it, with his talent for putting words together, the speed of his hands for changing chords and a very good ear for coding – he didn’t know it then, but he soon found out – everything that came into his music nervous system.
Then, the greatest story told in pop history: his partnership with Lennon, linked by the bond of music, which would transcend the chemistry on stage (much of the excitement of their live shows was driven by the energy with which each enhanced the other) to consolidated into two compositions that would first distinguish the Beatles from the rest of the Mersey groups (most covered modern heroes) and then “they would put together a work equal to any popular music of the 20th century”, as Mark Hertsgaard asserts in The Beatles. a day in the life (Grijalbo, 1995).
In the same sense, there is a quote from Ringo that shows the phenomenon that the two became in a short time: “What’s left of the song is (…) It’s not about how you it With respect I believe more in the song than in the music. And John and Paul wrote amazing songs.” Going into his modus operandi solves some enigmas: the views were individual; the solutions, joint. But in the final balance, the one that puts the Beatles on the Olympus they will never abandon, regardless of the percentage of the song that corresponds to each one (it is known that “Yesterday”, “Let it Be ” or “The Long and Winding Road” 95% belongs to McCartney, just like “In My Life”, “Help” or “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” from Lennon) but there was competition – this is George Martin, legendary producer of the world. album, always talked about a group – arising from knowing that there was something special in the other. It was a wise decision to unite these brilliances, and not separate them. The rest is a myth.
Those ten years with the Fab Four, fifty four making solo albums, musical collaboration as a healthy habit (with Elvis Costello; with Youth in the electronic music project The Fireman; with Rihanna and Kanye West for “FourFiveSeconds”), the achievement of going into academic music and coming out well, and an amazing ability to adapt to the times before them, these are the crown of Paul McCartney who is among us again. The greatest musicologist of the 20th century and up to now, with his perfect Beatle-era pop stuff, the anthems he knew how to do in that era and every era, and his on-stage presence. Eternal and current.
Photos: Kindness DF Entertainment and MJ Kim
