Last Saturday night Sir Paul McCartney played a concert in Halifax on the Commons. It was the only Canadian stop on his current tour which takes him down the east coast of the US to play six venues, including New York and Boston and ending in Dallas toward the end of August. It’s not a strenuous tour schedule, but I guess if you are Sir Paul you can do it at your own pace. Our next door neighbours, Red and Sharon, bought tickets for the concert, as did our friend Heather, but we decided not to even though Lorraine was President of the Calgary Beatles Fan Club in 1963 and had a special affection for Paul, as he was known to all of us back then.
We didn’t buy tickets, but we were fortunate enough to receive an invitation from Robin to attend his party “Baby let me drive your balcony”, said balcony facing the Commons close to the corner of Cunard and Robie where the stage was set up. We decided to go since, after all, it was an event and a party, and, after all, Lorraine had been President and a big fan, and, after all, I had had a Beatles haircut for a short time in my undergrad years, and, after all, we knew those old songs so well. There was a crowd at Robin’s, both an art crowd (we were part of this group) and a social worker crowd, many of them colleagues and friends of Robin’s partner, plenty of food and drink, and a great view from the balcony of the traffic jamming up, the long tractor trailer support units, two policeman looking elegant on two lovely horses (though Jackie reminded me that they are often used in crowd control, which did put a different spin on the image), the back of the stage, and a sea of people waving and swaying.
The concert was a good one, with a huge crowd and a set list that had enough favourites sprinkled through it to keep everyone we could see in the main audience pretty happy – and it kept us happy enough too. There was a limit of six on Robin’s balcony so people had to do rotations there, but there was no restriction on Robin’s bed which was next to his open window. It gave a great view, so we could watch Paul’s torso from behind through a gap in the backdrop as he moved around on stage – he’s not a dancer like Mick but he does sway some and step back and forth – and the sound was great. Every song was played note for note, pause for pause, syllable for syllable, and harmony for harmony like the originals that were burned in our memories, so Jackie, a social worker I seem to see about once a decade, and I were able to sing along without missing a beat. Her sad story was that her parents had refused to let her attend a Beatles concert in Paris in 1964 with her high school because they were worried what might happen to her, but her happy story was that Sir Paul had built this concert around the Beatles songbook, and now, 45 years later, she could hear him sing almost as he would have sung back then with John, George, and Ringo.
One crowd favourite with a local flavour was the Celtic ballad “Mull of Kintyre”, which you can watch here, a great version complete with our own pipe and drum band, the 78th Highlanders. An easy one for Sir Paul was “Hey Jude” because he got the audience to do most of the singing, which they didn’t mind at all. And “Yesterday” was rendered with the same aching nostalgia it has always evoked, which did not stop any of us from singing along. Jackie and I agreed that “Helter Skelter” simply felt wrong without John (though I've since learned that the song is all Paul), and we talked seriously – Jackie is an old “leftie” – about class analysis, honouring blues roots and people of colour (not many in the audience we could see), and the fact that Sergeant Pepper’s was played as a straight thank you and good-bye at the end, with not a hint of the irony of the original.
Our political commentary was halted at one point by an amazing fireworks display, which put the whole thing into concert spectacle context as we all stared out the window and said, Oh wow! It was a time, as people say around here, a fine time, and we all shared something, some recollection of a Beatles time or place, that made it worth going for. Thanks for that, Sir Paul.
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