JOHN BRUMMETT: Thank you, Sir Paul

Would we still need him, would we still feed him, when he's 73?

Why, yes, of course, emphatically and ecstatically.

If one Beatle was to survive and, a half-century past the screaming mania, wend his way to our remote burg to perform the musical arc and narrative of our lives ... well, Paul would be the one.

John and George were more serious, more deep, weirder. Ringo is more a cut-up.

All along it was Paul in the middle, the epitome, possessed of some of the seriousness and depth of John and George, some of the frivolity of Ringo and all of the music of all of them.


We of the baby boom generation in the Greater Little Rock region are uncommonly blessed. Our good fortune is that, at that spry 73, the ever-amiable and accessible Paul McCartney is willing to tour into our flyover section of America.

And it's that he can still perform with command and vigor the epic defining songs of our lives.

And we are uncommonly blessed that the taxpayers of Pulaski County built that suitable arena and that the Verizon's manager and booker, Michael Marion, somehow reeled in this show--to "Little Rock and Roll," Sir Paul called it, more than once.

So it all unfolded for us Saturday night. I relived fifth grade to graduation, from the talent show in the Baseline Elementary School "cafetorium" to the eight-track tapes playing on the McClellan High speech and debate team's road trip to Fayetteville--"Let it Be" and "Yesterday" and "Hey Jude" and "Back in the USSR" and "A Hard Day's Night" and "Lady Madonna" and "Love Me Do" and "Here, There and Everywhere"--for three solid hours, a lot longer than some of these youngsters play nowadays.

There were homages to John, George and, unexpectedly and delightfully, Jimi Hendrix.

Sir Paul McCartney, this historic world figure, stood center stage--in North Little Rock, actually--and beheld a sea of more than 15,000 soul-lifted Southern Americans.

There he related that he had watched from Liverpool as a boy more than a half-century ago when the civil-rights struggle in America began in Little Rock. Then, with the stage slowly risen to loom over the arena, he sang "Blackbird" in dedication to those who lived that struggle.

"Blackbird singing in the dead of night. Take these broken wings and learn to fly. You were only waiting for this moment to arise."

I'd call that a legitimate moment--for our town, for our time, for that arc and narrative of our lives.

And I'd call the evening a brief coup for Little Rock, which was for this occasion a regional hub, a destination, a mecca.

McCartney asked how many in the crowd were from Little Rock, and how many were from Arkansas but not Little Rock, and how many were not from either Arkansas or Little Rock. It was pretty much a three-way tie.

"The tourism board thanks you," Paul quipped.

On the way out, back across the Broadway Bridge, the van ahead of me bore a Kansas license plate.

When, as is customary on this tour, McCartney called selected audience members to the stage, it turned out that his crew had picked:

• Four women who had lit themselves up like Christmas trees--literally, I mean--and were from Memphis and Mississippi.

• A young couple from Japan, the male of which wanted to drop to his knees and propose marriage to his girlfriend right then and there.

She nodded yes.

That stunt may be getting to be a bit of a thing. A similar marriage proposal was made on stage in Brooklyn last week at a Bruce Springsteen concert.

It likely will remain a thing until some woman says "no."

At any rate, it's not every day that women from the musical hotbed of Memphis must go to Greater Little Rock to take a chance at being on stage with Paul McCartney.

And it's not every day that a Japanese wedding proposal is made and agreed to in North Little Rock, Ark.

Probably the strangest thing all evening was that the young man from Japan didn't kiss the young woman from Japan after she nodded yes. They both hugged Paul, though.

And about feeding Sir Paul when he's 73: I'm told McCartney spent an evening in the Capital Hotel and that he strode into the kitchen to thank the staff for a perfectly prepared meal.

I'm feeling such music-inspired generosity of spirit today that I even thank Warren Stephens for that elegant, world-class hotel worthy of musical and cultural and generational royalty.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 05/03/2016

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