Wichita • Wednesday, July 19, 2017

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From The Wichita Eagle, July 19, 2017:

A Beatle came to Wichita on Wednesday night.

Not just any Beatle but the Beatle, Paul McCartney. And he played 39 songs for a sold-out crowd of 12,500 at Intrust Bank Arena.

It was his first ever visit to Kansas, and he proved to be an affable chap, telling stories from the stage about his six-decade career, joking, reading fans’ signs aloud, even playfully shaking his backside as the camera zoomed in, projecting it on to the massive vertical screens on either side of the stage.

McCartney, 75, has a voice that’s more gravely than it was during his prime, and he can’t belt those high notes quite like he used to. But he’s still fit, energetic and full of charisma, and he’s still a top-notch musician. Throughout the show, he hopped from instrument to instrument, playing electric and acoustic guitars and sitting down behind two different pianos. He even played the ukulele, one he said former Beatles band mate, the late George Harrison, had given him.

And he performed songs that truly spanned his career, going all the way back to “In Spite of All the Danger,” a song he recorded with his Beatles precursor band The Quarrymen in 1958, all the way up to “FourFiveSeconds,” a song he made in 2015 with pop star Rihanna and rapper Kanye West. […]

From Kake.com, July 20, 2017:

Thousands of Paul McCartney fans braved the heat for up to two hours before the Intrust Bank Arena opened it’s doors, but one local group skipped the line and received the VIP treatment.

McCartney extended an invitation to the employees at Wichita’s Envision, who are blind or visually impaired. The Envision organization strives to help the blind and visually impaired, and more than half of it’s 400 employees are blind or low vision.

McCartney gave Envision 13 tickets. Each employee entered to win the tickets by writing an essay about how music inspires them.

The 13 employees who won couldn’t believe it.

“To experience such a beautiful sound such as Paul McCartney couldn’t get much better than that,” one employee said.

Charles Wilks just graduated with a music performance degree. Something he says McCartney’s music played a role in.

“A lot of it inspired me to pursue my career in music,” Wilks said.

As McCartney played for the Wichita crowd, the Envision bunch soaked in every moment.

“What a fantastic human being. It speaks of compassion and his ability to just think about the little people,” Wilks said.

From SPIN, July 20, 2017:

It doesn’t take a lot to mock the Westboro Baptist Church, the apocalypse-humping naysayers who protest anybody they claim isn’t living a properly God-fearing life, which is everybody. Just about anybody can life a happier, more fulfilling existence than a retrograde doom cult whose members free themselves the moment they realize every part of their life sucks. One of those happier existences belongs to Paul McCartney, who was greeted by the WBC before his Wednesday show at the INTRUST Bank Arena in Wichita, Kansas. Instead of getting annoyed by signs like “MAN’S JOB: OBEY GOD,” Sir Paul had some fun at their expense by using the prime rhetorical weapon of the 21st century: the meme.

Last updated on March 21, 2021

In Trust Bank Arena

This was the 1st and only concert played at In Trust Bank Arena.

Setlist for the concert