At the Guest Services Center, the last man on earth with a Jheri curl had a big smile on his face. In fact, you couldn’t spot anyone at the Barclays Center who wasn’t in a good mood. This was to be expected, since it’s always a special occasion when you see one of the Beatles. Especially in a year that’s felt like the longest game of Russian Roulette ever played, no pun intended.

If you’re of a certain age, or even if you weren’t alive back then, chances are you most associate Paul McCartney with the Summer of Love in 1967, which the Beatles helped define with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and “All You Need Is Love.” Or perhaps the A Hard Day’s Night summer of ’64, and maybe even the Help!/Shea summer of ’65 is immediately conjured up.

But for those of us who were kids of the ‘70s, McCartney is also emblematic of the Bicentennial summer of ’76. At the height of Framptonmania, “Let ‘Em In” and “Silly Love Songs” dominated the airwaves. Like Elton, Donna Summer, Steely Dan, and countless others, Paul McCartney and Wings were a major part of Generation X’s childhood soundtrack. In the mid-to-late ‘70s, you’d hear songs like “Listen to What the Man Said,” “Goodnight Tonight” and “With a Little Luck” played constantly alongside “Penny Lane” and “Get Back,” so you’d be simultaneously discovering Wings and the Beatles.

From the perspective of a child, it was hard to fathom that McCartney could create so many exceptional songs. Most importantly, they were all completely distinct from one another. How was it that the ragged metal/punk/alternative precursor “Helter Skelter” and the mellow AM Gold ballad “My Love” were both written and sung by the same guy? McCartney and the Beatles proved you could have the same kind of expansive range in rock’n’roll that Miles Davis displayed in Jazz and Pablo Picasso accomplished with the visual arts.

The man has so many beloved songs, his opening act is a DJ who plays remixed tunes that usually aren’t on the setlist, like “Getting Better” and “Say Say Say.” In his own unique way, it’s essentially McCartney letting everyone know, “Here’s what we won’t be performing tonight.” Combined with the concert itself, that’s 60 years in four hours, including The Quarrymen’s “In Spite of All the Danger.” Condensing one’s life into mere hours would appear to be an arduous task. However, when your biggest achievement is changing planet earth for the better (while in your 20s), everything else must seem rather simple.

All that music, and McCartney opened with … a John Lennon song. A magnanimous gesture, and a fitting one, being that he was performing in the adopted city of his old friend. Great as it was seeing him sing Lennon’s verses in “A Hard Day’s Night,” when he sang the “When I’m home …“ bridge, which he did in the original, it really hits you that you’re witnessing living history.

Just before the show started, two men in their 60s had wondered if McCartney could still “rock hard.” The second song, 1974’s “Junior’s Farm,” seemed to satisfy their curiosity. McCartney’s outstanding long-time band particularly stood out, making the song heavier than usual. No small feat, considering the original is a hard rock classic that 70’s FM radio played regularly beside Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, Kiss, and other hard rock/heavy metal acts the Beatles had a profound influence on. In McCartney’s first decade without his old band, “Junior’s Farm” was one of many examples of how he excelled in a world he partially created.

“Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Jet,” and “All My Loving” followed, one great tune after another. “Let Me Roll It” concluded with the “Foxy Lady” jam, an homage to Jimi Hendrix, a friend who once sought out McCartney to be the bassist in a supergroup with Miles Davis and jazz drum God Tony Williams. At that point, Abbey Road was brand new and Let It Be had been in the can. The latter album featured the next song performed, “I’ve Got a Feeling,” head-banging 70’s rock at its finest, despite being recorded in 1969. Guitarist Rusty Anderson’s replication of George Harrison’s frenzied descending lead break was pure arena rock greatness.

For “Nineteen Hundred and Eight-Five,” McCartney and his band did a perfect job on the harmonies for that extraordinary wordless vocal hook. Somehow, they invoked both the luminous California blue skies of the Beach Boys, and foreboding ‘40s/’50s black-and-white film noir. Next up was “Maybe I’m Amazed,” which will always summon the spring of ’77, when you’d hear the live version from Wings over America floating out of cars everywhere. McCartney’s brief opening piano melody alone can make you feel the tranquil glimmer of nostalgia. Remarkably, four decades later at 75, he’s still able to soulfully scream at the top of his lungs, “YEAH, YEAH, YEAH!” It’s a word that’s served him well.

“You Won’t See Me” from Rubber Soul got a slight makeover, starting slowly and building some drama towards the first chorus, similar to “Feel” by Beatles fanatics Big Star. “We Can Work It Out” may be the most “McCartney” of McCartney songs; jaunty rhythm, cautiously optimistic lyrics, with sublime melodies and vocals. Like most of the night, the perpetually smiling crowd sang along with him. Then again, he could play it in a Turkish prison, and the inmates would still feel chipper.

“In Spite of All the Danger” was originally from The Quarrymen, essentially the embryonic Beatles. They recorded it in 1958, fueled by Elvis, Chuck, Fats, and all the other rock’n’roll pioneers. However, it sounded more like the “cowboy songs” of the pre-rock era from acts like Gene Autry. In other words, the American Prairie via Liverpool. McCartney had the audience sing the “Ohhhhh-whoa-whoa-ohhhhhh” vocal hook back to him a few times. Not a bad reception for an obscurity he wrote way back in high school.

“Love Me Do” was yet another one everyone sang along with. For many people my age, it’s usually associated with the performance clip released in 1982 for its 20^th anniversary. That autumn, MTV had it in heavy rotation with Duran Duran and Billy Idol. An old black-and-white video of a short, simple song that had an Andy Griffith Show vibe was destined to stand out in the Day-Glo ‘80s.

The Jobim-influenced “And I Love Her,” “Blackbird,” the ’82 Lennon tribute “Here Today,” and “Queenie Eye” were next in succession. The latter, released in 2013, held up well with all the classics, and wouldn’t have been out of place on T. Rex’s 1971 landmark Electric Warrior. “Eleanor Rigby,” the sad orchestral tale of isolation and the elderly, reminded everyone how astonishing it was for a then-23-year-old multi-millionaire to write with such skill, maturity, and empathy. At this point, McCartney is probably older than the two tragic characters in the song.

He first acknowledged the 50^th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” It sounded like a psychedelic circus with a whirling, sinister Technicolor carousel out of a ‘60s “Hammer Horror” film. “Something” changed the mood from phantasmagoric nightmare to melancholic reverie. While McCartney’s been performing it since Harrison died 16 years ago, you never lose the thrill of seeing him do material from the other Beatles.

Continuing in that vein, he did “A Day in the Life,” written mainly by Lennon. In a live setting, the influence it had on Bowie’s “Space Oddity” was more pronounced than usual. After the “Woke up …” interlude, McCartney segued into “Give Peace a Chance.” Too bad the 21^st century seems to have responded with one continuous Ray Liotta laugh.

Almost 30 tunes in, he finally got to one of his greatest accomplishments, “Band on the Run,” essentially three different songs. The smooth lullaby first half, sci-fi reggae second half, and up-tempo final half, topped off with interstellar Americana slide guitar, took the show into another stratosphere. It also gave the crowd a second (or third) wind. Meanwhile, the septuagenarian onstage hardly seemed to break a sweat.

As the Beatles were slowly disintegrating, McCartney dreamed about his late mother, inspiring “Let It Be.” Even with a joyful sold-out arena singing every lyric, you can still sense the bleak desolation the song was born out of. The message of having faith despite dismal circumstances illustrated his remarkable capacity to, as he once put it, “take a sad song, and make it better.”

Speaking of which, “Hey Jude” ended the first set, and the crowd sang louder than usual. Even McCartney merely sitting behind his psychedelic piano and singing “Hey …” to start the song, got the crowd acting like Derek Jeter had suddenly appeared in his old Yankee uniform. After all this time, for some reason it occurred to me that the initial “nah nah” melody after the third verse could’ve been right out of an old Jewish folk song. Unfortunately, he didn’t do the stirring “JUDE! JUDE! A-JUDY-JUDY-JUDY-JUDY-OWWWWW-WOW!” Not only is it one of the iconic moments in rock’n’roll, but for all intents and purposes it gave birth to Steven Tyler.

How did a 22-year-old write “Yesterday?” It’s easy to forget how young he was at the time, and how good the song is. After awhile, when you hear something again and again, you no longer hear it. And yet it’s a perfect depiction of how we get the urge to cling to the past, when abrupt, unwelcome changes upend our lives.

After that first encore, he switched from acoustic guitar to his legendary Hofner bass, and the band kicked in with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise),” bringing some of the Summer of Love to a summer that felt more like the next song, “Helter Skelter.” Its placement towards the show’s conclusion exemplified McCartney and his band’s relentless energy, which seemingly increased as time went on.

When he sat down behind the piano and crooned, “Once there was a way to get back homeward,” that was a signal to prepare to leave at the final note. In recent years, he’s ended with “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End,” the medley that serves as the finale for Abbey Road (notwithstanding the 23 seconds of “Her Majesty”). McCartney’s got an excess of material he could close with, but the medley was ideal. It served as a goodbye from the Beatles, who broke up soon after, and to the ‘60s, which would’ve been entirely different without them.

“Oh yeah! All right! Are you gonna be in my dreams, tonight?!” Those aren’t lyrics from Kiss. That’s the first line from “The End.” Leave it to the Beatles to bid adieu with an ass-kicking three-man axe jam, setting the tone for the guitar odysseys of the subsequent decade, and a harbinger of the powerful triple guitar attacks of Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Outlaws. McCartney, Anderson, and Brian Ray (who co-wrote Smokey Robinson’s 1987 hit “One Heartbeat”) did a stellar job recreating this magic moment. Then the piano chimed like a Christmas bell, and they harmonized on the Beatles parting message: “And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.”

In a time when ignorance, inhumanity, incompetence, and infantilism are seen as virtues, some welcome words of wisdom.

Matt Leinwohl