DO YOU STILL NEED HIM, DO YOU STILL HEAR HIM, WHEN HE'S 84?

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

Happy 84th to Sir Paul McCartney — born June 18, 1942 in Liverpool, England!  Will you still need him, will you still feed him — when he's 84? Apparently, yes. The whole world still does. 

Did you know his first instrument wasn't even the guitar. His dad gave him a trumpet for his 14th birthday. Paul traded it in almost immediately — because you can't sing while playing trumpet, and singing was the whole point. 

He's left-handed, which meant he had to literally flip a right-handed guitar upside down and restring it just to play it properly. He figured it out after seeing a poster of Slim Whitman playing lefty. Imagine if he never saw that poster. 

"Yesterday" came to him in a DREAM — he woke up with the entire melody in his head and rushed to a piano before he could forget it. For weeks afterward he kept asking people if they recognized the tune, convinced he must have subconsciously stolen it from somewhere. He hadn't. It just came from him. 

And in 2005 he became the first musician ever to broadcast live music into outer space — performing for astronauts on the International Space Station during a concert in California. Paul McCartney has literally played for the cosmos. 

Eighty-four years old and he's STILL touring, STILL writing, STILL filling stadiums. Living legend doesn't even begin to cover it.