I was born the year jazz musician Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue, CBS premiered Rod Serling’s sci-fi series The Twilight Zone, and the United Nations adopted The Declaration of the Rights of the Child. A good time to be hatched in the Western world.
It was also the year an art school dropout named John Lennon formed the Quarrymen in Liverpool. A bassist named Paul McCartney joined the skiffle band soon after. I was barely out of diapers — and my future idols were barely out of their teens — when John and Paul, along with lead guitarist George Harrison and drummer Richard Starkey, played the Star Club in Berlin as the “Silver Beatles.” By the time I’d learned to speak, producer George Martin had signed them to EMI’s Parlophone label.
I was still a first-grader when the electrified, electrifying foursome graduated from boy-meets-girl to boys-meet-psychedelics, and were singing about living in a Yellow Submarine and chanting lines from The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I didn’t understand the meaning of any of it at the time, of course. In grade school, their music sounded to me like radio dispatches from another planet: sing-along commands from some benignly bopping beings with weird haircuts.
In time I’d come to think of John as the “artistic” one, a troubled guy sublimating his magical misery tour into rock n’ roll. Paul was the “cute one” with the angelic voice and a knack for ear-worm melodies. George was the quiet one, with the hawkish demeanour of a mystic-on-training-wheels. And Ringo was Everyman: a genial sort who seemed to be slumming among the immortals.
I remember my two older sisters returning home completely buzzed after my parents took them to see the foursome arrive at Dorval airport in Montreal — just a short time after their historic 1964 appearance on New York City’s Ed Sullivan show. My oldest sister brought home a Beatles cap as a prize.
For most my life I’ve had a conflicted one-way relationship with one of the four. Serious Beatles fans began to have their doubts about Paul early on, which only grew over time. There was a hint of Tin Pan Alley about the singer-songwriter — a habit of whimsicality and sentimentality that went against the rock n’ roll grain. The early offences are treacly, yet beautiful, ballads - mostly or wholly his. Among them are “Here, There and Everywhere” from the 1966 album Revolver, and “She’s Leaving Home” from 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
By 1968 my parents were having second thoughts about the Fab Four. They took exception to “Why Don’t We Do it On the Road,” a crude McCartney composition on The White Album which my oldest sister played loudly and defiantly on her record player. Like most parents of the time, they preferred Paul’s sentimental stuff, as channeled through the Beatles’ earlier, inoffensive incarnation as manager Brian Epstein’s “moptops.”
The group’s breakup in 1970 was immense news at the time. As a foursome, the Beatles released a dozen killer albums that redefined pop music, making the zeitgeist as much as reflecting it. All four had uneven solo albums thereafter: high-grade ore containing with diamonds like Lennon’s “Imagine,” Harrison’s “What is Life,” Ringo’s “Photograph,” and McCartney’s “Band on the Run.” Of the four, Paul was the most commercially successful and prolific. From the seventies on, he’s worked the cultural coal face like a miner on meth, releasing 44 albums that dip into every conceivable genre from reggae to country disco to ambient techno.
With last December’s release of his pandemic album, the lightweight McCartney III, it can now be said the musical genius has traced a path from “Eleanor Rigby” to “Lovely Rita” to “Lavatory Lil.”
McCartney’s early solo work, like that of his ex-colleagues, thrilled me and my teenage friends. Yet the multi-instrumentalist still managed to rankle. Fans and critics knew he had a major jones for Mary Jane, but couldn’t the gentleman farmer refrain from committing every ganga-fueled whimsy to tape? A forgiving Beatles fan could look past “Smile Away” from Ram, but “Mary Had a little Lamb” from Wild Life, the first outing from his band Wings? “Temporary Secretary” from McCartney II? Nuh uh. These weren’t even silly love songs, these were nursery rhymes for the lobotomized. The melodic McCartney had morphed into Big Mac with extra cheese.
McCartney’s 1973 Wings album, Band on the Run, was an epic production with monster tracks. Venus and Mars from 1975 also had its moments. But subsequent albums seemed like compilations of out-takes and B-sides. I kept buying the damn discs anyway, reaching peak disgust with 1978’s London Town. After one spin I walked the vinyl record outside the family home and tossed it into the park like a Frisbee.
There were momentary bright spots in McCartney’s post-seventies catalogue: some fine tracks from the 1989 album Flowers in the Dirt, for example. But there was nothing to compare to his earlier output. When the singer-shlockwriter was at his sentimental, lyrically ham-handed worst, he had no peer. Consult his 1982 duet with Stevie Wonder — “Ebony and Ivory” — if you require further proof.
As the years went by, I followed the Liverpudlian’s career with desultory interest. In my thirties, I turned down an offer to see Wings on their 1992 tour in Seattle (“And you call yourself a Beatles fan,” a friend with a ticket said dismissively). Knighted in 1997, the former Beatle joined Sir Elton John and Sir Bob Geldof in stodgy, rock n’ roll royalty. Sir Paul the billionaire now moved among the world’s Brahmin entertainment class in an airtight bubble of privilege. The San Francisco Weekly pegged him as “England’s noble knight of songfail.”
In 2012 Sir Paul released an album of torch songs from his youth. Being himself, he whimsically and annoyingly titled it Kisses on the Bottom. I liked one song on it.
I recently got a chance to watch The Beatles’ 1967 BBC film, Magical Mystery Tour, on YouTube. Paul, the camera-mugging master of caprice, was the one chiefly responsible for this monstrosity, which must be seen to be believed. Actually, it doesn’t. It’s even without the perverse charm of a musical cult classic like Van Morrison’s contract-breaking album for Bang! Records. I suppose this proves I have a Beatle problem; the man still has the power to annoy me long after the fact. But that’s on me, not him. He was 24 at the time of making the Magical Mystery Tour film, and let’s not forget the album of the same name contained the mostly-McCartney penned singles, “Penny Lane” and “Fool on the Hill”. Like so many other Beatles songs, these were works of astonishing musical beauty that continued to thrill new generations of listeners.
Genius mathematicians do their best work in their twenties, but no one slams a topologist if his or her theorems taper off with age. We unreasonably hold genius songwriters to a higher standard. In his book, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs, historian Joshua Shenk notes how great minds feed off creative partnerships. Picasso had Georges Braque to kickstart the cubist movement; Freud had the physician Wilhelm Fliess to consult about dream symbolism; Einstein bounced his theory of relativity off the engineer Michele Besso. Monet had Renoir and Susan B. Anthony had Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Throughout history, the best work is done in pairs — “most strikingly with Paul McCartney and John Lennon,” Shenk concluded.
The post-Beatles public feud between Lennon and McCartney was both entertaining and dispiriting: the back cover of McCartney’s 1971 album Ram featured a photo of a beetle mounting another beetle. The same year Lennon’s album Imagine parried with “How Do you Sleep,” which contained the deathless line, “All you ever did was Yesterday.”
Lennon and McCartney, besides being more than the sum of their parts, were genuinely funny guys with absurdist streaks a mile long. Listen to some of the Beatles’ early Sixties Christmas recordings for their fans and you understand why producer George Martin signed them to EMI’s comedy label. With their pageboy haircuts and jocular bantering, the Beatles were the ultimate novelty act in a Britain stirring from postwar austerity.
George Harrison once remarked that after the Beatles’ breakup the band’s spirit went into the British comedy troupe Monty Python. So it seemed comically appropriate as a post-Beatles coda when, on April 24, 1976, Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels offered “a certified cheque for $3000” for the Beatles to reform and perform on his late-night show.
“All you have to do is sing three Beatles songs,” Michaels said. “‘She Loves You,’ yeah, yeah, yeah — that’s $1,000 right there. You know the words. It’ll be easy. Like I said, this is made out to ‘The Beatles.’ You divide it anyway you want. If you want to give Ringo [Starr] less, that’s up to you. I’d rather not get involved.”
Unbeknown to the SNL producer, John and Paul were watching the show from only a short distance away at Lennon’s apartment at the Dakota. The frenemies thought of heading down to NBC’s studios as a gag, but were too tired, Lennon later recalled.
Any chance of the Beatles reforming died at the entrance to New York’s Dakota building on December 8th, 1980. So my Paul McCartney problem, I think, is mostly over a cheated historical timeline. After the tragedy involving a deranged fan, John was no longer around to restrain Paul’s worst musical impulses.
Considering what the two gave the world when they were together, it would be small-minded to blame one of them for not delivering the goods when they were separated. So McCartney isn’t the real problem, it’s me. Like every other Beatle fan who grew up in the Sixties, I expected my second favourite Beatle to keep cranking out soul-stirring compositions like link sausages. It wasn’t a reasonable expectation.
The man I thought of a genius when I was a kid was just that. But no human being, however talented, can live up to the white-hot klieg light of mass adulation. I sometimes think that the twee stuff in Paul’s post-Beatle catalogue wasn’t so much evidence of a lack of critical thinking or an abundance of carelessness, as an effort to deconstruct his own myth and confirm to the world that he was just a guy who liked penning maddeningly catchy tunes.
I’m now in my sixties. My quasi-hero is two decades older and has another album out. His earlier songs became musical touchstones in my life, as they were for millions of others from my generation and after. Even if it meant episodes of gritted teeth and vinyl frisbee-tossing for me personally, that’s a truly remarkable feat. I continue to listen to his Beatle and post-Beatle output to this day. Selectively, of course.
If you need any evidence of Sir Paul’s continuing ability to command global attention, check out a 2018 episode of Carpool Karaoke, in which host James Corden takes the aging Beatle for a drive around the latter’s childhood home in Liverpool. They circle around Penny Lane and other real-word sources of his musical inspiration, while the two sing along to Beatles’ hits.
McCartney explains how in dream his mother came to him with the words that were enshrined in one of his greatest songs, “Let It Be.” Corden responds with a memory from childhood: his grandad and dad sitting him down with the words, “We’re going to play you the best song you’ve ever heard,” before cueing up “Let it Be.” Corden adds, “If my granddad was here, he would get an absolute kick out of this.” Sir Paul replies, “He is,” and the host struggles to regain his composure.
Paul McCartney, along with his three Liverpudlian comrades, invaded the global mass market and collective dreamworld. With all his musical ups, who can begrudge him the album-filler downs? The man argued his own case in song, back in 1976: “Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs. And what’s wrong with that?” I’d like to know too — even if that toe-tapping tune contains about as much corn fructose syrup this septugenarian can stomach.