|
The Coolest Beatle
At 70, more than half the man he used to be.
By Alan Light | From the June 1 & 8, 2012, issue.
When the Beatles went to India in 1968 for a meditation retreat with
the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the folk-rock star Donovan was part of their
traveling party. The musicians had all brought their acoustic guitars, and
Donovan wandered around the grounds of the Maharishi’s compound in
Rishikesh, playing in a traditional folk-bluegrass style known as
fingerpicking.
After a few days, Donovan recently
recalled, John Lennon stopped him and said, “How do you do that? That
finger style, that picking, will you teach me?” He demonstrated the
technique to Lennon, but he also noticed Paul McCartney occasionally
hovering in the background. “Paul would stand around, he’d steal a look,
and then he’d walk away into the woods. He was listening.”
Too proud or too impatient to sit for
instruction, McCartney eavesdropped enough to figure out the method on his
own. Then he went off and used the style as the basis for “Blackbird,” “I
Will,” and “Mother Nature’s Son,” three of the acoustic masterpieces on the
Beatles epic double-LP set generally known as the White Album. With just a
glimpse of a new direction, he instantly began blazing a musical trail.
This capacity for constant,
lightning-quick creative revelation has characterized McCartney’s music for
50 years. When he turns 70 years old on June 18, perhaps the only thing
more remarkable than the idea of this eternally youthful icon reaching that
landmark is the fact that he has gotten there without having lost the
boundless inventiveness and creative curiosity that redefined the very
possibilities of rock and roll. Though McCartney is often overshadowed in
the public imagination by John Lennon’s hard-edged cool, and frequently
taken for granted after so many years in the pop spotlight, there is simply
no other figure in pop who can claim a track record so deep.
The Guinness Book of World Records
identifies McCartney as “the most successful musician and composer in
popular music history.” He’s had 15 top 10 albums and 21 top 10 singles—and
that’s not including his work with the biggest band of all time. His tours
still sell out stadiums around the world. His solo compositions have been
covered by artists from Michael Jackson to Guns N’ Roses. And his marriage
last year to Nancy Shevell, the daughter of a U.S. trucking magnate, helped
take his estimated worth from £495 to £665 million, making him the
wealthiest performer in British music.
But this ongoing commercial juggernaut
exists in tandem with an impressive eagerness to challenge himself and
expand musically. At an age when most rockers have long eased into life as
oldies acts, McCartney has undergone a startling creative renaissance. His
most recent release, Kisses on the
Bottom, is a smoothly orchestrated set of such Great American Songbook
standards as “Bye Bye Blackbird” and “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,”
while (entirely unverified) rumors have buzzed that his next album will be
a straight-up rock-and-roll record, produced with Dave Grohl of the Foo
Fighters.
Not surprising for someone who came of
age as half of the most celebrated songwriting duo in history, McCartney
has often sought out worthy collaborators, both writers (like Stevie Wonder
and Elvis Costello) and producers (including Youth, with whom he has
released a series of ambient-inspired projects under the name The Fireman,
and Nigel Godrich, who has worked with the likes of Radiohead and Beck).
McCartney has also composed several extended classical works: two
oratorios, a “symphonic poem” called “Standing Stone,” and an album of
shorter pieces, Working Classical. Last year he
worked with the New York City Ballet to create a new narrative piece
titled Ocean’s Kingdom—but he didn’t just
write a score and send it in. He developed the storyline, made paintings to
suggest the backdrops, and offered suggestions to his megastar designer
daughter, Stella, about the costumes.
Prompted perhaps by the death of his
beloved first wife, Linda, and a tumultuous second marriage to Heather
Mills, McCartney’s recent records—Chaos and Creation
in the Backyard, Memory Almost Full, and the vastly
underrated Fireman release Electric Arguments—have included a
surprising degree of introspection in their lyrics. It feels as if he has
finally allowed himself to stop competing with Lennon’s shadow and take on
some of the themes that arise later in life, territory that John never got
the chance to face.
Contrary to widespread belief that
John was the bitter and Paul was the sweet in the Beatles incomparable
blend of talents, the fact is that as the group progressed and began to
experiment in the recording studio in radical new ways, McCartney not only
took more chances musically than Lennon did, he also became more of the
band’s driving force. After the other Beatles had all married and moved to
the suburbs, he was still living in London with girlfriend Jane Asher’s
family, going to art galleries and avant-garde music events, absorbing the
city’s youthquake and bringing new ideas back to the records (a point made
repeatedly in his 1997 quasi-autobiography, Many Years From Now, which is almost painfully
defensive in its endless pleading “Hey, I was cool, too!”)
“I lived a very urbane life in
London,” McCartney once said. “John used to come in from Weybridge ... and
I’d tell him what I’d been doing: ‘Last night I saw a Bertolucci film and I
went down to the Open Space, they’re doing a new play there.’” Paul said
that John would reply, “God, man, I really envy you.”
It was Lennon who said that he
wanted Revolver’s droning,
psychedelic “Tomorrow Never Knows” (recently featured to great effect on an
episode of Mad Men) to sound like
“thousands of monks chanting.” But it was McCartney, immersed in the
experimental work of composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen,
who altered the heads on his tape machine to create the loops of layered
noise that ultimately defined the song’s shockingly futuristic sound.
From the Brazilian-influenced chords
of “Here, There and Everywhere” to the concept that shaped the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, McCartney spearheaded
many of the Beatles’s musical breakthroughs. He had the idea for the
extended medley that concluded Abbey Road: “I wanted to get
John and Paul to think more seriously about their music,” said producer
George Martin of the eight-song suite. “Paul was all for experimenting like
that.” (For his part, Lennon later dismissed the medley as “junk.”)
After the death of manager Brian
Epstein in 1967, and as Lennon drifted further into a drug haze, the
artistic leadership of the Beatles shifted from John to Paul, sometimes to
the chagrin of the other band members. “I’d play in a band with John Lennon
any day, but I wouldn’t join a band with Paul McCartney,” said George
Harrison in 1973.
To be sure, McCartney’s more
sentimental tendencies could also result in the “granny music” that Lennon
ridiculed, songs like “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”
that have not aged well. Nor have McCartney’s lyric-writing tendencies ever
allowed for the kind of personal and intimate confessions that defined
Lennon’s songs, from “Help!” all the way through to “(Just Like) Starting
Over.”
Yet the impact of Paul McCartney’s
musical range and ambitions (along with his incomparable bass playing)
meant a shift in the tectonic plates of rock and roll. “Paul has a gift of
melody and his lyrics are so inspiring,” says Brian Wilson of the Beach
Boys, one of McCartney’s own songwriting favorites. “‘Michelle’ from Rubber Soulwas partially my inspiration for creating the Pet Sounds record.”
McCartney has now been an ex-Beatle
about four times longer than he was actually in the band. But unlike John,
George, or even Ringo, he has never expressed any ambivalence about his
time or his legacy in the greatest show on earth—maybe because he has never
stopped making new music, reaching such heights as 1973’s first-rate
smash Band on the Run and 1982’s
eclectic Tug of War, and recharging
his batteries with side projects like the cover albums Back in the USSR and Run Devil Run.
If McCartney isn’t as critically
revered as idiosyncratic visionaries like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, it’s
presumably because he has never made a secret of his desire to please an
audience, cranking out accessible singles and love songs, silly and
otherwise, aimed straight for a populist bull’s-eye. That approach is most
evident on stage, where his irresistible, marathon parade of hits—backed by
a stellar band and with just enough surprises to hold the interest of the
hard-core fans and the star himself—has charmed audiences from the
hipsterati at the 2009 Coachella festival to the crowd of 200,000-plus that
attended a free concert in Mexico City a few weeks ago.
McCartney isn’t the first member of
the rock-and-roll pantheon to hit the big seven-oh; Dylan, Paul Simon, and
Ringo all got there first. But his degree of engagement and activity
surpasses not only his peers, but also rockers half—hell, a third—his age.
Sometimes, he recently told the
English music magazine Mojo, “I think,
‘That boy was a good writer.’ I’m singing it, my mind wanders, and
I’m going, ‘How old was I when I wrote this? Not bad.’ Like in
‘Yesterday’—‘I’m not half the man I used to be.’ I was writing that at 24?”
|
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
