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| Tug of War, (1982). Inner sleeve detail. |
The mystery of creativity, and why every Beatle fan still believes in Yesterday. A Rock and Roll whodunit.
From Tropic Magazine, Miami Herald, April 8, 1990. An eye-opener by Joel Achenbach (*)
Introduction: From the Tropic Editor Tom Shroder
That Magic Feeling
We had spent most of the morning setting speakers up on the patio around the backyard pool. At noon, the new FM radio station was going to do something unprecedented -broadcast an entire album, from start to finish without interruption, in stereo- stereo! It wasn't just any album, it was the new Beatles album, the one with the bizarre name.
Such a vivid day: the first warm of the year that I turned 13, the year you realize that you don't stay a kid forever, that you can break the rules, that anything -anything- might be possible.
Ten months earlier the Beatles had released Revolver, a radical departure from their previous music - a radical departure from anyone's previous music. Tucked into the lyrically ambitious songs were strange Eastern instruments, brass bands, music played backward. Before 1966, rock n' roll had one basic subject. The closest Revolver got to boy-girl antics was the manic screaming on "Got to Get You Into My Life." The one single they'd released since, "Strawberry Fields Forever" was warped, luminous, suggestive. If it had one foot in rock, it had another somewhere else, headed in a new direction.
Just which direction was about to be revealed on that summer noon in 1967. From the first fanfare and the words, "It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play..." the music sparked and seethed from the big old McIntosh speakers and even the quality of the daylight seemed to change.
In retrospect, the Beatles were a middle-of-the-road band. They carved a road into unexplored territory, and stayed right in the middle of it. Twice more I would hold a new Beatles album in my hand, awed that in a moment I would be tearing into it, putting it on the turntable, and listening to the future. There was a dizzy joy in that. A sense that the world was opening like a flower, that everything was in synch, headed somewhere better, closer to the truth.
It was, of course, an illusion. The world was changing, and so was an art form. But it wasn't getting better, necessarily, just different. For an odd moment in history the changes in popular music -a revolt against tradition, expansive experimentation, rejection of innocence- mirrored the changes in the World.
Thousands of us who matured as the Beatles altered the musical idiom had a soundtrack for our lives. It made us feel special, chosen. No wonder the normal random lurches of popular culture have since seemed so disappointing. No wonder it has been so hard to let that time pass into history where it belongs.
In the years since Paul McCartney announced the end of the Beatles, he has gone on to have one of the most successful solo careers in history. His appeal is still immense: He sold out two concerts in Joe Robbie Stadium for next weekend in record time.
But I will not be there. In those two decades I have not even bothered to buy a McCartney album -until I was inspired by Joel Achenbach's cover story that appears in today's issue. I thought it appropriate that I bought his latest album in a record store that sells no actual records, just cassettes and CDs. But as I struggled to strip the cellophane from the tape, my cynicism melted. I was struck by the old anticipation. After all, this was the same man, the same mind, that had made the Beatles what they were. I was excited, and afraid. Afraid I would be disappointed. I was. This was a perfectly good pop album. But even at its best, the magic was gone.
I wish that it weren't, or that it would spring up somewhere else all over again. But it won't. Ever. As Achenbach points out, rock can't come of age more than once. And neither can we.
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| Wild Life (1971). Back cover detail. |
1. The Mating Call Of The Aeolian Cadence.
Nineteen hundred and sixty-five was a good year for the Shazam method of songwriting. A scruffy rocker named Keith Richards woke in the night in a road-trip hotel room with an incredible riff in his head. He knew it was a hot guitar lick. What he didn't know was that it would become the superstructure of one of the greatest hit singles of the rock era. Shazam! "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction."
That same year, Paul McCartney rolled out of bed one morning with a beautiful melody on the brain. It was like a found object, so perfectly realized he figured he must have heard it somewhere. He fumbled with it on the piano. It had a classic melodic arc: a short phrase of three notes, answered by a longer phrase that soars to a high note before meandering back down the keyboard to another short phrase and a little jump at the end, a satisfying roller-coaster loop. Never much with words he sang:
Scrambled egg... da da da da da da scrambled egg...
McCartney was just 23 (and just Paul to much of the planet) and his band, The Beatles, had conquered the world as surely as Alexander or Charlemagne. More than your average pop idols, they were angelic majesties, living gods, the acme of cool. The had achieved intensities of popularity that no one had known existed and probably weren't sanitary. With the King off in Hollywood in arrested animation, they were suddenly bigger even than Elvis. Legend has it that during the hour they first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 not a single crime in America was committed by a teen-ager.
The only asterisk by their name in 1965 was the taint of teeny-bopperdom. For adults the Beatles were still a guilty pleasure. This tune in Paul's head would change all that.
"Yesterday," the descendant of "Scrambled Egg," is the world's most popular song, recorded by more artists than any other in history, spun 5000 times a week on DJ turntables in the United States even today. The critic Wilfrid Mellers tried to describe in technical terms why the song works so splendidly:
"The first bar, with its gentle sigh, seems separated, stranded, by the abrupt modulation; and although the troubles 'return to stay' with a descent to the tonic, the anticipated modulation sharpwards is counteracted when the B natural is flattened to make an irresolute plagal cadence."
Gibberish to Paul. His songwriting partner and best friend, John Lennon, likewise couldn't have made sense of such language. They were musical savages, holy barbarians, proof that you can graduate summa cum laude from the university of Rock 'n' Roll without being able to decipher sheet music. A tonic was something that went with gin. They regarded with glee the labored exegesis of their music by high-brow types, as when William Mann, critic for the Times of London, swooned, "One gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches, so natural in the Aeolian cadence at the end of Not A Second Time (the chord progression that ends Mahler's 'Song of the Earth')." "Aeolian cadence? Sounds like a type of bird," said John.
They were on a roll like no roll before. In early 1964, when movie producer Walter Shenson told John and Paul he needed four fast songs and two ballads for the upcoming film starring the band, the songs immediately appeared as if pulled from a back pocket. As filming neared completion, Shenson realized he needed another fast song to play during the opening credits, and that it should be called "A Hard Day's Night," to fit the movie title. That night he asked John Lennon for the extra song. Shortly after 10 p.m. John felt the muse. The next day at 8 a.m., Shenson was summoned to the dressing room. John and Paul were there with two guitars, and a pack of matches was propped up on the mirror with some tiny words written inside the cover. John sang the first 16 bars, Paul the middle eight. The song went to No. 1 on the Charts.
Shazam! What was the secret? Who gave them that gift? These semi-educated musicians performed a strange alchemy that turned almost everything they touched into a gold record. They rose to stardom on a profusion of upbeat two-minute songs that stuck to pop music convention with their eight-bar strains, rigidly linked in an A-A-B-A-B-A construction. They were a standard four-instrument band, two guitars, a bass and drums. If you diagram a Beatles song it looks just like the songs of all those other bands that haven't sold a billion discs and tapes and aren't in the Guinness Book of World Records. (Paul McCartney, specifically, is the most successful composer of all time, with 74 gold records with the Beatles and on his own. He has hit the No. 1 spot on the singles charts 32 times in the U.S., his only competition coming from John Lennon, with 26.)
Tuesday [April 10th, 1990] marks the 20th anniversary of Paul's announcement that the Beatles had broken up, yet their music thrives. There are still brisk record sales and daily Beatle Breaks on the radio, and now there is an entire academic field -Beatleology. At least 40 major books have looked at the band, each one trying to tweeze the material into finer pieces. There are serious books, tattletale books, ex-wife books, ex-girlfriend books, ex-friend books, even a book by a guy who had the chance to sign the Beatles to a contract and blew it. For sheer obsessive detail the blue ribbon goes to a book that provides documentary notes of the band's recording sessions, telling how many takes each song required. No detail is too arcane, too irrelevant, for the true Beatle fan. Theirs is a story with an operatic arc: four leather-jacketed teddy boys from Liverpool transformed themselves into globally worshiped boy Pharaohs, only to see their regency disintegrate spectacularly from the acids of internecine resentment and jealousy. It's a story worthy of a great filmmaker, rich with metaphors for everyone, and set to a great soundtrack. [1]
Every couple of years there is supposedly a new band on the scene that will recapture the glory of the Beatles. There was much hope in the 1970s for the British group Squeeze, with their sweet McCartneyish vocals. Then came the Bangles in the 1980s. The closest thing to white-hot beatlemania has been the ascent of Michael Jackson, but he's more in the tradition of Elvis, an entertainer with good stage moves who sings music written by others. The proper heirs of the Beatles have been Billy Joel, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, The Police, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and Talking Heads, pop songwriters and bands with vast commercial and critical appeal. But none of these has put a scare into the Beatles' sales records [2].
What is it that people heard that made them so love the Beatles? Was there genius in the mix? Who had it? Was it Paul? Was it John? Are the songs really superior or were they just part of a marketing coup? How much of the band's continued popularity is nostalgia, the background radiation from the Beatlemania explosion?
What's genius, anyway? What's artistry? What's talent? And finally, this; Out of all the millions of kids who grew up wanting to be Beatles, who wanted to ascend to the toppermost of the poppermost, why hasn't any succeeded? Why doesn't anyone write Hey Jude anymore? Why does even Paul McCartney seem like a pale imitation of Beatle Paul?
Obvious questions. Now for the tricky answers.
[1] I was thinking, wouldn't it be great if somebody makes a movie about the Beatles' visit to Philippines? That would be amazing! Violence, politics, The Lennon-McCartney rivalry's beginning, Brian Epstein saying no to Imelda Marcos' invitation... I can't wait. "Fab Four in Trouble" sounds like a great title.
[2] Let's not forget the Electric Light Orchestra, the truest and most loyal followers of the Beatles' philosophy. Jeff Lynne, ELO's leader, could have been easily Lennon's replacement in the Beatles' reunion of 1995.
2. The Genius Factor. 
Mozart is the prototype for the musical genius. Music came to him like an injection in the brain. "When I feel well and in a good humor, or when I am taking a drive or walking after a good meal, or in the night when I cannot sleep, thoughts crowd into my mind as easily as you could wish. Whence and how do they come? I do not know and I have nothing to do with it. Those that please me, I keep in my head and hum them," he wrote a friend.
In other words, the Shazam method. Clearly he was gifted. It's well known that he was composing music at the age of 5. What is less widely known is that it wasn't any good. Young Amadeus was precocious but you wouldn't want to buy his records. He didn't write a great work until he was 16 and had been playing music his whole life. He was a prodigy partly because he had a prodding parent, jus like Brooke Shields did. His father devoted himself to the boy's musical education, took him around Europe to hear all the great composers, and demanded musical compositions from the little bugger.
This is the pattern of geniuses: Obsessive, pushy parents. John Stuart Mill's father started him on a rigorous course of instruction when he was 2 years old. Michelangelo was also prepped for the job of genius. That doesn't mean they weren't naturally gifted. It means that genius takes tending.
And It means that genius as commonly thought of -the inevitable result of a genetic superiority or mystical power- is largely mythical. Genetic genius is overrated. John R. Hayes of Carnegie-Mellon University has shown that artists almost never produce their masterpieces until they've toiled for at least 10 years. In Paul McCartney's case, he started playing music at 13 and wrote "Yesterday" at 23.
What makes the Beatles impressive is that they weren't pampered rich kids. Only Paul came from a musical family. His father moonlighted as a jazz pianist. Paul was a natural at guitar. That's why John hesitated to let Paul join the Quarry Men in 1957: Paul was too good; John had drive and raw talent but not Paul's polish. John's ambition overcame his jealousy. Had John not let Paul into the band, says biographer Philip Norman, Paul would have probably grown up as "a very pleasant grammar school teacher organizing the end-of-term pantomime. The mothers would have thought he was dishy." And John would have become an interesting, offbeat rock star with a band named, say, Johnny and the Moondogs.
Were they geniuses? Paul isn't terribly brilliant on most scores. He was a good student in high school, but in his interviews he sounds awfully like a regular guy. John has a more solid claim to genius status because of his multitude of talents -writing and drawing, in addition to composing- and besides, John claimed to be a genius.
But the brilliance of the Beatles was no the brilliance of John or Paul. It was the brilliance of John-and-Paul. John was to weird to be a commercial success. Paul was too commercial to be an artistic success. They governed and goaded each other. Paul's melodic facility fused with John's acerbic edge to produce something unique.
Even that cannot explain the phenomenon of The Beatles. That was always John Lennon's point: his band worker harder than any other. The education of the band came in the sweaty clubs of Liverpool and Hamburg. They played a thousand gigs before anyone had ever heard of them. In Hamburg they played eight hours straight and then staggered at dawn to their beds behind a movie screen, roused at noon by the matinee.
When they finally played four songs for record producer George Martin in 1962, he thought they were perfectly dreadful. Their best song, "Love Me Do," was quaint and hummable, but hard to take seriously as a work of genius. They weren't prodigies.
"I felt that I was going to have to find suitable material for them, and was quite certain that their songwriting had no saleable future," Martin wrote in his memoir, All You Need Is Ears.
This must be juxtaposed with the fact that in their subsequent accomplishments the Beatles precisely fit the definition of genius: (1) the rare but radical disruption of preceding manners, attitudes, customs, or cognitive habits; and (2) the performance of complex tasks in manners and styles rarely observed," in the words of Robert S. Albert, editor of the anthology Genius and Eminence. What this definition doesn't say is that the genius must be smart. Genius is an achievement, not a predisposition.
To ascribe the success of the Beatles to some kind of God-given gift possessed by John and Paul is to rob them of the full drama of their accomplishment. It's a much more remarkable story if you realize that two people who were not prodigies were able, through hard work and bountiful luck and ambition and great timing and not insignificant talent, to erect an edifice as towering -as full of genius- as the Beatles.
What cannot be underestimated is the importance of the audience. The Beatles were creatures of a generational movement. They were a product of the times. They caught a huge wave not of their own making. "Creativity is no the property of a person," says Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor who studies creativity. "You can't just say that a person is creative or noncreative per se. When you refer to creativity it always refers to a dialectic between a person and what I call the field, basically, knowledgeable individuals who judge whether something is good or notThere were more teen-agers alive in 1964 than ever before in history. Cheap transistor radios from Asia had flooded the market. Rock 'n' Roll's great idea -a pounding backbeat that made you want to shake and shout- had been corporatized and denatured. The radio was starved for something other than Frankie Avalon. The scene craved a new sound. So many millions of kids where turned on to Rock 'n' Roll by Elvis that the odds dictated that Something New would happen.
The Beatles were just one of hundreds of bands hoping to fill that void. It's hard to know whether their triumph is a sign of superior musical talent, Fate, hair, or what. Certainly they had ambition to spare. John was the one with the fire in the belly. He and manager Brian Epstein plotted to become Bigger than Elvis as early as 1962, when they were still an obscure bar band. They were unapologetically commercial and would step on anyone who got in their way -as when they fired loyal drummer Pete Best and replaced him with one slightly better, Ringo Starr.
"Big bastards, that's what the Beatles were. You have to be a bastard to make it, that's a fact, and the Beatles are the biggest bastards on Earth," Lennon told Jann S. Wenner in a famous 1970 interview in Rolling Stone magazine, just after the breakup. He said the band kept the publicity machine rolling by giving the press free drinks and free whores and other spillage from Beatlemania. The Beatles were an institution that no one could afford to see wither, neither the reporters assigned to cover them (because after all that would reduce the play of the stories) nor the profiteers at the corporate office. "We were the Caesars; who was going to knock us, when there were a million pounds to be made?" said John.
The Beatles were tapped into what their audience wanted. In rock music, the stars come up out of the audience; the guitar heroes are all former rock 'n' roll fans. There is a connection and communication between stage and crowd. The Beatles synthesized and channeled a thousand ideas, from Paul mimicking Little Richard to George Harrison picking up the new fascination with Eastern mysticism.
The singular characteristic of the band when they first appeared was not their sound but their hair. What hair! They didn't invented the Beatle cut but they proselytized it. Boys with long, soft, girlish hair. They all looked identical. Just telling who was who seemed a major accomplishment. In class-conscious Britain, even the crusty snots were enraptured by these sly barbarians from Liverpool. 
Call the Beatles geniuses if you want to, or just call them hard-working. Talented musicians with great timing. There's not much difference. Wrote Wilfrid Mellers, the critic: "The Beatles, in common with other geniuses such as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, knew the right time and place to be born."
3. Solving The Equation.
Beyond the hair was the sound: African-American rhythms, exuberant harmonic singing, lyrics that for all their love-story simplicity had a way with the vernacular: "She was just 17, you know what I mean" -refreshing after the overwrought mock-serrrious love paeans of the early '60s. The Beatles reduced sexual joy to its most primitive glandular expression: "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah!"
"They were simple and sensuously affirmative; babes newborn, rejecting the past, yet singing for dear life," writes Mellers. He goes on: "In Beatle music the musical facts are not, compared with those in Beethoven's music, very complicated, though they may be of some subtlety, partly because they are not entirely literate." Mellers discovers that John songs then to have sharp notes, and Paul songs have lots of flat notes. Such analysis, unfortunately, sheds no light on the secret of the band's sound.
"If they could draw an equation, they could sell it and bottle it and everybody could write good melodies," says Tim Riley, author of Tell Me Why, an analysis of Beatle Songs. "It's like trying to describe a jewel. Why does this jewel sparkle and not this other one?"
Nonetheless Riley has tried to explain some of the unique qualities of a Beatles song. A track like "I Want To Hold Your Hand" seems, today, little more than a cheery upbeat pop song whose main purpose is to produce nostalgia, but when it was written in 1963 it was a ground-breaking sound, not just in the tight harmonies and the driving rhythm known in Liverpool as the Mersey Beat (after the Mersey River), but also in the way it changed textures. In the middle section the electric guitar disappears and is replaced by an acoustic guitar, softening the feel of the song momentarily ("..and when I touch you I feel happy inside...") and thereby heightening the intensity of the rhythm when the song goes electric again ("..I can't hide, I can't hide, I can't hiiiiiiiide!")
The mega-hit "She Loves You" was the same way. At one point the snare drum gives way to tom-toms, producing a totally different feel. It seems technical, but these shifting textures -found in almost every Beatle song- were nonexistent in the popular music of the day. Whose idea was it to alternate the drumming on "She Loves You"? Riley thinks it was the drummer's idea. Yes -the secret genius of the Beatles was Ringo!
As for George Martin, the band's producer, he was probably more a technical help than a creative one, even if it was his idea to put a string quartet behind Paul's guitar on "Yesterday." Martin writes in his memoir, "I have often been asked if I could have written any of the Beatles' tunes, and the answer is definitely no: for one basic reason. I didn't have their simple approach to music. I think that if Paul, for instance, had learned music 'properly' -not just the piano, but correct notation for writing and reading music, all the harmony and counterpoint that I had to go through, and the techniques of orchestration- it might have well inhibited him...Once you start being taught things, your mind is channeled in a particular way. Paul didn't have that channeling, so he had freedom, and could think of things that I would have considered outrageous"
Writing music was easy for Paul. Once he told Dustin Hoffman, "It's the same as you and acting; when the man says, 'Action!,' you just pull it out of the bag, don't you? You don't know where it comes from, you just do it!"
Philip Norman, who wrote Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation, the best account of the band, says of Paul's gift, "Tunes just fell off the end of his arm." Paul had a reason to excel: John was watching. "McCartney had one eye over his shoulder, wondering what Lennon would think," says Norman. The truth is that the secret of the Beatles was not the cooperation of John and Paul, but their intense mutual jealousy.
John said in an affidavit in 1970, when the Beatles were squabbling in court over the details of the breakup, "From our earliest days in Liverpool, George and I on the one hand and Paul on the other had different musical tastes. Paul preferred 'pop type' music and we preferred what is now called 'underground.' This may have led to arguments, particularly between Paul and George, but the contrasts in our tastes, I am sure, did more good than harm, musically speaking, and contributed to our success."
So they both were important. But who was better?
4. Taking Sides.
There are two kinds of people in the world: John fans and Paul fans. A John fan appreciates meaning in lyrics, avant-garde sounds, artistic daring. A Paul fan likes a nice tune. Whom you like defines what kind of person you are. Sometimes Paul fans won't admit their identity and skulk around in t he guise of John fans, because it's more fashionable. Far from being illusory, this rivalry was solidly founded by John and Paul themselves as they carried on first a secret competition and then a public feud of pathetic, tragic dimensions. "We were trying to outscore each other in the tug of war," sang Paul after John died. They didn't write songs together after 1965, other than to occasionally touch up each other's work. The irony is that they agreed from the beginning to write everything under the credit of Lennon-McCartney, creating the illusion of collaboration instead of competition. "Yesterday" is Lennon-McCartney even though John wasn't on the premises when it was written an recorded.
John gets points for being the official leader of the band in the early days, but then Paul gets points for composing the first hit, "Love Me Do," a triumph quickly outstripped when John came up with the band's first No. 1 in Britain, "Please Please Me"[1]. John expands his lead during most of Beatlemania, singing the bulk of the hits, publishing two books of acclaimed stories and generally setting the tone for the band. Paul keeps from falling too far by writing the great rock songs "I Saw her Standing There,""Can't Buy Me Love" and "She's a Woman"[2].
Then, just when John's championship belt seems most secure, as he writes "Ticket To Ride" and "Help!," Paul wakes up with "Yesterday" and starts his charge. Paul gradually eclipses John with a series of monster hits like "Penny Lane" and "Paperback Writer" and "Eleanor Rigby" and "Hey Jude" and "Get Back" and "Let It Be" and "The Long and Winding Road," as well as conceiving the structure of two of the band's best albums, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road. When the band finally breaks up, John edges back to parity with "Imagine," while Paul aggressively scores negative points with nauseating hit singles sung to such lyrics as "wo wo wo wo my love does it good."
The balance of power irreveribly shifts in John's favor finally in 1980 when he brilliantly outfoxes Paul by getting murdered by a Nightmare Fan. Paul now goes around trying to convince people that he, too, was in the band.
His selling job is all the harder because the intelligentsia and the rock press have always been John-biased. John was the smart one. He gave awesome interviews and ridiculed authority, unlike nice-guy Paul. John labeled Paul "conservative" when that was like calling someone a Nazi. The Beatles had a bubble gum aspect that made it hard for many people to admit they liked the band, so they just said they liked Lennon's work, not McCartney's. To this day, half-wit Beatles fans give John credit for a lot of Paul's songs, like "Why Don't We Do It In The Road?"
The Brilliance of The Beatles was not the brilliance of John or Paul. It was the brilliance of John-and-Paul. Apart, they were gifted. Together, they were genius.
Among people who know better -who know that Paul wrote a plurality of the Beatle classics- the only way to remain Lennon-biased is to invent distinctions between talent and genius, technique and artistry. "Where McCartney had great talent, Lennon was a genius," Ray Coleman wrote in the hagiography Lennon. John was "the founder, the powerhouse, the engine room of the Beatles... without him, they would have no cutting edge, conscience or originality."
This is essentially true, even if "Genius" is a bit vague. Biographer Philip Norman claims that Lennon was three-fourths of the band even though Paul was the superior tunesmith. How does that figure? Norman told Tropic, "Everything that the Beatles were in the beginning -funny, dry, charming, a little bit dangerous, offbeat, bohemian- was Lennon."
The person who is probably in the best position to judge the John vs. Paul match is [George] Martin, their producer, though John fans might argue he is a Paul groupie, known to spend more time on Paul songs and admittedly not that interested in lyrics. Martin has said, "It's quite likely that, in terms of success, Paul's songs will last longer than John's because they get more to the average man, to the heart strings, than John's did. That's being really commercial about it. But I couldn't put a cigarette paper between them." In other words, too close to call.
Martin does seem, on the whole, in the Paul camp. And Norman Smith, one of the engineers working for Martin, said, "There's no doubt at all that Paul was the main musical force... most of the ideas came from Paul."
So why people despise Paul?
On the most superficial level he has the handicap of being the cute Beatle. The idea that good-looking people are deeply talented is hard to stomach. Look at him: A working-class kid who had the run of the planet in his 20s, made half a billion dollars singing love songs and dance tunes, got to wear neat clothes, then settled down to a stable 20-year marriage, with four kids and several homes including a sheep ranch in Scotland. He's despicable!
On a slightly deeper, if still unfair, level, Paul has a political problem. As the Beatles grew shaggier in the 1960s they lost any resemblance to the mop-tops of only a few years earlier, except Paul, who maintained his cuddly appearance. His lyrics were, indeed, goofy and irrelevant. "Paul was viewed as a traitor to the counterculture." Nicholas Schaffner writes in The Beatles Forever. Even for sober-headed adults, to own a Paul solo album in the mid-1970s was social death. A slightly more sympathetic view was offered by necrobiographer Albert Goldman in a Lennon post-mortem: "In a business where freakishness and degeneracy are virtually the rule, Paul has spent his whole life without ever losing control."
The third and most troubling handicap for Paul is that, in stark contrast to John, he doesn't seem to have much of a soul. No one expects him to be Aretha Franklin, but with all his talent and resources you'd think he wouldn't need to leaven his music with so much enriched lour.
Hardly any Paul song in 30 years reveals what's inside him other than silly love notions. Poignant ballads like "Yesterday" and "Eleanor Rigby" have a stagy sorrow to them. Even his voice, though astonishing in its range and lovely to listen to, never carried the bluesy character of John's. Listen to John sing "Don't Let Me Down" and there's infinitely more pain and emotion than can be heard in anything by mockingbird Paul. Paul does his Elvis voice, his Little Richard voice, his Mother Nature's son voice, and it's all technique.
Paul isn't what you'd call a method singer. He's Laurence Olivier, not Marlon Brando. When he wanted to sound wary and agonized for "Oh! Darling" he made repeated trips to the studio over the course of five days until his vocal chords were raw and he got the sound he wanted. It's a great song but it's hard to take it seriously the way you could John's contemporaneous "Don't Let Me Down."
Maybe the reason that "Hey Jude" has such a terrific sound is that Paul had just broken up with girlfriend Jane Asher and, for once, felt pained enough to sing a song as though he really meant it.
[1] Actually, "Please Please Me" never reached number one in England, the top position it reached on Record Retailer was number two. Probably it was number one in some other publications in Liverpool. That's why the song is not included in the Number One Singles Collection 1 (Capitol, 2000)
[2] Let's not forget "I'm Down".
5. Turning On.
"It is in the outcast, disinherited, vagabond, criminal, defective, insane and generally abnormal elements of humankind that genius germinates," wrote Arthur C. Jacobson in Genius: Some Revaluations back in 1926.
Jacobson argued that alcohol abuse or the "toxins of tuberculosis" were the common element of creative minds. "The release of creative secondary personalities would seem to depend upon some sort of intoxication, with resulting paralysis of inhibitions."
This is an unfashionable way of looking at creativity today, but it has impressive anecdotal support. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote the poem Kubla Khan while semi-conscious on opium. The three great American writers of this century, Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald, were constantly drunk.
The Beatles were not the Just Say No Types. John once said, "The only way to survive in Hamburg, to play eight hours a night, was to take pills. I always needed a drug to survive." Paul ignored John's ridicule and held off from trying the "heaven and hell" drug LSD. When he finally took it, to keep a bad-tripping Lennon company during the Sgt. Pepper's sessions, they stared into each other's eyes for hours saying "I know, man."
Drugs like marijuana and LSD heighten one's sensitivity to, among other things, sound. Acid-gobbling guitarist Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead told Rolling Stone, "Being high, each note, you know, is like a whole universe. And each silence. And the quality of the sound and the degree of emotional... when you're playing and you're high on acid in these scenes it is like the most important thing in t he world. It's truly, phew, cosmic..."
There is no question that for the Beatles, drugs fueled creativity in the short fun -but stamped it out over time. Their greatest creative work, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, is an LSD album. Simultaneously, John was eating so much acid he was destroying his ego. His music became less melodic. He gradually pulled himself together but then hooked up with avant-garde artist Yoko-Ono and craved an existence independent from the Beatle family. Paul had to take over the band.
"Paul, like Yoko, was born to dominate." Behind his Robin Goodfellow mask of charm an insouciance beat the iron heart of the power tripper," Albert Goldman writes in his Lennon biography. "Is it any wonder that Paul got a little bossy, betraying his impatience with Ringo (who had gotten worse over the years) or with an uptight, crib-boo guitarist like George, or a sullen, apathetic drug addict like John?"
Paul saw himself as the Main Beatle. In 1969 he tried to get his band back on the road like a real rock group. At a meeting of the band an their counselors, he said, "I think we should get rid of all this big pressure and play little clubs and get back to our roots. I think we'll find ourselves playing again that way." John answered: "I think you're daft. In fact... I've quit the group."
Paul was crushed.
He convinced John not to announce the split publicly, and hoped for reconciliation. But his penchant for money-grubbing got him in trouble. John and Paul didn't own their songs. Instead, they owned shares in Northern Songs, a publicly traded company that owned the Beatles catalog. When the majority shareholder, Dick James, threatened to sell the company to Lord Lew Grade, John and Paul and the advisers decided to thwart the move by buying up more shares in the company. But when they got together and looked at who owned what, John discovered that Paul had secretly been buying more stock already. Paul owned 107,000 more shares of the Lennon-McCartney oeuvre than John. John blew up and the Beatles were soon history. (Lord Lew Grade did indeed buy the company [ATV, now Sony/ATV Music Publishing] and later sold it, to Paul's horror, to Michael Jackson, which is why Beatle songs now can be heard on TV commercials for Nike, Paul still gets a quarter share of the royalties, though a complex 1978 copyright law designed to protect widows, widowers and any children may erode his royalties and vastly increase those of -gad- Yoko Ono. Which is why Paul complains that Yoko is going to own more of "Yesterday" than he will.)
Paul eventually woke up to the reality of the band's disintegration and recorded a solo album, a simple work on which he played all the instruments. Paul rather connivingly announced the end of the Beatles on April 10, 1970, as a publicity plug for his solo album. He included a self-interview in which he said John and Yoko's wacky political activities, like calling press conferences while inside a bag, brought him no happiness.
"I am never, no not ever, going to forgive him," John said of Paul's public announcement. "It was like he took the Beatles away from me as a part of a promotional gimmick," John told a journalist that Paul didn't actually quit the band -"I sacked him."
Paul was secretly devastated by the breakup. As he told CBS News this year, "That was the worst moment other than my mother dying when I was 14... I didn't get up for a long time. I didn't shave for a long time. I drank a little." Paul not only suffered John's rejection but then was pummeled by rock critics who deemed the solo album a lightweight collection. The question is whether Paul was depressed because he missed the Beatles or because suddenly he wasn't critically infallible.
"Paul likes to be liked," wife Linda said.
When the Beatles went solo, the edgy, urgent, political music of John suddenly found its polar opposite in Paul's infectious, sleepy nursery rhymes. Paul's first solo album had one great song, "Maybe I'm Amazed," and a lot of filler. His next one, Ram, was deemed by critic John Landau "the nadir in the decomposition of '60s rock thus far" and "monumentally irrelevant."
Paul could do no right. When he put out "Give Ireland Back To The Irish" it was seen as a cynical grab for political correctitude like John's. Then, as if to prove that Ram wasn't the absolute nadir, he released a single with the unbelievable title of "Mary Had A Little Lamb." He had gone wiggy in the head.
Still, he had more hit singles in the 1970s than anyone in the world, more even than Elton John. In the process he lost his critical acclaim and alienated much of his old audience. It was as though, by singing "Silly Love Songs," et al., he was regressing into a false innocence, discarding the adult fans that had grown up with The Beatles and replacing them with 13-year-old kids in St. Louis. As John put it, Paul had become like Engelbert Humperdinck, selling songs to the "great Midwest where hits are made."
Paul formed the band Wings in 1971 and released the abysmal Wild Life, unprofessionally recorded in three days and featuring one song with the lyrics "bip bop, bip bom bop, bip bom bip bom bam" repeated as if to incite nausea. Other solo songs had choo-choo-choos and da-da-das and wo-wo-wos. John would never have let Paul sing the excruciating line in "Live and Let Die," "..In this ever-changing world in which we live in..."
John, meanwhile, produced the classic John Lennon/ Plastic Ono Band album, his primal scream, the songs so intensely personal and the instrumentation so spare and nervy that it was more like a monologue to a psychiatrist than a musical performance. His next album, Imagine, jacked up the melodic end of the equation, but was tainted with an unseemly, vicious attack on Paul.
Paul had actually started the public feud with that seething self-interview released with his first solo album. Paul then put a couple of jabs on Ram. "Too many people going underground," he sang in obvious reference to John and Yoko's political shenanigans. So John hit back with How Do You Sleep and even less subtle invectives:
"You live with straights who tell you you was king/
Jump when your mama tell you anything...
The only thing you done was Yesterday...
A pretty face may last a year or two/
But pretty soon they'll see what you can do/
The sound you make is Musak to my ears/
You must have learned something all those years."
Paul told the magazine Melody Maker: "John and Yoko are not cool in what they're doing." John responded in an open letter to Paul in the same publication: "If WE'RE not cool, WHAT DOES THAT MAKE YOU?"
Lennon's solo career then went into the toilet with a batch of naive protest chants on the album Some Time In New York City.
The great critic Lester Bangs wrote of the wreckage of the world's greatest pop band: "McCartney makes lovely boutique tapes, resolute upon being as inconsequential as the Carpenters... Lennon will do anything, reach for any cheap trick, jump on any bandwagon, to make himself look like a Significant Artist... Harrison belongs in a day care center for counterculture casualties... Ringo is beneath contempt."
Paul had serious plans to make an animated TV movie about the adventures of Bruce McMouse, a rodent living underneath the stage of the Wings band. The children mice were Soily, Swooney and Swat. Other ideas he had included a UFO epic and a "Casablanca of the 70s." He couldn't find any collaborators and settled finally on writing his own movie. He gradually accreted what he felt was a decent script. He showed it to Richard Lester, the director of A Hard Day's Night and Help! Lester said, "Don't do it!"
He did it. Nine million drained on a disaster called Give My Regards To Broad Street, Paul's Vegas-y nature coming through right on the title. It was a grown-up version of A Hard Day's Night, which is to say that it showed an aging corporate rock star's day-in-the-life. The plot centered on an evil banker trying to rip off the profits from Paul's music.
Salewicz, Paul's biographer, writes, "Those who have worked with Paul McCartney since the Beatles mention a major flaw in his abilities: so prolific is his songwriting that he is unable to separate the mediocre from the truly great -a task that had been John Lennon's." He's surrounded by yes-men, Salewicz writes. "Who around him was going to tell an ex-Beatle that what he'd just written was a heap of shit?"
6. Paul Is Dead.
Musical ability, like mathematical ability, often shows itself at an early age. Mathematicians do their best work by the age of 25. If they haven't made a breakthrough by 40 it's hopeless. Less obvious is what happens to the musically gifted when they age. Researchers say there's no evidence that older people can't compose great works. Witness Beethoven. But then again, Beethoven was a plodding worker, never the type to create with the Shazam method -like Paul McCartney. If you look at Paul's work, you'll notice that the lightning isn't striking as often. He has slipped a few notches even when allowances are made for the contributions of John during the Beatle phase.
"An enormous talent has just steadily declined over 20 years," says Philip Norman. "It's really quite tragic. He started off like Picasso. And he ended up like Norman Rockwell."
In fact, all the greats of the sixties have slipped. Bob Dylan has done some fine work of late but it doesn't compare with what he did in 1965. The Rolling Stones get by on skill more than inspiration. Bands like The Grateful Dead and The Who are museum pieces. The fresh, different, interesting music comes from a younger generation -as it always has. What's hard to know is whether this is merely a change in audience taste or an actual brain-cell burnout. Howard Gardner, the Harvard creativity researcher, says that as people get older they lose the ability to keep a great number of thoughts and ideas in their heads at once. Also, he says, "One thing that happens to people is that they lose nerve at some point, they've been quite successful and they don't want to take risks anymore."
In the 1970's Paul regularly flouted marijuana laws, was busted several times and forced to pay fines, and finally got himself jailed for 10 days for taking a suitcase of pot into Japan. No one doubted that the huge stash was for personal use. In 1984 he and Linda were busted in Barbados, were fined, and flew home to England, where they were instantly busted again at Heathrow Airport.
Chet Flippo's biography Yesterday quotes one unnamed insider as saying that Paul's musical judgment has been eroded by chronic pot use. Another biography, by Chris Salewicz, quotes one-time McCartney backup guitarist Nick Lowe: "He did seem to smoke it pretty much all the time." McCartney himself told Rolling Stone last year: "I've smoked a bit of pot," but suggested it wasn't as unhealthy a substance as whiskey.
"I'm actually doing all right compared to other people I know," he said. He's forty seven now. In any other industry he'd be in the prime of his career. In pop music he's a ghost from the past. Even if he wrote another Yesterday no one would care anymore. I'd be a smallish hit on the Easy Listening stations. Paul didn't change. The rest of us did. In the 1960's pop stars were taken seriously as spokesmen for their generation. People searched the grooves of a Beatles song for the coded messages, the secret instructions, the unspeakable insights. Paul had the idea of putting a sound on the final note of "A Day In The Life" that only a dog could hear. People found out because their dogs howled when it came on. If he did the same thing now, It would just be a nuisance.
There will never be another Beatles because rock will never be that young again. The great voyages of discovery have been completed. Never again will we be so innocent and so ready to be bad. The larger culture may yet indulge Paul a little longer. His latest album, Flowers In The Dirt, has received excellent reviews if unspectacular sales. His 1982 album Tug Of War was hailed by Rolling Stone as a masterpiece. That was just after John died. Paul sang a tribute to John, "Here Today," as the final track:
What about the night we cried,
because there wasn't any reason to keep it all inside?
George martin had reappeared to produce the record and he arranged strings in the background just as he did for "Yesterday." Paul never sounded better. In fact, it had a Beatle air to it -melodious, filled with shifting textures, maybe even an Aeolian cadence if we can ever figure out what one is. It was as thought the spirit of John had come back for a final collaboration, as Paul suggested in his final verse:
I really loved you and was glad you came along
and you were here today
For you were in my song...
For a moment it all came together and sounded like... genius.
(*) Joel Achenbach is a Tropic staff writer. Later, he became a bit crazy and started writing stuff like "The Beatles' breakup was a conspiracy by the CIA" and "Why there's no bootlegs on the Beatles' 1 album?". Anyway, he seems to love and hate Paul at the same time, and he's very intelligent. Therefore, this article deserves to be readen over and over.
Essential McCartney listening:
Darky owes much from its success to the conditions it was recorded. London's Abbey Road was the studio, Alan Parsons the main engineer (who later complained of not making any royalties out of this album), and the four members of the band were the actual producers. They risked everything and they got what they deserved: The permanency of the album on Billboard's Top 200 albums from 1973 until 1988 (I personally bought the Peruvian cassette for the first time one year later).
In a sequence of nine (or ten) tracks, lyricist Roger Waters pens the story of a man (you or I) obsessing with time slowly pushing him toward his death. "Breathe" and "Time" are written almost in the same moderate beat. Between them, "On The Run", an intricate game of synthesizers, heartbeats and airport sounds where airplanes take off and crash. Richard Wright, the keyboard player, executes an instrumental called "Great Gig In the Sky", based on the ancient Egyptians' idea of the chariot that takes the dead to Paradise. Did I say ancient Egyptians? See the pyramids in the inner sleeve of the CD. See the pyramidal prism that decomposes the white light. 
Darky owes much from its success to the conditions it was recorded. London's Abbey Road was the studio, Alan Parsons the main engineer (who later complained of not making any royalties out of this album), and the four members of the band were the actual producers. They risked everything and they got what they deserved: The permanency of the album on Billboard's Top 200 albums from 1973 until 1988 (I personally bought the Peruvian cassette for the first time one year later).
In a sequence of nine (or ten) tracks, lyricist Roger Waters pens the story of a man (you or I) obsessing with time slowly pushing him toward his death. "Breathe" and "Time" are written almost in the same moderate beat. Between them, "On The Run", an intricate game of synthesizers, heartbeats and airport sounds where airplanes take off and crash. Richard Wright, the keyboard player, executes an instrumental called "Great Gig In the Sky", based on the ancient Egyptians' idea of the chariot that takes the dead to Paradise. Did I say ancient Egyptians? See the pyramids in the inner sleeve of the CD. See the pyramidal prism that decomposes the white light. 
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