“ … Nice little folk songs for the grannies to dig”
- John Lennon on Paul McCartney’s songwriting
Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe notwithstanding, there were only four Beatles and only two of them walk the Earth today.
Richard Starkey, aka Ringo Starr, may well be an underrated rock drummer and decent bloke, perhaps the wisest and most grounded member of the group (when he shaved his head in 1976 he explained that there are times when one either cuts one’s hair or cuts one’s wrists and he took the more sensible option), but few have ever accused him of genius or heresy. Ringo drummed, mostly, though he played piano (“if it’s in C”) and emerged from the Beatles with his friendships intact. Ringo, admired and beloved as he is, was the least part of the creative combine of the band. For a while he had the best post-Beatles output (Sentimental Journey, Beaucoups of Blues and Ringo were a genuinely great start), but no one expected Ringo to make transcendent music.
Which leaves us with Paul McCartney, Macca, the cute one. McCartney has always suffered in comparison to John Lennon, who provided the tart to Paulie’s sweet and presumably checked McCartney’s tendencies toward sentimentality and facile “moon-June” lyrics. In general, we credit McCartney for the Beatles’ hummable tunes and Lennon for the band’s brilliant transgressions. But McCartney was the more experimental one, the studio knob tweaker behind the still-unreleased “Carnival of Light,” a 14-minute avant-garde number in, as McCartney told the Rockin Vicar website, “the Stockhausen/John Cage bracket.” It was recorded a year and a half before Lennon’s similar musique concrete experiment “Revolution 9.”
Lennon and McCartney were not the typical songwriting partnership. It has long been fashionable to see it as a kind of legal fiction - to sort the catalog into Lennon songs and McCartney songs. While this is an oversimplification - for instance, McCartney would write a line like “She was just 17/Never been a beauty queen” and Lennon would twist the prepositional phrase into the slyer, suggestive and much better “You know what I mean” - the truth is that each served a vital function in the other’s creative process. They competed and called each other out on their worst tendencies. They wrote better when they were writing for each other’s standards, if not exactly with each other. The conventional and not altogether untrue takeaway has always been that once McCartney lost Lennon as sounding board, he was revealed as a sappy and shallow tunesmith. He was capable of the occasional brilliant love song (“Maybe I’m Amazed” or “Every Night” off McCartney or “This One” off Flowers in the Dirt), but a lyrical lightweight compared to his former partner. When the Beatles split, most of us took sides.
I was a John guy, mostly, though I valued George Harrison and loved those early Starr albums. But McCartney was more problematic. I cared more than I should have about lyrics and McCartney’s were often inane, silly or simply banal. Some of the stuff on the radio was great - “Band on the Run,” “Junior’s Farm,” “Jet” - but to my mind, McCartney was also responsible for some of the worst pop music of the ’70s (“My Love,” “Goodnight Tonight” and the pre-emptive “Silly Love Songs”).
Lennon’s murder and subsequent canonization didn’t help McCartney’s critical reputation, although he continued to be the best-selling former Beatle. I paid only sporadic attention in the 1980s and ’90s, when every few years he seemed to be issuing what somebody somewhere was sure to call his great comeback record. In 2005, there was Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, in 2007 there was Memory Almost Full. Sorry, I’ve heard nothing in the past 30 years to alter my opinion.Not even the noisy Fireman electronic experiments he made in collaboration with Youth (the nom de dub of Martin Glover, former bassist for Killing Joke) are surprising, given McCartney’s long-term fascination with the avant-garde. Last year’s unfortunately titled Kisses on the Bottom, a collection of traditional pop songs, seemed a little like a surrender - the old lion at last embracing the nostalgic fog that had always enveloped him and limited his vision. It was a little sad but really more sweet than sad, which means it was McCartney.
What his latest record teaches us is just that at 71 he’s not quite ready to cede the stage and that he’s still capable of some sinewy pop. While he knows that you think you know what he is, he isn’t going to be content to give you perfectionist twaddle. There are at least five tracks on the ironically titled New (Hear) - McCartney’s 24th studio album since leaving the Beatles - that sound as though they might have been hits back in the ’80s and ’90s. Album opener “Save Us” sounds a bit like old 10cc; the catchy “On My Way to Work” somewhat disturbingly reminds me of the Crash Test Dummies’ 1993 hit “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm”; the title track is a neo-Mersey beat charmer that sounds as though it might have been produced by Brian Wilson rather than Mark Ronson; the rocker “Queenie Eye” and “Get Me Out of Here,” a pleasantly lightly sketched Buddy Holly pastiche. The album’s best song, the acoustic “Early Days,” is yet another hearkening back to Liverpool, yet delivered crisply and without schmaltz.
“Early Days,” produced by the formidable Ethan Johns, is a minor track, but the fact that McCartney doesn’t sabotage it with philosophy might be taken as a major milestone.Once again, he’s talking about his pre-fame friendship with Lennon but there’s a note of dissent in his brief as he reminds us that he was there, we were not, and maybe our assumptions aren’t as well-founded as we believe. In other words, our mythology was his life.
McCartney’s considerable gifts are undeniable. His voice is amazing, maybe the best vocal instrument ever put in service of rock ’n’ roll (Elvis Presley fans would dissent; so might Rod Stewart’s and Van Morrison’s, but none of them is as versatile). McCartney’s bass playing was remarkable. Had he never written a song, McCartney’s contribution to the Beatles - and thus to the way the world sounds - would still be prodigious.
On his own, McCartney has been durable, prolific and often enjoyable … sort of a more straightforward Elton John or a less pretentious Billy Joel. I don’t know that I’ll play New again, but I can’t say a bad word about it. The very idea of an old Beatle is ridiculous, yet McCartney seems to have managed to grow up with grace.
I don’t know that I can ever love the post-Beatles McCartney. He’s still seems too sunny and glib. But I can respect him. He’s earned that.
Email: pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style, Pages 48 on 10/27/2013