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McCartney Gets Cubist for “Picasso’s Last Words”

July 3, 2019 · by solobeatles

When McCartney and his wife Linda were on vacation in Jamaica in 1973, they visited the set of the feature film Papillon starring Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen. Hoffman invited the couple over to dinner and asked McCartney how he wrote songs. When McCartney replied that he just made them up, Hoffman produced the April 23 issue of Time with an article about “Pablo Picasso’s Last Days and Final Journey” and challenged him to write a song about that. The piece reported that Picasso had told his friends, “Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink anymore,” then went to bed and died in his sleep. McCartney started strumming a guitar and quickly made a chorus out of the quote.

“He’s doing it! He’s doing it!” Hoffman cried. He later said that the experience was “right under childbirth in terms of great events of my life.”

Later that year, Wings flew to Nigeria to record Band on the Run, by which time McCartney had fleshed out a few more lines. The painter wakes in the middle of the night and sings that he’s waiting. Either he’s waiting for death, or he’s already died and waiting for his wife on the other side to join him. Recently, McCartney had suffered the near-death experience of a bronchial spasm due to smoking and was told by his doctor to cut back on cigarettes, so perhaps that helped him relate to Picasso’s words.

Cream’s drummer Ginger Baker had a studio in a Lagos suburb called Ikeja and was pushing for McCartney to do the whole album there. McCartney didn’t want to but agreed to do “Picasso’s Last Words” at Baker’s place. Baker and some additional people from the studio filled some cans with gravel and shook them for percussion.

With his technique called cubism, Picasso would paint an object by breaking it up and showing different viewpoints of the object randomly recombined on the same plane, transforming something representational into something abstract. As quoted in Paul Gambaccini’s Paul McCartney: In His Own Words, McCartney said, “We started off doing [the song] straight. Then we thought, Picasso was kind of far out in his pictures, he’d done all these different kinds of things, fragmented, cubism, and the whole bit. I thought it would be nice to get a track a bit like that, put it through different moods, cut it up, edit it, mess around with it—like he used to do with his pictures. You see the old films of him painting, he paints it once and if he doesn’t like it he paints it again, right on top of it, and by about twenty-five times he’s got this picture … We were just making it up as we went along. We didn’t have any big concept of it in mind at all. I just thought, we’ll mess it up, keep messing it up until it sounds good, like Picasso did, with the instinctive knowledge you’ve got.”

Along with a drunken chorus singing “Drink to Me,” McCartney mixed tempo changes with echoes of other songs from the Band on the Run album — the “Jet” refrain and the “Ho Hey Ho” bit from “Mrs. Vandebilt.” A Frenchman from a tourist service offers to send free travel guides. The highlight of the collage is the “Sound of Philadelphia”/proto-disco string arrangement by Tony Visconti.

McCartney Celebrates His Groups Old and New With “Band on the Run”

March 5, 2019 · by solobeatles

Bored with recording in England in 1973, McCartney checked out a list of EMI’s international recording studios and discovered one in Lagos, Nigeria. Dreaming of new African rhythms to be discovered, he made plans for his band to travel there with former Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick.

Tension had been growing between McCartney and Wings guitarist Henry McCullough. In performances, McCullough prided himself on always improvising something new. McCartney believed the crowd wanted to hear it how they expected it. As Harrison had learned long ago, there wasn’t a lot for McCullough to add to McCartney’s tunes since Macca wanted them recorded exactly as he envisioned them. The low pay rankled, and Linda got on McCullough’s nerves. Finally, he turned in his notice a few weeks before the trip to Lagos. McCartney was surprised but figured they could make do without him.

The night before they were set to fly, drummer Denny Seiwell also quit, having lost faith that McCartney would ever give him a raise from $175 a week. McCartney decided, screw ’em both, Wings would record the album as just a trio. He had already played drums on THE WHITE ALBUM when Starr briefly walked out, and then on McCARTNEY. He figured it’d be easier taking over the drums himself than trying to explain what he wanted to a Nigerian. Seiwell noted later with irritation that McCartney mainly re-created all the drum parts Seiwell had worked out in advance.

It’s interesting that McCartney made perhaps his greatest album immediately after two-fifths of his band split—in particular, an album built around a song celebrating the camaraderie of bands. Perhaps having lost his second band in three years, McCartney had a vendetta to make an album so good they’d regret leaving.

McCartney’s previous hit “Live and Let Die” had introduced a more cinematic, action-oriented mind-set, and now the adrenalin of a very unique set of circumstances poured into “Band on the Run.” There was the life-threatening chaos of Lagos, where the McCartneys were mugged and Macca also suffered an attack of bronchial spasms. Also, McCartney’s persistent busts for marijuana had made him feel that the authorities were turning musicians into outlaws because they wanted to substitute herb for booze. The strands combined to make “Band on the Run” the greatest of his rock operas.

The song begins with the group stuck in jail for life, harmonizing like inmates in old prison movies. McCartney ruminates about what he’d do “if I ever get out of here,” a line Harrison uttered during one of the interminable Apple board meetings.

Suddenly, guitars and orchestra rev and roar like dynamite blasting a hole through the wall. The gang runs for the fences as the debris falls like the sound of the acoustic guitars strumming, embodying light and freedom as McCartney’s vocals echo. As the band runs toward the sun, one of them turns to the others and wryly cracks that he hopes they’re having fun. No other line captures the exhilaration and terror the Beatles must’ve felt being chased by the fans who nearly tore them limb from limb. Beatlemaniacs would drop down onto the tops of the limos and nearly crush the group inside so frequently that it became necessary to transport them in armored vehicles.

The song crystallizes McCartney’s nostalgia for old friends sharing the eye of a hurricane together, a time never to return, and simultaneously reflects his steely determination to capture the excitement again anyway. Even if McCullough and Seiwell had bailed out, he’d do it with his wife/best friend Linda and Denny.

McCartney’s vision of escape became the best-selling album of 1974, and the seventh best-selling album of the 1970s. Soon he would conquer America and the rest of the globe again in his 1976 Wings Over the World tour.

It would have been nice to be a fly on the wall the first time Lennon, Harrison, and Starr heard the song. Perhaps they smiled a little, remembering the blood stone days. Hard nut Lennon sang the album’s praises. A month after the single “Band on the Run” hit the US number one spot, Lennon went into the studios to record WALLS AND BRIDGES and finally came up with his own number one, “Whatever Gets You thru the Night.” Soon, he’d be talking with McCartney about meeting in New Orleans to record together.

The Beatles’ break up feud and its aftermath were over. McCartney was now healed and complete on his own, even as he nostalgically looked back at his old mates and celebrated them, echoing that moment from A HARD DAY’S NIGHT when the four banged open the theater door and ran down the fire escape with Ringo’s cry, “We’re out!”

Macca, Michael, and The Man

July 26, 2017 · by solobeatles

“The Man” is the second of McCartney’s three collaborations with Michael Jackson, recorded in 1981 and released on Pipes of Peace (1983).

Jackson wrote the lyrics, about some wise dancing man who “plays the game of life so well.” McCartney wasn’t sure if Jackson was talking about Jesus or a Jehova’s Witness — or just a happy “fool on the hill” type guy who kicked up his heels like The Wiz — but went with it.

So it was the second song McCartney sang that seemed to be a merry ode to the general wisdom of “The Man” (the other being “Listen to What the Man Said”), apparently unaware that to many “The Man” was slang for an oppressive government/authoritarian figure. Jackson, too, was apparently unaware or unconcerned.

With two hit singles under their belt (“Say Say Say” and “The Girl Is Mine”), it seemed they had a good thing going. But then McCartney advised Michael Jackson to start buying song copyrights to make big money. Around that time, ATV Music Publishing went up for sale. It owned the copyrights to most of the Lennon/McCartney songs, and as a courtesy they offered McCartney the option to buy it for $40 million. McCartney tried to get Yoko Ono (who ran Lennon’s estate) to split it with him, but she thought they could get it for $20 million. When that deal didn’t happen, McCartney decided to drop it because it was “too pricey.”

So in 1985, Michael Jackson bought it for $47.5 million. Even though he had originally passed, McCartney was reputedly unhappy about it, and they never worked together again.

My Favorite of Paul’s Classical Pieces: “Cell Growth”

July 6, 2017 · by solobeatles

McCartney’s symphony Standing Stone (1997) was the natural progression from “Yesterday,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and 1966’s The Family Way soundtrack (the first Beatle solo album). Recounting the rise of Celtic man (hence the Stonehenge reference of the title), it opens with the primordial great ball of fire and progresses to the first signs of life in this track, which recalls Fantasia’s take on Stravinksy’s Rite of Spring. Now if Macca just raps over an Asian folk tune, he’ll have every musical genre covered.

“Cell Growth” starts at 4:30 in the clip below:

And while we’re at it, here’s “Love in the Open Air,” from The Family Way.

McCartney’s Coolest B-Side? “Oh Woman, Oh Why”

October 31, 2016 · by solobeatles

The rock snobs of 1971 were underwhelmed by the cute and seemingly non-tortured “Another Day,” but had they listened to the flipside they would have realized that the son of Little Richard was still in possession of his shredding rock-and roll vocal range. McCartney slips back into the mode of “I’m Down,” “Oh! Darling,” and the climax of “Hey Jude,” while the slide guitar sounds like he’s riffing off the country blues on the second side of LED ZEPPELIN III, released a month or two before McCartney recorded this song. Macca was always trying to keep pace with the guitar virtuosos; after seeing Jimi Hendrix, he wrote the guitar for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” “Helter Skelter” was his attempt to outdo The Who’s live sonic assault.

Basically, “Oh Woman” is “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” with lyrics and a full band backing him. McCartney would dig the song’s drummer, Denny Seiwell, enough to bring him into Wings later in 1971.

In the song, McCartney’s woman shows up with a gun to shoot him down. He pleads with her to tell him what he’s done wrong and it’s his cheating ways. Perhaps it’s a flashback to the time in 1968 his pre-Linda girlfriend Jane Asher came home to London earlier than expected. The fans who hung around outside McCartney’s house saw her arriving and tried to warn McCartney, who was inside with girlfriend number two, Francie Schwartz. He scoffed, “Ah, pull the other one” — but suddenly Jane was standing there glowering.

The main attraction of the song is McCartney’s voice, a freak of nature every bit as powerful and rough as Kurt Cobain’s or any who have come down the pike since. This song should be played for people who associate McCartney solely with soft pop like “The Girl Is Mine.”

For a long time it was unavailable but this May it was included on the deluxe version of RAM, along with another great non-album B-side “Little Woman Love.” Other Grade A ’70s flipsides are still not on iTunes, including “Sally G” and “Girls’ School,” but presumably this will be gradually rectified when McCartney releases the remastered versions of albums like VENUS AND MARS and LONDON TOWN.

Decades Before U2’s Spider-Man on Broadway, Paul celebrates Marvel Comics

July 7, 2016 · by solobeatles

In the mid-60s, with Dylan saying things in lyrics that had never been said on record before, the Beatles and Stones worked hard to be intellectual heavyweights, even if they didn’t stretch out their songs to 10 verses like Dylan. (Though the Stones occasionally did for 4 or 5.) McCartney wrote “Eleanor Rigby” when his aunt chided him that he was just writing bubblegum; Jagger wrote “Sympathy for the Devil” based on a famous Russian novel his girlfriend Marriane Faithfull was reading, The Master and the Margarita.

A decade later, however, the rockers couldn’t be bothered. Instead of great plays and avant-garde poets McCartney was reading Marvel comics and enjoying a laid-back domesticity with Linda, sort of a touring/ganja-smoking “Father Knows Best” on tour with his wife and 3-4 kids. With the rock critics of the day made up of angry politicos or proto-punks, his song “Magneto and Titanium Man” seemed the embodiment of everything that was wrong about McCartney’s post-Beatles trajectory.

Today, however, after U2 has scored a Broadway Spider-Man play, it can be enjoyed for what it is. The ebullient keyboards perfectly capture the joy all young nerds feel when bopping down to the comic store for some new installments, and if you want to be pretentious about it you can say it’s pop art like Lichenstein or Ed Ruscha. McCartney would visit Marvel Comics in the ‘60s when the Beatles were in New York, and there was an issue of Strange Tales that featured the Fantastic Four’s Thing and Human Torch meeting the Beatles.

For McCartney’s 1976 tour, Marvel Comics legendary artist Jack Kirby drew images of the characters that were projected behind the group. McCartney gave Kirby’s family front row seats and after one show Kirby came backstage and gave McCartney a drawing of Magneto vs. Wings. (Pictured above.)

“Magneto”’s album Venus and Mars was not as strong as its predecessor Band on the Run, but it had an organic rock sound that would later come to stand out against McCartney’s increasingly synth-dominated music of the next decade.

For the record, Titanium Man and Crimson Dynamo were Iron Man enemies and Magneto was the X-Men’s arch-nemesis. According to an anonymous fan on You Tube, McCartney was inspired to write the song after playing with his kids and their toys and talking about his favorite comic characters.

John and Paul Reunion 1974

July 4, 2016 · by solobeatles

In 1974 Lennon produced Harry Nilsson’s album Pussy Cats in Los Angeles. With Nilsson’s gift for gorgeous melodies and his peerless voice, there was speculation that he could be a new McCartney for Lennon; probably Nilsson hoped so himself.

But McCartney had been a fan of Nilsson’s for years, as well, so he and Linda dropped by the Pussy Cats sessions at Burbank Studios the same night Stevie Wonder was there. Wonder was currently in the midst of a streak of chart-topping classics following his 1972 tour with the Rolling Stones.

One could have heard a pin drop when McCartney walked in, as the Beatles’ break up had been famously acrimonious. Finally, Lennon said, “Valiant Paul McCartney, I presume?”

McCartney replied, “Sir Jasper Lennon, I presume?” referring to the roles they performed in a 1963 Christmas stage show. They shook hands and soon started jamming.

Lennon sang lead and played guitar, McCartney drummed and sang harmony, Wonder sang and played electric piano, Linda played the organ, Lennon’s girlfriend May Pang the tambourine, Nilsson sang, Jesse Ed Davis played guitar, producer Ed Freeman played bass and Bobby Keys played sax. They jammed some blues, then covered “Lucille,” “Sleep Walk,” “Stand By Me,” “Cupid,” “Chain Gang” and “Take This Hammer.”

It should have been a classic moment, but it was past midnight and everyone was coked out. On the famous bootleg, A Toot and a Snore, Lennon says to Wonder, “You wanna snort, Steve? A toot? It’s goin’ round.” A couple tunes later Lennon is looking for some more coke while repeatedly complaining about the technical difficulties he’s having with his mike and headphones.

On one hand it’s sad that the last known recording of McCartney and Lennon should be so lackluster. But on the other hand, it’s nice to hear that they were friendly again. The “Lucille” cover is almost passable, on par with some of the more coherent “Get Back” outtakes.

The Mournful Glory of McCartney’s “Wanderlust”

April 14, 2016 · by solobeatles

The stately piano and Phillip Jones Brass Ensemble give “Wanderlust” perhaps the finest sense of grandeur of any McCartney composition, which is why it was one of the newer songs he performed in his 1984 film Give My Regards to Broad Street (with Ringo on drums). The weariness in his vocals seems to carry the tragedy of Lennon’s recent murder.

So it is first almost disappointing to learn that lyrically it recounts the story of his near bust for pot during the recording of 1978’s London Town on the yachts in the Virgin Islands. US customs raided them and gave them a stern warning about the consequences of holding weed. The captain of the yachts then told McCartney he was not going to stand for drugs on his boats and a bad argument ensued. Seriously irritated, McCartney wanted to find another boat, and some other people in the dock said he could use their catamaran, called “Wanderlust.” Since then, the name became associated with freedom in McCartney’s mind.

A much worse experience occurred in January 1980. When Wings landed in Tokyo, security quickly discovered a 219-gram/7.7 ounce bag of pot in McCartney’s luggage. They immediately escorted him to jail and cancelled the sold out shows. There has been some dispute over the years whether it was he or Linda who packed the suitcase so blatantly, either because they were stoned or because they assumed they were untouchable. The bust carried a mandatory sentence of 5 years, and it was a scary week for Macca in prison as Japanese politicians called for his trial. He was living the opening section of “Band on the Run” for real. After nine days, Japan wanted to avoid an international incident and allowed him to return to Scotland.

As McCartney laments being harassed for what to him seems a petty crime, one can feel the stress of all his cumulative pot busts and the emotional toll it must have taken on him. In the big picture, it reflects how the counterculture’s dependence on drugs became their Achilles’ heel. From The News of the World colluding with Scotland Yard to imprison the Stones for drugs in 1967, to the Beatles’ busts, to Abbie Hoffman hiding underground for years after a coke bust, governments used drugs as an excuse to jail anyone who didn’t get with their program.

The Beatles once planned to escape the Blue Meanie cops by buying their own Greek island, one of the fantasies of 1967’s Summer of Love that never came to fruition. But you can hear the same yearning to escape in McCartney’s sad “Wanderlust” refrain. Ten years later the Band on the Run is still running because they preferred to smoke instead of drink.

Paul and George Help James Taylor on the Original “Carolina in My Mind”

June 1, 2015 · by solobeatles

After the Beatles signed James Taylor to their label Apple in 1968, McCartney played bass on the original “Carolina in my Mind” and Harrison sang back up. As Wikipedia elaborates below, the lyrics refer to Taylor recording his first album at Abbey Road while the Fab Four (“the holy host of others”) did the White Album. Taylor also sings of being on the dark side of the moon, which perhaps influenced another band that recorded at Abbey Road, Pink Floyd.

Also on Taylor’s first album was “Something in the Way She Moves,” which of course became the first line to one of Harrison’s biggest hits.

From Wikipedia:
The song references Taylor’s years growing up in North Carolina.[4] Taylor wrote it while overseas recording for The Beatles’ label Apple Records. He started writing the song at producer Peter Asher’s London flat on Marylebone High Street, resumed work on it while on holiday on the Mediterranean island of Formentera, and then completed it while stranded on the nearby island of Ibiza with a Swedish girl Karin he had just met.[2][5] The song reflects Taylor’s homesickness at the time,[6] as he was missing his family, his dog, and his state.[5]
Dark and silent late last night,
I think I might have heard the highway calling …
Geese in flight and dogs that bite
And signs that might be omens say I’m going, I’m going
I’m gone to Carolina in my mind.
The original recording of the song was done at London’s Trident Studios during the July to October 1968 period, and was produced by Asher.[7] The song’s lyric “holy host of others standing around me” makes reference to The Beatles, who were recording The White Album in the same studio where Taylor was recording his album.[4] Indeed, the recording of “Carolina in My Mind” featured a credited appearance by Paul McCartney on bass guitar and an uncredited one by George Harrison on backing vocals.[4] The other players were Freddie Redd on organ, Joel “Bishop” O’Brien on drums, and Mick Wayne providing a second guitar alongside Taylor’s.[7] Taylor and Asher also did backing vocals and Asher added a tambourine.[7] Richard Hewson arranged and conducted a string part;[7] an even more ambitious 30-piece orchestra part was recorded but not used.[4] The song itself earned critical praise, with Jon Landau’s April 1969 review for Rolling Stone calling it “beautiful” and one of the “two most deeply affecting cuts” on the album and praising McCartney’s bass playing as “extraordinary”.[8] Taylor biographer Timothy White calls the song “the album’s quiet masterpiece.”[4]
The song was first released on Taylor’s eponymous debut album in December 1968 (February 1969 in the United States), and was later released as a single in the UK in February 1969 and in the US in March 1969.[9] However, owing to the same problems which plagued the release of the album (namely, Taylor’s inability to promote it due to his hospitalization for drug addiction), the single’s original release only reached number 118 on US pop charts and failed to chart in the UK.[9] Indeed, Taylor had fallen back into addiction during the London recording sessions,[4][10] and his line about being surrounded by Beatles had been immediately followed by Still I’m on the dark side of the moon.[6]
COMPLETE ARTICLE CAN BE FOUND AT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_in_my_mind

On a sadder note, below is an article about how Lennon’s New York neighbor James Taylor had an unnerving encounter with Mark David Chapman the day before Lennon was killed.

http://www.aolnews.com/2010/12/08/james-taylor-recalls-encounter-with-lennons-assassin/

(The photo on our home page with Lennon, Taylor, Yoko Ono, and Carly Simon was taken in 1977.)

Macca Gets Freaky With “Monkberry Moon Delight”

May 10, 2015 · by solobeatles

Backed by what sounds like a villainous circus organ from a creepy 1930s cartoon, McCartney lurches in with a voice that has gone beyond Little Richard into demented Screamin’ Jay Hawkins territory. In Hawkins’s seminal hit “I Put a Spell on You” (1956), he shrieked, gargled, cackled, and guffawed like an unhinged black Vincent Price. Onstage he would rise from a coffin bearing voodoo props. Later, Tom Waits would take up his growling, guttural mantle.

In his incendiary 1970 Rolling Stone interview, Lennon expressed surprise at McCartney’s self-titled first solo album, saying he expected more from him. At the dawn of 1971, McCartney found himself in the position of being dismissed by the critics while Lennon and Harrison were heaped with praise for their LPs Plastic Ono Band and All Things Must Pass. Pelted with tomatoes in his mind, he realized he must catch up with his second album Ram or be left behind.

He goes to the piano in the attic while the wild wind howls. He’s getting older, his hair’s a mess, he’s in his pajamas, his stomach is in knots from the bad reviews, and the rats are in the walls (both real farm rats and the ex-bandmates in his mind).

But then he sees Linda giving the kids their milk and it inspires him to get back in touch with his own absurd inner child. “When my kids were young they used to call milk ‘monk’ for whatever reason that kids do—I think it’s magical the way that kids can develop better names for things than the real ones. In fact as a joke, Linda and I still occasionally refer to an object by that child-language name. So, monk was always milk, and monkberry moon delight was a fantasy drink, rather like ‘Love Potion No. 9,’ hence the line in the song ‘sipping monkberry moon delight.’ It was a fantasy milk shake.”

Linda echoes his words like a gum-smacking, seen-it-all, hand-on-her-hip New York moll. Her singing gilds the razor’s edge of flatness with surprising defiance, as coached meticulously by her perfectionist husband. Finally, he degenerates into eerie howling and spastic mumbling.

Hawkins would go on to release “Monkberry Moon Delight” as a single in 1973.

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