I have had it up to here waiting for the Beatles catalogue to be remastered

in 1969 john wanted to release a plastic ono band single of "you know my name (look up the number)" backed by "what's the new mary jane". he was, mercifully, dissuaded.

paul's funny voice thing is interesting to me. been doing some beatles and solo listening lately cause of these threads and it seems like john and paul both have really clear obvious defensive tics they fall back on that distance themselves from where they are and what they're doing. john's is sort of more outwardly directed, making fun of other people or if he clowns himself it's in a "isn't this thing we're doing so stupid and phony" kind of way. to get armchair psychoanalytic it seems like the whole "ironic detachment to avoid seeming uncool by committing to something" which is interesting cause he is thought of as the more committed, authentic, passionate one. now we'd like to do, 'ark the angels come! of course it's also interlaced with his fondness for absurdity and empty wordplay for its own sake, which i don't think is quite the same thing.

paul OTOH, i mean some of his pastiche is clearly just that he likes dabbling in styles and trying things on (and also just genuinely loves old-timey music/little richard/wilson pickett/etc.). but he also i think finds a security blanket in taking on roles and putting on voices. if the take's going south, lapse into a country drawl and toss in some cutesy ad libs. and it did him in in the end... reminds me of theater kids or improv kids, in college when they're still finding themselves, where you almost can't have a conversation because they're always lapsing into a character or a voice or a pop culture reference. paul as a person remains much harder to penetrate. he's always "on" whether it's singing "honey pie"/"you gave me the answer"/etc. or just, interview-paul rubbing the side of his nose and smilingly relating anecdotes he's told four million times as if they're 100% freshly coming to mind. he interacts with the studio mic like he's dealing with an audience. and somehow all or almost all of his music is part of that, whether it's in a funny voice or not. reminded a bit of ebert on chuck berry, sth like "behind the guy who let it all hang out is a guy who played it all close to the vest."

One of the best things about the Lewisohn book is learning that Paul and John's personalities were essentially formed as we know them back when they were little kids. Paul is always eager to please, John is often a dick.

I liked the part in the BBC doc where Paul and George try and describe the spastic tics John would do under pressure - iirc they're both apologizing for any hurt inflicted by the somewhat offensive parody of a physically disabled person, but at the same time reminiscing with fondness how John's mannerisms could put the group at ease, like he was good at goofing off even when they were playing stadiums, reminding them to not take Beatlemania too seriously

paul as a person remains much harder to penetrate. he's always "on" whether it's singing "honey pie"/"you gave me the answer"/etc. or just, interview-paul rubbing the side of his nose and smilingly relating anecdotes he's told four million times as if they're 100% freshly coming to mind. he interacts with the studio mic like he's dealing with an audience. and somehow all or almost all of his music is part of that

I disagree. Probably going back to the '80s in retrospect but certainly in his recent career, his music strikes me as being very open, clear, honest.

'The End of The End', 'Little Willow', 'Riding to Vanity Fair', 'Early Days', 'Ever Present Past', 'That Was Me' etc. could not be any more open, clear and honest.

It's not that I don't think he ever writes from the heart, or that every one of his recordings buries any kind of honest communication, I just think he has a tendency to be in 'performance' mode kind of continuously. I don't say that as an attack - y'all know I'm a big fan and in the past few days Press To Play, London Town, and the self-titled have all hit my turntable.

If it wasn't a criticism, I'm not sure what point you were making. I understand the criticism of answers you may have heard multiple times to interview questions. I'm not sure how I relate that, though, to some performative tendency you're identifying in his music, whether it's "Honey Pie"/"You Gave Me the Answer" or something else. I'm REALLY unsure how I relate it to any of his music from the last 20 years.

i dunno, i thought doc casino's point was pretty clear -- paul is clearly a guy who feels comfortable inside his role as a performer and probably resembles artists like chuck berry (who kept a clear distance between themselves and their audience) than artists like john (who seemed to want to erase that distance, sometimes at least). pointing out the difference between paul's and john's use of silly voices, clowning at the mike, etc., is an interesting observation i hadn't thought of before. he was also clearly talking about paul's career as a whole, so i don't think it negates his point to argue that paul's music has become more "open, clear, and honest" in the past 20 years.

I don't buy the idea that the lack of personal content in, say, his '70s songwriting is "defensive."

And 20 years is a long time. Longer than the '70s!

surely we can discuss paul's role in the beatles without it being perceived as an attack on the authenticity of his music? in the bbc doc he comes off as the most outspoken, I'm guessing they had a lot more interview footage with him than the others, but he also seems to be putting on an act in a way the others don't - you see paul by a bonfire in the forest, riding a boat etc etc, and ofc this doesn't mean he's not telling the truth or being inauthentic but he's still kinda performing? glad he did, since he's really great at it

I think Fallon's impersonation in this clip is funny
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_zf6kYvR8k

surprising his mid 90s auto-biog/memoir rarely comes up in these conversations about Macca. it's remarkably frank, almost brutal at times.

37% Frank 63% Brutal

I don't buy the idea that his '70s songwriting lacks personal content.

in the bbc doc he comes off as the most outspoken

Do you mean Anthology? He's definitely the most animated of the three, but the Beatles were rarely, if ever, a source of frustration for him (at least, not until Allen Klein showed up). They certainly were for George, and, to a lesser extent, Ringo.

During the segments where the three are interviewed together, George has this look on his face like, "Ugh, this fucking guy again." Not that they didn't genuinely love each other, but Paul's "performing" persona no doubt got on George's nerves.

John Lennon apparently used to complain that people were more likely to cover Paul McCartney songs than his. Yoko apparently tried to reassure him on one such occasion by saying that John's songs had more depth or some such crap. Horseshit. It's really for several reasons: one is that in his solo career, the more newspaper/journalist/political type of tracks have dated horrendously lyrically or in many cases weren't very good. Secondly, his love songs are mostly great, but lyrically are all "ooh Yoko, ooh Yokoyokoyoko, ooh Yoko, you turn me awn" which is only a comfortable thing to sing if you're actually John Lennon. Thirdly, some of the personal content in tracks like 'Mother' would be inappropriate for anyone else to sing. There's a good reason why only a very small portion of post-1969 Lennon ever gets regularly covered: 'Imagine', 'Jealous Guy', 'Working Class Hero', 'Love', 'Woman', 'Instant Karma!' etc. and that reason is that they're generally more comfortable for others to sing on a lyrical level. Also, we can add to the fact that Lennon's solo discography isn't that large and quite a fair bit of it post-1971 isn't very good.

There's that Lennon interview where he goes on about how he felt McCartney was creatively dead after 1970. In reality, it was Lennon that was creatively dead after 1971. He pretty much established a template with his early solo singles, Plastic Ono Band and Imagine and worked within that template until he died. For every great song: '#9 Dream', 'Mind Games', 'Woman', 'What You Got', there was at least two lousy ones. McCartney didn't stop trying things that were new to him, and delivered pop goodness time and time again.

As for Harrison's post-All Things Must Pass work... well, let's just say that he was past his prime as a songwriter not long after he reached it.

John Lennon apparently used to complain that people were more likely to cover Paul McCartney songs than his.

I suspect this is in reference to their Beatles songs rather than their solo material. How many covers of solo McCartney songs were there (before 1980, that is -- when Lennon was still around to complain)? The only one I can think of is the Faces' "Maybe I'm Amazed" (though there might be a couple of versions of "My Love" or something).

There were likely more covers of "Imagine" than of all of Paul's solo output combined.

tarfumes, yup was referring to the Anthology, otm about George's face/Macca's performance

I'll look into that Macca autobio!

in the Beatles Songbook doc one of the pundits says Lennon could write 2 types of songs, either they were about the entire world or only aout himself - no middle ground. Paul can write a song about somebody else.

C'mon, John wrote that song about Mr. Mustard

Jealous guy writing aout things

FWIW I just think Paul mugs, continuously and perhaps compulsively. It doesn't make him a bad guy, it doesn't mean there's never any "personal content" to his lyrics, and it is usually not an obstacle to my liking his music. I like a little hamminess. I just think it's something that's *there* as much as his melodicism or his wildly inventive bass playing. And my original aim was just to compare this to John, who IMHO had his own set of walls and evasions and distancing tactics but never really gets interpreted as such because he's presumed to be the "confessional" and "authentic" one.

But even if his songs are more often in the first-person and can, especially solo, often be linked to things we know from his biography, John's still presenting. He's performing, and guarding himself from criticism, whether it's the original thing of funny voices, or jokes and asides, or "The Ballad of John and Yoko" generally, or the haze of vocal effects and overdubs he started pursuing from the mid-60s on, or Spector's wall of sound, or a maze of poetry and wordplay and admitted gobbledygook which sometimes serves the role of, idk, teenagers giggling Monty Python jokes back and forth to each other as a way to not talk about their real fears and anxieties. Ah! böwakawa, goo goo goo joob. A womp bomp a loo bomp, a womp bam boom.

Macca falls into that fascinating rarified category of artists who have written many of the greatest songs of all time as well as some of the worst of all time.

Okay, which songs has McCartney written that are the worst of all time, then?

The past few years I've probably listened to these more than any official Beatles albums. While I can't make it through an entire solo album aside from Plastic Ono Band, these are a great way to revisit a lot of great tracks.

The Beatles - Instant Karma! (1970)
The Beatles - Imagine Clouds Dripping (1971)
The Beatles - Living In The Material World (1972)
The Beatles - Band On The Run (1973)
The Beatles - Good Night Vienna (1974)

During the segments where the three are interviewed together, George has this look on his face like, "Ugh, this fucking guy again." Not that they didn't genuinely love each other, but Paul's "performing" persona no doubt got on George's nerves.

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), M

Yeah, I've written about this phenomenon re George a lot. It's like visiting your parents after you've lived 10 months alone.

Jealous guy writing aout things

I lol'd

I think McCartney is totally at ease with fame and being a celebrity and accepted it all as part of the job and was mentally prepared for it as far back as the early '60s, he understands his place in music and history and has a far smaller ego than most would have if they were thrust into the same position.

Lennon had about a zillion issues, many of which he found fame and riches couldn't fix. He clearly hated dealing with the more crazier end of the fanbase and I think that parts of being famous undoubtedly freaked him out. I think he enjoyed the money and the perks of celebrity and the attention, though.

Harrison struck me as always having been a bit of a grump and often gave the impression he didn't realise how lucky he was - everything just seems to be a chore. I think he enjoyed being in a position where he could hang out and play music with other celebrity musicians and the perks of celebrity but mostly hated being famous. The Harrison of 1963 strikes me as being a very different guy to the Harrison of 1968.

Starr understands and knows he's one of the luckiest people alive.

Being in the Beatles was a traumatic experience for George, and he seems to have emrerged with post-trauamatic stress disorder.

George grew up in a house without indoor plumbing and had to wear shoes with cardboard soles -- he knew exactly how lucky he was. But when he dreamt of being "rich and famous" at 14 in 1957 (or 19 in 1962) he didn't think that meant, among other things, death threats, psychics predicting you'll die in a plane crash, and audiences drowning you out and not caring what or how you play. In Anthology you can see how he still has fond memories of the first year or two of Beatlemania, but that it quickly got to be a bizarre and scary situation.

George grew up in a house without indoor plumbing and had to wear shoes with cardboard soles -- he knew exactly how lucky he was.

Y'know, even with this in mind, I'm not convinced at all that he did. I mean, the guy was in The Beatles and whined about it - he could have been in Gerry and the fuckin' Pacemakers!

Yes, it must have been somewhat scary to deal with the negative aspects of celebrity, but the guy continued to whine about being a Beatle long after the fact.

What is the '90s autobiography/memoir being discussed?

Kinda not into the "Ringo as lucky" trope tbh - though tbf it has its own thread: Is Ringo Starr the luckiest man evah? I think Ringo fucking rules and can't imagine the Beatles without him, but in terms of reaction to fame he does seem to have taken it the most 'in stride' of any of them. Apart from some evident drugs-and-alcohol coming-apart-at-the-seams stuff for some years there, of course.

I don't begrudge George being sort of unimpressed by it all - moreso than Lennon, who more actively disparaged 'The Beatles' as entity/phenomenon, he seemed to actually want to live as if it wasn't really that big a deal that a rock band was really popular and successful. I don't think it's a matter of playing "with other celebrity musicians" as just, he's a guitarist and wants to play music with people, particularly people who aren't bossing him around, treating him like a kid sidekick, and responding to his contributions with half-hearted "uh huh, hmmm, that's interesting I guess." Lucky, sure, they were all lucky, but he was a great guitarist and worked his ass off as much as the other three. He was also the most active voice protesting their continued shitty-sounding touring, and the notion of returning to live performance with Get Back - he wanted to play and like most musicians he didn't want to play like shit and sound like shit.

One of the most revealing moments in the Anthology docs the cut, I think from a montage of Beatlemania at its peak, the Beatles being shuttled into their car by security against the horde of fans beating on the window, to George in interview: "We couldn't really do much." It was a completely exhausting job that didn't make the most of his talents and for which he was never compensated on an equal level with his bandmates, because "it's only a Northern Song."

What's that bit in Anthology? "You know, I was in upstate New York playing with Bob Dylan and the Band and to have to return to the winter of discontent that was the Beatles was a very hard thing."

^^^ was thinking about this bit the other day! Kind of my go-to image for making sense of Let It Be and the breakup generally.

"he does seem to have taken it the most 'in stride' of any of them" maybe, but he refuses to give autographs to fans which is kind of shitty

Yes, it must have been somewhat scary to deal with the negative aspects of celebrity, but the guy continued to whine about being a Beatle long after the fact.

― ...so music and chicken have become intertwined (Turrican), Monday, April 17, 2017 12:43 PM (fifty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sure, he whined about it long after the fact, but also long after the fact he was also almost killed by an intruder/crazed fan, and was subject to humiliating treatment from his doctor while on his death bed.

Xpost Ebony and Ivory are two of the greatest songwriters of all time collaborating on one of the worst songs of all time.

xxxp this is the macca book i was on about

it's OOP now but goes for buttons on Ebay

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/the-25-greatest-rock-memoirs-of-all-time-20120813/paul-mccartney-many-years-from-now-1997-20120813

One of the most revealing moments in the Anthology docs the cut, I think from a montage of Beatlemania at its peak, the Beatles being shuttled into their car by security against the horde of fans beating on the window, to George in interview: "We couldn't really do much." It was a completely exhausting job that didn't make the most of his talents and for which he was never compensated on an equal level with his bandmates, because "it's only a Northern Song."

― long dark poptart of the rodeo (Doctor Casino), Monday, April 17, 2017 12:47 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. He also said something like, "The only moment we could be alone with our thoughts was when we went to the toilet to have a cigarette."

Yeah, Many Years from Now changed my thinking about McCartney for sure. Great book.

I don't buy the idea that his '70s songwriting lacks personal content.

Me neither but I'd have to hunt around for personal content on an album like Band on the Run.

One of the most revealing moments in the Anthology docs the cut, I think from a montage of Beatlemania at its peak, the Beatles being shuttled into their car by security against the horde of fans beating on the window, to George in interview: "We couldn't really do much." It was a completely exhausting job that didn't make the most of his talents and for which he was never compensated on an equal level with his bandmates, because "it's only a Northern Song."

― long dark poptart of the rodeo (Doctor Casino), Monday, April 17, 2017 12:47 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. He also said something like, "The only moment we could be alone with our thoughts was when we went to the toilet to have a cigarette."

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Monday, April 17, 2017 1:00 PM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That new Eight Days a Week documentary by Ron Howard was lacking in a lot of ways but really did do a great job of capturing just how TERRIFYING Beatlemania was, the sheer chaos at points was really breathtaking and I can't imagine having lived through that

like sometimes it seemed like the crowd would have just ripped them to shreds if they could have

Ebony and Ivory are two of the greatest songwriters of all time collaborating on one of the worst songs of all time.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, April 17, 2017 5:57 PM (forty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ah, y'see, to be the worst song of all time it would have be totally devoid of merit and thoroughly detested by everybody. You may not like 'Ebony and Ivory', but it doesn't qualify for "worst song of all time" in any way.

Ringo is totally lucky, as much as I like his drumming. He wasn't even the original drummer in The Beatles and wouldn't have even got onto the records if they hadn't argued strongly with George Martin about it. He was the drummer in a band with Lennon/McCartney! Christ, he coulda been in Freddie and the Dreamers!

They were very lucky as well to have him. It's not just that he was a good drummer; his musicianship reflected the same long, studied, hard-working path that the other three took. He had the exact same roots. Obviously with Pete Best, they were nowhere near as good. But I think the three Beatles with a studio drummer like on the Anthology version of "Please Please Me" could have ultimately been a much less appealing and much less successful enterprise.

The luck the Beatles stumbled into was mind-boggling including, but not limited to, being taken under the wing of a completely inexperienced manager who refused to take more than 15%; getting signed to Parlophone, and shoved onto George Martin's plate, because Martin's boss was upset that Martin was cheating on his wife (there's a bit more to the story than that, but it was never the "they auditioned for me and I signed them" myth that's been propagated over the years).

That's the crazy joy of the Lewishon book. Just vital lucky break after vital lucky break, and that's not even factoring in innate talent.