McCartney’s creativity in 3 photographs

Plus: 5 of my favorite books about the Beatles

Hey y’all,

This letter is brought to you by side two of Abbey Road at full volume.

Something some of you may not know about me is that I’ve been a bit of a Beatles freak since I was in middle school. Here, I have mapped the cycle of my Beatles fandom:

There really is no in between for me. I’m either all in, or all out, which is why any new Beatles book, any new Beatles movie, any new Beatles anything has the ability to send me down the Beatles hole.

The highlight of last week — maybe the highlight of my whole year so far — was being a special guest to kickoff Beatles season on The Walter Martin Radio Show. Walter and I both grew up Lennon worshippers, so we got together to talk about our mixed feelings of admiration and bewilderment concerning Mr. McCartney and Morgan Neville’s new documentary, Man on the Run.

You can listen to our whole hour-long conversation here.

I love doing podcasts and radio interviews, but I’m such a visual guy that sometimes I miss having my little props and pictures, so I thought for the rest of this letter I would augment our conversation with 3 of my favorite pictures of Paul McCartney, that present him in 3 different stages of his creative development.

1. This is a photo taken by Mike McCartney, Paul’s younger brother, of Paul McCartney and John Lennon writing “I Saw Her Standing There” in 1962.

Josh Shenk wrote about the photo in Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs:

One late November afternoon in 1962, John Lennon and Paul McCartney got together to write at Paul’s house at 20 Forthlin Road in Liverpool. Their ritual was to come around in the afternoon, just the two of them, when Paul’s dad was at work. They would go to the small front room overlooking Jim McCartney’s patch of garden and sit opposite each other. “Like mirrors,” Paul said.

John sat on a chair pulled in from the dining room. He had his Jumbo Gibson acoustic-electric with a sunburst finish. Paul sat on a little table in front of the telly with his foot on the hearth of the coal fireplace. He played a Spanish-style guitar with nylon strings, strung in reverse for a lefty. In a photography shot by Paul’s brother, Michael, they’re both looking down at a notebook on the floor, filled with lyrics…

…Years later, Paul told his brother that he loved his photo of the “I Saw Her Standing There” writing session because it captured how it really was—”the Rodgers and Hammerstein of pop at work.” Writing “eyeball to eyeball,” as John said, they weren’t just frontmen for a rock group; they were composers working in concert.

Lennon and McCartney were best friends and musical partners who met as teenagers, were formed, and found their great gifts together. You can’t really think about one without the other.

2. This photograph of the Beatles in the studio is part of the booklet that comes with the 50th anniversary CD edition of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Here’s a clearer picture (I can’t find a photo credit in the booklet or online):

The other Beatles are all at their posts. George at the organ. John in front of an amp. Ringo drumming. But there’s Paul, up on his feet moving a microphone. Why isn’t an engineer doing it for him?

In engineer Geoff Emerick’s memoir, Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording The Beatles, he writes about all the strict rules and restrictions of the recording studio in that era. (When the Beatles first started out, the engineers were still wearing lab coats.) They broke all sorts of rules and protocol for the albums leading up to Pepper’s, and, clearly, the rules had mostly been thrown out the window at this point. Emerick writes that Paul was the most curious of the crew about the recording process. He wanted to get hands-on, which is what he’s doing in this photo: He’s not waiting for some engineer to fix the sound.

Paul would also stay at the studio late after the other band members had gone home to overdub his bass lines one section at a time, getting them as perfect as he could. “There were nights when he would labor until dawn,” Emerick writes, “keeping at it until his fingers were literally bleeding.”

Ian Leslie, in his book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs describes the different ways Lennon and McCartney brought material to their bandmates:

John was more likely to take partially worked-out songs to Paul and the others, and then flesh them out in collaboration. His ideas were platforms for the creativity of the group. McCartney’s ideas tended to be more fully formed, which left less scope for Lennon and the others. He had the ability to hear a song—melody and counterpoint, key changes and instrumentation—in his head, like an aural hallucination, together with a clear idea of how to make it real in the studio. Paul was also an instrumental all-rounder and the most accomplished musician in the group.

Paul was trying to get a sound that he heard in his head, so he rode the other Beatles really hard. He could go too far, trying to get a sound, driving the other Beatles crazy on tracks like “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” which, by the way, gets the funniest epitaph from Ian MacDonald in Revolution in The Head:

If any single recording shows why The Beatles broke up, it is MAXWELL’S SILVER HAMMER. Compulsively fertile in melody and fascinated by music’s formal beauties, McCartney could, when unrestrained by Lennon’s cynicism, fatally neglect meaning and expression. This ghastly miscalculation - of which there are countless equivalents on his garrulous sequence of solo albums - represents by far his worst lapse of taste under the auspices of The Beatles.

3. Here is a photo taken by Linda McCartney of Paul recording drum overdubs in a bathroom for McCartney II in 1980. This is a man who is playing. He’s on his own, doing it all himself. There’s no John or George around to roll eyes at him. He is not worried about being a goofball. He’s not worried about going overboard. (And he does. Exhibit A: “Temporary Secretary.”)

In a recent Fresh Air interview, Morgan Neville said:

I mean, he puts out 10 records in 10 years. But on top of that, he's doing all kinds of side projects. I mean, he is somebody who needs to be doing something. I asked him about it. You know, I said, are you a workaholic? And what he said to me is, well, you don't work music, you play it. So I think I'm a playaholic. And I think that's true. I mean, to this day - Paul McCartney's probably making music today, you know, and every day. I mean, that's what he still does, 'cause that's that's how he expresses himself. And I get that. You know, if I was Paul McCartney, I'd make music every day, too.

Music, for McCartney, seems to be compulsive. It’s what he does. It’s when he is whoever and whatever he is.

Maybe the thing I’m most fascinated by about Paul McCartney is his insistence that he doesn’t really know where the music comes from. Years ago, I clipped this paragraph from a 2016 interview (and wound up using it in the first chapter of Don’t Call It Art):

You’ve never got it down. It’s this fluid thing, music. I kind of like that. I wouldn’t like to be blasé or think, ‘Oh you know I know how to do this.’ In fact I teach a class at a the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys — I do a little songwriting class with the students — and nearly always the first thing I go in and say [is], ‘I don’t know how to do this. You would think I do, but it’s not one of these things you ever know how to do.

John Higgs expands on this in his book Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche:

After sixty years of interviews, it’s clear that McCartney does not understand why music comes so naturally to him, or flows out of him so easily, in a way that doesn’t happen to other people. He seems at times afraid that it might stop – he has never learned how to read music, for example, in case it breaks the way he works. As the Irish poet Paul Muldoon has said when discussing McCartney’s creativity, ‘It’s not a particularly fashionable idea right now but if you scratch any interesting artist you’ll hear that one of the key components to how they do it is that they don’t really know what they’re doing. […] If you don’t know what to expect, there’s a chance the listener and reader will find themselves in a place they wouldn’t expect to end up, that’s where interesting art resides.’

Another thing I admire is that McCartney doesn’t torture himself too much with his songwriting process. More from Love and Let Die:

McCartney places great emphasis on starting and finishing work immediately, before you have had the chance to overanalyse or come up with an excuse not to do it. This is an attitude that he credits his father with instilling in him. Whenever Paul or his brother Mike would try to get out of a chore by saying they would do it tomorrow, their father would tell them ‘D.I.N. – do it now’. As he explains, ‘you get rid of the hesitation and the doubt, and you just steamroll through’. This approach paid dividends when he came to work with John Lennon. Every time they sat down to write a song they would finish it, and they never once came away from a writing session having failed to come up with something. “I’m all for that way of working,’ he has said. ‘Once John and I or I alone started a song, there was nowhere else to go; we had to finish it, and it was a great discipline. There’s something about doing it when you have the vision.’

Ok, that was a lot. Let’s wrap this up with 5 of my favorite books about the Beatles!