How did the Beatles do it? Paul McCartney is finally telling us
The basics of the Beatles story are a matter of public record — cynical John meets happy-go-lucky Paul, then George and, later, Ringo join a group that cranks out song after song for an all too brief period, then the world’s greatest hit-making machine explodes in a welter of personal and business squabbles. And yet, as Adam Gopnik pointed out in a 2016 New Yorker article, “something mysterious remains, and that mysterious thing, as always in the lives of artists, is how they did what they did.”
Till now. With the publication of “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present,” a massive twovolume collection of every lyric Paul McCartney ever wrote during his Beatles days and after, at last we know where the songs (at least the ones he wrote or co-wrote) came from. Or let’s say we know as much as we ever will: McCartney’s comments on each of these 154 songs that he wrote either himself or with a partner like John Lennon or, later, Linda McCartney are generous, but they’re also conversational, meaning they are intimate yet incomplete.
Reading “The Lyrics” is like standing in a master chef’s kitchen as he prepares a dish, adding a dash of this and a spoonful of that and talking to us so winningly that we don’t realize till later that he has withheld an ingredient, one that, because he was so deeply engaged himself, he didn’t know he was withholding.
But here is what he does tell us. First, he owes it all to Black artists. “When you get right down to it,” says McCartney, “in everything I’ve ever done — in the Beatles, Wings, solo — there’s an undercurrent of Black music. You could say it’s the blues, but it could be soul.” Even the White performers the early Beatles based themselves on, a group that includes Elvis, Buddy Holly, and Jerry Lee Lewis, were all influenced by Black musicians like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, so “that’s definitely the underpinning of almost everything I’ve done.”
Next, work with — and steal from — good people. Their late-career bitter clashes notwithstanding, Paul makes it clear how much sheer fun it was to write with John. But he also credits classically trained producer George Martin, his jazz trumpeter father, Jim, and his high school lit teacher Alan Durband as influences. As far as musical theft goes, McCartney points out that the Beatles stole the Beach Boys’s vocal harmonies but that “of course, they were nicking from us. Everybody was nicking from everybody else. There was a circularity to the whole enterprise.”
That said, be your own person. Jim McCartney’s knowledge of music-hall standards shaped the whole “Sgt. Pepper” album and many more Beatles songs, but when he complained about Americanisms creeping into the queen’s English and suggested the lads use the word “yes” in the refrain of “She Loves You,” the four musicians stuck to their guns, and the result was their biggest-selling single in the United Kingdom. (Can you imagine singing along to a song that begins “She loves you / Yes, yes, yes”?)