PAUL IN CONTROL

DAMIAN FANELLI EXPLORES THE SIX BEST GUITAR SOLOS THAT PAUL MCCARTNEY EVER LAID DOWN WITH HIS MAIN SQUEEZE.

“People tend to credit John with the backwards recordings, the loops and the weird sound effects, but the tape loops were my thing,” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club McCartney says in Barry Miles’ Many Band. It was, in fact, played by s a musician, Paul McCartney is probably best known forMcCartney.hiscreative,“TheonlythingI Years From Now. melodic Beatles and Wings bass lines. But he’s always been a guitarist ever used them on was ‘Tomorrow at heart. The guitar was, after all, his first instrument (if you ignore Never Knows.’ It was nice for this to the trumpet his father gave him for his 14th birthday), and it’s always been his leak into the Beatle stuff as it did. main songwriting tool. “We ran the loops and then

And while George Harrison played the bulk of the Fab Four’s lead guitar we ran the track of ‘ Tomorrow parts (especially in the band’s early years), McCartney occasionally – and Never Knows’ and we played the understandably – claimed the lead-guitar spotlight, as did rhythm guitarist John faders, and just before you could Lennon (and Cream’s Eric Clapton, on one famous occasion). tell it was a loop, before it began to repeat a lot, I’d pull in one of the other faders, and so, using the other people, ‘You pull that in there,’ ‘You pull that in,’ we did a half random, half orchestrated playing of the things and recorded that to a track on the actual master tape, so that if we got a good one, that would be the solo. We played it through a few times and changed some of the

AOn what is clearly one of the most powerful guitar solos to be found on a Beatles song, McCartney channels a bit of Jeff Beck (with descending pull-offs a la “Shapes of Things”) and gives a nod to Harrison’s current, Indian-inspired frame of mind.

“I was pleased to have Paul play that bit on ‘Taxman’,” Harrison said in 1987. “If you notice, he did like a little Indian bit on it for me.”