From Saint Paul to Mr Mean – a tale of two McCartneys
The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1, 1969–73 Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair HarperCollins £30 )))))
Alongside Bob Dylan, The Beatles are by far the most widely documented artists in popular culture. Beatle books and films already number into the hundreds, and yet still they keep coming, fatter and more forensic than ever.
In 2013, Mark Lewisohn, the undisputed Professor of Fabology, published the first volume of a mooted trilogy. Tune In covered 960 pages and yet took the story only up to 1962 and Love Me Do. Peter Jackson’s recent Get Back documentary spent eight hours tracking the band over 22 days and was accompanied by a hefty coffee-table tome.
Now comes a Paul McCartney biography that begins in 1969, ends in 1973, and fills close to 700 pages in the process. Sieving through almost every day in the life of its subject, it tracks, with the dedication of a stalker, his progress from solo ex-Beatle to the formation of a new band, Wings, in which he flirts with democracy before settling for autocratic rule.
If the devil is in the detail, then The McCartney Legacy is positively satanic. Which is not to say there isn’t value in its obsessive harvesting of sources. Drawing on hundreds of interviews – mostly other people’s – Kozinn and Sinclair have certainly done their homework. An American journalist, the former has interviewed McCartney several times, but sensibly doesn’t lay claim to these encounters yielding any great personal insight. From the start, the authors establish a basic duality inherent in the way the former Beatle presents himself: the public-facing jocularity (‘Him’) shading into the more complex, combative ‘Me’ behind closed doors.
We saw flashes of this McCartney in Jackson’s film, and there are more here. The book begins in 1969 with the trauma of The Beatles’ protracted break-up. Depressed and seeking solace in a fug of marijuana, alcohol and lawsuits against his former bandmates, McCartney claims he ‘really was done in for the first time in my life’. The Beatles’ dynamic is generally softened these days, so it’s refreshing to be reminded of their backbiting. When McCartney forms Wings and releases Wild Life, George Harrison deems it ‘crummy’. Later, Macca says of Lennon: ‘I’m just not that keen on John after all he’s done… I think he’s a bit daft, to tell you the truth.’
It’s no hardship to spend a little time with the antidote to Saint Paul. We see him bawling out guitarists, lording it over minions and chucking vegetable scraps at a Life photographer who has trudged miles over bog and burn to track down McCartney at his farm on the Mull of Kintyre.
There is, as ever, mischief to be had in interviewing ex-colleagues keen to take a dig at their former paymasters’ airs. Wings drummer Denny Seiwell recalls once asking Linda McCartney to move back from the microphone when she was recording harmony vocals. ‘How far?’ she queried. ‘You got a car?’ he replied. Making Band On The Run in Lagos, Paul and Linda are robbed at knifepoint by six men, despite Linda’s protestations to their attackers that they should leave her husband alone because he was ‘a soul brother’.
Elsewhere, there are cameos by everyone from Donny Osmond to Ginger Baker. Dustin Hoffman pops up in Jamaica, bootlegging a private concert on a portable tape machine.
All this gossipy goodness rubs up rather awkwardly against reams of bone-dry information on recording sessions, countless musicians, engineers, readers’ polls, tour dates and album reviews; no detail is too minor to be omitted.
It makes The McCartney Legacy a somewhat discordant mix of breathless titillation and nerdy encyclopaedia. Peppered with reported speech that never quite rings true, the uninspired writing rarely yields any insights into McCartney’s remarkable creative gifts. As an example of analytical rigour, his astrological sign – Gemini, for the record – is cited as evidence of a conflicted nature.
Nevertheless, the relentless accruing of facts and anecdotes ends up forming a credible portrait of the artist, even if there is no arc to the narrative; the book is all verse and no chorus. The torrential rush of information simply ceases at the end of 1973, with the news that McCartney has bought Linda 12 pheasants for Christmas, housed temporarily in a garage at their house in St John’s Wood.
The authors end up giving us two books – which is fitting, given that there are two McCartneys. Another editor might have condensed the impressive feats of research into a zippier read and filed the rest for a separate work of reference. Instead, both co-exist in a rather sluggish hybrid.
As a one-stop compendium covering a fascinating period, The McCartney Legacy will tempt diehard fans, even if there’s not much here they won’t already know, and a lot that casual readers won’t necessarily want to.
‘To be continued…’ it concludes. Promise or threat? A bit of both, on this evidence.