New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
McCartney talks ‘magic’ of lyrics at Yale
NEW HAVEN — Melanie Coggins remembers the first time she saw her mother cry.
It was a December morning in 1980. Coggins, 7 years old at the time, was getting ready for school.
“She was getting me dressed for school and I said, ‘Mommy why are you crying?’” Coggins recalled. “She said, ‘Because this man, John Lennon, somebody bad hurt him and killed him.”
Coggins’ mother, Christine Nastri, has been a Beatles fan since her teens. She remembered giggling as the group performed “I Saw Her Standing There” on Ed Sullivan in 1963. She fell in love with those early songs and the Beatles’ startling personas — Chelsea boots, British accents, slim suits and, especially, their shaggy, mop-topped hair.
Sixty years later, Nastri said her favorite Beatle is still Paul McCartney.
“Seeing him is on my bucket list,” Nastri said. “This is my only chance.”
Nastri crossed that item off her bucket list Thursday as Sir Paul McCartney strode across the stage at Yale’s Woolsey Hall. The 80-year-old musician and activist — clad in white-soled, black sneakers and a blue suit with a bone-white dress shirt underneath a black hoodie — was on hand to discuss his new book, “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present.” His suit was still a bit slim and his grayed hair still a bit shaggy. He was joined by the book’s co-author, Irish poet Paul Muldoon, and Yale professor Neil Gray Jr. McCartney holds an honorary music degree from Yale and one of his grandchildren recently graduated from the Ivy League university.
In his new book, McCartney tells stories behind lyrics he wrote with Lennon as a Beatle, along with his time leading the band Wings and as a solo artist. The conversation at Yale focused largely on McCartney’s time with the Beatles and his approach to lyrics.
While the Liverpool teens — Lennon, McCartney and fellow Beatles George Harrison and Pete Best (Ringo Starr came later) — got their musical inspiration from American rock acts like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, McCartney said it was an English Literature professor who inspired the stories and characters he’d invent in his songs.
“We were sort of 16-year-old kids and not really interested in literature,” McCartney said.
But his teacher showed him Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” and the works of Shakespeare. Soon, the young MCartney was fascinated with words and phrases like “pinch wimple,” an early English term for a scarf with a brooch.
“I got into these books. I got into the language. The plays,” he said. “You have a couple of years of quite intense study of this language. And it shows. When I left school and started writing songs, a lot of this was still in my writing.”
McCartney said he was always fascinated by Shakespeare ending sonnets with rhyming couplets.
“It was like, ‘Oh, goodnight,’” McCartney said with a snap. “It’s a neat way to end a sonnet. And I realized, years later, that I used the same technique — And in the end, the love you make/Is equal to the love you take — goodnight,” he said, referring to the lyrics of “The End.”
McCartney said some of the characters in his songs came from people he knew growing up in the culturally diverse, English port city of Liverpool. A confluence of lonely old women living solitary existences in post-war England became “Eleanor Rigby.” But the priest in the song, was originally Father McCartney.
Lennon liked it. McCartney didn’t.
“I said, ‘No.’ I’m uncomfortable. That’s my dad,” McCartney told the crowd. “We’ve got to look for something else.”
They grabbed a phone book. “We flipped through to McCartney, McDonough, McKenzie. Well, that sounds good,” he recalled. “So it became Father McKenzie.”
McCartney said he believes in a magical, mysterious nature to songwriting and can often feel like a conduit.
“I have to (believe in magic). Because some of the things that have happened to me in songwriting are pretty amazing,” he said.
Like a melody that came to him in a dream. He thought it was something he heard on the radio. Or maybe one of the songs his father would sing around the house. After a few weeks of asking friends they finally told him, “It’s yours.”
But the magic that brought him the melody forgot to include the lyrics. So, as he began to pen what would become the song “Yesterday,” he subbed in a few lines.
“My words were: Scrambled eggs/oh my darling how I love your legs,” he said. “Then I decided, at some point, I’ve got to change it.”
The Beatles broke up before McCartney was 30. But by that time, around 300 LennonMcCartney songs were written. McCartney was introduced to Lennon by a school friend named Ivan. McCartney was a more straight-laced 14-year-old boy sitting at a piano. Lennon was 16, drinking a beer. And as Lennon leaned over the piano, McCartney could smell his breath.
“Who is this guy?” he remembered thinking, not being a fan of Lennon at first.
The two were from different backgrounds. McCartney had a big family and a stable home life. Lennon’s was a bit rougher. McCartney said that gave him an edge and a springboard for ideas.
McCartney and Lennon would sit across from each other as they wrote. McCartney left-handed and Lennon playing with his right, the two looked like mirror images of each other, McCartney said. And when he would bring in lyrics like “I’ve got to admit it’s getting better/Getting better all the time,” Lennon would write a line like, “It can’t get no worse.”
McCartney said the two would sit around for two or three hours daily and write, ending each session with at least one completed song. Only one session didn’t result in a song, he said. It was one of those magical moments when McCartney came up with a concept of golden rings.
“I can give you golden rings,” he sang. “I can give you any…things.”
It was terrible, he said. But they went back to it and came up with the lyric “Baby, you can drive my car/Yes, I’m gonna be a star.”
McCartney said he couldn’t write without Lennon. And, in a way, he said he still can’t.
When the Beatles disbanded in 1969, it was the first time since he was a teenager that McCartney had to write a song without Lennon telling him if an idea was bad. So, McCartney invented a magical version of Lennon that still lives in his head long after Lennon’s physical death.
“I’ll stop and just sort of say, ‘Well, wait a minute. What would John have thought of this?’ and if it’s, ‘Okay,’ I can keep going with it. But if I can see him going, ‘Ehhhhh,’ I’ll just toss it,” McCartney said. “I still refer to him.”
“The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present,” is available wherever books are sold.