Paul McCartney (24 page)

The Beatles’ first American visit, in February 1964, was technically not a tour but a promotional trip, taking in only New York, Washington DC and Miami. The vast audience who’d fallen for them on The Ed Sullivan Show had to wait until August, when they returned to give 30 concerts in 23 cities, each one to audiences of between 10,000 and 20,000.

This was a completely new concept of a tour–not just a series of random concerts but a kind of royal progress which at each stop called forth hysterical crowds and frantic media, threatened the fabric of huge arenas and tested the efficiency and patience of police forces and fire departments to the limit. It opened the door to an ‘invasion’ of America by other British bands and singers who never would have stood a chance without the Beatles’ trailblazing; it created a method of parting young people from their money on a scale never before dreamed; it turned pop into rock, no longer merely music but a ‘culture’; and changed the hairstyle of a generation, rendering the all-American crew cut as obsolete as the Model T Ford.

In the audience at Chicago’s International Auditorium on 5 September was 13-year-old Glenn Frey, who would go on to co-found the Eagles, one of the biggest and best bands of the 1970s. That night when the Beatles ran onstage, there was no longer any doubt of ‘the cute one’s’ identity. A girl who’d been standing on a seat in front of Frey fell backwards into his arms with a swooning cry of ‘Paul!’

Longevity was something the Beatles never anticipated. From the moment they became famous, two questions were constantly thrown at them: ‘How long do you think all this will last?’ and ‘What are you going to do when it’s over?’ For pop music’s short history had seen the same pattern repeated time and again. Makers of hit records enjoyed only months, sometimes no more than weeks in the spotlight before their fickle young audience tired of them and their sound, and moved on to someone else. A lucky few managed to follow Elvis into conventional show business or films, but most sank back into the obscurity whence they had come.

Thus, after eight months as Britain’s top pop group, the Beatles were starting to wonder if that might be it. Christmas 1963 seemed to bring an answer in the affirmative when they were knocked off the top of the UK singles chart by the Dave Clark Five’s so-called ‘Tottenham Sound’ and were received with indifference on their first visit to France. It was just as the Paris press was calling them ‘vedettes démodées’ (yesterday’s stars) that ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ reached number one in America.

Even after their conquest of America–and then the world–their management and record label continued milking their popularity as hard as possible before that inevitable day when the teat ran dry. As a result, they shouldered a horrendous workload. George Martin at Parlophone demanded a new single every three months and a new album every six, which somehow had to be fitted in between touring Britain, America and Europe, making two feature films and doing innumerable interviews and photo-shoots. Only naturally tough Liverpudlians, schooled in sleeplessness by Hamburg, could have stayed the course. Looking at them in those days, ever fresh and chirpy, one never guessed how often they were worn ragged.

John and Paul were not the first British pop artistes to write their own material; their fellow Liverpudlian Billy Fury had released an album of self-penned songs in 1960. But they were first to arrive in the charts with a catalogue of more than 100 titles which grew larger and more valuable by the month. For both–as each declared publicly from mid-1963–their insurance against a coming time when the world no longer wanted the Beatles was to become full-time songwriters. Even then, despite their impossibly crowded and frenetic schedule, they managed to be as prolific as if already doing it full time.

The Beatles’ virtually non-stop life on the road meant they could write together just as they once had in Paul’s front room at 20 Forthlin Road, each doing both words and music and grabbing inspiration from whatever was to hand. ‘From Me to You’, for example, was written on a tour-bus journey from Shrewsbury to York, its title suggested by the New Musical Express’s letters page, ‘From You To Us’. ‘In those days, the two of them turned out songs like a factory production-line,’ Tony Bramwell remembers. ‘They’d get an idea in the back of the bus and in about 20 minutes… bang, they’d finished it. People in other bands who’d started to write songs together, like Roger Greenaway and Roger Cook, couldn’t believe how quick and easy it was for John and Paul.’

At the beginning of their partnership, every new composition would be listed in Paul’s school exercise book as ‘Another Original by Lennon and McCartney’, irrespective of how much–or little–each had contributed to it. When the songs began to have value, they agreed that the dominant writer’s name should come first, although it wasn’t always the case: ‘Love Me Do’, largely Paul’s work, was credited to Lennon–McCartney and ‘Please Please Me’, largely John’s, to McCartney–Lennon (as were all the original tracks on their first album).

Thereafter, following the alphabetical precedent of most composing teams, it was fixed as Lennon–McCartney. By Paul’s later account, the decision was taken by Brian and John; when he protested, not very strongly, they told him it wasn’t set in stone but could be ‘alternated’ in the future. The byline could well have become a tripartite one, for record-producers in those days routinely got themselves listed as co-composers of original songs they recorded or demanded their own songs be used as B-sides. But George Martin, true gentleman that he was, asked no reward beyond shaping the raw songs into polished hits.

Initially, Lennon and McCartney’s output was deliberately skewed to the Beatles’ young female fans–the former Hamburg studs singing devoutly about holding girlfriends’ hands. After ‘Love Me Do’, ‘Please Please Me’ and ‘From Me to You’, they developed almost a superstition that every hit had to have ‘me’ or ‘you’ in it; after ‘She Loves You’, they felt duty-bound always to throw in a ‘yeah yeah yeah’. It brought the first breath of criticism from Paul’s musician dad who’d loved everything up until then, the standards especially. ‘Son, there are enough Americanisms around,’ Jim McCartney protested. ‘Couldn’t you sing “Yes, yes, yes” for once?’

They also supplied material to the other Liverpool acts Brian Epstein was signing up and taking to Parlophone–the seemingly all-conquering ‘Mersey Sound’–even though many posed a challenge to the Beatles in the charts. ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’ (from the Please Please Me album), ‘Bad to Me’ and ‘I’ll Keep You Satisfied’ were consecutive UK number ones for Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. ‘Love of the Loved’ (from the Decca audition tape) launched the career of the Cavern’s former cloakroom attendant, Cilla Black, while the Fourmost made the Top 20 twice, with ‘Hello Little Girl’, another Decca audition reject, and ‘I’m in Love’.

In contrast with the hits he dashed off with John, Paul devoted much time and trouble to songs he wrote alone. ‘All My Loving’, that seemingly impromptu shout of joy, actually began as a piece of verse, for which the melody came as an afterthought. Early in Cilla’s career, he gave her ‘It’s for You’, an ambitiously complex ballad that would be one of her few brushes with subtlety.

Acts outside the Epstein ‘family’, too, benefited from Lennon and McCartney’s seemingly infallible touch. ‘Misery’ was written for Helen Shapiro but, declined by her manager Norrie Paramor, was snapped up by Kenny Lynch, resulting in John and Paul’s first cover version by a black artiste. ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, never issued as a Beatles single, went to a Larry Parnes artiste, Duffy Power. Most famously, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, shorn of Paul’s airy harmonies and converted into raw R&B, was the number eight single that set the Rolling Stones on the path to becoming the Beatles’ chief rivals.

In the early 1960s, the music-publisher’s role was not only collecting royalties on cover versions and radio and TV plays but also issuing the songs as sheet music for live bands or Victorian-style home performance, with pictures of the artistes on the covers. The first Lennon–McCartney songs to reach this pinnacle, ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘P.S. I Love You’, went to Ardmore and Beechwood, an old-established London publishing firm on which Brian Epstein happened to stumble while still hawking round the Beatles’ demo tape.

After Ardmore and Beechwood’s lacklustre performance in support of their debut single, Brian decided to find a new publisher and sought advice from George Martin. Martin recommended Dick James, a former dance-band vocalist who had once himself recorded for Martin and, after years as a Tin Pan Alley song-plugger, had recently set up his own eponymous publishing company. As a quid pro quo for getting the Beatles onto an important TV pop show, Thank Your Lucky Stars, Dick James Music published ‘Please Please Me’ and its B-side, ‘Ask Me Why’.

James’s innovative idea was to set up an autonomous company inside his organisation to deal exclusively with Lennon and McCartney’s song output. It was given the sturdily plain-spoken name of Northern Songs and divided 50 per cent to James and his partner, Charles Silver; 20 per cent each to John and Paul; and 10 per cent to Brian. The arrangement would come in for criticism further down the line, but at the time it showed visionary faith in Lennon and McCartney’s potential.

At first, Martin exercised a producer’s absolute authority, backed up with the omniscience of a trained classical musician, conductor and performer. ‘You can’t do that,’ he’d tell John and Paul, ahead of their song of that name, and they’d bow to his superior knowledge. Martin, however, soon realised that despite their lack of any formal training, both had an instinctive musicality, untrammelled by any rules or inhibitions. It was useless to tell them that something they wanted to do wouldn’t ‘work’: when they tried it, more often than not it did.

For example, on the final ‘yeah’ of ‘She Loves You’, they’d unwittingly used a major sixth. In vain did Martin protest that the Glenn Miller swing band had ended numbers that way time and again back in the 1940s and that it was ‘corny’. Millions of other young Britons, who’d never heard of Glenn Miller or major sixths, screamed their disagreement through an entire summer. ‘[Martin] would give us parameters,’ Paul remembers. ‘Like “You mustn’t double a third” or “It’s corny to end with a sixth and a seventh is even cornier.” It was a good thing we could override a lot of his so-called professional decisions with our innocence.’

Both Paul and John were still as euphoric at stumbling on a new chord-change as in their Quarrymen days–such as the more pensive middle eight of ‘From Me to You’. Here, John later acknowledged, ‘Paul was more advanced than me. He was always a couple of chords ahead, and his songs usually had more chords in them.’

Perceptions of pop music changed for all time in December 1963, when William Mann, classical music critic of The Times–then known as ‘the top people’s paper’–wrote an article naming Lennon and McCartney as ‘the year’s outstanding composers’.

In a detailed analysis of their songs, Mann discussed technical features of which the two had never been remotely aware: the ‘octave ascent’ in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, the ‘chains of pandiatonic clusters’ in ‘This Boy’, ‘the melismas with altered vowels’ in ‘She Loves You’, the ‘Aeolian cadence’ at the end of ‘Not a Second Time’, whose chord-progression corresponded exactly with Mahler’s ‘Song of the Earth’. In the general paean of highbrow praise, Paul was singled out for his ‘cool, easy and tasteful’ cover of ‘Till There Was You’ and, indirectly, for ‘a firm and purposeful bass-line with a musical life of its own’.

One aspect of this oft-quoted article tends to be overlooked. While The Times’s august critic extolled Lennon and McCartney’s innate Britishness, after so many years of American-flavoured pop, he made no mention of their lyrics. The truth was that in 1963, these were mostly still at the ‘you… true… things you do’ level, though the odd native colloquialism sometimes crept in. Paul’s original opening to ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, for instance, had been ‘Well, she was just seventeen’, followed by ‘Never been a beauty queen’, a memory of childhood visits to Butlin’s holiday camps. In consultation with John, that second line changed to the more natural, and Liverpudlian, ‘You know what I mean’.

July 1964 brought the soundtrack album to the Beatles’ first feature film, A Hard Day’s Night, newly-released to huge popular and critical acclaim in both Britain and America. The album was the first to dispense with cover versions and feature only Lennon–McCartney songs. John was its dominant presence with 10 out of the 13 tracks, while Paul had only ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘And I Love Her’ and ‘Things We Said Today’.

The last of those, while neat and catchy, was a somewhat throwaway McCartney Beatles track. But buried in it was a first hint of the particular Britishness he would bring to classics of the future:

Someday when we’re dreaming

Deep in love, not a lot to say…

It’s that ‘not a lot’–which, in understated British vernacular, means ‘nothing’. And that characteristically rosy view of the future: one-time lovers still together, perhaps when they’re 64, sharing a fond, reminiscent silence.

‘Changing my life with a wave of her hand’

Paul’s relationship with Iris Caldwell had ended in early 1963. By that time, their cosy dating routine in Liverpool was long over and they saw each other only in brief interludes between his tours with the Beatles and her engagements as a cabaret dancer.

Lately, Iris had moved upmarket from seaside cancan shows to the chorus line at the swanky Edmundo Ros Club in London’s Mayfair. Ros’s calypso orchestra, broadcast every Sunday morning on the BBC Light Programme, was a cherished childhood memory of Paul’s, so one evening he dropped by the club unannounced, bringing Ringo with him. ‘They weren’t allowed in,’ Iris recalls. ‘The doorman didn’t think they were well enough dressed.’

Despite all the new diversions offered by London, breaking up with Iris wasn’t easy for Paul. They’d been together for two years; besides, he remained hugely fond of Iris’s eccentric mother, ‘Violent Vi’, and her brother, Rory Storm, who’d been top dog in the Liverpool music scene when Lennon and McCartney still fronted the Quarrymen. Somehow, Liverpool’s ‘Mister Showmanship’ had been left behind by the national Mersey Beat craze which the Beatles had sparked off and which had brought recording deals to other city bands like Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Searchers, the Swinging Blue Jeans, the Fourmost, the Mojos, Faron’s Flamingos and many more.