Paul McCartney (34 page)

As well as backing the paper, he donated a long interview with Miles in hopes of drumming up advertising from the music industry. The interview frankly admitted the two had ‘shared a joint’ while it was going on. Paul, certainly, was in more expansive mood than at any soufflé-speaking press conference, even venturing into the territory where John had so recently been crucified. ‘Everyone having realised there isn’t such a thing as God and there’s no such thing as a soul and when you die, you die…’

His profile as a patron of the avant-garde was so high that when the Japanese performance artist Yoko Ono had arrived in London that summer, he had been one of her first ports of call. Coincidentally, Yoko and her then husband, American film-maker Tony Cox, were living in the same north London district as himself–in fact, just the other side of Lord’s cricket ground.

Yoko’s projects at the time included assembling a collection of modern music manuscripts to give to the great musical adventurer John Cage as a fiftieth birthday present. Hearing that Paul was an admirer of Cage’s, she approached him to donate one of his manuscripts, but he declined. (He didn’t possess such a thing in any case, being unable to read or write music.)

In November, John Dunbar gave Yoko her first London exhibition, Unfinished Paintings and Objects, at Indica. Since her overtures to Paul had come to nothing, Dunbar mentioned the event to John, who frequently dropped by the gallery to turn on with him. Rather than wait for the official private view, John walked into Indica on the night before, while Yoko was still arranging her exhibits.

Giving up life on the road, with its need constantly to close ranks against the world’s worst hysterics, hustlers and bores, did not mean the end of the Beatles’ ‘group mind’. Quite the opposite in fact.

During the first stages of recording a follow-up to Revolver, Paul went to see his father in Cheshire, taking along his friend the brewing heir Tara Browne. For Jim McCartney, it must have been a moment of special unreality. All Jim’s life, Guinness had been something kept in a crate out in the pantry: now it was sitting in his front room.

During the visit, Paul hired a couple of mopeds on which he whimsically suggested he and his fellow boy millionaire should ride into Liverpool to visit his cousin Bett. En route, while pointing out the Wirral scenery to Tara, he lost concentration and fell off his machine, hitting the pavement with his face so hard that a tooth came through his top lip. When he reached Bett’s, she called in a doctor friend, who stitched the wound there and then without anaesthetic.

The rough-and-ready surgery left a scar that was barely noticeable–witness the promotional film for the Beatles’ ‘Rain’, made in May 1966, in which he appeared in close-up. But he was painfully sensitive about this first serious physical flaw since his early teenage weight-gain and to hide it decided to grow a moustache.

Facial hair was unusual among young Britons at that time, and moustaches had not been generally worn since the Great War except by ex-military men and secretaries of golf clubs. Paul made his more exotic than the usual horizontal slab by turning down its ends: he later claimed his model had been ‘Sancho Panza’, though he probably meant Pancho, the Mexican sidekick of the Cisco Kid whose adventures he used to watch on 1950s television. When he unveiled it to his fellow Beatles, the group mind immediately produced a group upper lip. By the beginning of 1967, John, George and Ringo also sported moustaches in the same Mexican, or Zapata, style.

Perhaps the most surprising new mood among British young people was a sudden wave of nostalgia for their childhood–or, rather, for the Victorian artefacts and iconography that had surrounded them, unnoticed, throughout the 1950s. Pop art, largely through the unusually-bearded Peter Blake, fanned the craze for faded sepia photographs, tasselled lamps, button-back chaise-longues and enamel signs for Bovril, R. White’s lemonade or Mazawattee Tea.

John and Paul had both independently picked up on this during the Beatles’ brief furlough. When they returned to Abbey Road for the follow-up to Revolver, each had written a song which evoked his boyhood in the most abidingly Victorian of British cities. John’s was ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, commemorating an old Salvation Army orphanage near his Woolton home in whose grounds he and his lawless followers used to trespass. And Paul’s was ‘Penny Lane’.

Strictly speaking, this was predominantly Lennon territory. The winding lane on the fringe of Allerton and the modest district round about had numerous intimate family associations for John: his father, Freddy, had attended the nearby Bluecoat School while he himself had lived in Newcastle Road, a couple of turnings off the lane, until the age of five and later been sent to Dovedale primary school, which was even closer. His mother, Julia, once worked in a Penny Lane café and Julia’s common-law husband, John Dykins–in a horrible reprise of her fate–was fatally injured in a car crash in the lane and died in the same hospital she had, Sefton General.

For Paul, Penny Lane was merely somewhere he’d passed through innumerable times at the Smithdown Place end, where it widened into a small shopping ‘parade’ and a confluence of bus-routes. Yet his memory was as clear as John’s in ‘Strawberry Fields’ was fuzzy: in effect, a view from the top deck of a 1950s green Liverpool Corporation bus, possibly with George’s dad at the wheel, while waiting for the conductor to ring the bell for departure.

There, in photographic detail, was Bioletti the barber, his front window displaying photographs of customers smirking proudly beneath outlaw Teddy boy coiffures. There was the traffic roundabout with the shelter where the composer would sit on summer afternoons swapping cigarette-cards and marbles with schoolmates, or on freezing winter nights with compliant girls. There, in the one direct autobiographical touch, was a glimpse of his mother Mary, the ‘pretty nurse… selling poppies from a tray’.

Even on these most individual of their solo compositions, Lennon and McCartney remained a team, working on the final drafts together and helping each other unstintingly in the studio. Paul played the Mellotron intro to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, sounding like a creaky old harmonium in some dusty church hall of their boyhood. John donated lines to ‘Penny Lane’–such as ‘four of fish and finger pies’, conflating fish-and-chip shop slang and smutty things they used to do with girls in the Smithdown Place bus-shelter.

The recording sessions illustrated not only what creative carte blanche the pair now enjoyed at Abbey Road, but also their very different ways of exercising it. Indolent as always, John left the orchestration of ‘Strawberry Fields’ to George Martin and was so indecisive about its two alternative versions that in the end Martin used both, making the first segue into the second. But Paul was always definite that ‘Penny Lane’ must have a ‘clean’ sound to match its clarity of recollection.

His growing interest in classical music, nurtured by Martin as well as by Margaret and Jane Asher, proved crucial in achieving that. In its original version, the track had a rather subdued instrumental passage of trumpet and woodwind that he never quite liked. Then on television he happened to see a performance of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 featuring piccolo trumpet, an instrument half the size of a normal trumpet and pitched an octave higher. When he requested (which by now meant commanded) a piccolo trumpet for ‘Penny Lane’, Martin booked David Mason, the player he’d seen on television.

The arrangement scored by Martin–which would so perfectly conjure up those breezy, gritty ‘blue suburban skies’–proved a severe test of Mason’s virtuosity. ‘Paul had no idea how damned difficult it was to play,’ Martin recalled. ‘David had to lip every note [i.e. control the pitch with only his lips and breath]. Paul’s attitude was rather the same as to a plumber or electrician: “He’s a piccolo-trumpeter… that’s his job.”’

Labouring over ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Penny Lane’ for so long, the Beatles had missed the deadline for the second album they were contracted to deliver in 1966, and by the New Year it was still nowhere near completion. To appease their ravenous public, Martin put out the two tracks as a double A-sided single on 17 February.

The weight of brilliance and innovation packed onto one small 45 rpm disc had never been surpassed and probably never will be. Yet despite Lennon and McCartney’s galvanic effect on Britain’s pop musical taste, a large public still enjoyed the same easy-listening ballads it had back in the 1950s: ‘Penny Lane’/‘Strawberry Fields’ was denied the number one slot in the UK by Engelbert Humperdinck’s ‘Release Me’.

Return of the Jim Mac Jazz Band

In any case, the album was no longer about Liverpool and childhood. The previous November, in another reconnecting-with-thereal-world exercise, Paul had gone on a safari holiday in Kenya, accompanied only by Mal Evans. During the flight home, he’d been thinking as always of the Beatles’ American competition, especially the new West Coast psychedelic bands with ironically fanciful names–Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company–that were being embraced delightedly by the same people who’d once scoffed at ‘Beatles’.

To while away the inflight hours, he thought up an imaginary addition to the genre, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band–a nod to the current fad for Victorian red military tunics–and began to put a song together around it. When ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ were removed from the album-in-progress, the now fully-written (and abbreviated) ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ was among the little raw material remaining.

It was Neil Aspinall, that most intelligent of roadies, who later claimed most convincingly to have had the brainwave. Why not make the Pepper band alter egos of the Beatles in their new uniform whiskers, and devote the whole album to its exploits? Weary as they were of playing John, Paul, George and Ringo, all four concurred with enthusiasm; from then on, Martin recalls, ‘it was as if Pepper had a life of its own’.

The idea that a pop album could be more than a random collection of tracks, but have the same cohesion as a classical symphony, was not new, or not quite. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the Beatles’ own Revolver had possessed such compulsive all-through listenability as to make each appear more than the sum of its parts. The first so-called ‘concept’ album had already come from the world of American experimental rock: in June 1966, Frank Zappa and the (all male) Mothers of Invention had released Freak Out!, a biting satire on American politics and culture, constructed in what were not tracks so much as movements or chapters. ‘This is our Freak Out!’ Paul often said during the Sgt. Pepper sessions, though he also had Pet Sounds repeatedly played at Abbey Road to remind the others, and himself, how high they were aiming.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is regarded as the ultimate concept album, but actually wasn’t one at all. After the recording of Paul’s signature song and a reprise to end side two, neither he nor John made any attempt to take the Sergeant Pepper theme any further; as Ringo later recalled, ‘we just went back to doing tracks’. Almost every one of those tracks would acquire a subtext, real or imaginary, more fascinating to millions than anything a faux-Victorian NCO and three subordinates might conceivably get up to.

In many ways, the album carried on the childhood and Liverpool theme with its circus and fairground sound effects, its pervading atmosphere of the traditional northern music hall that was in both its main creators’ blood. Yet in other places, it was grown-up to an unprecedented, indeed perilous, degree. It was at once sunnily optimistic and harrowingly bleak, fantastical yet down-to-earth, instantly accessible yet teasingly mysterious. Its superabundance reflected a conscious wish on the Beatles’ part to make amends to their fans for their abandonment of touring. Clamped between headphones in a recording studio, they managed to put on a live show more exciting, more intimate, than any since they’d left the Cavern.

Sgt. Pepper certainly was John Lennon’s Freak Out! The songs he brought to it–one his masterpiece, ‘A Day in the Life’, another a close runner-up, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’–were drenched in the LSD he now consumed in industrial quantities; with his chronic shortsightedness added, the result could be imagery to dazzle Dalí. There was also a power-surge by George as a songwriter and performer following his study of Indian music and religion, which added sitars, tablas, a whiff of joss and a very un-Liverpudlian earnestness.

In contrast, Paul’s contributions all had the same ‘clean’ sound as ‘Penny Lane’ (at one point making use of that unlikeliest pop effect, a rippling harp) and were as firmly rooted in the everyday. ‘Fixing a Hole’ was a direct reference to DIY at High Park Farm. ‘Lovely Rita (Meter Maid)’ commemorated a female parking attendant who’d broken with tradition by giving him a ticket and whose first name turned out to be Meta. ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ finally made use of the little music-hall ditty he’d started before ever meeting John: of all its deft little domestic touches, perhaps the best were the names of his imagined grandchildren, ‘Vera, Chuck and Dave’.

The harp introduced ‘She’s Leaving Home’, another McCartney ‘short story’ song, destined always to be unfairly overshadowed by ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’. The problem of young female runaways was currently in the news, thanks to Jeremy Sandford’s milestone TV drama Cathy Come Home, which Paul had watched with Jane at Cavendish. He’d been equally moved by the story of a real-life runaway, 17-year-old Melanie Coe, whose distraught father told the Daily Mail, ‘I can’t imagine why she would do it. She had everything here.’ He was never more sensitive and empathetic than in this portrait of another ‘Cathy’, stealing away at daybreak for a clearly ill-advised elopement with ‘a man from the motor trade’, and her parents’ bewilderment on discovering ‘our baby’s gone’.

That sensitivity could be less evident in his dealings with people in the real world. After his forays into avant-garde music, he now tended to regard the classically-trained George Martin as somewhat old-fashioned in refusing to rank the likes of John Cage and Luciano Berio alongside Mozart or Brahms. One evening when Martin and his wife, Judy, were having dinner at Cavendish, Paul insisted on playing him a whole album by the experimental saxophonist Albert Ayler and–when that failed to convert him–started an argument about what did and did not constitute ‘real music’, citing numerous other names of whom Martin had never heard, and did not want to. The slightly embarrassing situation was lightened by Jane’s deft switching of the subject to Gilbert and Sullivan.