It is the image of an unshaven young man who comes to mind when I think of Paul McCartney. He wears a brown leather jacket with teddy fur, which is half open so that you can see your white t -shirt. A baby, wrapped in the fluffy inner lining, looks curiously out of the jacket. Paul McCartney smiles. It is a tired smile, as young fathers show it more often.
Perhaps it is also a tentative or even insecure smile because there is an uncertain future in front of him. Not only because of the young family and all the adventures that they bring with it. But also because this picture that his wife Linda has made of him in a difficult, yes one can probably say that traumatic time has arisen. He was about to break his job with his best friends, and the rumor was kept that he was dead. Overall, this is not the best starting point for starting a family.
Post-Beatles depression
In the fall of 1969 Paul McCartney from London fled to the country. He had no longer wanted to see how everything he loved was going down the stream. John Lennon had announced his exit at the Beatles internally and the manager, who he used against McCartney’s will, had announced them all small. A dilapidated Scottish farm on the Kintyre peninsula, which he bought a few years earlier for tax reasons, served the Beatle on the Run as a refuge.
On some days he was so depressed that he didn’t leave the bed. He drank. Whiskey. Way too much. But at some point he realized that there was more than what he had lost: success, fame, the fans’ enthusiasm and the recognition of the critics. His young family, nature, his talent, love, maybe even a life beyond the vanities and the hustle and bustle. He was 27 years old. Time to grow up.
Emotional nudity
The photo with the baby in the jacket can be found on the back of his first solo album, which is simply called “McCartney”. The beatle still recorded it in the winter of 1969-70 to distract itself from the depressing FAB-Four agony. He had had a Studer four-track band machine from the studios on the Abbey Road in his city house, which was only a few minutes away from the foot, on the Cavendish Avenue and only recorded sketches, experiments and solojams.
Also and some songs that he had already tried with the Beatles like the lovely “junk” and the youth reminiscence “Teddy Boy”, which he completed in the Morgan Studios in the northwest of London. “Maybe i’m Amazed”, a song that can easily record it with his big Beatles piano ballads, “Let it be” and “The Long and Winding Road”, but is emotionally naked and direct, he hid it-just like another highlight of the plate: “Every Night”-professionally in the Emi studios at Abbey Road on.
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“McCartney”, this LO-Fi pioneering act, crisis management plate and declaration of independence, appeared on April 17, 1970. From that day-he made it clear in the info included in the press-he was an ex-beatle. Over half a century has passed since then. Paul McCartney turns 80 on June 18. Everyone will write about the largest and most influential band in pop history, the engine of which he was with his dreams, his ambitions, his work ethics and his talent. However, his most impressive performance does not seem to me to have been a beatle, but the one to be an ex-beatle.
John Lennon hardly entered a stage after the end of the band and went into early retirement in the middle of the 1970s. George Harrison made a big US tour that he later regretted, and then also avoided the concert halls. Ringo Starr waited until the Beatles Renaissance at the end of the eighties before he was tingling through the country as an oldie act. Only Paul McCartney continued steadfastly: published records, played concerts, stood by the zeitgeist.
McCartney, seventies, followed a romantic and very eccentric vision of pop music, which stood across the blues rock machism at the time, which is still connected to the word “Rockstar”. His songs did not act on the good old rock’n’roll, but on agricultural and family life. Told about dogs, horses and eternal love and were made to be sung in the tour bus with the children. For this he harvested a lot of ridicule of (usually male) critics and colleagues.
The critics crush their knives
The contemporary reviews of the first Post-Beatles albums have aged much worse than the music itself: in the raw, naked solo single-course “McCartney” Richard Williams from the “Melody Maker” recognized the “pure banality”, the manic-genial, between simplicity and witchcraft oscillating “RAM” was for Jon Landau from the rolling stone ” Low point in the decay of the Sixties rock “, the” Wild Life “, which sounds charmingly, was” musically weak and textual impotent, trivial and insensitive, “John Mendelsohn wrote in the same place, and in the Bukolian pop of” Red Rose Speedway “” Village Voice “critic Robert Christgau recognized the” probably worst Album, which was ever made by a rock’n’roller first rank ”.
The press had shot in particular on Linda McCartney. “Whatever Linda may contribute as a wife and mother,” wrote John Mendelsohn well informed about “The role of women” – “She is not a singer, she is unable to only hit the tone with the simplest phrase.” She may not have been a gifted musician, but not only her courage to try herself as a novice in the band of an ex-Beatle was admirable, she gave the McCartney songs a great warmth on his solo debut due to her harmon bust and her influence is felt into the texts.
She turned a total macho into a feminist – McCartney’s songs are heard about love and relationships on “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver” and compare them with those from 1968 – and later convinced vegetarians convinced from many carnivors. She was significantly involved that male artists – following McCartney’s example – dared to sing about other things than about their sexual potency.
Drama and melody
The recognition of the critics (there were hardly any critics) came back for a short time when McCartney left eccentricity, stubbornness and hermitage and had ears again for what was going on in the pop world. He had a great talent for acquiring different styles so that they became part of his musical mother tongue. So he built up a sound from the beginning of the seventies-glam, prog and singer-songwriters-a sound that should become characteristic of his new band and had little in common with the Beatles.
You can hear the result for the first time on the album “Band on the Run”, which was created in adverse circumstances: Half of the band had terminated the night of the departure for the shots of the album in the Nigerian Lagos, the McCartneys were victims of a robbery on one of the first days of recording, in which they lost the demos to all songs, and Afrobeat-Pionier Fela Kuti. Public, he wants to claw the music of Africa. McCartney continued. When “Band on the Run” appeared at the end of 1973, the press celebrated it like a comeback. Finally, you got from a beatle what was expected of a beatle: epic rock songs, whimsical suites, drama and melody.
The revolution of adulthood
When I was able to speak McCartney in the Abbey Road Studios in 2008 for a few minutes, this turn from the private person was interested in more than any Beatles story. He was afraid of no longer being relevant, he explained to me at the time. At the time, his ex-colleagues had the bigger hits that he was written down by the criticism. He had to react.
After “Band on the Run”, the Wings became one of the largest bands of the seventies. Those who had broken up to the music of the Beatles in the sixties to leave the hard structures of the post-war period behind were settled down to the soft sounds of the Wings hits. Could there be better words for what you felt when you lived through the private revolution of the family founding, as: “The Wonder of It All, Baby/ The Wonder of It All, Baby/ The Wonder of It All, Baby, Yeah, Yeah” (from “Listen to What The Man Said”)? In any case, I can’t think of any.
McCartney made adult music. What many did not notice: It was music that showed an alternative to what was considered to be adulthood until then. Obviously it was not about coolness, but about living a life in which everything has its place: art and children, inspiration and responsibility; And one thing caused the other. The Beatles had to separate to make this revolution possible because it started with “McCartney” 55 years ago.