There is a moment in Richard Linklater’s absorbing familial drama Boyhood in which Ethan Hawke, playing the role of put-upon father Mason Sr, gifts his son a mixtape. The CD is compiled exclusively of tracks released during the solo careers of one-time Beatles, arranged to represent one last great imagined record. “Whenever you listen to too much of the solo stuff it kind of becomes a drag, you know?” he says. “But you put them next to each other, right, and they start to elevate each other. And then you can hear it: it’s The Beatles.”
Mason doesn’t just have a mixtape to give, mind you – he has advice too. In his dusky Texan accent, he tells his son that there is no one great Beatle. All are as good as one another, he says – each played into the band’s core strengths, working as one integral unit rather than a scattershot collection of disparate creatives.
Macca has been unfairly characterised as a soulless popsmith – a corporate dullard when compared to arch-raconteur and political renegade Lennon
But that’s fucking bullshit. It might not be popular to say, but for this writer’s money, Paul McCartney is and always will be the greatest member of The Beatles.
Over the years, Macca has been unfairly characterised as a soulless popsmith – a corporate dullard when compared to arch-raconteur and political renegade Lennon. And, perhaps these days, some of that rings a little true: since the release of his covers record, the heinously-titled Kisses On The Bottom, McCartney has been in autopilot mode, flicking back from somnambulistic jazz stylings to glossy, overproduced pop tunes. He hasn’t really released a great song since ‘Run Devil Run’, the title track off the excellent record of the same name, and his creative dearth has only been accentuated by onscreen appearances in dreck like the newest Pirates Of The Caribbean film.
‘Run Devil Run’ was admittedly the last vital piece of work he’s released
Thanks to his soulless output since the start of the new millennium then, it’s easy to forget what an innovator McCartney once was. But from the Beatles’ sixties streak to the release of his cult favourite McCartney II in 1980, Macca had an unparalleled two-decade long run, twenty years in which he tirelessly subverted the norms of pop from the inside, bucking established trends and substituting in his own warm-hearted, clear-eyed strand of jazz-blues pop.
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Unlike Lennon, whose stripped-back post-Beatles balladry outwardly rejected the style of the time while still relying on a range of pop tropes, McCartney’s best work revolts against the norm without the listener even realising, lurching impressionistically about the place. A song like ‘Too Many People’ is as easy to consume as candy, but it’s never slight, or undercooked – throughout its four overstuffed minutes, it lurches from blues solos to bombastic pop choruses to ’50s-style croonery, eventually heaping up into one big pile of tinnily-picked notes and McCartney’s joyful whooping.
‘Live And Let Die’… does more in its startlingly compact three minutes than most bands attempt in an entire career
In that way it is, like so many of McCartney’s songs, the sound of a genius-level musician frenetically flitting from idea to idea, assembling a myriad of conflicting tropes and tones. Even Wings, often regarded as McCartney’s most soulless and embarrassing outfit, proved to be a band as ready to tackle both West African-inspired drumming and leery, wafting electro stylings. After all, ‘Live And Let Die’ – possibly their most mocked song in some corners – does more in its startlingly compact three minutes than most bands attempt in an entire career.
Admittedly, moments like ‘Let Me Roll It’ show Paul buckling under the weight of ambition
Of course, it doesn’t all work, and sometimes Macca’s songs buckle under the weight of their own ambition. A song like ‘Let Me Roll It’ is just too much – too bombastic; too excessive; too unhinged. But when McCartney nails it, he nails it like no other musician working today. He plucks things out of the air, metamorphosing mere magic and trickery into a straight miracle.
You can understand literally how he does it – you can unpick his structure, and the debt he owes to blues and to jazz – but there is still something ineffable that he adds. You could spend years trying to write a Paul McCartney song and, no matter how close you got, there would be something you’d never be able to replicate; something somehow divorced from the notes he plays and the words he writes.
You could spend years trying to write a Paul McCartney song and, no matter how close you got, there would be something you’d never be able to replicate
After all, to understand him – or, perhaps, to fail to understand the exact nature of his genius – all you need to do is look at Macca’s first four songs on Abbey Road. They are, in order, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, ‘Oh! Darling’, ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ and ‘She Came In Through The Bathroom Window’. Isolate those four songs from the rest of the record – listen to them, one after the other – and you will hear the sound of The Beatles in its purest, most undiluted form.
From the technicolour insanity of ‘Maxwell’ to the balladry of ‘Darling’ to the innovation of ‘Money’ to the pure blues rock of ‘Bathroom Window’, those four tracks encapsulate everything that made the band great. They are the Beatles’ Rosetta Stone – the key to understanding their craft, and their uncontested genius. And, more than that, they are the towering achievement of a songwriter who has long paved the way for true pop innovation; a musician who, for better and for worse, has never written the same song twice.
When Paul hit the mark, he encapsulated everything that made The Beatles great
