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selenakI'll have you know this is all ponygirl2000's fault. Writing to me about Two of Us, she said she had liked the film, with the one caveat that "I'm not sure from both a narrative and (more shakily) a historical perspective about making Paul so completely well-adjusted. His patience in the movie seemed to tip over into saintliness at certain points. With all the discussion of John's childhood issues it would have been nice to delve more deeply into Paul's drive and need to please. It's more interesting to think that his charm is a bit of a mask for a control freak with more than a few of his own loopy behaviours and substance abuse problems - except from the perspective of actual person!Paul of course."
Which is a very valid point to make. I love the film to bits, but it did deserve the this parody raising the same point, and I quote:
AIDAN QUINN
I see a beautiful boy who’s mother says goodbye, who blames himself for his father’s mistakes and tries to believe ordinary little things don’t scare him to death, when they do. I see a man who still doesn’t realize how beautiful he is.
(pause)
Why the hell am I playing therapist so much? I’m Paul fucking McCartney, not Dr. Janov.
SCREENWRITER
I thought it’d be interesting if we spent half the time going into how John’s mind works and why he acts the way he does. John’s much more interesting then you in that respect, you see.
AIDAN QUINN
You mean it’s more interesting to psychoanalyze a man who just throws a fit whenever he feels like it then a man who hides everything from the world and his family behind a smile and then goes on to drown himself in drugs and alcohol?
SCREENWRITER
Yeah, well, at least John didn’t write Silly Love Songs you hack.
Now, as far as fictional treatments are concerned, there is one obvious advantage when focusing on John's issues. He's dead, the story finished, and he can't Joss you. Also he did, as the quote above mentions, have the habit of throwing a temper tantrum a lot, and was very vocal about (many of) his issues, which means the public at large knows a lot about them. Paul is still alive, which makes delving into his psyche automatically feel far more intrusive, and he's far better at guarding his privacy (in general, not always). Never mind fiction; biographers who attempt to have a go at Mr. McCartney are regularly frustrated by the fact that they don't get interviews from a) him (with the exception of Barry Miles, who did the authorized one), b) his children, c) his brother (not in the last 20 years anyway), or d) John Hammel. Never heard of the last one? With reason. He's been Paul's personal assistant, roadie, sidekick and general best friend since the mid-70s and can be spotted regularly on occasions ranking from touring to family baptisms to daughter Stella's fashion shows and gets thanked in the credits of many an album (oh, and in the transcript of the divorce proceedings). But he refuses to give interviews as much as the late Neil Aspinall (Beatles roadie turned Apple boss) did. Jane Asher, the woman with whom Paul had his most serious relationship pre-Linda? No interviews on the subject ever since their breakup. Current girlfriend, Nancy Shevell? No interviews. This is all great when it comes to maintaining privacy (and speaks of the loyalty of the people in question), but somewhat frustrating for the biographical industry which has to do with cousins, short affairs, brief acquaintances and ex employees instead. And of course the occasional rambling and less guarded moment in interviews given to non-biographers. Given that any member of the Beatles gave a gazillion interviews since they came to public attention a little less than five decades ago, and everybody and their dog seems to have a "my encounter with (Ex-)Beatle X" (including Paul) story, this still makes for a lot of material, plus there is of course the work. Not to say that behind the dogged optimism and the thumbs aloft mannerisms lies a secret axe murderer, just that the impression you - well, I - get is based on the material that is available is that he has his own set of dysfunctions (some of which actually overlap with John's, and some are quite different), with less obvious coping mechanisms. The primary one being music.
Earlier this week, I got around for the first time to listen to Ecce Cor Meum, an oratorio on four movements released as an album in 2006. He had started working on it in 1998 (when it was a commission from Magdalen College to set the seal on a new concert hall), then Linda died, the whole thing was delayed (and not ready for the concert hall opening) and became something more personal, there was an early version in 2001 with which he wasn't satisfied, more work, the disaster of second marriage and its end, and finally the premiere in 2006. Of his earlier attempts at classical music, I knew only the Liverpool Oratorio which I could take or leave, but Ecce Cor Meum turned out to be stunning. Very beautiful (more on that below), and also the latest in a line of several examples of a quintessential McCartney trait, to wit, that for all his affable manner and decades in the public spot light, he's not really good at expressing feelings verbally; he channels them into composing and playing instead. To qote from the leaflet, "what I'll leave behind me will be music, and I may not be able to tell you everything I fell, but you'll be able to feel it when you listen to my music. I don't have the time or the articulation to be able to say it all, but if you enjoy composing you say it through the notes". (Or, as he put it decades earlier re: The Long and Winding road: I like writing sad songs, it's a good bag to get into because you can actually acknowledge some deeper feelings of your own and put them in it. It's a good vehicle, it saves having to go to a psychiatrist. Songwriting often performs that feat, you say it but you don't embarrass yourself because it's only a song, or is it? You are putting the things that are bothering you on the table and you are reviewing them, but because it's a song, you don't have to argue with anyone. )
Naturally, busybody fans like myself aren't content to simply listen, we have to speculate as well. To kick the theorizing about Paul's hang-ups and coping mechanisms off, here's a classic Lennon/McCartney exchange from the early 70s, i.e. when things were bad between them and phonecalls were heated and usually ended abruptly. Quotations of dialogue courtesy to the gentlemen in question, as related in interviews.
John: You know what you are? You're all pizza and fairy tales!
Paul: What a great album title! Well, if that's what I am, I'm not wholly against that description of me. I can think of worse things to say. *hangs up*
I'm usually siding with Paul when it comes to the early 70s, but I can see why John would find that reaction frustrating.:) (BTW he actually came close to using "pizza and fairy tales" as an album title years later, but went with "Flaming Pie" instead.)
I always found the shared and different reactions to drugs through the 60s pretty telling. In the pre-fame Hamburg days, everyone in the group was introduced to amphetamines and took pills a plenty to get through the gruelling long hours. All four Beatles were introduced to marijuana by Bob Dylan and were enthusiastic about it. (Got to get you into my life is actually Paul's ode to pot.) Then John, George and their wives are dosed with LSD by a dentist, and while Cynthia and Pattie are freaked out, their husbands are very intrigued and want to share the new drug with the other two Beatles, treating it as basically the door to Narnia. Ringo tries at least (though LSD was never his drug of choice). It's Paul who suddenly balks, for longer than a year. The second LSD trip for John and George, which they wanted to share with Ringo and Paul only to find that Paul refused to take his share of LSD became somewhat famous because it happened mid -65 tour, in Los Angeles, and was when John got the idea from for She Said, She Said, via Peter Fonda, who got Paul's share of the LSD instead and shared his near-death experience as a child with George Harrison which freaked out a listening John to no end. After Fonda left, John tried to get Paul to join the acid club again, but Paul suddenly remembered he'd invited Peggy Lipton, with whom he'd had a one night stand the previous year. The result of this did not sit too well with John, as Peggy Lipton reports in her memoirs:
I came for dinner, and I was the only girl there. John definitely didn't like that. He didn't like me being there at ALL. He was mean and sarcastic. As far as he was concerned, I had no business being invited to dinner with the four of them. For him this was an exclusive boys' club. He was purposely making me feel uneasy. (...) John made some snide comment like, "What is SHE doing here?" I got the idea that he thought Paul was an idiot to take a girl so seriously he'd actually invite her to dinner, when all he really needed to do was fuck her AFTER dinner.
Now, the hesitation with LSD (complete with diversion tactic at the expense of third party who had no clue on what was going on - poor Peggy!) obviously wasn't from some sudden anti-drug stance on Paul's part, or because LSD was more dangerous than pot. He tried out cocaine that same year (and went on to use it now and then until Maharishi times). But LSD is a drug that famously drills through your subconscious and makes you look at it. And then there's the question of control. When describing his first dentist-caused trip, John mentioned he still has a sketch he made back then of four faces saying "we agree with you"; that was one of the things he'd seen. When Paul finally (right at the start of the Sgt. Pepper Sessions more than a year later) did take acid with John (after one earlier attempt far away from the group with Tara Browne, which doesn't seem to have worked properly), he saw and felt something quite differently. John (by then a regular user) had actually taken some LSD in the studio, for the first and last time (they used pot at work but never one of the heavier drugs otherwise), was obviously not in a condition to work as a result, and the only Beatle with a house in town, nearby, no less, was Paul, so he took John there and en route gave in to the LSD question:
I thought, Maybe this is the moment where I should take a trip with him. It's been coming for a long time. It's often the best way, without thinking about it too much, just slip into it. John's on it already, so I'll sort of catch up. It was my first trip with John, or with any of the guys. We stayed up all night, sat around and hallucinated a lot.
Me and John, we'd known each other for a long time. Along with George and Ringo, we were best mates. And we looked into each other's eyes, the eye contact thing we used to do, which is fairly mind-boggling. You dissolve into each other. But that's what we did, round about that time, that's what we did a lot. And it was amazing. You're looking into each other's eyes and you would want to look away, but you wouldn't, and you could see yourself in the other person. It was a very freaky experience and I was totally blown away.
There's something disturbing about it. You ask yourself, 'How do you come back from it? How do you then lead a normal life after that?' And the answer is, you don't. After that you've got to get trepanned or you've got to meditate for the rest of your life. You've got to make a decision which way you're going to go.
I would walk out into the garden - 'Oh no, I've got to go back in.' It was very tiring, walking made me very tired, wasted me, always wasted me. But 'I've got to do it, for my well-being.' In the meantime John had been sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity. It was a good trip. It was great but I wanted to get out of there for a while. I'd just had enough after about four or five hours (...) I mean, I could feel every inch of the house, and John seemed like some sort of emperor in control of it all. It was quite strange. Of course he was just sitting there, very inscrutably.
There's being close, and there's being too close, especially if you're someone for whom handing over control to someone else has always been, and would always be an issue. Linda McCartney's friend Danny Fields, who wrote a book about her, said in it re: Paul:
I think I am not the first person to deem Paul autocratic, which is not a moral judgment or an ethical one. He is simply autocratic. He is The Don.
Now you could argue being hesitant about sharing your subconscious with John Lennon (never a poster child of emotional stability) is actually a sound instinct for emotional self-preservation, not control issues. (John didn't seem to think so, of course. As late as the Let it Be sessions, when you'd think he wasn't interested anymore in sharing thoughts with anyone but Yoko, we get this gem of an exchange as transcribed here: Lennon changes the subject by bizarrely asking Paul, "Hey, did you dream about me last night?" Paul doesn’t remember his dreams. Lennon had a "very strong dream–we were both terrified! Different dreams but you must have been there. I was touching you." Paul does his best to ignore this as everyone goes back into "Octopus’s Garden.") However, other than the three Beatles (and possibly the above listed folk unwilling to talk to biographers) you have a lot of friends/acquaintances who felt they were kept at arm's length by Paul. In a polite, nice and often charming way, but still. (John's childhood friend Pete Shotton and Pattie Harrison, for example, describe him practically identical as someone playing his cards close to his chest, whom they didn't feel they ever really got know, despite being around him a lot for quite a while.) Pete Townshend (yes, the one from The Who), who eventually did become a close friend (after some hilariously friendly-but-awkward encounters in the 60s which are worth quoting in another post) had this to say on the subject:
I really came to know Paul so much better and to love him and to accept him in a way that I don't think I would have done had he had a more traditional kind of showbiz marriage. (...) Linda was very, very pro-active in their social life. When they were driving through this town, she was the one who used to get him to come and visit, even made a couple of surprise visits. She was the one who would call me and then put him on the phone, and we would talk. Then he would be open and entirely accessible, but it was Linda who was always reminding him that he really had friends, that he was likeable as a person, that he could reach and be reached . . . she was constantly there with the idea that there is love between people when the tape stops running and the curtain is down.
When the curtain is down. Which brings us to when this gregarious performer/ deeply private person paradox seems to have started. To wit, with the death of his mother when he was 14. Before that, Paul seems to have spent a thoroughly enjoyable childhood with his brother and his parents. Given that Jim loved jazz and had had a jazz band as a young man, the life of the party who told his sons "if you can play an instrument you'll be never bereft of friends" and Mary was an ambitous workoholic (as a nurse and midwife) who impressed on her sons that "you can always do better" and who managed to keep the considerable pain her breast cancer must have caused her to herself for years so that when she died it came as a completely unprepared surprise for the children, they obviously left an impact before that point but no McCartney relation ever described pre-Mary's death Paul as anything but a cheerful kid, good at school, into some mischief with his brother but nothing out of the ordinary. His father had given him a trumpet to play which didn't work for him, he'd traded it in for a guitar and had started to play that once he figured out he had to do it upside down because he was left handed, but it wasn't more than a hobby yet. That radically changed after Mary died.
Brother Mike in 1965: I remember that we both felt that the important thing was to show our cousins that we were not softies in any way and to put on what is called "a brave front". I think we went a bit overboard about this, and that Paul made some flippant remark which sounded pretty callous at the time. Of course, he didn't mean it. But, as the eldest, he felt he had to say something and what he said was just silly. I know he could have bitten his tongue immediately after.
Paul was far more affected by Mum's death than any of us imagined. His very character seemed to change and for a while he behaved like a hermit. He wasn't very nice to live with at this period, I remember. He became completely wrapped up in himself and didn't seem to care about anything or anybody outside himself. He seemed interested only in his guitar, and his music. He would play that guitar in his bedroom, in the lavatory, even when he was taking a bath. It was never out of his hands except when he was at school or when he had to do his homework. Even in school, he and George Harrison used to seize the opportunity every break to sit and strum. (...) I would go looking for him and sometimes I would find him, up in his bedroom, perhaps, sitting in the dark, just strumming away on his guitar. Nothing, it seemed, mattered to him any more. He seldom went out anywhere - even with girls. He didn't bother much with any of his friends except his schoolmate George Harrison and John Lennon, who was at the art school next door. Work and work alone - his school books and his guitar - appeared to be the only thing that could help him to forget.
Two points here: keep the "putting up a brave front" and "making a flippant remark" in mind when we come to John's death and the day afterwards. And speaking of John, his biographer Ray Coleman in a McCartney detour was the first but not the last to whom it occured that "Why she had to go, I don't know, she wouldn't say/ I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday" might not be a generic love long after all. As with all good songs, of course, you don't need the biographical context to feel the emotion of the song, but it's a plausible connection. Coleman was the first to ask Paul point blank (in a John-related and therefore given interview) and got a "possibly" as a reply.
The other striking thing is that this is where both completely obsessed musician Paul and withdrawing into himself Paul make their first appearance. All that non-stop guitar playing paid off when he met John of course; the fact he was better at it that all the Quarrymen put together, including John who knew only banjo chords and could not even tune his guitar alone (he paid a neigbour to do it) was a big reason why despite that nearly two years age gap he was asked to join the group. But we're not dealing with a plaintive semi-orphan grateful the cool older boy and his chums have deigned to accept them in their gang, oh no. According to the surviving Quarrymen, who had joined the band for a laugh, because rock'n roll was cool and because John said so and you did what John told you when you were in John's social circle, he was a pushy busybody not losing any time to give them a total make-over. A) Practice sessions. Both individual ones with John and general ones with the group. The former also quickly led to songwriting, of course. B) A professional look. No more jeans and t-shirts. Post-Paul photos of the Quarrymen suddenly show them with jackets like the "real" bands of the day wore. C) Badgering John into accepting George, who was younger than Paul but could play guitar even better. D) At which point mysteriously one former Quarryman after the other drops out.
...well, okay then. No wonder John thought, as he told both official Beatles biographer Hunter Davies and Jann Wenner years later, that "I'll have to keep him in line". Which he usually did with his razor sharp tongue and also via their songwriting. John had written poems and stories pre-Paul but it doesn't seem to have occured to him to write songs as well (it's worth noting that most performers until that time didn't; certainly John's idol Elvis Presley did not, though Buddy Holly, who became a major influence on both John and Paul, did), that only happened when finding out Paul had done so already. (That pre-John song was called "I lost my little girl". Make of that what you will.) So early on you have them giving each other all the musical education ever got before becoming famous, or, as John put it, "I write the way I do because of Paul and he write the way he does because of me". And then Julia Lennon died, and John's reaction to the death of his mother was in many ways the opposite from Paul's initial one. Not for him the sitting around in dark rooms, or endless guitar playing, or withdrawing into himself. He actually stopped playing for a while altogether while being not just verbal about his rage at that death but picking a fight with everyone he could find. As John's art college fellow student Bill Harry put it, "A lot of people lost their patience with John. So many young people in Liverpool had lost parents to the war, or disease, it was actually a fairly common experience. And hardly anyone responded quite as violently as John. None of us had gone into this big, self-pitying thing. The feeling was - just get one with it. But Paul seemed to have limitless patience for John", sitting with him, keeping the band going by bringing them to John since John didn't want to come to them, and so forth.
Now, John's younger half sister Julia Baird has the interesting theory this wasn't just about helping John but also because John voiced that which Paul had sublimated until then: "So John and Paul had this enormous bonding I think. And I think they almost went out to wreck everything initially because where Paul may, or may not, have been more self contained about it before, certainly John would have triggered off maybe a bigger outward response in Paul because John was outraged."
You have basically two different versions of Lennon/McCartney descriptions by third parties, people who focus on their differences (complete with wondering not why they eventually split up but why they became such firm friends at first given the differences), Klaus Voorman in Hamburg, for example, and to a lesser degree Geoff Emerick, or descriptions that focus on what they had in common, which you get for example from George Martin, or Linda McCartney, who even said "they were so alike" (not an opinion widely shared among partisans of either, but then she was married to one of them and said that after twenty years of said marriage). I don't see these impressions as mutually exclusive. John's way of responding to pain with rage partially came to depend on Paul being there for the clean-up operation afterwards (see Klaus Voorman's description of John's more outrageous stunts in Hamburg). Paul depended on John to be that vocal, be that outrageous first, both imo because he himself couldn't/wouldn't and because he liked being needed.
Philip Norman, talking about finally getting an interview with Paul (albeit via email) for his 2008 John biography after thirty years of frosty silence due to Shout! and Normanesque utterings such as the 1981 statement that "John Lennon was 80% of the Beatles"), mentions this reply to a minor question: “Is it true that you and John, left- and right-handed as you were, could play each other’s guitars?” And he said yes: together they were ambidextrous, and in their personalities as well."
It's a great image - "together they were ambidextrous". But what do you do if one half of that ambidextrous being isn't available anymore? John's need for symbiosis was far more open and obvious, between the insistence on being referred to as JohnandYoko from now on, Yoko's bed in the recording studio and the never apartness until the Lost Weekend, but while Linda didn't follow Paul to the toilet, what Paul did early in that marriage isn't any less needy and co-dependent if you look closer. For starters, the insistence on making Linda a musician. She loved music, but she was a photographer by profession and passion, and the public ridicule she was exposed to when she got on stage with Paul as part of the newly formed Wings was relentless and cruel. ("What do you call a cow with wings? Linda McCartney", and similar "witticisms".) It hadn't even been her idea or wish. "He made her do it", said Pete Townshend, "he admitted it to me, he made her do it". Not just during the Wings years but also in the 90s when he went on tour again, because of course she had to be part of the band. Why? Because, according to Paul, the best thing about the Beatles had been to share music with your best friend, and Linda was his best friend now. So what if she had to be taught how to play first, he'd taught John how to play as well (completly ignoring with the blindness of the musically gifted that you need talent as well as practice). Not that the McCartney marriage was one sided in who started projects in general - for example, vegetariansm and animal rights acticism were both Linda's ideas and he followed her lead there - but the insistence on making her into a musical partner as well as a wife was all Paul, and it was strong enough to override any consideration of what she had to go through as a result. (BTW, an argument could be made that the transition from 60s promiscous rock star to 30 years of monogamous happy marriage worked because he was able to share that with her, but then again she could have been part of the touring and at his side without being a musician.)
As for the mother issue - John might have been the one who called Yoko "mother" and be photographed with her in an embryo position, but he wasn't simply bitchy when stating in a 1971 interview that part of Linda's appeal to Paul must have been that "she came with a ready-made family". (I.e. was a mother with a daughter.) Paul himself told Barry Miles part of why he fell for Linda beyond sexual attraction was that she was a mother. Talking about the two weeks in New York as a break from the tension-ridden White Albums session that made the relationship go from casual to serious, he said about staying at Linda's apartment: Linda was often doing something, she had her own life to lead, and I had much more time on my hands. She would have to take Heather to school, pick Heather up from school, cook the meal, certain things as a mother she had to do. And her womanliness impressed me, I'd never actually known anyone who was quite so much a woman. Linda was a very good mother. It was one of the things that impressed me about her was that she had the woman thing down, she seriously looked after her daughter. It seemed very organised to me, in a slightly dishevelled way. She was very kind-hearted too, so that finished it all off.
Pre-Linda (whose mother was dead), Paul had shown a tendency to bond with the mothers of his more serious girlfriends along with the girlfriends. Iris Caldwell, one of his Liverpool girlfiends, has a great anecdote about Paul seeing her mother even after they had broken up and also calling before he played "Yesterday" for the first time on tv so Mrs. Caldwell wouldn't miss it. Margaret Asher, Jane's mother, was the one to invite him to live with them when the Beatles moved to London (which he accepted at once - he severely disliked the bachelor's flat Brian Epstein had rented for him, Ringo and George) and he actually says more about her in the Barry Miles biography than about Jane. When reminiscing about Linda with their daughter Mary in the documentary Wingspan, one of the first anecdotes he tells is of Linda's arrival in his London house and ensuing horror at the state of the fridge ("you know how mum was - fridge mum!"), featuring only one milk in decay, saying "you can't live like this, you need someone to take care of you". So I think it wasn't just that Linda had a daughter, and he had always wanted children, but that Linda knew how to be a mother, how to mother someone. No, John wasn't the only one.
As for the relentless working drive specifically in situations where the alternative is grief and pain: well, this is the man with the following track record in responses: Brian Epstein dies - let's make a new album and a film (Magical Mystery Tour). Mystery stuff goes down in India, John hooks up with Yoko - new album, and a double album, and a new company (Apple) hat's the ticket! The long term relationship with Jane Asher ends, group relationships go spectacularly downhill - let's make a new album which will also be a film and a live concert! The group implodes even faster, at this point everyone but Paul has taken their turn at a walkout and John drops the "I want a divorce, like my divorce from Cynthia" bombshell - LET'S MAKE ONE MORE NEW ALBUM AND GO ON AN ANYMOUS TOUR. (He got the album, at least.) Jim McCartney dies - European tour. Which he goes through with. Despite the opening Copenhagen concert being two days after the death. (Incidentally, regarding the timing of Jim's death, as this blogger points out, Jim died on March 18, 1976, Alfred Lennon died on April 1st, 1976, and according to John's Playboy interview, he and Paul saw each other on April 24 and 25th, 76. (No, John doesn't name the date but he names the watching of the famous Saturday Night Live sketch together, and you can date that one.) So, given their fathers died even closer to each other than their mothers had done, guessing the topic would have come up in conversation is rather tempting. In fiction, that might even have been a reason why Paul made that visit at that particular time.) And then we reach John's death and the day afterwards. Paul had actually been one of the last people to find out because the McCartneys had gotten into the habit of leaving the phone of the hook at night. So December 9th 1980 started for them in ignorance until Linda drove the girls to school and Paul put the phone on the hook again. At which point he found out. So does he decide to stay at home and most importantly keep away from any reporters while he's still in shock. No. He goes into the recording studio. At which point it's probably not too much to say the whole tried and true coping mechanism broke down.
Some eye-witness accounts from the engineers and other musicians present:
Geoff Emerick: Paul walked in, subdued, pensive and deep in thought. As we made eye contact I could see the deep sadness welling inside him. "I'm so sorry, Paul," I mumbled awkwardly. "I know, Geoff, I know," he replied, his voice barely above a whisper. (...) Somehow none of us could seem to come up with the right words to say. There probably were no right words to say. After a while our recollections petered out in an uncomfortable silence. Paddy laid down his parts quickly and efficiently, then, giving Paul an awkward hug, departed for the airport. After he'd gone, Paul picked up his bass and idly ran down a few lines, then wandered over to the piano and improvised for a little while, then picked up a guitar and strummed a few chords. He was more than just in a state of shock. He seemed utterly lost and bewildered. Finally, an exhausted and drained Paul mumbled a soft "All right, lads, I guess that's enough for today." He walked out the front door and faced the surging phalanx of reporters.
Which resulted in one of those moments that follow you forever after. (Let me tell you, I am so grateful nobody ever taped me on the days when members of my family died.) Talk about saying "something wrong". Obvious reporter question, how do you feel? "It's a drag."
He got roasted for that back in the day, obviously, and even today it sometimes pops up as "proof" that Paul never cared about John. (George, who'd gone to the recording studio as well that day, wisely avoided reporters until weeks later and at any rate wasn't under the same glare of public scrutiny.) But never mind the public, the death itself never went away. Says Eric Stewart, who worked with Paul two months later on the song "Yvonne" Paul had written for him: “During the session Paul fell into a lugubrious mood. He suddenly said, ‘John has gone. John’s gone. He’s dead and he is not coming back.’ And he looked completely dismayed, like shocked at something new that had just hit him. I said, ‘But Paul, it’s been a few weeks now.’ He said, ‘I know, Eric, but I’ve just REALIZED.’ And he stopped talking and started playing the piano, non-stop."
Tug of War, the album he had started to work on when John died, didn't get released until 1982, and as Jonathan Gould pointed out, John is all over that album, not "only" in the song adressed to him, Here Today, but also in songs like the title cut: We expected more, but with one thing or another, we were trying to outdo each other, in a tug of war. (Which was the image George Martin had memorably used about them - "imagine two people pulling on a tug of war, smiliing at each other, pulling all the time and getting closer all the time. The tension between them makes for the bond." ) As for Here Today - which Yoko in last winter's BBC interview has named as her favourite of the songs written about John (of which there many - George's "All those years ago", Elton John's "Empty Gardens", among others) - its very premise is a conversation not had, things not said, only expressed in music. "What about the time we met? Well, I suppose that you could say we playing hard to get. Didn't understand a thing, but we could always sing." Same with the song from the later 80s, This One: If I never said it, I was only waiting, for a better moment, that didn't come.
In a way, all that pouring yourself into work and not verbalizing darker feelings goes along with clichés about the English, or if you like about men. And yet Paul McCartney strikes one as one of the least macho rockstars of his generation, and he's certainly not verbally restrained in general. (Given to meanderings off topic in longer interviews, but that's something else.) Or in his body language. (Brian Wilson who admires him once sighed that he finds Paul scary because "he's so hyper and energetic".) But the work in question is music, which is all about feeling, and that makes the intriguing paradox, because the music is certainly expressive as hell. Paul might have never done either Primal Scream Therapy or an album resulting from same, but from the time that little ditty on the White Album with the lines "Can you take me back where I came from? Brother, can you take me back?" shows up, the musical outpouring focused on loss, loss of connection, of people, of a life, the longing for what of loss becomes more and more. Even independent from the Julian Lennon background, Hey Jude is about comfort and encouragement. Let It Be continues the theme even stronger, though by now the chance of going back is remote, of still connecting is remote. "And though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see". Comfort here comes from two sources, a dead woman - and music. "I wake up to the sound of music." By the time we're reaching the Abbey Road medly, it's definitely over. "All that magic feeling, nowhere to go." "Once there was a way to get back home." Not there is, there was. The songs are just fragments, not complete anymore, and yet making a virtue of necessity and forming a new whole out of their incompleteness.
So in 2006, to bring the story full circle, Ecce Cor Meum, starting out as a comissioned piece and yet another bit of musical experimentation (Jonathan Gould once called Paul a musical magpie, which is a good description) - and ending up as a kind of musical credo. What Anthony Smith, then President of Magdalen College, had asked for was "a choral piece which could be sung by young people all the world over - something like Händel's Messiah". Händel's Messiah the result certainly is not, among other things because its composer wanted to write something spiritual but not religious. "Religious conjures up pictures of us and them - my god's better than yours. And religion, the way I was taught it, had a lot of uncomfortable things in it, wrath and punishment and original sin, that I'm not very happy with. So I didn't want to say God instead of Allah."
If not God, then what? He meanders off again while trying to verbalize it in the introduction, via storytelling, about going back to Liverpool when they were touring, when a blizzard hit them. "Our van skidded off the motorway and down a slope. There was no way we could get back up, and someone said, 'What's going to happen now?' And someone else said, 'I dunno. Something will happen.' That became a phrase of us. And sure enough a lorry driver saw us, stopped and we all crammed into his cab. It shaped my philosophy: the faith in a benevolent spirit." (Getting better all the time. Take a sad song and make it better.) He's really not best at explaining in prose. But the music, oh, the music. Sadly only excerpts are available on Youtube. It starts on a somber note, with the first section titled Spiritus, all questions, hushed minor chords seeking for something, and then they swell. The second movement, Gratia, which is online completely, starts with a poignant string theme, and then you get this glorious soprano (Kate Royal on the CD), a bel canto solo. Haven excerpt before hearing the entire thing, because it's just beautiful:
As the title says, about gratitude; my response as a listener was - gratitude for survival, for love existing, the wonder around us, that note of grace which is still there in sadness. Here is the entire movement:
Then comes the Interlude, which is the only section without any words, an oboe solo, subtitled "Lament". Peter Quantrill called it the heart of the piece in a review; Paul said it was about Linda. I find it striking there are no string instruments here, no percussions, nothing but the oboe and wordless vocalising by the chorus. It's eerily beautiful.
Movement 3 is titled Musica, and we're getting to the theme here. Basses anchor the upper voices, the piccolo trumpet (ah, Penny Lane, there beneath the blue suburban sky in summers meanwhile back) offers a syncopated counter-theme, and it's a love declaration as passionate as you could wish, to music itself, bringing joy and connection
Lastly, the final section, the title of which is also the title of the oratorio. "Here in my music I show you my heart". While the CD version is not online, it has already been performed, as had been the original intention, by various choirs big and small the world over, and here is one of them who did put it up on YouTube. While lacking some of the instrumentation (notobly the glorious organ solo), the vocals come through splendidly:
In conclusion: music as a way to work through issues or as a way to avoid them? Both? With his avowed dislike of seeing therapists, I doubt the man himself knows. But whatever it is, it makes for both a great gift to the listener, and one that stays with you.
ponygirl2000's fault. Writing to me about Two of Us, she said she had liked the film, with the one caveat that "I'm not sure from both a narrative and (more shakily) a historical perspective about making Paul so completely well-adjusted. His patience in the movie seemed to tip over into saintliness at certain points. With all the discussion of John's childhood issues it would have been nice to delve more deeply into Paul's drive and need to please. It's more interesting to think that his charm is a bit of a mask for a control freak with more than a few of his own loopy behaviours and substance abuse problems - except from the perspective of actual person!Paul of course."Which is a very valid point to make. I love the film to bits, but it did deserve the this parody raising the same point, and I quote:
AIDAN QUINN
I see a beautiful boy who’s mother says goodbye, who blames himself for his father’s mistakes and tries to believe ordinary little things don’t scare him to death, when they do. I see a man who still doesn’t realize how beautiful he is.
(pause)
Why the hell am I playing therapist so much? I’m Paul fucking McCartney, not Dr. Janov.
SCREENWRITER
I thought it’d be interesting if we spent half the time going into how John’s mind works and why he acts the way he does. John’s much more interesting then you in that respect, you see.
AIDAN QUINN
You mean it’s more interesting to psychoanalyze a man who just throws a fit whenever he feels like it then a man who hides everything from the world and his family behind a smile and then goes on to drown himself in drugs and alcohol?
SCREENWRITER
Yeah, well, at least John didn’t write Silly Love Songs you hack.
Now, as far as fictional treatments are concerned, there is one obvious advantage when focusing on John's issues. He's dead, the story finished, and he can't Joss you. Also he did, as the quote above mentions, have the habit of throwing a temper tantrum a lot, and was very vocal about (many of) his issues, which means the public at large knows a lot about them. Paul is still alive, which makes delving into his psyche automatically feel far more intrusive, and he's far better at guarding his privacy (in general, not always). Never mind fiction; biographers who attempt to have a go at Mr. McCartney are regularly frustrated by the fact that they don't get interviews from a) him (with the exception of Barry Miles, who did the authorized one), b) his children, c) his brother (not in the last 20 years anyway), or d) John Hammel. Never heard of the last one? With reason. He's been Paul's personal assistant, roadie, sidekick and general best friend since the mid-70s and can be spotted regularly on occasions ranking from touring to family baptisms to daughter Stella's fashion shows and gets thanked in the credits of many an album (oh, and in the transcript of the divorce proceedings). But he refuses to give interviews as much as the late Neil Aspinall (Beatles roadie turned Apple boss) did. Jane Asher, the woman with whom Paul had his most serious relationship pre-Linda? No interviews on the subject ever since their breakup. Current girlfriend, Nancy Shevell? No interviews. This is all great when it comes to maintaining privacy (and speaks of the loyalty of the people in question), but somewhat frustrating for the biographical industry which has to do with cousins, short affairs, brief acquaintances and ex employees instead. And of course the occasional rambling and less guarded moment in interviews given to non-biographers. Given that any member of the Beatles gave a gazillion interviews since they came to public attention a little less than five decades ago, and everybody and their dog seems to have a "my encounter with (Ex-)Beatle X" (including Paul) story, this still makes for a lot of material, plus there is of course the work. Not to say that behind the dogged optimism and the thumbs aloft mannerisms lies a secret axe murderer, just that the impression you - well, I - get is based on the material that is available is that he has his own set of dysfunctions (some of which actually overlap with John's, and some are quite different), with less obvious coping mechanisms. The primary one being music.
Earlier this week, I got around for the first time to listen to Ecce Cor Meum, an oratorio on four movements released as an album in 2006. He had started working on it in 1998 (when it was a commission from Magdalen College to set the seal on a new concert hall), then Linda died, the whole thing was delayed (and not ready for the concert hall opening) and became something more personal, there was an early version in 2001 with which he wasn't satisfied, more work, the disaster of second marriage and its end, and finally the premiere in 2006. Of his earlier attempts at classical music, I knew only the Liverpool Oratorio which I could take or leave, but Ecce Cor Meum turned out to be stunning. Very beautiful (more on that below), and also the latest in a line of several examples of a quintessential McCartney trait, to wit, that for all his affable manner and decades in the public spot light, he's not really good at expressing feelings verbally; he channels them into composing and playing instead. To qote from the leaflet, "what I'll leave behind me will be music, and I may not be able to tell you everything I fell, but you'll be able to feel it when you listen to my music. I don't have the time or the articulation to be able to say it all, but if you enjoy composing you say it through the notes". (Or, as he put it decades earlier re: The Long and Winding road: I like writing sad songs, it's a good bag to get into because you can actually acknowledge some deeper feelings of your own and put them in it. It's a good vehicle, it saves having to go to a psychiatrist. Songwriting often performs that feat, you say it but you don't embarrass yourself because it's only a song, or is it? You are putting the things that are bothering you on the table and you are reviewing them, but because it's a song, you don't have to argue with anyone. )
Naturally, busybody fans like myself aren't content to simply listen, we have to speculate as well. To kick the theorizing about Paul's hang-ups and coping mechanisms off, here's a classic Lennon/McCartney exchange from the early 70s, i.e. when things were bad between them and phonecalls were heated and usually ended abruptly. Quotations of dialogue courtesy to the gentlemen in question, as related in interviews.
John: You know what you are? You're all pizza and fairy tales!
Paul: What a great album title! Well, if that's what I am, I'm not wholly against that description of me. I can think of worse things to say. *hangs up*
I'm usually siding with Paul when it comes to the early 70s, but I can see why John would find that reaction frustrating.:) (BTW he actually came close to using "pizza and fairy tales" as an album title years later, but went with "Flaming Pie" instead.)
I always found the shared and different reactions to drugs through the 60s pretty telling. In the pre-fame Hamburg days, everyone in the group was introduced to amphetamines and took pills a plenty to get through the gruelling long hours. All four Beatles were introduced to marijuana by Bob Dylan and were enthusiastic about it. (Got to get you into my life is actually Paul's ode to pot.) Then John, George and their wives are dosed with LSD by a dentist, and while Cynthia and Pattie are freaked out, their husbands are very intrigued and want to share the new drug with the other two Beatles, treating it as basically the door to Narnia. Ringo tries at least (though LSD was never his drug of choice). It's Paul who suddenly balks, for longer than a year. The second LSD trip for John and George, which they wanted to share with Ringo and Paul only to find that Paul refused to take his share of LSD became somewhat famous because it happened mid -65 tour, in Los Angeles, and was when John got the idea from for She Said, She Said, via Peter Fonda, who got Paul's share of the LSD instead and shared his near-death experience as a child with George Harrison which freaked out a listening John to no end. After Fonda left, John tried to get Paul to join the acid club again, but Paul suddenly remembered he'd invited Peggy Lipton, with whom he'd had a one night stand the previous year. The result of this did not sit too well with John, as Peggy Lipton reports in her memoirs:
I came for dinner, and I was the only girl there. John definitely didn't like that. He didn't like me being there at ALL. He was mean and sarcastic. As far as he was concerned, I had no business being invited to dinner with the four of them. For him this was an exclusive boys' club. He was purposely making me feel uneasy. (...) John made some snide comment like, "What is SHE doing here?" I got the idea that he thought Paul was an idiot to take a girl so seriously he'd actually invite her to dinner, when all he really needed to do was fuck her AFTER dinner.
Now, the hesitation with LSD (complete with diversion tactic at the expense of third party who had no clue on what was going on - poor Peggy!) obviously wasn't from some sudden anti-drug stance on Paul's part, or because LSD was more dangerous than pot. He tried out cocaine that same year (and went on to use it now and then until Maharishi times). But LSD is a drug that famously drills through your subconscious and makes you look at it. And then there's the question of control. When describing his first dentist-caused trip, John mentioned he still has a sketch he made back then of four faces saying "we agree with you"; that was one of the things he'd seen. When Paul finally (right at the start of the Sgt. Pepper Sessions more than a year later) did take acid with John (after one earlier attempt far away from the group with Tara Browne, which doesn't seem to have worked properly), he saw and felt something quite differently. John (by then a regular user) had actually taken some LSD in the studio, for the first and last time (they used pot at work but never one of the heavier drugs otherwise), was obviously not in a condition to work as a result, and the only Beatle with a house in town, nearby, no less, was Paul, so he took John there and en route gave in to the LSD question:
I thought, Maybe this is the moment where I should take a trip with him. It's been coming for a long time. It's often the best way, without thinking about it too much, just slip into it. John's on it already, so I'll sort of catch up. It was my first trip with John, or with any of the guys. We stayed up all night, sat around and hallucinated a lot.
Me and John, we'd known each other for a long time. Along with George and Ringo, we were best mates. And we looked into each other's eyes, the eye contact thing we used to do, which is fairly mind-boggling. You dissolve into each other. But that's what we did, round about that time, that's what we did a lot. And it was amazing. You're looking into each other's eyes and you would want to look away, but you wouldn't, and you could see yourself in the other person. It was a very freaky experience and I was totally blown away.
There's something disturbing about it. You ask yourself, 'How do you come back from it? How do you then lead a normal life after that?' And the answer is, you don't. After that you've got to get trepanned or you've got to meditate for the rest of your life. You've got to make a decision which way you're going to go.
I would walk out into the garden - 'Oh no, I've got to go back in.' It was very tiring, walking made me very tired, wasted me, always wasted me. But 'I've got to do it, for my well-being.' In the meantime John had been sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity. It was a good trip. It was great but I wanted to get out of there for a while. I'd just had enough after about four or five hours (...) I mean, I could feel every inch of the house, and John seemed like some sort of emperor in control of it all. It was quite strange. Of course he was just sitting there, very inscrutably.
There's being close, and there's being too close, especially if you're someone for whom handing over control to someone else has always been, and would always be an issue. Linda McCartney's friend Danny Fields, who wrote a book about her, said in it re: Paul:
I think I am not the first person to deem Paul autocratic, which is not a moral judgment or an ethical one. He is simply autocratic. He is The Don.
Now you could argue being hesitant about sharing your subconscious with John Lennon (never a poster child of emotional stability) is actually a sound instinct for emotional self-preservation, not control issues. (John didn't seem to think so, of course. As late as the Let it Be sessions, when you'd think he wasn't interested anymore in sharing thoughts with anyone but Yoko, we get this gem of an exchange as transcribed here: Lennon changes the subject by bizarrely asking Paul, "Hey, did you dream about me last night?" Paul doesn’t remember his dreams. Lennon had a "very strong dream–we were both terrified! Different dreams but you must have been there. I was touching you." Paul does his best to ignore this as everyone goes back into "Octopus’s Garden.") However, other than the three Beatles (and possibly the above listed folk unwilling to talk to biographers) you have a lot of friends/acquaintances who felt they were kept at arm's length by Paul. In a polite, nice and often charming way, but still. (John's childhood friend Pete Shotton and Pattie Harrison, for example, describe him practically identical as someone playing his cards close to his chest, whom they didn't feel they ever really got know, despite being around him a lot for quite a while.) Pete Townshend (yes, the one from The Who), who eventually did become a close friend (after some hilariously friendly-but-awkward encounters in the 60s which are worth quoting in another post) had this to say on the subject:
I really came to know Paul so much better and to love him and to accept him in a way that I don't think I would have done had he had a more traditional kind of showbiz marriage. (...) Linda was very, very pro-active in their social life. When they were driving through this town, she was the one who used to get him to come and visit, even made a couple of surprise visits. She was the one who would call me and then put him on the phone, and we would talk. Then he would be open and entirely accessible, but it was Linda who was always reminding him that he really had friends, that he was likeable as a person, that he could reach and be reached . . . she was constantly there with the idea that there is love between people when the tape stops running and the curtain is down.
When the curtain is down. Which brings us to when this gregarious performer/ deeply private person paradox seems to have started. To wit, with the death of his mother when he was 14. Before that, Paul seems to have spent a thoroughly enjoyable childhood with his brother and his parents. Given that Jim loved jazz and had had a jazz band as a young man, the life of the party who told his sons "if you can play an instrument you'll be never bereft of friends" and Mary was an ambitous workoholic (as a nurse and midwife) who impressed on her sons that "you can always do better" and who managed to keep the considerable pain her breast cancer must have caused her to herself for years so that when she died it came as a completely unprepared surprise for the children, they obviously left an impact before that point but no McCartney relation ever described pre-Mary's death Paul as anything but a cheerful kid, good at school, into some mischief with his brother but nothing out of the ordinary. His father had given him a trumpet to play which didn't work for him, he'd traded it in for a guitar and had started to play that once he figured out he had to do it upside down because he was left handed, but it wasn't more than a hobby yet. That radically changed after Mary died.
Brother Mike in 1965: I remember that we both felt that the important thing was to show our cousins that we were not softies in any way and to put on what is called "a brave front". I think we went a bit overboard about this, and that Paul made some flippant remark which sounded pretty callous at the time. Of course, he didn't mean it. But, as the eldest, he felt he had to say something and what he said was just silly. I know he could have bitten his tongue immediately after.
Paul was far more affected by Mum's death than any of us imagined. His very character seemed to change and for a while he behaved like a hermit. He wasn't very nice to live with at this period, I remember. He became completely wrapped up in himself and didn't seem to care about anything or anybody outside himself. He seemed interested only in his guitar, and his music. He would play that guitar in his bedroom, in the lavatory, even when he was taking a bath. It was never out of his hands except when he was at school or when he had to do his homework. Even in school, he and George Harrison used to seize the opportunity every break to sit and strum. (...) I would go looking for him and sometimes I would find him, up in his bedroom, perhaps, sitting in the dark, just strumming away on his guitar. Nothing, it seemed, mattered to him any more. He seldom went out anywhere - even with girls. He didn't bother much with any of his friends except his schoolmate George Harrison and John Lennon, who was at the art school next door. Work and work alone - his school books and his guitar - appeared to be the only thing that could help him to forget.
Two points here: keep the "putting up a brave front" and "making a flippant remark" in mind when we come to John's death and the day afterwards. And speaking of John, his biographer Ray Coleman in a McCartney detour was the first but not the last to whom it occured that "Why she had to go, I don't know, she wouldn't say/ I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday" might not be a generic love long after all. As with all good songs, of course, you don't need the biographical context to feel the emotion of the song, but it's a plausible connection. Coleman was the first to ask Paul point blank (in a John-related and therefore given interview) and got a "possibly" as a reply.
The other striking thing is that this is where both completely obsessed musician Paul and withdrawing into himself Paul make their first appearance. All that non-stop guitar playing paid off when he met John of course; the fact he was better at it that all the Quarrymen put together, including John who knew only banjo chords and could not even tune his guitar alone (he paid a neigbour to do it) was a big reason why despite that nearly two years age gap he was asked to join the group. But we're not dealing with a plaintive semi-orphan grateful the cool older boy and his chums have deigned to accept them in their gang, oh no. According to the surviving Quarrymen, who had joined the band for a laugh, because rock'n roll was cool and because John said so and you did what John told you when you were in John's social circle, he was a pushy busybody not losing any time to give them a total make-over. A) Practice sessions. Both individual ones with John and general ones with the group. The former also quickly led to songwriting, of course. B) A professional look. No more jeans and t-shirts. Post-Paul photos of the Quarrymen suddenly show them with jackets like the "real" bands of the day wore. C) Badgering John into accepting George, who was younger than Paul but could play guitar even better. D) At which point mysteriously one former Quarryman after the other drops out.
...well, okay then. No wonder John thought, as he told both official Beatles biographer Hunter Davies and Jann Wenner years later, that "I'll have to keep him in line". Which he usually did with his razor sharp tongue and also via their songwriting. John had written poems and stories pre-Paul but it doesn't seem to have occured to him to write songs as well (it's worth noting that most performers until that time didn't; certainly John's idol Elvis Presley did not, though Buddy Holly, who became a major influence on both John and Paul, did), that only happened when finding out Paul had done so already. (That pre-John song was called "I lost my little girl". Make of that what you will.) So early on you have them giving each other all the musical education ever got before becoming famous, or, as John put it, "I write the way I do because of Paul and he write the way he does because of me". And then Julia Lennon died, and John's reaction to the death of his mother was in many ways the opposite from Paul's initial one. Not for him the sitting around in dark rooms, or endless guitar playing, or withdrawing into himself. He actually stopped playing for a while altogether while being not just verbal about his rage at that death but picking a fight with everyone he could find. As John's art college fellow student Bill Harry put it, "A lot of people lost their patience with John. So many young people in Liverpool had lost parents to the war, or disease, it was actually a fairly common experience. And hardly anyone responded quite as violently as John. None of us had gone into this big, self-pitying thing. The feeling was - just get one with it. But Paul seemed to have limitless patience for John", sitting with him, keeping the band going by bringing them to John since John didn't want to come to them, and so forth.
Now, John's younger half sister Julia Baird has the interesting theory this wasn't just about helping John but also because John voiced that which Paul had sublimated until then: "So John and Paul had this enormous bonding I think. And I think they almost went out to wreck everything initially because where Paul may, or may not, have been more self contained about it before, certainly John would have triggered off maybe a bigger outward response in Paul because John was outraged."
You have basically two different versions of Lennon/McCartney descriptions by third parties, people who focus on their differences (complete with wondering not why they eventually split up but why they became such firm friends at first given the differences), Klaus Voorman in Hamburg, for example, and to a lesser degree Geoff Emerick, or descriptions that focus on what they had in common, which you get for example from George Martin, or Linda McCartney, who even said "they were so alike" (not an opinion widely shared among partisans of either, but then she was married to one of them and said that after twenty years of said marriage). I don't see these impressions as mutually exclusive. John's way of responding to pain with rage partially came to depend on Paul being there for the clean-up operation afterwards (see Klaus Voorman's description of John's more outrageous stunts in Hamburg). Paul depended on John to be that vocal, be that outrageous first, both imo because he himself couldn't/wouldn't and because he liked being needed.
Philip Norman, talking about finally getting an interview with Paul (albeit via email) for his 2008 John biography after thirty years of frosty silence due to Shout! and Normanesque utterings such as the 1981 statement that "John Lennon was 80% of the Beatles"), mentions this reply to a minor question: “Is it true that you and John, left- and right-handed as you were, could play each other’s guitars?” And he said yes: together they were ambidextrous, and in their personalities as well."
It's a great image - "together they were ambidextrous". But what do you do if one half of that ambidextrous being isn't available anymore? John's need for symbiosis was far more open and obvious, between the insistence on being referred to as JohnandYoko from now on, Yoko's bed in the recording studio and the never apartness until the Lost Weekend, but while Linda didn't follow Paul to the toilet, what Paul did early in that marriage isn't any less needy and co-dependent if you look closer. For starters, the insistence on making Linda a musician. She loved music, but she was a photographer by profession and passion, and the public ridicule she was exposed to when she got on stage with Paul as part of the newly formed Wings was relentless and cruel. ("What do you call a cow with wings? Linda McCartney", and similar "witticisms".) It hadn't even been her idea or wish. "He made her do it", said Pete Townshend, "he admitted it to me, he made her do it". Not just during the Wings years but also in the 90s when he went on tour again, because of course she had to be part of the band. Why? Because, according to Paul, the best thing about the Beatles had been to share music with your best friend, and Linda was his best friend now. So what if she had to be taught how to play first, he'd taught John how to play as well (completly ignoring with the blindness of the musically gifted that you need talent as well as practice). Not that the McCartney marriage was one sided in who started projects in general - for example, vegetariansm and animal rights acticism were both Linda's ideas and he followed her lead there - but the insistence on making her into a musical partner as well as a wife was all Paul, and it was strong enough to override any consideration of what she had to go through as a result. (BTW, an argument could be made that the transition from 60s promiscous rock star to 30 years of monogamous happy marriage worked because he was able to share that with her, but then again she could have been part of the touring and at his side without being a musician.)
As for the mother issue - John might have been the one who called Yoko "mother" and be photographed with her in an embryo position, but he wasn't simply bitchy when stating in a 1971 interview that part of Linda's appeal to Paul must have been that "she came with a ready-made family". (I.e. was a mother with a daughter.) Paul himself told Barry Miles part of why he fell for Linda beyond sexual attraction was that she was a mother. Talking about the two weeks in New York as a break from the tension-ridden White Albums session that made the relationship go from casual to serious, he said about staying at Linda's apartment: Linda was often doing something, she had her own life to lead, and I had much more time on my hands. She would have to take Heather to school, pick Heather up from school, cook the meal, certain things as a mother she had to do. And her womanliness impressed me, I'd never actually known anyone who was quite so much a woman. Linda was a very good mother. It was one of the things that impressed me about her was that she had the woman thing down, she seriously looked after her daughter. It seemed very organised to me, in a slightly dishevelled way. She was very kind-hearted too, so that finished it all off.
Pre-Linda (whose mother was dead), Paul had shown a tendency to bond with the mothers of his more serious girlfriends along with the girlfriends. Iris Caldwell, one of his Liverpool girlfiends, has a great anecdote about Paul seeing her mother even after they had broken up and also calling before he played "Yesterday" for the first time on tv so Mrs. Caldwell wouldn't miss it. Margaret Asher, Jane's mother, was the one to invite him to live with them when the Beatles moved to London (which he accepted at once - he severely disliked the bachelor's flat Brian Epstein had rented for him, Ringo and George) and he actually says more about her in the Barry Miles biography than about Jane. When reminiscing about Linda with their daughter Mary in the documentary Wingspan, one of the first anecdotes he tells is of Linda's arrival in his London house and ensuing horror at the state of the fridge ("you know how mum was - fridge mum!"), featuring only one milk in decay, saying "you can't live like this, you need someone to take care of you". So I think it wasn't just that Linda had a daughter, and he had always wanted children, but that Linda knew how to be a mother, how to mother someone. No, John wasn't the only one.
As for the relentless working drive specifically in situations where the alternative is grief and pain: well, this is the man with the following track record in responses: Brian Epstein dies - let's make a new album and a film (Magical Mystery Tour). Mystery stuff goes down in India, John hooks up with Yoko - new album, and a double album, and a new company (Apple) hat's the ticket! The long term relationship with Jane Asher ends, group relationships go spectacularly downhill - let's make a new album which will also be a film and a live concert! The group implodes even faster, at this point everyone but Paul has taken their turn at a walkout and John drops the "I want a divorce, like my divorce from Cynthia" bombshell - LET'S MAKE ONE MORE NEW ALBUM AND GO ON AN ANYMOUS TOUR. (He got the album, at least.) Jim McCartney dies - European tour. Which he goes through with. Despite the opening Copenhagen concert being two days after the death. (Incidentally, regarding the timing of Jim's death, as this blogger points out, Jim died on March 18, 1976, Alfred Lennon died on April 1st, 1976, and according to John's Playboy interview, he and Paul saw each other on April 24 and 25th, 76. (No, John doesn't name the date but he names the watching of the famous Saturday Night Live sketch together, and you can date that one.) So, given their fathers died even closer to each other than their mothers had done, guessing the topic would have come up in conversation is rather tempting. In fiction, that might even have been a reason why Paul made that visit at that particular time.) And then we reach John's death and the day afterwards. Paul had actually been one of the last people to find out because the McCartneys had gotten into the habit of leaving the phone of the hook at night. So December 9th 1980 started for them in ignorance until Linda drove the girls to school and Paul put the phone on the hook again. At which point he found out. So does he decide to stay at home and most importantly keep away from any reporters while he's still in shock. No. He goes into the recording studio. At which point it's probably not too much to say the whole tried and true coping mechanism broke down.
Some eye-witness accounts from the engineers and other musicians present:
Geoff Emerick: Paul walked in, subdued, pensive and deep in thought. As we made eye contact I could see the deep sadness welling inside him. "I'm so sorry, Paul," I mumbled awkwardly. "I know, Geoff, I know," he replied, his voice barely above a whisper. (...) Somehow none of us could seem to come up with the right words to say. There probably were no right words to say. After a while our recollections petered out in an uncomfortable silence. Paddy laid down his parts quickly and efficiently, then, giving Paul an awkward hug, departed for the airport. After he'd gone, Paul picked up his bass and idly ran down a few lines, then wandered over to the piano and improvised for a little while, then picked up a guitar and strummed a few chords. He was more than just in a state of shock. He seemed utterly lost and bewildered. Finally, an exhausted and drained Paul mumbled a soft "All right, lads, I guess that's enough for today." He walked out the front door and faced the surging phalanx of reporters.
Which resulted in one of those moments that follow you forever after. (Let me tell you, I am so grateful nobody ever taped me on the days when members of my family died.) Talk about saying "something wrong". Obvious reporter question, how do you feel? "It's a drag."
He got roasted for that back in the day, obviously, and even today it sometimes pops up as "proof" that Paul never cared about John. (George, who'd gone to the recording studio as well that day, wisely avoided reporters until weeks later and at any rate wasn't under the same glare of public scrutiny.) But never mind the public, the death itself never went away. Says Eric Stewart, who worked with Paul two months later on the song "Yvonne" Paul had written for him: “During the session Paul fell into a lugubrious mood. He suddenly said, ‘John has gone. John’s gone. He’s dead and he is not coming back.’ And he looked completely dismayed, like shocked at something new that had just hit him. I said, ‘But Paul, it’s been a few weeks now.’ He said, ‘I know, Eric, but I’ve just REALIZED.’ And he stopped talking and started playing the piano, non-stop."
Tug of War, the album he had started to work on when John died, didn't get released until 1982, and as Jonathan Gould pointed out, John is all over that album, not "only" in the song adressed to him, Here Today, but also in songs like the title cut: We expected more, but with one thing or another, we were trying to outdo each other, in a tug of war. (Which was the image George Martin had memorably used about them - "imagine two people pulling on a tug of war, smiliing at each other, pulling all the time and getting closer all the time. The tension between them makes for the bond." ) As for Here Today - which Yoko in last winter's BBC interview has named as her favourite of the songs written about John (of which there many - George's "All those years ago", Elton John's "Empty Gardens", among others) - its very premise is a conversation not had, things not said, only expressed in music. "What about the time we met? Well, I suppose that you could say we playing hard to get. Didn't understand a thing, but we could always sing." Same with the song from the later 80s, This One: If I never said it, I was only waiting, for a better moment, that didn't come.
In a way, all that pouring yourself into work and not verbalizing darker feelings goes along with clichés about the English, or if you like about men. And yet Paul McCartney strikes one as one of the least macho rockstars of his generation, and he's certainly not verbally restrained in general. (Given to meanderings off topic in longer interviews, but that's something else.) Or in his body language. (Brian Wilson who admires him once sighed that he finds Paul scary because "he's so hyper and energetic".) But the work in question is music, which is all about feeling, and that makes the intriguing paradox, because the music is certainly expressive as hell. Paul might have never done either Primal Scream Therapy or an album resulting from same, but from the time that little ditty on the White Album with the lines "Can you take me back where I came from? Brother, can you take me back?" shows up, the musical outpouring focused on loss, loss of connection, of people, of a life, the longing for what of loss becomes more and more. Even independent from the Julian Lennon background, Hey Jude is about comfort and encouragement. Let It Be continues the theme even stronger, though by now the chance of going back is remote, of still connecting is remote. "And though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see". Comfort here comes from two sources, a dead woman - and music. "I wake up to the sound of music." By the time we're reaching the Abbey Road medly, it's definitely over. "All that magic feeling, nowhere to go." "Once there was a way to get back home." Not there is, there was. The songs are just fragments, not complete anymore, and yet making a virtue of necessity and forming a new whole out of their incompleteness.
So in 2006, to bring the story full circle, Ecce Cor Meum, starting out as a comissioned piece and yet another bit of musical experimentation (Jonathan Gould once called Paul a musical magpie, which is a good description) - and ending up as a kind of musical credo. What Anthony Smith, then President of Magdalen College, had asked for was "a choral piece which could be sung by young people all the world over - something like Händel's Messiah". Händel's Messiah the result certainly is not, among other things because its composer wanted to write something spiritual but not religious. "Religious conjures up pictures of us and them - my god's better than yours. And religion, the way I was taught it, had a lot of uncomfortable things in it, wrath and punishment and original sin, that I'm not very happy with. So I didn't want to say God instead of Allah."
If not God, then what? He meanders off again while trying to verbalize it in the introduction, via storytelling, about going back to Liverpool when they were touring, when a blizzard hit them. "Our van skidded off the motorway and down a slope. There was no way we could get back up, and someone said, 'What's going to happen now?' And someone else said, 'I dunno. Something will happen.' That became a phrase of us. And sure enough a lorry driver saw us, stopped and we all crammed into his cab. It shaped my philosophy: the faith in a benevolent spirit." (Getting better all the time. Take a sad song and make it better.) He's really not best at explaining in prose. But the music, oh, the music. Sadly only excerpts are available on Youtube. It starts on a somber note, with the first section titled Spiritus, all questions, hushed minor chords seeking for something, and then they swell. The second movement, Gratia, which is online completely, starts with a poignant string theme, and then you get this glorious soprano (Kate Royal on the CD), a bel canto solo. Haven excerpt before hearing the entire thing, because it's just beautiful:
As the title says, about gratitude; my response as a listener was - gratitude for survival, for love existing, the wonder around us, that note of grace which is still there in sadness. Here is the entire movement:
Then comes the Interlude, which is the only section without any words, an oboe solo, subtitled "Lament". Peter Quantrill called it the heart of the piece in a review; Paul said it was about Linda. I find it striking there are no string instruments here, no percussions, nothing but the oboe and wordless vocalising by the chorus. It's eerily beautiful.
Movement 3 is titled Musica, and we're getting to the theme here. Basses anchor the upper voices, the piccolo trumpet (ah, Penny Lane, there beneath the blue suburban sky in summers meanwhile back) offers a syncopated counter-theme, and it's a love declaration as passionate as you could wish, to music itself, bringing joy and connection
Lastly, the final section, the title of which is also the title of the oratorio. "Here in my music I show you my heart". While the CD version is not online, it has already been performed, as had been the original intention, by various choirs big and small the world over, and here is one of them who did put it up on YouTube. While lacking some of the instrumentation (notobly the glorious organ solo), the vocals come through splendidly:
In conclusion: music as a way to work through issues or as a way to avoid them? Both? With his avowed dislike of seeing therapists, I doubt the man himself knows. But whatever it is, it makes for both a great gift to the listener, and one that stays with you.
