Getting Better

One of the lighter numbers from the epochal Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the landmark artistic statement which McCartney dominated, Getting Better is pure pop joy, full of layered, ringing guitars, jaunty percussive rhythms, and terrific back-up vocals from John, who contributed the wonderfully (and typically) contrapuntal sentiment that things might be getting better simply because they can’t get no worse. This is the sort of song that years later, another ace pop tunesmith named Adam Schlesinger would write in abundance, infused with sunny joy, yet not without a certain wry sense of perspective. It’s 1967 now, and Paul is spinning ’em out right, left, and centre, just tossing them off with barely a pause, becoming the Beatles’ de facto musical director as John retreated into LSD and began searching for the alternative he’d find soon enough in the arms of a rather odd avant garde conceptual artist from Japan.

How Kind of You

One of the major compositions from 2005’s Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard, an excellent album that marked the beginning of an extraordinary late career renaissance, and was characterized by a more mature, reflective, and often melancholy frame of mind, as befit a man then attaining senior citizen status. Layered, complex, and intricately arranged, with somber lyrics betraying unsettled emotions, this one was produced by Nigel Godrich, who’d lately earned widespread praise for his work with Radiohead. There’s certainly a touch of Let Down and Fake Plastic Trees in the mood and overall compositional feel here, and elsewhere on the album, but Godrich’s main contribution was to act very much in the tradition of George Martin as a critical and unbiased filter for musical ideas, granting the Living Legend no leeway at all when he thought Paul was offering something substandard. McCartney, accustomed at this point to complete and utter deference (bordering sometimes on worship), was at first taken aback, but he grew to very much like the give and take, and the music clearly benefitted. This is no silly love song. It’s a heartfelt expression of gratitude from a wounded heart that’s almost beyond healing. It’s no wonder, of course, that the mood was tending gloomy; things at this point were decidedly unpleasant on the home front, the ill-starred relationship with Heather Mills having left the rails so thoroughly that within the next year Paul was forced into a litigious divorce that ended with him paying the woman close to 50 million dollars, a sum McCartney no doubt peeled off the bankroll he keeps in his pocket as walking around money. Maybe a certain amount of misery is good for the art? Listen especially to the gloriously evocative extended coda, as the song veers into ominous, unhappy territory before being brought home by one of the finest musical resolutions in Paul’s entire catalogue. That, kids, is how you do that.

Mother Nature’s Son

There are times when I think this is the loveliest thing he ever wrote. The delicate guitar work (played in a finger-plucking style learned from Donovan during the interlude at Rishikesh), the gorgeously smooth and mournful understatement of the brass, the booming drums in the distance (placed outside the studio and down the hall to create the effect), hinting at rolling thunder just over the horizon, this is the distillation of one brief moment of perfect bittersweet happiness, as beautiful as it is ephemeral.

Figure of Eight

Another track off Flowers in the Dirt, this one’s a bit of a sleeper, nothing spectacular, but liable to grow on the listener. I can attest that it’s a perfect mid-tempo soundtrack for cruising down the highway on a long road trip. I think John would have liked it, it’s straightforward, a little moody, and not at all sweet. I’ve always felt it would fit well in a mix-tape with stuff by the likes of Fleetwood Mac.

Things We Said Today

Wait a second – the mop-tops are writing their own songs. Paul’s best solo contribution to Hard Day’s Night, on which most of the songs were still fully co-written with John, with John dominating. It’s a curiously downbeat sort of love song, unexpectedly aloof and pensive, and thus a good companion to John’s excellent I’ll Be Back off the same album. Things We Said Today was one of the first to persuade the community of “serious” musicians and composers that these kids weren’t the disposable pop idols depicted in most of their press coverage. There were those who’d seen this from the beginning, and now their numbers began to swell.

On the Wings of a Nightingale

Attached are both Paul’s low-fi home-recorded demo, and the fully realized version performed by the Everly Brothers. This is another fine example of Paul’s uncanny capacity to adopt any style the situation demands, in this case infusing the track with a sort of rock-a-billy melodicism that’s perfect for the Everlys, who took to it like ducks to water. Succinct, perfectly structured, and superbly tuneful, while providing yet another example of its composer’s mastery of the art of bringing a song in for a landing, On The Wings of a Nightingale also demonstrates the extent to which McCartney was ready to gift the fruits of his “A” game to other artists.

Dance Tonight

From Memory Almost Full, released in 2007. Just a happy little ditty? Well, sure, in a way, but so artfully done, so full of craft – just listen to the keyboard harmonies, which come straight from the hymns Paul sang as a young choirboy, and the characteristically vertical melody of the whistling bridge, which on its own is worth the price of admission. It’s vintage McCartney, meant to bring a smile to your face straight away, and leaving it for repeated listenings to build an appreciation of the little touches that make it special.

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band / With a Little Help From My Friends

A great way to kick off the dawning of a new musical epoch, with Paul assuming centre stage as master of ceremonies to introduce his new creation, a fictional band he contrived in the aftermath of the decision to stop touring, when all of them were bone-tired of the strain of being Beatles (reportedly, the name occurred to him when he misheard somebody on an airplane asking a flight attendant for some salt and pepper!). During the made-for-TV Anthology series, there was a segment in which George Martin, sitting at one of Abbey Road’s vintage mixing consoles, threaded through one of the original master tapes – a hallowed, priceless thing – and adjusted the sliders to isolate Paul’s vocal on this track. “Just listen to that”, said George. “What a great rock & roll voice”. Announcing that the “singer wants to sing a song”, McCartney then exits stage right, giving Ringo his moment in the sun with a jaunty tune composed deliberately to accommodate the affable drummer’s somewhat narrow vocal range. Ringo was always a reluctant lead singer, but he pulled it off, and With a Little Help From My Friends became an instant standard, covered by all sorts of artists (particularly Joe Cocker, who received endless praise for a heavily reworked, bluesy sort of rendition that always affected me like fingernails on a chalkboard). There’s something rather brave and heartwarming about it, with Ringo asking us to bear with him while he tries not to sing out of key. Listen particularly to Paul’s bass playing, which author Jonathan Gould likened to the sound of a circus bear, pirouetting happily at the back of the stage.

Noteworthy too is the exuberant reprise, which officially (and deceptively) ends the show, before the mind-blowing darkness of A Day in the Life descends. The guitar sound verges on heavy metal:

Junk / Singalong Junk

If you want to ground the argument that McCartney is the greatest, most evocative melodist of the modern era, begin here. Released on his eponymous first solo effort, Junk was half-written in advance of the White Album sessions, but never finished; such was the quality of the remainder bin in those days. The song paints a poignant vignette of sad, discarded objects being hawked in a second-hand store, and one can’t help but wonder about how they all found their way there, and what became of the people who once had use for them. 

Jet

You think he can’t rock? Give your head a shake. The boy can definitely rock.  Jet, a perennial favourite from Band on the Run, has been bringing ’em to their feet for almost 50 years now, and believe me, if you don’t get it from the record you would if you heard it live. It’s exhilarating. People go nuts. Sure, the words are essentially meaningless, as they so often were for a while there in the Seventies (I blame it on all the dope he was smoking), but who cares? Let’s dance! Besides, who but Paul ever overlays such hard, heavy-metal underpinnings with such sublime melody? Who ever penned so graceful a conclusion to a hard rock song? What, you’re a career grump or something? You don’t like feeling happy and alive?

It turns out “Jet” was the name of a little black pony, so that’s another critter joining Martha in being made immortal in song.

Mr. Bellamy

An offbeat and curiously compelling little song that could have come from no other composer, with its gloomy brass introduction (which could well serve as the theme music for an English soap opera along the lines of Coronation Street) and its jumpy, staccato piano setting the tone. Mr. Bellamy is everywhere described, including by the composer himself, as a tale of some sort of depressed mid-level corporate drudge who’s out on a ledge thinking about jumping. This is nonsense – Paul’s just having us on – listen to those repeated, meow-like scratches on the guitar whenever the would-be rescuers, undoubtedly from a ladder company of the fire brigade, attempt to get ahold of him. Mr. Bellamy is obviously a domestic cat, seemingly stuck up a tree! Probably a big orange Tabby. That’s why the boys are cautioned to proceed slowly and take care not to frighten him (if he was a person, the shrinks would be trying to talk him down), and that’s why Bellamy, way up in the branches, is playing hard to get. He’s not stuck. He’s being a cat, and he’s actually quite comfortable up there, away from all the noisome primates, and no, he’s not coming down.

The Long and Winding Road

An exquisite track which for decades was, to Paul’s infinite horror, despoiled on record by Phil Spector’s ham-fisted wall of sound production methods (cue scads of violins! Now harps! Go celestial choir!), here it is, finally, in its pristine form, from the 2003 “naked” remix of Let it Be. It works a lot better when it’s just piano, a little tasteful guitar accompaniment, and Billy Preston adding touches on keyboard, doesn’t it? I doubt much needs to be said about this soulful, heart-rending ballad, composed at an emotional low ebb during the sometimes fractious Let it Be sessions, when it began to dawn on McCartney that a Beatles break-up was inevitable, despite all the energy he’d invested into keeping the band’s precious synergy alive. Anyway, you’ll never know, but many ways I’ve tried. Taken in context, that’s awfully sad. 

Here’s one of the better scenes from the so-so movie Yesterday, a fantasy in which the protagonist awakens one day to find himself the only person alive who ever heard of the Beatles, and knows their songs. Claiming authorship for himself, thus achieving notoriety as a purported master composer, he winds up here in an informal songwriting contest, with Ed Sheeran being a very good sport by playing himself. Ed comes up with a little song I quite like, using stranded penguins as a metaphor; Jack, curating the entire Beatles’ catalogue, apparently composes Long and Winding Road off the top of his head, and Sheeran, feeling like Salieri to Jack’s Mozart, glumly acknowledges he’s hopelessly overmatched. I remember thinking, as I watched this, that it was entirely possible McCartney actually did write the bulk of it off the top of his head, just like that. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

Come and Get It

Recorded sometime around the White Album sessions, this is McCartney’s all but completed version of the guaranteed hit he later handed to Badfinger, giving the new recruits to Apple Records their first action on the charts. Layer on a couple of backing vocal tracks and the Beatles could have taken it right to the top themselves, but this was the point at which both John and George were growing weary and resentful of the endless, metronomic drumbeat of McCartney-penned #1 A-sides. Very well then, let the other guys have it, and good on ’em too. The lyrics provide sardonic commentary on the goings-on at Apple, which at this point was being taken to the cleaners by just about every charlatan and hanger-on who ever claimed to have had a big idea, among them a transparent fraud nicknamed “Magic Alex”, who squandered God knows how many thousands of pounds promising to achieve technological wonders in the manufacture of studio recording equipment, while managing mainly to produce loose piles of tangled wire, sometimes attached to a speaker, sometimes to an oscilloscope (you can imagine George Martin’s reaction). Meanwhile, people were shoplifting them blind in the artsy-craftsy Apple Boutique, until finally they just flung open the doors and told everyone to go ahead and take whatever they pleased, before shutting the place down. Ah well. All grist for the mill, which Paul ground into another effortless pop gem while working on other things.

Woman

Another chart-topper penned by Paul to help out Gordon Asher, brother of beloved Jane, the song’s obvious muse. Written under a pseudonym – Paul was eager to see if he could compose a hit if no one associated the song with the Beatles – its true authorship soon leaked, spoiling the experiment. I think it would have been successful either way. The miniature documentary above concludes with Paul’s own demo recording, which is much superior to the over-arranged version released by Peter and Gordon, and showcases a massive talent just hitting its stride in 1965.