Also pervasive is the stoic wisdom and guidance of his father, Jim, whose attitude to life is quoted in the titles Do It Now and Put It There, and echoes in countless other stories of optimism and humanity that abound in the McCartney catalogue. Too Much Rain is one of his “get over it” songs. We Can Work It Out speaks for itself‚ even if the subtext rings a little “selfish” from here.
Lennon, of course, weaves through his old partner’s recollections like a recurring dream. “Opposites attract. I could calm him down and he could fire me up,” McCartney says, describing their days of deepest friendship as teens hitchhiking Europe. Ticket To Ride drew on one such adventure, top-and-tailing in a single bed at cousin Betty’s pub in the village of (you guessed it) Ryde.
Later songs are open letters in times of estrangement and worse. A dozen years lie between Dear Friend and Here Today: the difference between white-hot anger and fathomless sadness. The latter seeps everywhere, but the rage remains also, when a song such as Too Many People opens wounds from the mud-slinging ’70s. “John … was the one who would write a hurtful song,” his friend says, hurt still. “That was his bag.”
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It was not McCartney’s. He defies his critics and upholds the sentiment of Silly Love Songs with unflagging pride. “With any luck it helps define the world,” he reflects on the whole peace-and-love barrow the Beatles made so earnestly fashionable, then and forever.
That said, deeper investigation of his unparalleled catalogue of love songs reveals plenty of darker shades beyond the rosy palette of My Love and I Will. The foretold break-up of For No One he seems to feel acutely even now. Somedays catches him in another reverie of realisation — and impromptu poetry. “There’s a crack between the headlong and the halting,” he says of that song’s almost subliminal twists. “If you’re lucky, a few things might slip out.”
Lucky. As revealing, for all concerned, as these 154 deconstructions can be, it’s this up-front abdication of control, of responsibility and ultimately of authorial meaning that makes McCartney’s story, and his open-handed attitude to a monumental body of work, so engaging.
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There’s no denying the thrill in offhand anecdotes from the eye of the 20th-century pop-culture storm, when Andy Warhol, Harold Pinter, Allen Ginsberg, Willem De Kooning and every other loose cannon on deck drops by for tea.
Similarly, the hundreds of pages of handwritten lyrics, doodles and photographs alone make these books an essential part of historical record, whether it’s Macca strumming in the front seat of his Aston Martin in the very throes of writing Two Of Us, or the actual photos of monkeys copulating in Rishikesh that inspired the primal eruption of Why Don’t We Do It In the Road?
But it’s the endlessly morphing meaning and magic that nobody can explain that drives McCartney to create. As he says while attempting to measure the lasting worth of Let Me Roll It, “we can talk about lyrics till the cows come home, but a good riff is a rare beauty”.
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‘A good riff is a rare beauty.’ Paul McCartney on music, love and life
Source: Philippines Alive
