Sunday, May 9, 2010
BRIGHT AND SHINY :
The Secret Music of Paul McCartney
By Donald Brackett
“And the fireman rushes in, from the pouring rain, very strange….”
Paul McCartney, 1967
“The fireman’s candle never goes out...”
Paul McCartney, 2008
Be prepared to be shocked. Paul McCartney considered as an avant-garde musician? As usual, truth is stranger than fiction, and certainly more interesting than myth. Thrillington, recorded in 1971, was merely the second of several secret identities which the ever erstwhile McCartney cleverly used to further his creative ambitions while still concurrently delivering the bright and shiny goods we have all come to identify with his illustrious name. The first persona of course was the world famous Sergeant Pepper, the second was Percy T., and the third was the relatively unknown The Fireman. But all are multi-faceted reflections, or refractions perhaps, of the complicated artistic world of this innovative musician. But he’s even far more innovative than some might imagine, given that most of his most adventurous work has been done either in secret or has been held back for a variety of reasons, both legal and commercial. The time is thus long overdue for a serious critical reassessment of the serious side of McCartney and his solo music, along with an in-depth appreciation for this almost unknown daring side to a profoundly well known and successful popular musician. Perhaps even too well known for his own good.
Perhaps prompted by the not so sudden decision to finally release his experimental sound collage, Carnival of Light, 1967 (or least promise to continue trying to do so), after nearly forty two years of languishing in legend, but equally inspired by his own deft solo work and recent collaborations with artists more than half his age, inevitably the re-examination of McCartney’s body of work also leads to some surprising revelations about his personal position in the history of taking creative chances. “It gets dangerous when you start believing your own legacy” is how he himself he puts it.
Speaking of legacies, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”, John Lennon once cavalierly joked, in the usual off-the-cuff manner that often belied the profoundly painful truths hidden beneath his vulnerable, vicious and beautiful armor. The reassessment of McCartney thus also has the parallel side effect of reconsidering Lennon, and determining just who was the cutting edge composer and cultural risk-taker between them. There is really no contest. Both were geniuses but only one of them was and is truly comfortable being a genius.
There's a difference.
McCartney has been unfairly labeled a commercial sell-out over the years due to the scintillating perfection of his admittedly perfect pop songs, and this has occurred at the expense of his other secret side, the side that was a far more accomplished avant-garde artist than his late partner could ever have hoped to be (even with the assistance of his black-clad goddess). In fact, Lennon’s own famous tape loop experiments in musique concrete (Revolution #9 from the White Album for instance) were pale solipsistic imitations of McCartney’s more confident excursions, with which he prepared a context for the source material from the BBC library that Lennon would later toy with after staying up too late one year. Someone had too much to think last night.
Indeed, many of their innovations together, such as the rushing tape reversals on “Rain”, the wonky guitars on Taxman, even the loops on “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and of course the Pepper excursions, to name but a few, were generated by the open confidence of McCartney and not by the notorious insecurities of his brilliant but disturbed partner. It was McCartney who firmly believed that taking chances was part of his professional job description, even as a Beatle, but definitely since then, even though much of his most interesting work was overlooked by a huge public in favour of his more feel-good material, a public that he himself helped create.
Lennon spent most of his precious time attempting to catch up to and surpass his partner’s obvious penchant for pushing the artistic envelope, with his Ono-alliance being only the most blatant attempt to do so. Few people Lennon encountered would ever catch a glimpse the soft soul crushed under that hard shell of his. Two people who did both feel it and fully appreciate it would later become his first and only songwriting partner and his second wife. It gives the term love-triangle a whole new meaning.
This much is journalistic liturgy: The Beatles were together for just eight years (really only six if you want to be psychologically accurate) until the split in 1970. McCartney has spent the greatest part of his life and career as a solo performer, with painfully less creative success than he enjoyed with Lennon, though with considerable of the commercial sort He concedes that he will probably never again write songs with the luminescence of “Here, There and Everywhere” or “Eleanor Rigby” from Revolver, 1966.
According to Mark Edmonds, who interviewed him recently regarding his newest work, “McCartney feels real, tangible, lingering pain about the Beatles, and particularly the fact that he has carried the blame for their break-up. The roots of the Beatles’ break-up go back to 1967, with the death of Brian Epstein. The group’s finances soon became chaotic and McCartney pushed for the Eastmans, his in-laws, to take over their management. Lennon opposed McCartney’s desire to control the band’s destiny and legacy, and proposed a new manager, Allen Klein, with whom he, George and Ringo had already signed. Stalemate ensued. McCartney wouldn’t budge, nor would Lennon. By then all four were ready to go their separate ways. McCartney sued to legally wind up the band, ensuring it couldn’t reform without him and leaving none of their legacy under Klein’s control. The split was messy and brutal.” (1)
Like so many others, I too fell for the myth that Lennon was the daring and experimental half of the legendary partnership, and indeed many of his songs were on the edge of a certain sonic border, but his was a personal and social radicalism, one that became entangled in the same sad web as all his other precious gifts. Yet surprisingly to some, myself included at first, it was McCartney who had the deep prior knowledge of serious new contemporary music required to even dream of incorporating it into his rock or pop music, let alone explore its outer limits authentically, as he did in his later orchestral compositions. It was McCartney who knew and loved the new music compositions of Cage and Stockhausen, a sonic landscape that no other Beatle wanted to visit at all. In fact, George’s typically cheeky response was, “I avant garde a clue!”
In that most radical of years, 1968, commenting on his famous songwriting partner’s “liaison” with the infamous Ono, McCartney himself sarcastically said, “When two great Saints meet, it is a humbling experience”. Yet he could almost have been describing the Lennon-McCartney musical miracle itself, just as easily as the Lennon-Ono heresy. As a solo artist, Lennon was a sullen sulk, but John with Paul was revealed scripture.
It appears there are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who believe the world is divided into two kinds of people, and the kind that don’t. But often, whether we like it or not, those two inevitably find each other. McCartney was half of one kind of person, Lennon was half of another kind. And then, each of them had their secrets sides. That makes four of them already. One was just more obvious about it than the other. In their secret sides, each of them had a kernel of the other embedded within themselves, and it was this potent combination of two very different pathologies, one relatively benign and extroverted, the other one self-destructive and introverted, simultaneously leading to both heavenly harmony and horrifying dissonance that gave their subtly nuanced collaborations such intense verve. Even today. Maybe moreso today.
His best known innovations should be examined in the context of his astonishing collaborations within The Beatles format. Rock’n’roll, that remarkably American invention, was already inherently dissonant and, along with jazz and blues, represents what could be seen as an artistic rejection of classicism. But McCartney, by reinventing its traditions, would push rock to an exquisite limit of creativity that transformed it forever. He then went on to explore the less commercial realms far outside those traditions.
This then in essence is the the story of these two drastically very different personal and professional reactions to the fact that the world really liked them, considering the scope of the changes they brought to the world, and two very different artistic directions taken after their partnership dissolved, one moving toward the world, one away from the world. While Lennon was the revolutionary person, McCartney was the revolutionary artist, and since he was relatively healthy and hugely happy with his genius instead of being fixated, potentially in the closet and as misanthropic as John appeared to be, Paulie thrived. Yet ironically they also each had two fully developed but spit-sides of themselves, one side of which they submerged and sublimated in order to collaborate with their partner in that swift magic they were capable of creating, but only together.
In terms of responding to the simple fact that the world not only loved but possibly adored him, each one had a pathology: for Paul, the world liking him made sense, since he was like-able, brilliant and beautiful, and he was also balanced in his repression of his secret side, which was allowed to emerge only in the form of John Lennon. Therefore the fact that the world liked him simply meant that he was doing something right. Meanwhile Lennon, who repressed his sensitive guilt-ridden vulnerability and allowed human compassion to emerge only in the form of Paul McCartney, clearly believed that if the world liked him then he must be doing something wrong, since naturally the world was compromised and doomed, so he went out of his way not to please people, and yet felt doomed himself because he could never escape the fact that even when he wanted to displease people, he still pleased them. The curse of fulfilled-dream syndrome perhaps.
McCartney has a totally different form of pathology than Lennon, but only on the surface. His particular compulsion is to perpetually entertain us, to soothe us. His half of the amazingly creative team that fueled The Beatles was also fraught with remarkable insecurities of a different order, the desire to please and the anger he somehow managed to sublimate and transform into perpetually soothing anthems of hopeful happiness and wistful loss. But his former songwriting partner never had that particular problem. He had others, of course, but McCartney was always able to rise above the inherent inner conflicts in his creative character as a solo artist, and to be authentically happy to entertain us. It wasn't him after all, whop took his lucky break and broke it in two. Though lately Paul he has begun to release a few thought provoking skeletons from his closet, and he is coming out from the commerical closet in quite a different way.
The popular myth goes like this: unfortunately for Paul, his powerfully creative and muse-like connection with John is all the more obvious today, when one recognizes that half of his own post-Lennon music, while being perfectly crafted and very popular, is about as compelling as traveling in an cozy elevator. Yet the other half, the secret half, is of an experimental order that makes us stop in our tracks. There’s a kind of bipolar genius here.
Some of McCartney’s experimental music even anticipates the rough-hewn and loose-limbed structures of Jack White’s best music in quite a visionary manner, since Paul’s original forays into raw self-produced and all-instrument virtuosity were conceived some thirty years before White’s ascent to global rock star status. McCartney was already busy getting back to the rough roots of non-studio rock music recorded on the fly with hyper-analog equipment, five years before Jack White was even born. And five years before that, he was also composing in a totally abstract and songless sonic language in "Carnival of Light". So it’s that second half of McCartney, the secret side sublimated through Lennon, that we’re interested in considering in the context of “Bright and Shiny”.
A good example of the harmonic divergence so well analyzed by Ian Macdonald would be to examine two different songs on roughly the same subject, such as a McCartney creation like “Penny Lane”, and a Lennon creation like “Strawberry Fields Forever”. Both songs are about their childhoods, but while one is a lyrical romp through a kindhearted fantasy world concocted through the generosity of Paul, the other is a fantastic visit to the real estate of abandonment courtesy of John. Both are among their best songs. Only on the surface does one appear more experimental than the other. Sometimes I wonder which is the real world and which is the imagined one, in these songs. But more importantly, both songs are made possible through the agency of the other partner, even if one or the other is officially considered the nominal author of the song itself. Each of these superb artists looks through the other, both mirror and window, in order to marshal their forces to uncommon creative heights. Until, that is, Lennon decided he didn’t want to do that anymore. Or that he couldn’t. Or he forgot how to. Or his black-clad goddess prohibted it.
But McCartney, having access to more than one side of himself (whereas Lennon had lost access to virtually any of his erased selves) has never forgotten how to be both an creative artist and a performer, a visionary and an entertainer, with perhaps too much of the best of everything. Either way, he seems to be engaging in the kind of introspective vault tinkering that a senior artist usually does when they’ve entered somethiong like the late-Picasso stage of their own career arc. Edmonds comments that, “He has almost breezily drawn a line under the messiest divorce in decades, and yet his role in the split from The Beatles still cuts deep. McCartney is clearly in touch with his mortality, and he doesn’t want his immortality tarnished.” (3)
But after all, it is the music McCartney was recording in-between takes of one of his masterpieces, “Penny Lane”, back then in '67, and which will finally be released, hopefully next year (or maybe the year after that, or maybe it's laready been secretly released as the seond half of "Don't Stop Running", on Electric Arguments) that really interests us here, as well as his early solo experiments with rough recording styles. But that little 14-minute romp through abstraction McCartney concocted with considerable confidence and aplomb was simply too much for the rest of The Beatles to tolerate musically, intellectually, emotionally, artistically, spiritually, mentally, and well, just Beatley.
This story is all about that other secret side. It’s a side celebrated in certain albums, and hidden away in others, so therefore it is through the ongoing recorded body of work that we can best trace these secret tendencies, as outlined in the table of contents portion of this proposal. The creative arc both begins and ends with "Carnival of Light".
Although McCartney was certainly not the only member of the group to feel constricted by the Beatle format and to try to escape from it, he was definitely the only one who made genuinely experimental music out of the fertile solo transition period immediately following his freedom. McCartney’s first three solo records, McCartney 1970, Ram 1971 and Wildlife 1971, were each a consciously meditated and mediated retreat from the sonic opulence of hyper-tech studio-made music, each recorded at home, without an engineer or producer. Each was not so much an anti-Beatle record of the sort John would unfortunately make, but rather an anti-hype and gritty basement tape kind of record that was far, far ahead of its time. As per the future Jack White.
It was almost as if the grand masterwork of George Martin’s final production for the majestic Abbey Road was just all too polished and sophisticated for his tastes as the reiterator of Rock’s roots, so McCartney allowed all the rough edges of his conception to be memorialized in the music itself on those first three solo efforts. In retrospect, this was very White-like long before anything like his arcane strategy had been dreamed of. The mid-career McCartney maturity phase is ironically also one of mid-life crisis, reflected in the abstract edges and slightly punk-edgy urges of McCartney 2, in 1980. His label for would not let him release McCartney 2 as he designed it, a demanding double record of considerable scope and scale, because the second disc was utterly experimental, and they explained that "this was not the Paul that people want to hear..." and he caved in.
True Himself does like to please. But a big part of him also likes to let his musical mind go wandering, where it will go. Yet look where his mind goes if he lets it, or if we let him. No one knew who or what The Fireman was back in 1993 when McCartney used one of his favorite motifs, donning the mask of an alter-ego within which he can go further than he could by himself, or perhaps more importantly, as himself, in order to collaborate with a gifted young producer-wizard and reinvent himself as a dance-mix master. For Paul it must just be another form of Pepper-like sound collage after all, a stylistic device that has long absorbed him. The very randomness of his current free form band is exactly the element he most cherishes.
Part of the purpose here in the assumption of an alter-ego is to have a means of channeling that secret desire for disorder, as McCartney himself described it to Thorpe: “It was a very random process but it is very liberating. It's an approach I've been interested in. With Sergeant Pepper, the whole idea was to create a band and we could pretend we were that band, not The Beatles. So we made that record with that in mind.Normally when John would walk up to the microphone, some part of his brain would be conscious that he was doing a John Lennon vocal. And that's sometimes a little bit of a pressure. So we created this idea in Sergeant Pepper where you're not John Lennon, you're Dirk. So you go up to a mic and you just sing how you want to sing rather than how you expect people think you're going to sing. And it's quite liberating to do that.” (5)
Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest, 1993, was particular exhilarating before the media and public discovered who The Fireman was. Flaming Pie, 1997, is one of the finest pieces of songwriting he has done in years, directly from his heart to you, in his most elegant of packages. It’s what he does best. But then he boldly followed up with both Rushes 1998, his second outing as The Fireman, a wordless and muscular dance experiment for people with alien hand syndrome, and Liverpool Sound Collage, 2000, which harkens back to his early tape experiments on Revolver and Pepper. The Fireman? He rushed in from the pouring rain, very strange!
As a matter of fact, McCartney has often remarked that he’d like to release the album everyone is afraid of, the one called Paul Goes Too Far. Bring it on. One of the purposes here is to encourage him do so. As a matter of fact, the subtitle to his new release may well have used that tongue in cheek line quite seriously, except that for our purposes he has gone just far enough. Wedged between his serious contemporary chamber music, along the lines of the English pastoral composers such as Vaughn Williams and Delius, in both Working Classical, 1999, and Standing Stone, 1997.
But then he once again returned from those exotic excursions, returned to form perhaps, returned home one might say, to visit his own backyard, both figuratively and literally, in Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, 2002, which was like fine aged armagnac. Twin Freaks, 2005, is an amazing experiment wherein McCartney gave free access to a treasure chest of his master tapes to one of his young collaborators, who then remixed well known songs in fragmented and sculptural ways with suitably shiny results.
The Fireman has three albums so far. His newest record, Electric Arguments, 2008 was a brilliant return to form which merges the two sides of his character into an almost conventional rock band format. But still, the music he had composed behind that persona mask is far from conventional, and contrary to his myth, McCartney always was and still is, a shockingly innovative and dissonant contemporary artist. He just hides it so well behind that beatific smile.
In fact, maybe I'm amazed that McCartney hasn't yet sought out Jack White to play with him, especially since White is just about the only person capable of matching Lennon's wicked voice and matching his astonishing charisma. But that might yet come to pass. His many and varied collaborations (such as Michael Jackson and Elvis Costello) will also be explored to a degree in this book, but only insofar as they represent his ongoing attempt to discover a new partnership as significant as the one upon which his legend is based. McCartney expresses it with suitably wistful insight into his character: “I like working with someone. I like giving up control. I don't need to have full control all the time. I like a bit, but I like to throw it open to someone. It's more fun than sitting in a room on your own all day.” (Ibid)
In a sense, this story is also book-ended by itself: on the one hand by the aborted attempt to release "Carnival of Light" in 1967 (the same year that the visionary Brian Wilson’s Smile experiment failed to launch) and on the other hand, its eventual release in, when 2012?, hot on the heels of a yet another record, as yet untitled, by a sixty-seven year old genius who is utterly comfortable being the Mozart of contemporary pop music.
Upon reflection, one of the best reasons he has for releasing "Carnival of Light" soon is precisely the fact that he is also still releasing some of the most accomplished and innovative records of his musical career, The Beatles included, and perhaps he’d just like to rightly remind us that he’s been doing this sort of thing, both stylistic sides delivered at once, for more than four decades now. It’s that legacy thing again. It must be difficult though, knowing that almost nothing you can ever do in this lifetime, no matter how beautiful or brilliant, will approach the legacy you shared with Mr. L. Quite a burden to live and perform with. But keep trying by all means. We're behind you all the way.
The Secret Music of Paul McCartney
By Donald Brackett
“And the fireman rushes in, from the pouring rain, very strange….”
Paul McCartney, 1967
“The fireman’s candle never goes out...”
Paul McCartney, 2008
Be prepared to be shocked. Paul McCartney considered as an avant-garde musician? As usual, truth is stranger than fiction, and certainly more interesting than myth. Thrillington, recorded in 1971, was merely the second of several secret identities which the ever erstwhile McCartney cleverly used to further his creative ambitions while still concurrently delivering the bright and shiny goods we have all come to identify with his illustrious name. The first persona of course was the world famous Sergeant Pepper, the second was Percy T., and the third was the relatively unknown The Fireman. But all are multi-faceted reflections, or refractions perhaps, of the complicated artistic world of this innovative musician. But he’s even far more innovative than some might imagine, given that most of his most adventurous work has been done either in secret or has been held back for a variety of reasons, both legal and commercial. The time is thus long overdue for a serious critical reassessment of the serious side of McCartney and his solo music, along with an in-depth appreciation for this almost unknown daring side to a profoundly well known and successful popular musician. Perhaps even too well known for his own good.
Perhaps prompted by the not so sudden decision to finally release his experimental sound collage, Carnival of Light, 1967 (or least promise to continue trying to do so), after nearly forty two years of languishing in legend, but equally inspired by his own deft solo work and recent collaborations with artists more than half his age, inevitably the re-examination of McCartney’s body of work also leads to some surprising revelations about his personal position in the history of taking creative chances. “It gets dangerous when you start believing your own legacy” is how he himself he puts it.
Speaking of legacies, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”, John Lennon once cavalierly joked, in the usual off-the-cuff manner that often belied the profoundly painful truths hidden beneath his vulnerable, vicious and beautiful armor. The reassessment of McCartney thus also has the parallel side effect of reconsidering Lennon, and determining just who was the cutting edge composer and cultural risk-taker between them. There is really no contest. Both were geniuses but only one of them was and is truly comfortable being a genius.
There's a difference.
McCartney has been unfairly labeled a commercial sell-out over the years due to the scintillating perfection of his admittedly perfect pop songs, and this has occurred at the expense of his other secret side, the side that was a far more accomplished avant-garde artist than his late partner could ever have hoped to be (even with the assistance of his black-clad goddess). In fact, Lennon’s own famous tape loop experiments in musique concrete (Revolution #9 from the White Album for instance) were pale solipsistic imitations of McCartney’s more confident excursions, with which he prepared a context for the source material from the BBC library that Lennon would later toy with after staying up too late one year. Someone had too much to think last night.
Indeed, many of their innovations together, such as the rushing tape reversals on “Rain”, the wonky guitars on Taxman, even the loops on “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and of course the Pepper excursions, to name but a few, were generated by the open confidence of McCartney and not by the notorious insecurities of his brilliant but disturbed partner. It was McCartney who firmly believed that taking chances was part of his professional job description, even as a Beatle, but definitely since then, even though much of his most interesting work was overlooked by a huge public in favour of his more feel-good material, a public that he himself helped create.
Lennon spent most of his precious time attempting to catch up to and surpass his partner’s obvious penchant for pushing the artistic envelope, with his Ono-alliance being only the most blatant attempt to do so. Few people Lennon encountered would ever catch a glimpse the soft soul crushed under that hard shell of his. Two people who did both feel it and fully appreciate it would later become his first and only songwriting partner and his second wife. It gives the term love-triangle a whole new meaning.
This much is journalistic liturgy: The Beatles were together for just eight years (really only six if you want to be psychologically accurate) until the split in 1970. McCartney has spent the greatest part of his life and career as a solo performer, with painfully less creative success than he enjoyed with Lennon, though with considerable of the commercial sort He concedes that he will probably never again write songs with the luminescence of “Here, There and Everywhere” or “Eleanor Rigby” from Revolver, 1966.
According to Mark Edmonds, who interviewed him recently regarding his newest work, “McCartney feels real, tangible, lingering pain about the Beatles, and particularly the fact that he has carried the blame for their break-up. The roots of the Beatles’ break-up go back to 1967, with the death of Brian Epstein. The group’s finances soon became chaotic and McCartney pushed for the Eastmans, his in-laws, to take over their management. Lennon opposed McCartney’s desire to control the band’s destiny and legacy, and proposed a new manager, Allen Klein, with whom he, George and Ringo had already signed. Stalemate ensued. McCartney wouldn’t budge, nor would Lennon. By then all four were ready to go their separate ways. McCartney sued to legally wind up the band, ensuring it couldn’t reform without him and leaving none of their legacy under Klein’s control. The split was messy and brutal.” (1)
Like so many others, I too fell for the myth that Lennon was the daring and experimental half of the legendary partnership, and indeed many of his songs were on the edge of a certain sonic border, but his was a personal and social radicalism, one that became entangled in the same sad web as all his other precious gifts. Yet surprisingly to some, myself included at first, it was McCartney who had the deep prior knowledge of serious new contemporary music required to even dream of incorporating it into his rock or pop music, let alone explore its outer limits authentically, as he did in his later orchestral compositions. It was McCartney who knew and loved the new music compositions of Cage and Stockhausen, a sonic landscape that no other Beatle wanted to visit at all. In fact, George’s typically cheeky response was, “I avant garde a clue!”
In that most radical of years, 1968, commenting on his famous songwriting partner’s “liaison” with the infamous Ono, McCartney himself sarcastically said, “When two great Saints meet, it is a humbling experience”. Yet he could almost have been describing the Lennon-McCartney musical miracle itself, just as easily as the Lennon-Ono heresy. As a solo artist, Lennon was a sullen sulk, but John with Paul was revealed scripture.
It appears there are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who believe the world is divided into two kinds of people, and the kind that don’t. But often, whether we like it or not, those two inevitably find each other. McCartney was half of one kind of person, Lennon was half of another kind. And then, each of them had their secrets sides. That makes four of them already. One was just more obvious about it than the other. In their secret sides, each of them had a kernel of the other embedded within themselves, and it was this potent combination of two very different pathologies, one relatively benign and extroverted, the other one self-destructive and introverted, simultaneously leading to both heavenly harmony and horrifying dissonance that gave their subtly nuanced collaborations such intense verve. Even today. Maybe moreso today.
His best known innovations should be examined in the context of his astonishing collaborations within The Beatles format. Rock’n’roll, that remarkably American invention, was already inherently dissonant and, along with jazz and blues, represents what could be seen as an artistic rejection of classicism. But McCartney, by reinventing its traditions, would push rock to an exquisite limit of creativity that transformed it forever. He then went on to explore the less commercial realms far outside those traditions.
This then in essence is the the story of these two drastically very different personal and professional reactions to the fact that the world really liked them, considering the scope of the changes they brought to the world, and two very different artistic directions taken after their partnership dissolved, one moving toward the world, one away from the world. While Lennon was the revolutionary person, McCartney was the revolutionary artist, and since he was relatively healthy and hugely happy with his genius instead of being fixated, potentially in the closet and as misanthropic as John appeared to be, Paulie thrived. Yet ironically they also each had two fully developed but spit-sides of themselves, one side of which they submerged and sublimated in order to collaborate with their partner in that swift magic they were capable of creating, but only together.
In terms of responding to the simple fact that the world not only loved but possibly adored him, each one had a pathology: for Paul, the world liking him made sense, since he was like-able, brilliant and beautiful, and he was also balanced in his repression of his secret side, which was allowed to emerge only in the form of John Lennon. Therefore the fact that the world liked him simply meant that he was doing something right. Meanwhile Lennon, who repressed his sensitive guilt-ridden vulnerability and allowed human compassion to emerge only in the form of Paul McCartney, clearly believed that if the world liked him then he must be doing something wrong, since naturally the world was compromised and doomed, so he went out of his way not to please people, and yet felt doomed himself because he could never escape the fact that even when he wanted to displease people, he still pleased them. The curse of fulfilled-dream syndrome perhaps.
McCartney has a totally different form of pathology than Lennon, but only on the surface. His particular compulsion is to perpetually entertain us, to soothe us. His half of the amazingly creative team that fueled The Beatles was also fraught with remarkable insecurities of a different order, the desire to please and the anger he somehow managed to sublimate and transform into perpetually soothing anthems of hopeful happiness and wistful loss. But his former songwriting partner never had that particular problem. He had others, of course, but McCartney was always able to rise above the inherent inner conflicts in his creative character as a solo artist, and to be authentically happy to entertain us. It wasn't him after all, whop took his lucky break and broke it in two. Though lately Paul he has begun to release a few thought provoking skeletons from his closet, and he is coming out from the commerical closet in quite a different way.
The popular myth goes like this: unfortunately for Paul, his powerfully creative and muse-like connection with John is all the more obvious today, when one recognizes that half of his own post-Lennon music, while being perfectly crafted and very popular, is about as compelling as traveling in an cozy elevator. Yet the other half, the secret half, is of an experimental order that makes us stop in our tracks. There’s a kind of bipolar genius here.
Some of McCartney’s experimental music even anticipates the rough-hewn and loose-limbed structures of Jack White’s best music in quite a visionary manner, since Paul’s original forays into raw self-produced and all-instrument virtuosity were conceived some thirty years before White’s ascent to global rock star status. McCartney was already busy getting back to the rough roots of non-studio rock music recorded on the fly with hyper-analog equipment, five years before Jack White was even born. And five years before that, he was also composing in a totally abstract and songless sonic language in "Carnival of Light". So it’s that second half of McCartney, the secret side sublimated through Lennon, that we’re interested in considering in the context of “Bright and Shiny”.
A good example of the harmonic divergence so well analyzed by Ian Macdonald would be to examine two different songs on roughly the same subject, such as a McCartney creation like “Penny Lane”, and a Lennon creation like “Strawberry Fields Forever”. Both songs are about their childhoods, but while one is a lyrical romp through a kindhearted fantasy world concocted through the generosity of Paul, the other is a fantastic visit to the real estate of abandonment courtesy of John. Both are among their best songs. Only on the surface does one appear more experimental than the other. Sometimes I wonder which is the real world and which is the imagined one, in these songs. But more importantly, both songs are made possible through the agency of the other partner, even if one or the other is officially considered the nominal author of the song itself. Each of these superb artists looks through the other, both mirror and window, in order to marshal their forces to uncommon creative heights. Until, that is, Lennon decided he didn’t want to do that anymore. Or that he couldn’t. Or he forgot how to. Or his black-clad goddess prohibted it.
But McCartney, having access to more than one side of himself (whereas Lennon had lost access to virtually any of his erased selves) has never forgotten how to be both an creative artist and a performer, a visionary and an entertainer, with perhaps too much of the best of everything. Either way, he seems to be engaging in the kind of introspective vault tinkering that a senior artist usually does when they’ve entered somethiong like the late-Picasso stage of their own career arc. Edmonds comments that, “He has almost breezily drawn a line under the messiest divorce in decades, and yet his role in the split from The Beatles still cuts deep. McCartney is clearly in touch with his mortality, and he doesn’t want his immortality tarnished.” (3)
But after all, it is the music McCartney was recording in-between takes of one of his masterpieces, “Penny Lane”, back then in '67, and which will finally be released, hopefully next year (or maybe the year after that, or maybe it's laready been secretly released as the seond half of "Don't Stop Running", on Electric Arguments) that really interests us here, as well as his early solo experiments with rough recording styles. But that little 14-minute romp through abstraction McCartney concocted with considerable confidence and aplomb was simply too much for the rest of The Beatles to tolerate musically, intellectually, emotionally, artistically, spiritually, mentally, and well, just Beatley.
This story is all about that other secret side. It’s a side celebrated in certain albums, and hidden away in others, so therefore it is through the ongoing recorded body of work that we can best trace these secret tendencies, as outlined in the table of contents portion of this proposal. The creative arc both begins and ends with "Carnival of Light".
Although McCartney was certainly not the only member of the group to feel constricted by the Beatle format and to try to escape from it, he was definitely the only one who made genuinely experimental music out of the fertile solo transition period immediately following his freedom. McCartney’s first three solo records, McCartney 1970, Ram 1971 and Wildlife 1971, were each a consciously meditated and mediated retreat from the sonic opulence of hyper-tech studio-made music, each recorded at home, without an engineer or producer. Each was not so much an anti-Beatle record of the sort John would unfortunately make, but rather an anti-hype and gritty basement tape kind of record that was far, far ahead of its time. As per the future Jack White.
It was almost as if the grand masterwork of George Martin’s final production for the majestic Abbey Road was just all too polished and sophisticated for his tastes as the reiterator of Rock’s roots, so McCartney allowed all the rough edges of his conception to be memorialized in the music itself on those first three solo efforts. In retrospect, this was very White-like long before anything like his arcane strategy had been dreamed of. The mid-career McCartney maturity phase is ironically also one of mid-life crisis, reflected in the abstract edges and slightly punk-edgy urges of McCartney 2, in 1980. His label for would not let him release McCartney 2 as he designed it, a demanding double record of considerable scope and scale, because the second disc was utterly experimental, and they explained that "this was not the Paul that people want to hear..." and he caved in.
True Himself does like to please. But a big part of him also likes to let his musical mind go wandering, where it will go. Yet look where his mind goes if he lets it, or if we let him. No one knew who or what The Fireman was back in 1993 when McCartney used one of his favorite motifs, donning the mask of an alter-ego within which he can go further than he could by himself, or perhaps more importantly, as himself, in order to collaborate with a gifted young producer-wizard and reinvent himself as a dance-mix master. For Paul it must just be another form of Pepper-like sound collage after all, a stylistic device that has long absorbed him. The very randomness of his current free form band is exactly the element he most cherishes.
Part of the purpose here in the assumption of an alter-ego is to have a means of channeling that secret desire for disorder, as McCartney himself described it to Thorpe: “It was a very random process but it is very liberating. It's an approach I've been interested in. With Sergeant Pepper, the whole idea was to create a band and we could pretend we were that band, not The Beatles. So we made that record with that in mind.Normally when John would walk up to the microphone, some part of his brain would be conscious that he was doing a John Lennon vocal. And that's sometimes a little bit of a pressure. So we created this idea in Sergeant Pepper where you're not John Lennon, you're Dirk. So you go up to a mic and you just sing how you want to sing rather than how you expect people think you're going to sing. And it's quite liberating to do that.” (5)
Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest, 1993, was particular exhilarating before the media and public discovered who The Fireman was. Flaming Pie, 1997, is one of the finest pieces of songwriting he has done in years, directly from his heart to you, in his most elegant of packages. It’s what he does best. But then he boldly followed up with both Rushes 1998, his second outing as The Fireman, a wordless and muscular dance experiment for people with alien hand syndrome, and Liverpool Sound Collage, 2000, which harkens back to his early tape experiments on Revolver and Pepper. The Fireman? He rushed in from the pouring rain, very strange!
As a matter of fact, McCartney has often remarked that he’d like to release the album everyone is afraid of, the one called Paul Goes Too Far. Bring it on. One of the purposes here is to encourage him do so. As a matter of fact, the subtitle to his new release may well have used that tongue in cheek line quite seriously, except that for our purposes he has gone just far enough. Wedged between his serious contemporary chamber music, along the lines of the English pastoral composers such as Vaughn Williams and Delius, in both Working Classical, 1999, and Standing Stone, 1997.
But then he once again returned from those exotic excursions, returned to form perhaps, returned home one might say, to visit his own backyard, both figuratively and literally, in Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, 2002, which was like fine aged armagnac. Twin Freaks, 2005, is an amazing experiment wherein McCartney gave free access to a treasure chest of his master tapes to one of his young collaborators, who then remixed well known songs in fragmented and sculptural ways with suitably shiny results.
The Fireman has three albums so far. His newest record, Electric Arguments, 2008 was a brilliant return to form which merges the two sides of his character into an almost conventional rock band format. But still, the music he had composed behind that persona mask is far from conventional, and contrary to his myth, McCartney always was and still is, a shockingly innovative and dissonant contemporary artist. He just hides it so well behind that beatific smile.
In fact, maybe I'm amazed that McCartney hasn't yet sought out Jack White to play with him, especially since White is just about the only person capable of matching Lennon's wicked voice and matching his astonishing charisma. But that might yet come to pass. His many and varied collaborations (such as Michael Jackson and Elvis Costello) will also be explored to a degree in this book, but only insofar as they represent his ongoing attempt to discover a new partnership as significant as the one upon which his legend is based. McCartney expresses it with suitably wistful insight into his character: “I like working with someone. I like giving up control. I don't need to have full control all the time. I like a bit, but I like to throw it open to someone. It's more fun than sitting in a room on your own all day.” (Ibid)
In a sense, this story is also book-ended by itself: on the one hand by the aborted attempt to release "Carnival of Light" in 1967 (the same year that the visionary Brian Wilson’s Smile experiment failed to launch) and on the other hand, its eventual release in, when 2012?, hot on the heels of a yet another record, as yet untitled, by a sixty-seven year old genius who is utterly comfortable being the Mozart of contemporary pop music.
Upon reflection, one of the best reasons he has for releasing "Carnival of Light" soon is precisely the fact that he is also still releasing some of the most accomplished and innovative records of his musical career, The Beatles included, and perhaps he’d just like to rightly remind us that he’s been doing this sort of thing, both stylistic sides delivered at once, for more than four decades now. It’s that legacy thing again. It must be difficult though, knowing that almost nothing you can ever do in this lifetime, no matter how beautiful or brilliant, will approach the legacy you shared with Mr. L. Quite a burden to live and perform with. But keep trying by all means. We're behind you all the way.
Friday, May 7, 2010
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