Paul is Fab.
For a
while back there (70s and 80s), he wasn’t thought of as especially Fab. He was
the uncool one, the irksome one, the one who always seemed to be emotionally guarded
and relentlessly on message. He was Macca, thumbs aloft, head in a cheery side bob,
campaigning to change the writing credits on the Beatles records to put his
name first. Compared to John Lennon – quirky, spiky, difficult, interesting,
cool, murdered, sainted – Macca was low-grade fab, the least of the Beatles, including
Ringo (sorry, Ringo). It was a sad affair: McCartney hadn’t changed, not
really. It’s just that the world had changed its opinion of him for the worse. I
must be one of the only people in the world who unironically loved – yes loved
-the Rupert Bear song he did. I still rate it as one of his best.
But
then, happily, sometime in the dying days of the millennium and ever since, he
got fully Fab again, as we all wised up and realised how great he is. Without
hyperbole, he really is a musical genius. On Get Back, we got to witness
him pulling that peerless title song out of thin air, to the delight of
everyone in the room and the astonishment of everyone in the world. And he did
it whilst sporting the best beard in rock history and scoffing jam on toast. He’s
once more releasing acclaimed albums and touring with a great show. He
headlined Glastonbury. He is loved, he is Fab.
And
that’s how it should be. Paul McCartney is one of history’s most important
cultural icons: he is the man who co-wrote or fully wrote some of the greatest
songs ever recorded. He is not, however, the best Beatle. He will remain
forever in the shadow of John Lennon. And that, too, is how it should be.
Because whereas in the 70s and 80s the Lennon-McCartney pendulum was weighted
unfairly too far towards Lennon, the pendulum has now swung the other way, and
is now weighted too far towards McCartney. All sorts of revisionism is taking
place in Beatles scholarship and fandom, with Paul being routinely championed and
Lennon (and Harrison and Starr) if not exactly denigrated then certainly
downplayed. I heard a podcast the other day in which the hosts argued sincerely
that from the very start the Beatles had co-leadership from Lennon and McCartney,
which is an absurd claim for a band that Lennon created and which at one point was
named Johnny and the Moondogs; it’s a claim which can only be put forward with
the aim to flatter McCartney and downplay Lennon. The discussion after Get
Back was very favourable to McCartney (rightly so) but did seem to me at
least to gloss over the fact that he was occasionally so irksome one of his
bandmates walked out and (kinda/maybe) quit the band. And this is a year on
from another of his bandmates being so irked by him that he walked out and
(kinda/maybe) quit the band. And a year on from when the horn player brought
into play on For No One (one of Paul’s most achingly beautiful songs)
was so irked/exasperated by McCartney that, according to George Martin, “he
nearly exploded!” In the Hamburg Days, Stuart Sutcliffe barely tolerated him,
and Astrid said that “In order, I liked Stu, John, George, Pete (Best) and
Paul.” George Harrison clearly had major issues with Paul, and only grudgingly
agreed to team-up with him and Ringo for the ‘Threatles’ Anthology
project because he was in a deep financial hole. It is widely accepted that McCartney
is single-minded, belligerent, and often tactless. McCartney has his faults.
On the other hand, unlike John, Paul
was never cruel or petty, nor did he bear grudges like the notoriously
curmudgeonly George Harrison. Irksome McCartney was often right on a lot of the
big calls (regarding Alen Klein, for example), had a much better business sense
than his bandmates and was the one who was at the last the most invested in and
appreciative of The Beatles. The Beatles were teens/early tweens when they
formed, and they grew apart as they matured into complex individuals with vastly
different outlooks and interests, and narcotics regimes; the spaced-out Lennon
clearly ceded control of the band, at least nominally, around Magical Mystery
Tour, as his interests expanded all over the place and coalesced into the
sexual magnetism and intellectual artistry of Yoko Ono, and it’s a miracle that
McCartney kept them together for so long after their manager died and things
started falling apart. Anyone should get a free pass for that alone. McCartney
should have been knighted for it.
I’ll
always favour John Lennon because he was my first love and I think he has a
cultural heft even greater than McCartney’s. I’m less irritated by John, even
though he was undoubtedly a major league asshole on occasion, than I am by Paul,
perhaps because I sense an artistic and personal authenticity with Lennon that
I don’t get from McCartney. But I was always rather saddened by the anti-Paul
mood that persisted for so long, and I felt (and feel) that John was uncomfortably
hero worshipped, with his many flaws whitewashed. They named an airport after
him, and that’s quite right. But the Lennon/McCartney pendulum needs balance,
so Paul should get one too. A smaller one. Because Paul is Fab. He’s just not
as Fab as John.
