Paul and Mike

 

A pulley system had been swiftly assembled to haul logs up a cliff for camp fires. At the suggestion of his brother, Michael McCartney tried to see if he could be transported down the cliff face with the same facility as the pile of logs. But when Michael got halfway down, Paul and the other scouts, worried about Michael’s speed, attempted to induce a braking effect by tugging on one of the ropes. Unfortunately, they pulled the wrong rope and Mike McCartney plunged down the precipice, smashing into an oak tree at the base of the cliff. His left arm severely fractured in three places, Michael spent the entire scout period and two extra weeks in the Sheffield Infirmary, some ten miles away. Arthur Evans admits that he and many of his colleagues already felt great sorrow and sympathy for the two brothers because of the loss of their mother; Evans had lost his father at a similar age. ‘That had been the most shattering experience of my life, and one of the most influential. The suddenness of it affects one profoundly. I don’t remember any outward show of grief from Paul But you bottle it up at that age-you’re very concerned with your new maturity.’

It was with something of a heavy heart, then, that he contacted Jim McCartney to give him the news of this latest calamity. Their father made a considerable impression on Evans: ‘A very charming, very, very concerned man. I liked him very much. He was a very warm, generous, concerned parent. Some of the parents who would visit the camp wouldn’t come and speak to me unless I went over and spoke to them first, but that certainly wasn’t the case with Mr. McCartney. Certainly he didn’t reproach me over Michael’s accident.’

Paul meanwhile, adopted what was beginning to become a familiar role. ‘Paul was a very unflappable person. And while he was obviously concerned–I had the impression he and his brother were very, very close–he took the situation calmly. After coming to tell me, with a face as white as a sheet, that Mike had fallen down this gorge, he then stayed on. He certainly didn’t seem to have considered going home with his father. In fact, he went into Sheffield every day to visit his brother in the hospital.”

~McCartney, Chris Salewicz, 1986

The Eye Contact

Mark Lewisohn discusses Lennon and McCartney.

Paul and John

 

There are sweet moments between all of them—Paul playing piano while Ringo does a spontaneous soft-shoe, George and John having an animated conversation about watching the newly formed Fleetwood Mac on a late-night TV show, Ringo slyly laying his hand overtop of Paul’s and Linda’s in the control room as they listen back to the rooftop recordings, which turns into a playfight. But the romantic friendship between Paul and John, fraying yet unbroken, is the band’s, and the film’s, emotional center. It’s constantly flickering in their eyes, in the physical chemistry between them, in the rhythms they fall into that leave everyone else a few inches outside.  

Late into the project, Paul notices the theme about coming apart and returning home extending through many of their songs, and John cocks an eyebrow. “It’s like you and me are lovers,” he says drily, then pauses: “We’ll have to camp it up for those.” Often when John goes into his habitual kooky voices and Goon Show-style surreal comedy routines, the oft-abandoned Liverpool kid in him seems to be defending against such moments of intimacy and vulnerability with Paul. That particularly comes up on “Two of Us,” which I’ve always thought of as their love duet; in rehearsals they’ll do it in Scottish brogues, or through goofily grotesque clenched teeth, almost any way but straight.

Carl Wilson review of Get Back for Slate Magazine

John, Chris, and Tommy

American singers Tommy Roe and Chris Montez were touring the UK with an up and coming British act called the Beatles.  According to Tommy: “nobody in the States had ever heard of the Beatles.” 

According to Chris, “we got along good together. They seemed like regular guys, just rockers. And they loved music. Paul was real humble and real nice. Ringo and George were real cards. You know, I had a lot of respect for Lennon, and even more now. But he was who he was. Lennon was, I guess, kind of rambunctious.”

The evening of the fight,  “somebody in the business threw them a party,” according to Tommy. “ It was in a beautiful house, kind of a country house out in the forest. Everybody was drinking beer and having a good time. And Chris had left the party and was on the bus asleep in his seat. And we all come piling back on. I come on, I sit down next to Chris. And John comes in, all the Beatles come in, and John’s got a beer in his hand and he’s really whacked, you know, just drunk out of his head and pours the beer on Chris’s head… and Chris wakes up, he’s wet with beer, and he goes, ‘Oh man, what’s that?’ He was pissed. And the big scuffle starts, and we start fighting in the aisles and scuffling and, you know, it was kind of ugly.”

Tommy got between them and tried to make the peace.  Paul, according to Chris, tried to extend the olive branch. “Paul sat by me and said, ‘Come on, Chris, let’s be friends. I said, ‘Paul, just get away from me, I don’t want nothing to do with you guys. You know, you pissed me off. John? I guess he was a wise guy. But I got the sense that, I shouldn’t say this, that he was jealous of who I was or what I did. I don’t know what his problem was, but I didn’t like it too much.”

Later Tommy says that John demanded his guitar back. ‘Before the fight, John was letting me use his Gibson guitar on the bus to write songs. The next day he said, ‘You can’t use my guitar anymore!  That’s it. That’s it! No more. Leave my guitar alone.”

 

John and Picasso

from London Arts Group

Mom and Dad

I’m grateful to have had parents who believed in me and my brother, loved us and provided us with a foundation that has enabled me to handle all the rough moments that have come my way. Going through more than 150 of my songs over the course of five years helped me put so many things into perspective, especially the role that Jim and Mary McCartney played in teaching me that people are basically good–sound lessons that I absorbed and imparted to my children. There are a few baddies, of course, but most people have a good heart. 

I can still picture my father waiting with my brother and me at a bus stop in Liverpool, along with other people in the queue. He’s wearing his trilby, a kind of hat men wore in those days like a uniform. He’d make sure we raised our own school caps to women. ‘Good morning,’ we’d say. It was such a sweet, old-fashioned gesture, and something that has stuck with me all these years. And I can still remember Dad always talking to us about tolerance. ‘Toleration’ and ‘moderation’ were two of his favourite words. 

Paul McCartney, The Lyrics

George Harrison, The Early Years

 

George Harrison was born in a neighbourhood which, as he once recalled, looked like Coronation Street, but saw out his days in homes which would have been beyond his wildest childhood dreams. A cramped two-up, two-down terraced house in Arnold Grove in Liverpool’s Wavertree area was Harrison’s first home.

The young George lived with his bus driver father, Harold, who had been a seaman for many years, and his mother Louise, who was of Irish descent, and his two brothers, Harry and Peter, and sister, also called Louise.The living room at the front of the house was barely used and the family used to gather in the kitchen for the warmth of the stove and the fire. The Arnold Grove house had an outside toilet, at the back of the yard, like most homes at the time, and, for a short while, a hen house. There was no bathroom, just a zinc bathtub which would be filled from the kettle and pans. As he recalled in the Beatles Anthology: “My earliest recollection is of sitting on a pot at the top of the stairs having a poop– shouting ‘finished’.”

When he was five, the family moved to a new council house at Speke after having spent many years on a waiting list. Like many other children he disliked school–in his case, Dovedale Road Infants –which he remembered smelled of boiled cabbage. Sharing a playground at the same time was John Lennon, although they were unaware of each other due to the two-year age gap. 

Harrison has spoken of a happy childhood, during which he would listen to the family radio and hear old dance bands and the familiar voices of Josef Locke and Bing Crosby. But his earliest musical memories were of listening to Hoagy Carmichael songs and One Meatball by Josh White. Elder brother Harry had a portable record player which he would lovingly pack away after each use–and which the rest of the family were barred from touching. But fascinated George and brother Pete would sneak it out and spin discs, listening to artists such as bandleader Glenn Miller, whenever Harry was out.It was through a shared musical interest that he became friendly with Paul McCartney, who would catch the same bus coming home from school. McCartney, then 14 to Harrison’s 13, played the trumpet and they would often talk about their interests, later poring over chord books to learn tunes. The budding guitar hero would sit at the back of class at school, drawing guitars instead of concentrating on lessons.The flourishing friendship between George and Paul saw them head off on a hitch-hiking odyssey to Devon with barely any cash, sleeping on the beach in Paignton. Using a meths burner to cook along the way, the pair survived partly thanks to the goodwill of the people they met on the way and head back through Wales. Paul later moved away from Speke to Allerton, close to Lennon’s home on Menlove Ave, and he swapped his trumpet for the guitar.

Though still at school, Harrison and McCartney would try to get a bit more credibility by sneaking out, ditching their uniforms and hanging out at the nearby art college which Lennon attended.“I remember the first time I gained some respect from John was when I fancied a chick in the art college. She was cute in a Brigitte Bardot sense, blonde, with little pigtails,” Harrison said.“I pulled her and snogged her. Somehow John found out and after that he was a bit more impressed with me.”

George Harrison, The Early Years, Daily Mail. 

The Nude Beatles

In 1968, Richard Bernstein created one of the most controversial pieces titled The Nude Beatles where he had superimposed the Beatles’ heads on nude male bodies in neon colors. A French judge ordered the prints to be confiscated and Apple Records (the Beatles’ label) sued the artist, but ultimately he prevailed. Bernstein, who later met John Lennon and discussed the painting, told him that the work would have made a great album cover. Very few of these prints exist today, but one was recently exhibited at MoMA in 2015 for the Making Music Modern exhibition.

Richard Berstein:  The Starmaker

“And Then There Were Two” Jackson Edit

There’s been alot of talk on social media about Peter Jackson’s Get Back edits–in particular, the segment in which Paul woefully utters the phrase “and then there were two.”

The Jackson edit shows Paul uttering the phrase followed by that now familiar, woeful cutaway to his face.  However, it appears that the phrase was a wry comment Paul made somewhat earlier in the conversation, and was followed by a laugh.

Paul’s woeful expression actually occurred later, following a long discussion with Neil Aspinal and Michael Lindsay Hogg regarding John’s emotional distance from the band and the manner in which he positioned Yoko as his proxy:

Hogg: “do you think if you put any pressure on John he’d go your way a bit more?”

Paul:  Whose this?

Hogg:  John.

Paul (wistful) l: I dunno…(pauses.) But I’m not, you know, I can’t be bothered doing all that.

(Silence. Paul shakes his head at Hogg and stares into space. He appears resigned and defeated. His eyes well up.)

Jackson wasn’t being entirely disengenous in his edit (Paul was obviously feeling resigned and defeated following the meeting with George and the cutaway to his face showed it), but Jackson was engaging in some dramatic licence for effect.  It would be an interesting endeavor to compare Let It Be,  Get Back, and the Nagra tapes side by side, because only then can an unobstructed  view of the latter days of the band be had.

Paul’s Lament

Most music performed by a group is the product of constant, gracious compromise. In the Beatles circa 1969, Paul McCartney is the negotiator-in-chief, and he’s aware of every eggshell he has to walk around or smash to achieve greatness or just to get shit done… But contrary to the prissy picture that’s sometimes been painted of him during the Beatles’ latter days, he comes off as surprisingly aware of the minefield of sensitivities around him, if sometimes a beat or two after the fact… and he’s certainly beyond aware that he’s paying a cost to be the boss. He’s a domineering older brother to George and rival/BFF/frenemy to John, and now he’s playing de facto manager to everyone — not necessarily because he’s taken pole position in the band on merit alone, but because Lennon is suddenly more invested in a woman than he is in being in even the world’s greatest boy band. Seeing McCartney recognize and articulate all these shifts, and soldier on while he gets a little bit sad about them, is one of the pleasures of “Get Back.” If you don’t come away from this with just a little more admiration for Paul, you may just be too in the bag for John and Yoko and their bag-ism, but that’s all right. 

Why The Beatles’ Get Back May Go Down As The Most Essential Roc Doc, Variety.