Four years in the life of Paul McCartney…
Fans and critics alike have tried to carve up The Beatles for years. Like the dolls on the band’s banned 1966 ‘Butcher’ album cover, there has been an impulse to dissect their collective brilliance and wrap each of them in easily digestible pieces. John Lennon was the avant-garde one, Paul McCartney was the saccharine one, George Harrison was the spiritual one, Ringo Starr was the funny one, etc. Such reductive assessments are, of course, nonsense. But if there’s a member of the band whose reputation has taken the most damage in the 53 years since The Beatles split, it’s McCartney.
When Peter Jackson’s 2021 series The Beatles: Get Back showed McCartney conjuring the documentary’s title song out of the ether, it was a revelatory moment for many. Oh yeah (yeah, yeah), they thought, that bloke who wrote or co-wrote songs like Please Please Me, She Loves You, Paperback Writer, Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane and Hey Jude was actually a musical genius.
The song-channelling sequence was a significant step in getting his reputation back to where it once belonged. The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1, 1969-1973 by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair takes that recording session – and all the others the group slogged through in the dying months of the Sixties – as its starting point. The book is the first in a planned series that aims to chronicle McCartney’s musical and personal trajectory up until the present day.
Kozinn and Sinclair’s approach has been inspired by the work of Mark Lewisohn, the foremost authority on The Beatles. There’s a similar level of exhaustive research, together with a willingness to challenge accepted narratives. Thoroughness can only get you so far, though. Even the most diehard fan needs some meat (or a vegetarian option) on the bones of recording details, gig setlists and equipment info. Kozinn and Sinclair deliver in that respect as well.
They’re manifestly helped by the beguiling mass of contradictions that is James Paul McCartney. In the period the book covers he shows rare courage in casting off the trappings of his success, yet still has a relentless drive to outsell everyone else. He regularly expresses a desire to be one of the band, but is unable to resist the urge to take control. In much the same way a left-leaning, philanthropic, high achiever is branded a hypocrite at the merest hint of halo slippage, detractors have been quick to leap upon the instances when McCartney hasn’t behaved like ‘the nice one’ (another example of asinine Beatles stereotyping). But compared to most of his peers (the word is used loosely because, other than his former bandmates and maybe Elvis, no other musicians at the time came close to his level of fame), he maintains a remarkable appearance of normality as the second phase of his career takes shape.
The authors’ decision to represent events without the benefit of hindsight is also a smart move, as it allows the story to be told in a manner that captures the immediacy and uncertainty of McCartney’s post-Beatles situation. This particularly pays dividends where the Allen Klein chapters are concerned. We share McCartney’s intense frustration at Lennon, Harrison and Starr’s inability to perceive the American businessman’s true nature. The hurtful intra-Beatle battles are also felt more keenly from a perspective where reconciliations (which did come later) seem impossible.
With Jackson’s masterful Get Back series being an obvious bookend to The McCartney Legacy, The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years is more than passable as the other. Ron Howard’s 2016 documentary film boasts some glorious footage of McCartney in the group he lovingly calls ‘a great little band’. Howard doesn’t have the luxury of Get Back’s 468-minute running time, but it’s a concise showcase of the live Beatles experience.
The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1, 1969-1973 by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair (HarperCollins). Also available as an Audible audiobook. The Beatles: Get Back (Disney+). The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years (Sky).
