Bill Harry.

"The Paul McCartney Encyclopedia"The Beatles 1963-1970

BILL HARRY. THE PAUL MCCARTNEY ENCYCLOPEDIA

BILL HARRY
THE PAUL MCCARTNEY ENCYCLOPEDIA

INTRODUCTION
Paul McCartney: Renaissance Man
John Lennon's Aunt Mimi said she'd always remember me
because I was the first person ever to call John a genius. There is
no doubt that John was one of the most creative figures of
twentieth-century popular culture. However, his tragic death
elevated him to iconic status, with the result that the undoubted
brilliance of his former partner Paul McCartney became overshadowed.

To my mind Paul is also a genius and, when he used to

write me letters during the early stages of the Beatles' career, I
felt that his writing contained a delightful sense of humour, which,
in some ways was equal to John's.
The composer of classic popular songs such as
'Yesterday', 'Hey Jude', 'Eleanor Rigby', 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely
Hearts Club Band', 'Lady Madonna' and 'Let It Be' was also the one
who conceived a number of the major Beatles projects. Not only was
Paul the man responsible for the ideas behind the Sgt Pepper's
Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road albums, plus the Magical
Mystery Tour film, but he also sketched and drew the initial designs
for a number of the Beatles' album covers.
Paul also composed soundtrack music for the films The
Family Way and The Honorary Consul.
John initially became involved in experimental music
when he composed a version of 'Revolution' for the November 1968
album The Beatles. However, Paul preceded him, becoming the first
member of the Beatles to conduct experiments with sounds when he
composed Carnival of Light. This was a sound collage lasting 13
minutes and 48 seconds that Paul composed for an event called the
'Carnival of Light Rave' at the Roundhouse in Camden Town, London,
which took place on 28 January and 4 February 1967.
John is also remembered as an avant-garde filmmaker,
although his collaborations were mainly Yoko Ono's ideas, which he
co-produced with her. Their first film was called Smile, produced in
1968, a 52-minute film of John smiling. Other projects included Up
Your Legs Forever, an 80-minute film featuring three hundred pairs
of legs, and Fly, a film in which a fly crawled across a naked
girl's body.
Yet even in the field of avant-garde movies, Paul had
beaten John to the punch. In 1966 he made two avant-garde films, The
Defeat of the Dog and The Next Spring Then.
Paul has continued to make film shorts over the years
covering subjects ranging from the Grateful Dead to Rupert the Bear.

In the recording studio he conducted a 41-piece

orchestra on the 'A Day In The Life' track on the Sgt Pepper album.
He is also a multi-instrumentalist who plays not only bass guitar
but also lead guitar, steel guitar and acoustic guitar - and bongos,
drums, flugelhorn, flute, harpsichord, harmonium, maracas, organ,
piano, string bass and trumpet! He took an interest in composing
classical music when Brian Pidgeon, the general manager of the Royal
Liverpool Philharmonic, commissioned him to compose Paul McCartney's
Liverpool Oratorio with Carl Davis.
The work was then given its world premiere at
Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral on Friday June 28 1991 before an
audience of 2,500 as part of the orchestra's 150th-anniversary
celebrations.
Since its debut, during a period of five years, the oratorio has
been performed more than a hundred times in twenty different
countries.
Liverpool Suite is another classical collaboration by
Paul and Carl Davis, which is basically a distillation of the most
melodic and songlike segments of Paul McCartney's Liverpool
Oratorio.
Another work is Standing Stone, a symphonic poem by
Paul, which marked EMI Records' centenary and was premiered at the
Royal Albert Hall on Tuesday 14 October 1997, where it received a
standing ovation.
Paul was to say that the origin of Standing Stone came
about following the death of his friend Ivan Vaughan from
Parkinson's disease.
Ivan was the person who first introduced Paul to John
Lennon. A television documentary, Ivan, portrayed his struggle with
the disease and Paul allowed his song 'Blackbird' to be played at
the beginning and end of the programme free of charge.
He then invited Ivan to spend Christmas 1984 with the
McCartneys at their home in Sussex and continued to keep in touch
until Ivan's death.
He said,' "Jive with Ive, the ace on the bass" was his
intro when we played together. Ivan was very important to me. Poetry
seemed the right way to express what I felt about his death. Later,
I decided to write an epic poem that would serve as the framework
for Standing Stone. I realised that I wasn't going to write a
symphonic work where you take a theme and develop it throughout a
movement, partly because I simply didn't know how to do that.'
The theme is basically that of the history of life on
earth via the ancient standing stones of the Celts.
Another composition is Working Classical, and in August
2000 Paul composed Liverpool Sound Collage as a soundtrack to the
artist Peter Blake's exhibition at the Tate Liverpool.
In the 27 January 1995 issue of New Statesman and
Society, Paul made his debut as a published poet with five poems:
'Chasing The Cherry,' 'Mist The Mind,' 'The Blue Shines Through',
'Trouble Is' and 'Velvet Wine'.
On 23 March 1995, at St James's Palace, London, before
Prince
Charles and invited guests, Paul was present to hear the
debut of 'Leaf, an eight-minute piece for solo piano, which he
composed. The event was called 'An Evening with Paul McCartney'.
Paul emerged as a painter with his first exhibition,
which opened in Germany on 1 May 1999. He had been passionate about
art since he was a child and used to paint his own birthday and
Christmas cards. He also designed some of the Beatles' album
sleeves.
In London in the mid-sixties, under the influence of the
gallery owner Robert Fraser, he became an art collector and
particularly liked the work of Rene Magritte.
Paul also became acquainted with the Dutch painter
Willem de Kooning, based in New York, who was a client of Paul's
father-in-law. When Paul had turned forty, he was encouraged by de
Kooning to take up painting and soon had his own studios in his
homes in the South of England, Arizona and Long Island. An added
incentive was a Christmas present from Linda - Rene Magritte's own
easel. Since 1983 Paul has produced nearly 600 abstract paintings.
The paintings are in oils and acrylic, and cover
landscapes, portraits and abstracts; they include several paintings
of Linda. There are also paintings of John Lennon, David Bowie and
the British Queen, the last entitled Salute to the Queen. Other
titles include John's Room, Yellow Linda With Piano, Egypt Station,
Sea God and Tara's Plastic Skirt.
Singer, songwriter, musician, classical composer, poet,
painter, filmmaker, Paul McCartney is a true renaissance man.
Another example of his creativity in verse is Blackbird Singing:
Poems and Lyrics 1965-1999 (Faber & Faber).
Paul first began to write poetry while at the Liverpool
Institute and in his introduction to his book he mentions his desire
to have a poem printed in the school magazine - but it was rejected.
He doesn't mention it by name, but it could well be 'The Worm Chain
Drags Slowly', which was one of his first efforts at poetry. Paul
also mentions how the death of his friend Ivan Vaughan led him to
attempt to express his feelings in verse.
The volume is introduced and edited by Adrian Mitchell,
who also persuaded Paul to include song lyrics in the collection.
Mitchell is a major contemporary poet who has given more than a
thousand performances of his work around the world. He first met
Paul in January 1963, when, as a journalist with the Daily Mail, he
published the first interview with the Beatles in a national
newspaper.
He developed a friendship with Paul and actually
performed four of his poems backed by Paul, Linda and the band on
the 'Unplugged' tour at Cliffs Pavilion, Southend, on Friday 19 July
1991. (It was Linda who actually phoned Mitchell and suggested that
he edit a book of Paul's poems.)
In 1995 Mitchell was poetry editor of the New Statesman
and published a page featuring five of Paul's poems. Paul was
originally inspired to publish his work by Linda, and the book is
dedicated to her and their four children.
There are more than a hundred poems written between 1965
and 1999 and a dozen of them are about Linda, written in the months
before and after her death in April 1998.
Paul Muldoon, professor of poetry at Oxford University,
comments, 'McCartney's new poems confirm that poetry matters to us
at times in our lives when we try to make sense of things. We are
always reading over the shoulder of the poet and have the moment of
opportunity to share the grief.'
Although song lyrics are juxtaposed with the poems, the
strength of both approaches is evident: images in the lyrics of
'When I'm Sixty-Four' and 'Eleanor Rigby', for instance, and the
powerful words in 'Black Jacket' ('Sadness isn't sadness it's
happiness in a black jacket', and its climax 'tears are not tears
they're balls of laughter dipped in salt'). Truly evocative are his
haunting elegies to Linda, such as 'Her Spirit'.
Paul has received acknowledgment for his undoubted
talents, becoming a Freeman of the City of Liverpool, a Fellow of
the Royal College of Music and a Fellow of the British Academy of
Songwriters, Composers and Authors. He received a knighthood for his
services to music. Yet he says that his greatest achievements are
his four children. Paul became pop music's first billionaire and
publications have made much copy out of the fact that he is so
wealthy. What they don't emphasise are the huge number of
contributions he makes to charities. They are not only financial
contributions, either: he gives time and makes appearances to
promote various causes; he writes and records for charities; and he
is particularly unstinting in championing vegetarianism, animal
rights and the dangers to the world's ecology.
While writing this book, I have come to realise that
Paul's life has been so full of events and music that much might be
missed in this volume. There is certainly enough material to double
the word count, and no doubt there are a number of unrecorded songs,
appearances, people and events that some readers may find missing
from this first edition. I would welcome comments, therefore, for
future editions.
I have been writing about Paul McCartney since 1961 and during that
time have continued my research in newspapers, magazines, fan
magazines, television and film. Many of the books included in the
bibliography were consulted and of particular value were
publications such as Beatles Monthly, Beatlefan, Beatles Unlimited
and the London Beatles Fan Club Magazine, whose issues contain an
incredible amount of information, lovingly compiled by dedicated
fans.
I would like to thank Carolyn Thorne and Barbara Phelan
for their editorial support and everyone at Virgin Books for making
my book a reality.
Bill Harry, London, July 2002