The only thing you done was “Yesterday”
You probably pinched that b*tch anyway
[NOTE: This is the third and final part of our 12th anniversary 2 or 3 lines interview with 2 or 3 lines. If you missed parts one and two, scroll down – the three parts appear in reverse order.]
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2 or 3 lines: Did you read the recent New Yorker interview of Paul McCartney? The one where he dismissed the Rolling Stones are “a blues cover band,” and went on to say that he thought the Beatles’ “net was cast a bit wider than theirs”?
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Q: The new McCartney book you’re referring to is titled The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present. Have you had a chance to peruse it yet?
A: No, I haven’t. It was only published about a week ago, and it will be some time before it makes its way into my local public library. I’m sure as hell not going to spend my own money on that b*tch, so I’ll have to wait until then.
Q: Here’s how the publisher has described the book, which is 960 pages long:
“A work of unparalleled candor and splendorous beauty, The Lyrics celebrates the creative life and the musical genius of Paul McCartney through 154 of his most meaningful songs. . . . The Lyrics pairs the definitive texts of 154 Paul McCartney songs with first-person commentaries on his life and music. Spanning two alphabetically arranged volumes, these commentaries reveal how the songs came to be and the people who inspired them . . . Here are the origins of “Let It Be,” “Lovely Rita,” “Yesterday,” and “Mull of Kintyre,” as well as McCartney’s literary influences, including Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, and Alan Durband, his high-school English teacher.
What do you think?
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A: Shakespeare was one of McCartney’s literary influences? Spare me. But I’m curious to see the book because it is inconceivable to me that anyone could fill up 960 pages talking about Paul McCartney’s song lyrics – even McCartney himself. That would be true even if he stuck to his Beatles songs – with a few exceptions, his post-Beatles body of work is a total waste of time.
Q: So you’re not a fan of “Mull of Kintyre”?
A. I’ve never heard it. But give me a second and I’ll take a quick look at the lyrics. [Silence.] OK, I just pulled up the lyrics to that song online. It seems that the Mull of Kintyre is a place in Scotland where McCartney has owned a farm for some time, and the song is about how much he loves being there. The song’s lyrics are all about “sunsets on fire” and “deer in the glen” and “mist rolling in from the sea.” It is utterly forgettable – it reads like something an 80-year-old widow living in a Scottish village might have written and submitted to her local weekly newspaper.
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Q: Let’s go back to what Sir Paul said about the Stones. The Stones certainly started out as a blues cover band. I’m looking at one of their early Crawdaddy Club setlists, which includes covers of songs by Bo Diddly, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, and Jimmy Reed.
A: They also covered a lot of Chuck Berry songs, and songs like “Poison Ivy” and “Love Potion No. 9,” which aren’t really blues songs – but if you’re defining “blues” to include “rhythm and blues,” I won’t argue with that description.
Q: If the Stones started out as a blues cover band, what did the Beatles start out as?
A: Before they became the world’s most successful boy band, the Beatles were a band that mostly played covers of songs suitable for drunken sailors and prostitutes to dance to.
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| (Stop blaming Yoko! It was PAUL!) |
A: Yes. When they were in Hamburg, the Beatles covered everything from fifties toe-tappers (like “Sweet Little Sixteen” and “Hippy Hippy Shake”) to show tunes (“A Taste of Honey” and “Till There Was You” from The Music Man) to ancient pop standards (“Bésame Mucho” and “Red Sails in the Sunset”) that were perfect for slow dancing, which allowed the drunken sailors to feel up the prostitutes and allowed the prostitutes to pick the pockets of the drunken sailors.
Q: I suppose the real question isn’t whether the Stones were a blues cover band at the beginning of their career, but whether it’s fair to characterize the Stones of the late sixties and early seventies – when they were at their peak – as a blues cover band.
A: The question answers itself, doesn’t it? Songs like “Satisfaction” and “Paint It, Black” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Gimme Shelter” aren’t blues songs, or even R&B songs – although they were influenced by blues music and R&B.
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Q: What about McCartney’s other comment – that the Beatles’ “net was cast a bit wider” than that of the Rolling Stones?
A: The Beatles’ net was not cast very wide at all at first – the original songs on the first few albums are stylistically and thematically very similar. As I’ve said before, Lennon and especially McCartney were very good at coming up with catchy little musical “songlets” – their usual modus operandi was to turn one songlet into the verse or verse/refrain, take another songlet and use it as the bridge (despite the fact that the second songlet might be musically quite different from the fist songlet), and repeat everything until the song was long enough to be released as a single or used as filler on an album. As for the lyrics to those songs, the less said the better.
Q: Now, you don’t really mean that – I’m sure you have a lot you want to say about Lennon and McCartney’s lyrics.
A: Actually, I do. Starting with quoting what many people would agree is the best book ever written about the Beatles’ music – the late Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head, which discusses each and every song the Beatles ever recorded. MacDonald was a fan of the Beatles, but even he acknowledged that the Beatles’ lyrics were “casual” and “slipshod” compared to those of many other songwriters. The Beatles weren’t writing songs for adults, so they didn’t need to worry much about the lyrics – after all, their early records were pitched at 13-year-old girls, so there was no point in writing sophisticated lyrics.
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Q: MacDonald wrote, “As verse, little of the Beatles’ word-output coheres, except by way of mood and style. Is this a serious criticism of their work? Yes.”
A: Even Lennon and McCartney admitted that they put very little thought into the lyrics of the songs on the first several Beatles records. Those songs are very easy to sing along to, but when it comes to the lyrics, there’s not much there. The boys and girls who populate those songs are indistinguishable – they’re utterly generic. They don’t have names, and they don’t have backstories – we don’t even know if the girls are blondes, brunettes, or redheads. Look at the lyrics to “I Want to Hold Your Hold Hand” and “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “Please Please Me” and “P.S. I Love You” and “I Saw Her Standing There.” There’s nothing real about them – they’re assemblages of trite expressions and romantic clichés pitched to middle-school-aged girls. I’m talking about middle-school-aged girls in the sixties, of course – middle-school girls today are infinitely more mature and sophisticated, and would likely laugh at these songs as hopelessly out of it.
Q: To be fair, didn’t most of the hit pop singles of that era have very simple lyrics?
A: Many of them did. But look at some of the Beatles’ contemporaries. Look at “I Get Around” by the Beach Boys, which was released at about the same time as the Beatles’ records I just mentioned. “I Get Around” is not only much more musically sophisticated than those Beatles records, it also features lyrics that tell a real story about real characters. I’m not saying those lyrics are especially profound – it’s a song written for teenagers, after all – but it’s not as generic and two-dimensional as the typical Lennon-McCartney song of that era.
Q: What you are saying may be true of the lyrics for the songs on the early Beatles albums – the “Beatlemania” era. Wouldn’t you admit that the lyrical sophistication of the Beatles records increased significantly over the years?
A: John Lennon’s lyrics certainly grew in sophistication – think “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I Am the Walrus” and especially the parts of “A Day in the Life” that he was responsible for. Those are songs for grown-ups – as were the songs that Bob Dylan and the Who and the Kinks and the Stones were writing in that era. Look at Stones songs like “Satisfaction’ and “Paint It Black” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Gimme Shelter” and “Monkey Man” and “Dead Flowers” and so many others – compare the lyrics of those songs with McCartney’s lyrics for not only childish twaddle like “When I’m Sixty-Four” and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” but also his more serious songs – which were mostly sentimental, pseudo-profound crap. Think “Yesterday” and “Let It Be” and “Hey Jude.” The guy had an incredibly fertile mind when it came to musical ideas, but he was just hopeless as a lyricist – either because he didn’t think lyrics were important, or because he simply didn’t have the brains or the heart to write better ones.
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Q: You’ve identified a number of what you consider McCartney’s worst songs with the Beatles. What were McCartney’s best songs?
A: He made important contributions to “A Day in the Life” and the Abbey Road side-two medley – but those were really more songlets rather than fully-developed songs. I have a lot of affection for “Get Back,” but it’s not much more than a songlet as well. The one truly great, fully-realized Beatles song that McCartney is apparently wholly responsible for is “Helter Skelter.” I find it mind-blowing that “Helter Skelter” is a McCartney song – it would make perfect sense as a John Lennon song, but has absolutely nothing in common with any of Sir Paul’s other creations. I can’t overstate how awesome a record I think “Helter Skelter” is, and it’s all McCartney. Go figure . . .
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Q: Circling back to the subject of the Rolling Stones, and McCartney’s comment that the Beatles “net was cast a bit wider” than the Stones, isn’t it true that the later Beatles albums incorporate a much more diverse palette of musical styles than what the Stones were recording at the same time?
A: Maybe. But that certainly doesn’t say anything about the relative quality of their music. That “diverse palette” was due in large part to the fact that the Beatles had three very different songwriters who were operating quite independently at the end. Lennon and McCartney worked together closely in the early days but by the time of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper and especially The White Album and Abbey Road, John and Paul and George were on their own – there was little no collaboration between them, and little or no consistency as a result.
Q: By contrast, Jagger and Richards had their ups and downs, but they never stopped collaborating – they never went their own separate ways.
A: That’s right. Generally speaking, it was Keith who came up with the riffs and Mick who came up with the lyrics. That doesn’t mean all their songs sounded alike – if we look at Beggars Banquet, for example, “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Street Fighting Man” are very different from “No Expectations” and “Factory Girl.” But there’s much more of a family resemblance between Jagger-Richards songs than they are between Lennon and McCartney and Harrison songs.
Q: So you would admit that McCartney was right when he said that the Beatles cast their net wider when it came to diversity of musical styles – but you wouldn’t admit that was necessarily a good thing.
A: That’s right. Just because your net covers a larger surface area doesn’t mean you catch more fish. The Stones clearly caught a lot more fish – their musical net went a lot deeper instead of just skimming the surface.
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Q: David Remnick, who interviewed McCartney for the New Yorker, wrote in that piece that “[s]ongs are emotionally charged and brief, so we remember them whole: the melody, the hook, the lyrics, where we were, what we felt. And they are emotionally adhesive, especially when they’re encountered in our youth.”
A: The Beatles were such an overpowering pop-culture phenomenon when my friends and I were impressionable young teenagers that it’s no surprise that their music left an indelible mark on our psyches. I rarely change stations when a Beatles song comes on the radio. But when I look at their songs objectively – when I break down their musical structure and read the lyrics with a critical eye – there’s no there there. That’s especially true of McCartney’s songs.
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Q: Do you think of McCartney’s songs as sort of the musical equivalent of fast food? Fast food can be very satisfying while you’re eating the stuff, but intellectually you know it’s not good for you.
A: Mark Twain had this to say about Richard Wagner’s music: “I understand it is much better than it sounds.” Paul McCartney’s music is just the opposite – it’s not as good as it sounds. I would compare the experience of listening to his songs to the experience I often have when I go to the movies. The overall experience of watching a movie in a theatre can be pretty intense, especially if there’s a lot happening – a lot of action and a complicated plot. I often walk out of the theater thinking “Wow!” and feeling pretty pumped up. But if I actually think about the movie on the drive home, or discuss it with someone else, I start to see the flaws I didn’t pick up while I was in the theatre.
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Q: Your press person is giving me dirty looks because I’ve kept you so long – I know you have other interviews to do, so I’ll wrap things up.
A: Don’t sweat it – it’s been a good conversation. But my people get a lot of interview requests each time another 2 or 3 lines anniversary rolls around, and I do need to hit the road.
Q: One final thing. Why have you felt the need to devote so many 2 or 3 lines posts to analyzing and critiquing the Beatles. You seem more than a little obsessed with the Beatles – specifically, you seem obsessed with cutting the Beatles down to size. Why do you think that is?
A: The Beatles were the pre-eminent pop music group for my generation – no one compared to them. There were people who loved Dylan, or the Stones, or Motown, or the Grateful Dead, but almost everyone acknowledged the supremacy of the Beatles – they were numero uno.
Q: Were you one of the “almost everyone” group?
A: Absolutely.
Q: But you don’t feel that way any more?
A: Well . . . it’s complicated. For years, I simply accepted as a given that the Beatles were the best. But I didn’t know why – I didn’t know how to explain the unique phenomenon that was the Beatles. On the surface, Lennon and McCartney were nothing special – they were typical teenaged boys who showed no particular musical or intellectual gifts growing up. It was very difficult for me to wrap my head around the scenario that not only were both of them songwriting geniuses, but that they found each other at a very young age and formed a partnership that somehow transcended their considerable individual gifts – their whole was so much greater than the sum of their parts that it seemed too good to be true. Not only that, but there’s George Harrison to boot – another unremarkable teenager from the same unremarkable locality who may not have the equal of Lennon or McCartney as a songwriter, but who was extraordinary in his own right. I thought about the whole thing a lot, and tried to come up with a rational explanation for the whole Lennon-McCartney-Harrison phenomenon. But I couldn’t . . . which made me start to wonder whether they were really that special.
Q: I can’t explain quantum physics. But that doesn’t mean I question its existence.
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A: I’m not sure that’s a good analogy. In any event, it seems to me that when it comes to the Beatles recorded output – in particular, the portion of their recorded output that Paul McCartney was responsible for – the emperor has no clothes. Actually, that’s an exaggeration – McCartney has some clothes, but when you get up close and take a really close look at his clothes, they’re just not that impressive. But I know I’m beating a dead horse here.
Q: That’s never stopped you before!
A: Mea culpa.
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As noted above, 2 or 3 lines has devoted a number of posts that attempt to shed light on the phenomenon that is the Beatles.
Click here to read why he considers Paul McCartney to be one of the most overrated recording artists of all time.
Click here to read the post that introduced the “songlet” concept.
Click here to read about the song that proves once and for all just have lazy and unimaginative a songwriter Paul McCartney can be. To be fair, McCartney wrote that song when he was only 16, and the abilities of 16-year-olds are limited. But why did McCartney feel the need for the Beatles to record the damn thing a few years later?
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If you’re in the mood for still more dead-horse-beating on the subject of the Beatles, scroll to the top of this page. Look for the “blog archive” header on the right side of the page. Click on the “2021” link, and then click on the “February” link. Under the name of the month, you’ll find a number of links to posts about early Beatles records. (Click on the “March” link and you’ll find two more such posts.)
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A “diss” track – “diss” is short for “disrespect – is a track that sh*ts on a rival artist. “Diss” tracks often inspire replies, which may themselves inspire rebuttals – and so on and so forth.
Rappers have been belittling each other in “diss” tracks since at least 1986, when “The Bridge Wars” broke out between a group of rappers from the Bronx and a rival group from Queens. (Both sides claimed that their borough was the true birthplace of hip-hop.)
The most famous hip-hop rivalry was the East Coast-West Coast feud of the nineties, which reached its zenith in the ne plus ultra of “diss” tracks, Tupac Shakur’s infamous “Hit ‘Em Up,” which insults Notorious B.I.G. up one side and down the other. (Tupac pulls no punches in that track, not only threatening to use his AK-47 and Glock 15-shot pistol on Biggie and his pals, but also claiming to have slept with his rival’s wife: “That's why I f*cked yo' b*tch, you fat motherf*cker!”)
But there were “diss” tracks long before there was hip-hop – most notably, Paul McCartney’s 1971 anti-John Lennon song, “Too Many People,” and Lennon’s very pointed anti-McCartney reply, “How Do You Sleep?”
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The lyrics quoted at the beginning of today’s post are what Lennon originally wrote, but manager Allan Klein was worried by the “You probably pinched that b*tch anyway” line – a reference to McCartney’s concern that he might have unintentionally plagiarized the melody of “Yesterday.” (After that tune came to him in a dream, McCartney asked his fellow Beatles, producer George Martin, and others if they recognized it. No one did, so after a few weeks he stopped worrying.)
Klein came up with “And since you're gone you’re just another day,” which alludes to McCartney’s 1971 hit single, “Another Day.” (One reviewer said “Another Day” sounded like an advertising jingle for underarm deodorant, while another dismissed it as “Paulie picking his nose”).
In addition to the line about “Yesterday,” Lennon’s diss track also states that Paul was creatively if not literally dead (“Those freaks was right when they said you was dead”) and characterizes his post-Beatles recordings as elevator music (“The sound you make is Muzak to my ears”).
To add insult to injury, George Harrison – who may have loathed McCartney as much as Lennon did – also played on the record. (Listen at about 2:40 of the song for Harrison’s guitar solo, which some believe is his best ever.)
Click here to listen to “How Do You Sleep?”
Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:
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