Many of you know how much I love The Walter Martin Radio Hour. I’ve been listening (and subscribing) to it almost since the beginning, and it’s been a constant source of pleasure and indeed joy for me. His enthusiasm is certainly contagious, but the greatest value here is the depth of his musical knowledge and the sheer number of tracks he has hipped me to that I would not have known about otherwise. (Here I think especially of his recent three-hour playlist of Jamaican pop music from the Fifties to the Seventies.) But his constant ragging on Paul McCartney in this remarkably long Beatles season has annoyed me. I must mouth off.
My first annoyance came when Walter did his series on Paul: he said almost nothing about Paul’s work after 1978 or so, and for his Paul-post-Beatles playlist picked outtakes, oddities, and stuff Linda did. (Walter likes Linda.) Macca has produced a buttload of mediocre music, to be sure, but there are also some really good things — for instance Flowers in the Dirt (1989), and especially the fantastic demos of those songs that he did with Elvis Costello. There are a number of terrific pop songs on Flaming Pie (1997) and Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005).
Why didn’t Walter mention any of this stuff? My assumption is that he has never heard it and dislikes Paul intensely enough that he was unwilling to give it a listen. But what that means is that his Paul-post-Beatles playlist yields a profoundly distorted view of what Paul has accomplished. I’m not saying that Walter needed to have a serious encounter with the McCartney discography; but if he didn’t want to, he should have just said that he didn’t want to and therefore would not make a playlist. What he did instead is a just a gratuitous insult to Paul, it seems to me.
Now, do I regularly listen to Paul’s post-Beatles music? With the exception of those demos with Elvis, no. But then, I don’t listen to John Lennon’s post-Beatles music either. I don’t think either man is one-tenth as interesting alone as the two were with each other and the other Beatles. But if you’re gonna treat George’s post-Beatles career with respect (which Walter did) and you’re gonna treat John’s post-Beatles career with respect (which I certainly expect Walter to do when the time comes), then Paul deserves the same treatment.
But Walter can’t get over his distaste. In the currently ongoing John Lennon series, he interprets everything John does in the best possible light and everything Paul does in the worst possible light. If John wants to experiment in the studio and do weird things with mics and introduce delays and promote other sort of imaginative engineering — and he was constantly pressing the EMI engineers in such ways — then wow, the dude is so cool, he’s so creative. Buhen Paul wants to do it, he may well be attempting to “sabotage” John’s music.
The facts are: Each of them could sometimes care about the success of the group and could sometimes be selfish. Each could have a great insight at one moment and come up with a stupid idea the next. The stupid ideas weren’t usually malicious or manipulative or controlling, they were just stupid. (Everyone in that studio from 1965 on was coming up with stuff, all the time. Paul has talked over the years about telling the engineers “Just try it, if it doesn’t work we can erase it and do something else. Just try it.” Often they did erase it after all … but not always.) Neither John nor Paul was a saint or a faultless genius, and picking suspiciously at everything Paul did while celebrating everything John did is just partisan cheerleading. It’s not true to the actual situation.
N.B. Ian Leslie does the best job of capturing the real dynamic.
One of the other things Walter complains about is Paul’s “hot-dogging,” as he calls it, on the bass in some songs. Also on backing vocals. Now, before we get to that, we need to distinguish this point from what might be thought a related one. Paul, who has a plausible claim to being a better guitarist than George (see the P.S. below) and was obviously a far superior guitarist to John, didn’t get that many chances to play guitar for the Beatles. Especially in the first half of the Beatles’ career, he was largely confined to the bass at a time when pop-music bass playing was expected to be very simple and placed very low in the mix. So Paul was always fighting with the EMI engineers, who were afraid that if you increased the volume of the bass then, when the vinyl record was played, the needle of a phonograph could jump out of its groove. For safety’s sake they always kept the bass levels low, and you can barely hear Paul’s playing on many of those early songs (unless you’re listening to a modern remaster).
Do you think any of the other Beatles would have been happy with having their contribution to the song virtually inaudible? (Even Ringo wouldn’t have liked it.) So Paul was always getting the engineers to listen to songs recorded in the USA, especially Motown songs, and saying, “Listen to the bass here. If they can do it, why can’t we?” And as far as I can tell, all the other Beatles backed Paul on this point. I don’t think there’s a controversy about this; I don’t think even Walter would believe that Paul was out of line in wanting his bass to be more prominent in the mix.
But distinct from the question of how audible his instrument was is the question of what, exactly, he was playing. Among rock and pop bassists Paul was a virtuoso, and so he naturally wanted to explore the possibilities of the instrument, wanted to see what it and he could do. For Walter, this is a bad thing … when Paul does it. (Some other artist trying to explore the possibilities of his or her instrument would probably be awesome. But with Paul, it’s hot-dogging.)
Now: Does Paul overdo it sometimes? Goodness gracious yes. For instance, I think — and George Harrison strongly agrees with me here — that his playing is way too busy on “Something.” But the song that precedes “Something” on Abbey Road is “Come Together,” which also has an elaborate bass line — and it’s brilliant. Almost universally revered, though probably Walter dislikes it. But a great musician trying to extend the possibilities of his for-too-long-marginalized instrument isn’t going to nail it every time; and it’s not an unforgivable crime for him to go overboard occasionally. Heck, Paul and Ringo both go nuts on “Rain” and it’s the best rhythm track in the whole Beatles catalogue.
One reason for Paul’s over-elaboration, I think, involves the way the Beatles recorded their songs in the latter stages of their career. Once the band, working with George Martin and the engineers, got a basic track established — drums and rhythm guitar usually — then the various Beatles would add any further contributions later, on their own. Often Paul’s bass would be the last element recorded: he sat in a studio by himself and listened to the rest of the song on headphones as he worked out his part. It’s the kind of situation that invites too-muchness, a problem that Paul was aware of, as can be seen by his enthusiasm for getting the band to record as a band again: thus the Get Back sessions. But being aware of the problem was not the same as overcoming it. The temptation to overdo was always right in his face.
Paul’s leadership of the band in the studio is another thing that Walter can’t really forgive him for, but here’s the thing: as John, in the mid-Sixties, got more and more drug-addled, he wrote fewer and fewer songs. (The ones he produced tended to be bangers, though.) It’s vital to understand that if Paul had not stepped up and taken a more dominant role — if he had not become a kind of organizer and the cheerleader for the group as well as its primary songwriter — the Beatles might very well have fallen apart as early as 1965. And even if they had managed to hold together in some form, they could not possibly have produced anything remotely like Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper. It was Paul’s leadership that made those records possible, even if John wrote some — most, I would say — of the coolest music for them.
Is that what anybody would want? A world in which Paul stays politely in the background and just plays his one-two-three-four (I-V-vi-IV) walking basslines, doesn’t write too many songs, and waits for John to come out of his most recent drug coma? It sure as hell isn’t what I would want. Paul could be over-elaborate in his playing, and he certainly could be bossy and OCD — Ian MacDonald is right to say that the most correct brief answer to the question of why the Beatles broke up is: “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” — but cast your mind back to 1965 and 1966 and look at the results.
I have mouthed off. (All that said, you should absolutely subscribe to the Walter Martin Radio Hour. It’s amazing.)
P.S. Re: Paul and George as guitarists, I think Paul was technically superior in that he could play sequences of notes that George couldn’t manage, at least not at Paul’s desired tempo. But George played many beautiful riffs and solos that Paul could have played if he had thought of them; but he never would have thought of them. George had a feel for the kind of sparely elegant melodic or harmonic line that Paul would have disdained; as a guitarist, George simply had better taste.
