Sir Paul McCartney’s Lyrics: “geniality and humility”

Christopher Jackson

I once commissioned Paul Muldoon for a poem for a magazine for which I was editing the poetry section. He was very responsive to the idea that the readers of a high end luxury magazine ought to have some poetry in their life. I made it clear I would pay £100.

Muldoon sent a poem which was really a song lyric and I still remember it’s refrain: “It’s been an uphill battle to go downhill all the way.”

Incidentally, when I tried to pay Muldoon he went mysteriously dark, though his home address was on his email. When I was next in New York, I took a hundred dollars down to his apartment on the Upper West Side, and gave it to his wife, Muldoon being out of town in New Jersey.

I later discovered that he was financially secure many times over. He simply didn’t need the money and wasn’t interested in it.

In that he was a strange kind of poet. I didn’t know then that this was the same apartment which Paul McCartney had begun occasionally visiting in order to have the conversations which make up this book. Had I known, I might have stayed around a bit.

This book, writes McCartney in the foreword, was a far more feasible project than a straight autobiography: the songs, in any case, tell the story of his life better than a prose book. The book is the product of a series of enviable conversations between Muldoon and McCartney, but with Muldoon’s contributions elided.

In some respects, this is a shame as I expect the back and forth would in some ways have been more interesting than what we are presented with here. Muldoon is one of the greatest poets of our time, and would be greater still if he could always bring himself to write comprehensibly. I expect some of what we have here would be more exciting if we could hear the pair of them sparking off each other.

With the conversations divided into chapters centred around songs, some of them can seem a bit perfunctory – a couple of pages for ‘A Day in the Life’, that remarkable work, about which books could be written. There is much that could be said about McCartney’s contribution in the second part of the song after the titanic crescendo of the orchestra, which isn’t touched on here.

McCartney has in the past said it was a song he’d had lying around. It would have been interesting to know the process by which the two were yoked together. Though the truth is, for most of the time in songwriting, the songwriter is in receipt of forces he won’t understand and there is a sense in which McCartney can sometimes seem a baffled visitor on his own songwriting past.

But this is to carp about what we don’t have instead of to celebrate what was actually managed. We should be grateful for this: McCartney is a world-historical figure who is far busier than most, and it’s good that he found the time for us at all.

Besides there are some moments of real insight. For instance, in ‘All My Loving’, McCartney points out that it is an epistolary love song in the vein of Fats Waller’s ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter’. But it is also to do with being on the road and not being able to see your love. That makes Lennon’s triad chords in the rhythm guitar all the more suitable because it mimics train tracks, and the rickety motion of transport.

I’ve always liked McCartney. Lennon could be cruel in a way unthinkable for McCartney, and cruel to McCartney too. I think it probably stemmed from work ethic. Lennon had a sort of lazy streak which probably irked McCartney who, born with a gift which often seems to emanate from some other dimension, seems to have been born with a kind of duty to be true to it.

He’s still hurt, of course. Things turned out better than they might have with Lennon, because at least they weren’t actively warring with each other. Apparently they had a nice conversation on their final meeting about baking bread.

Strange forces brought these two together. It continues to feel marvellous that in Liverpool at that time, these four boys were permitted to meet, that their music found its audience. They then hit upon, and at the same time had a share in creating, a historical moment which we are only just beginning to understand.

It was freedom: the freedom to experiment and to find out who and what one loved. And it was love, as McCartney has often pointed out, which underpinned it all. Over eight wonderful years, ‘Love Me Do’ became ‘And in the end/the love you take/is equal to the love you make’.

After that, McCartney got lucky domestically with Linda Eastman, and here and there the music falls off a bit. That seems to be a law of popular music: the energy of youth can only come once. It is invisible in those simple chord sequences which gave us She Loves You: there is a primal urge driving it forward which could only come once.

Sometimes a magnificent song would come along: ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, ‘Band on the Run’, and much later, ‘Beautiful Night’.

But something went out of McCartney’s life forever when John, with the malicious glee which sometimes characterised him, announced that he was leaving the Beatles. It appealed to John’s wrecking ball nature to destroy the thing he loved.

It never appealed to McCartney – and still doesn’t. Every time we have a new initiative with the Beatles today – such as the AI project Now and Then, you feel that McCartney is the driving force. He wants to be back in Abbey Road again. Perhaps he wants to be young again.

Yet this is to paint him as more melancholy than he actually is: optimism has always marked McCartney – a sense that somehow or other everything will be alright. His songs almost always insist on a good outcome, sometimes amidst sadness. Jude will make it right if he lets it be. Even Yesterday, on the face of it a very sad song, seems to resolve that sadness by the end: perhaps yesterday in that song is a place where the singer will one day comfortably reflect. It is a place he will one day revisit.

That is what this book is, a kind of reckoning. It would have been possible to have done it differently and just published the transcripts as Seamus Heaney did in Stepping Stones and as Nick Cave did with Faith, Hope and Carnage.

But it’s good to have this book. It doesn’t really alter McCartney’s reputation too much since he was already in the stratosphere anyway: it simply proves that genius can sometimes go hand in hand with geniality and humility. And if that’s the case with McCartney, it certainly had better be the case with us who, whatever our virtues, never had it in us to write ‘’Eleanor Rigby’.