“McCartney Has Worked So Hard At Seeming An Ordinary Bloke That It Is Easy To Miss The Least Ordinary

“McCartney has worked so hard at seeming an ordinary bloke that it is easy to miss the least ordinary and least bloke-ish thing about him: the magnitude of his melodic gift. A genius for melody is a strange, surprisingly isolated talent, and doesn’t have much to do with a broader musical gift for composition; Mozart certainly had it, Beethoven not so much. Irving Berlin could barely play the piano and when he did it was only in a single key (F-sharp major: all the black keys), and yet he wrote hundreds of haunting tunes; André Previn, who could do anything musically as a pianist and a conductor, wrote scarcely a single memorable melody, although he did write several shows and many songs. McCartney, as Norman reminds us, had the gift in absurd abundance. Before he was twenty, he had written three standard songs—“I’ll Follow the Sun,” “When I’m Sixty-Four,” and what became “Michelle.” By the time he was thirty, he had written so many that he now seems to lose track sometimes, reviving old tunes in concert that he has half forgotten.

Someone could get a Ph.D. thesis out of studying the major-minor shifts in his Beatles songs: sometimes the change is from verse to chorus, to mark a change from affirmation to melancholy, as in “The Fool on the Hill”; sometimes it’s in the middle of a phrase, as in “Penny Lane,” to capture a mood of mixed sun and showers. These are things that trained composers do by rote; McCartney did them by feel—like Irving Berlin writing for Fred Astaire, he was a rare thing, a naturally sophisticated intuitive. Lennon’s tragic martyrdom, and McCartney’s fall from critical favor, made it seem as though one had been regarded as a more consequential figure than the other. In truth, throughout the nineteen-sixties Paul’s musical primacy was largely taken for granted. In 1966, the critic Kenneth Tynan, a hard man to please, proposed doing a profile of Paul, in preference to John, because he was ‘by far the most interesting of the Beatles and certainly the musical genius of the group.’“

Tags

paul mi AMORS

More Posts from Bright-starr and Others

bright-starr

7 months ago

Here is a quote I think of every time I see these pictures. "The rumor since has been that I edged [Stuart Sutcliffe] out of the band, because we certainly did have our difficulties. For me, it was mainly because I didn't think he was a very good musician, which he wasn't, and he admitted it. So, for me, that caused problems, because being a—I mean, you could say being a perfectionist, but actually asking the bass player to play in the same key as us isn't really looking for perfection. It's quite a mild request." — Sir Paul McCartney, The Lyrics podcast, "Michelle," April 10, 2024.

Tags

kjjj viejo hijo de puta igual he was so right

290 notes View Post

bright-starr

7 months ago

235 notes View Post

bright-starr

6 months ago

308 notes View Post

bright-starr

6 months ago

(from Unseen Archives) John looks like he's sneezing, George is off to his first day of school, and Paul's hailing a cab

1K notes View Post

bright-starr

7 months ago

"When I touch you, I feel happy inside, I can’t hide, I can’t hide." "Ask me why, I’ll say I love you." "What you need is a schedule, achieve something every day."

Tags

I've never heard this before I'm with paul though

449 notes View Post

bright-starr

3 months ago

Temporary Secretary - Paul McCartney

18K notes View Post

bright-starr

7 months ago

The fans call Paul the handsome one, and he knows it. The others in the group call Paul "The Star." He does most of the singing and most of the wiggling, trying to swing his hips after the fashion of Elvis Presley, one of his boyhood idols. In the British equivalent of high school, Paul was mostly in the upper ranks scholastically, unlike the other Beatles. "He was like, you know, a goody-goody in school," remembers one of Paul's boyhood friends. He also, as another former classmate remembers him, was a "tubby little kid" who avoided girlish rejections by avoiding girls. ... Paul, who plays bass guitar, wears the same tight pants that are part of the uniform of the Beatles, although he often distinguishes himself by a vest. "Paul," says one member of the troupe, "is the only one of the boys who's had it go to his head." Sometimes, talking with the other Beatles, he finds himself using accents much more high-toned than the working-class slang of Liverpool, where he grew up. When he does, John Lennon mockingly mimics him.

- Al Aronowitz, ‘The Beatles: Music's Gold Bugs’, Saturday Evening Post, (March 1964)

Tags

i love him to bits

153 notes View Post

bright-starr

3 months ago