Book Review | Paul McCartney finally talks clean – Musician openly talks about his pro-drug and anti-Yoko Ono

Biography

Paul McCartney: Life & Words. Translated by Pasi Jääskeläinen and Timo Korppi. Bazar. Package of two books, 874 p.

Where was this book still needed? Paul McCartney told about his life Barry Milesin in an authorized biography Many Years From Now in 1998, and Yesterdaywas published in 2002.

In addition, there are thousands of interviews as well as various biographies of The Beatles and McCartney that have been done without his involvement.

But maybe there was still room for an autobiography, for Life & songs in the package, he still offers something new.

McCartney visit the poet-songwriter Paul Muldoonin lets go through 154 songs from teens to current production.

Through the songs, he talks about his life stages in the I-form, so the interviewer has faded himself from the text. However, source comparisons would have been needed where McCartney remembers things differently than before.

The Finnish translation of the introduction has a straightforward sentence structure, but it gets used to everything. The structure itself is cunning, even awkward: the songs are handled in alphabetical rather than relational order.

However, there is more talk of childhood at the beginning and old age at the end, so the chronology is also affected.

He talks a lot about his written influences Shakespeare since, but of course some of the lyrics only work in connection with music. Eleanor Rigby and for example For No One are impressive even in plain text.

Books are coffee table format and artwork luxuriously rich. The print and paper are of the highest quality than in art books.

Most interestingly, McCartney, who turns 80 in June, seems to be talking his mouth clean only now, for example, about the following themes.

1. Drug acceptance

McCartney once underestimated the pro-drug references in his production and stated Hi, Hi, Hi song that he would no longer write one.

Now he gives back: “The two most important staples in rock ‘n’ roll are sex and drugs.”

They are “fun things” and sometimes he is annoyed by the “useless chastity” of the audience.

“The thought evaporates as the familiar scent of Marin flares my nose and I think, ‘It came from there, and it smells good.'”

He prides himself on drug references in songs like Let Me Roll It and The Beatles Got To Get You Into My Lifewhich, according to McCartney, was an “oodini in the cloud”.

He doesn’t base and resent harder drugs John Lennonin heroin use Let It Be sessions.

Heroin is also distinguished from the 1986 Anti-Heroin Project Simple As That in the song.

2. Anti-Yoko Ono

Peter Jackson volume document The Beatles: Get Back shows how well McCartney tried to treat Lennon’s future wife Yoko Onon constant presence Let It Be sessions in January 1969.

However, it boiled inside.

“Yoko was literally on the road in recording events and it posed big challenges,” he estimates. “It was very important for group dynamics.”

He hoped someone from the band would decide to say, “I can’t sing if he’s there.”

This was not done because it was well known that Lennon would prefer Ono to The Beatles.

“I would have been able to thaw Yoko in the studio if he had only agreed to sit on the blanket in front of my amp. I would have really put in the effort to be able to live with that thing, ”McCartney continues.

In the end, he did as Lennon, that is, asked for his future wife Linda Eastmanin to the studio and later recruited this for the band Wings as well.

3. Flight injury

John Lennon and Paul McCartney blackmailed each other as songwriters and were close friends at best.

Although McCartney made The Beatles ’breakup public in the spring of 1970, he dates the breakup up to September 1969, when Lennon said“ heip ”between negotiations, virtually left the band and laughed.

“It was quite a complete collision,” McCartney recalls.

He wanted the flight to become The Beatles Manager Allen Kleininwho, according to Paul, “had promised Yoko Ono an exhibition in New York”. McCartney refused, and the band disbanded.

McCartney claims to have gotten over it.

“It was the best friend and collaborator of my youth with whom I had produced some of the best works of the 20th century (as he himself modestly put it). If she once fell in love with this woman, what would she have to do with me now? ” he concluded.

In the last years of Lennon, they met again. McCartney hopes he would have dared to tell his friend more directly how much he loved this.

4. Ownership of songs

In the past, McCartney has stated that Lennon could do 10 or 15 percent of the Beatles songs that McCartney mainly did, and vice versa. They added material to each other’s singing blanks and improved them together.

Now McCartney is switching from the traditional Lennon-McCartney label to “his own songs” and makes no mention of Lennon’s contribution at all A Day in the Life in the song, although its entry is, of course, in the book Lennon-McCartney.

Lennon composed and recited most of the masterpiece, but McCartney only talks about writing the verses “He blew his mind out in a car / He didn’t notice that the lights had changed” about the one who died in a car accident Tara from Guinness as well as the intermediate part he wrote and the avant-garde orchestral spacecraft he devised.

Has Lennon’s role just been forgotten to mention? In the past, McCartney has recognized Lennon’s song as the main author.

5. The eternal optimist does not talk about divorce

McCartney doesn’t talk his mouth clean about his failed second marriage, for Heather Mills not mentioned at all. Other traumas are dealt with from the mother’s early death, but she is not left in the gloom of gloom.

McCartney also refuses to think that cynicism is better than peace and love. When he was accused of “making silly love songs,” he responded with a song Silly Love Songs.

“It’s easier to get critical approval if you oppose everything,” McCartney ponders.

“But love for another person makes our lives better.”

Here Lennon followed McCartney and made some of his most beautiful love songs after the protest phase.

To the book there was no room to handle all of McCartney’s songs. I waited for example The End of the End song, but it’s clear without any background.

In the song, the eternal optimist anticipates the moment of his death and hopes that people will then tell jokes and recall old songs.

There is no reason to cry because this world was not bad and he is on his way to something much better.