Paul McCartney I
I’ve been thinking a lot about Paul McCartney, what with his new record out, with its valedictory feel, and all. McCartney is a subject of longstanding fascination, fandom, frustration and exasperation around my household, so much so that it’s hard to know where to begin. For every moment of genius in his work (about sixteen million or so) there seems to be an equal number of missteps, squanderings of talent, outright atrocities and failures of character, and I’d like to take the time to sort it all out in the next few days.
But here’s a good place to start:
So we were listening to the Beatles on the way to Target the other day, chatting about this and that, and their recording of “Long Tall Sally” came on, featuring McCartney’s joyful, electrifying, vocal-cord-shredding singing, the only serious challenge to Little Richard’s ownership of this song ever attempted. And Kit, 4, in the back seat of the Prius, started getting really excited. “Mom! Mom!” she said. “This is what I wanted my ukelele to sound like!” Kit’s mom explained that she had earlier in the week expressed dissatisfaction with the sound of her ukelele, despite the time spent tuning it. Little did she realize that Kit wasn’t looking for tuning, she was looking for electricity, and of course, the propulsion of John Lennon playing it.
I could probably tell a personal story or two about every single Beatles song in existence, but this incident struck me. We had been driving in the car listening to the Beatles for about twenty minutes at that point, and songs like “You Won’t See Me” and “Hello Goodbye” had played. In fact, McCartney’s very “Long Tall Sally”-esque “I’m Down” had just played moments earlier, and Kit hadn’t batted an eyelash. What was it about the recording of “Long Tall Sally” that had captured Kit’s ear? What quality did that recording have that produced the shock of recognition, the sudden realization that this is what she wanted her music to sound like? She didn’t want it to sound like “Nowhere Man” or “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” or “All Together Now” (three of the most requested tunes on my iPod), she wanted it to sound like “Long Tall Sally.” (This is the child who picked, of all things, 1963’s “There’s a Place” as the song to listen to 19 times in a row while we were recently stuck in traffic.) All the songs we’d been listening to featured electric guitars, and most of them featured McCartney singing. Did Kit sense, on some level, that McCartney singing a Little Richard song in front of Lennon and Harrison’s guitar (and Ringo’s drums, of course — that’s the only thing my kids really understand about the Beatles is that Ringo plays the drums) produced an alchemy that the other songs did not? And what is that alchemy? Why was the startling, shattering “I’m Down” pleasant enough, but “Long Tall Sally” a life-changing experience?
