McCartney – Chris Salewicz, 1986 ★★

Portrait of an Artist as a Young Ted

Pain can be a midwife to great art. So it was with Paul McCartney and the Beatles. At least that’s the theory Chris Salewicz offers in this engaging if thin biography.

McCartney was just 14 when his mother died from cancer. The loss cut him deep, but the lad hid it well. Less than a year later, he would meet an older boy, John Lennon, soon to lose his own mother. From that shared anguish came an outpouring of music that would shape a generation and change a world.

Still the pain continued.

Many years later, when Lennon himself died from an assassin’s bullets, McCartney would surprise many when confronted about it by a reporter, saying: “It’s a drag, isn’t it.” For many, it was further proof that McCartney was as soulless as his run of solo pop hits. For Salewicz, it was a glimpse of the boy who never recovered from his mother’s death:

Yet in the very brevity of that understated reply was exposed every screaming nerve end running amok beneath the impenetrable blankness of his shock as – in what had become a chilling pattern – yet another person suddenly vanished from his life.

Paul McCartney, arms folded, as a boy with his mother Mary and younger brother Michael. During this time Paul was known as "Fatty," and Salewicz notes, once got stuck atop an orchard gate while trying to steal apples. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/132785888983882247/.

While its lame title and run-of-the-mill collection of “fab photos” proclaim this another cheap cash-in pop-star bio, Salewicz actually tries to do something useful and unique with his book: Make a case that Paul McCartney was more than a glib tunesmith when it came to driving the Beatles’ success.

In fact, as Salewicz tells it, McCartney had at least as much to do with that success as did Lennon:

Paul showed John all the guitar chords he had learned, but as Paul played left-handed guitar, John would have to go to the mirror in his bedroom and relearn them. Their relationship, however, was not one-sided: as much as John was inspired to progress by Paul’s unswerving diligence, so the younger boy was equally liberated by John’s anarchic approach to music.

Salewicz was sailing against the tide when McCartney was published in 1986; back then it was easy to dismiss Paul as the cute lightweight who pulled the girls while the martyred Lennon reached deeper and mined real gold. Salewicz works hard at constructing a counter-thesis, offering some evidence to back it up.

Paul McCartney (on left) lines up with George Harrison and John Lennon in a 1958-era photo, when their band was still The Quarrymen. Between Paul and George may be then-drummer Colin Hanton, who Salewicz says was delegated the job of sacking another guitarist from the band so George could have the job. Image from https://www.beatles-komplet.cz/fotoalbum/1958/quarryman-1958.html

A next-door neighbor who knew Mary McCartney suggests Paul’s best-known song, “Yesterday,” was a direct response to his mother’s death and another unfortunate remark Paul had made after, about how the family would cope without her income. As he sings in the song: “I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday.”

While Lennon works hard for his success, Paul is even more determined, becoming a perfectionist on stage and in the studio. When Lennon’s buddy Stu Sutcliffe can’t carry his weight playing bass in early Beatles shows, Paul pressures John to get rid of him.

Beneath an amiable surface, Salewicz writes, lay a spine of steel: “He had to be strong, for his father and brother, and for his mother. And he had to be successful.”

When Salewicz explores the origins of Paul and the Beatles, the result is impressively detailed and researched. Salewicz lays out how and where exactly John and Paul first met (St. Peter’s Church in Woolton, July 6, 1957) and how their manager Brian Epstein landed his boys an audition with EMI, via a tip at a copyright office by someone impressed with the band’s material.

Paul sings to a female fan while John provides instrumental support on opening night at the Casbah Coffee Club, August 29, 1959. It was at this club they recruited the owner's son, Pete Best, to be their new drummer, and began a shift to a harder style that ended with a new name: The Beatles. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quarrymen

The common view is that these and other parts of the Beatles’ beginnings were mired in myth until Mark Lewisohn came along in the 1990s, yet Salewicz’s story is closer to that version than I expected from a mid-1980s book. Furthermore, he tells it well.

An early promoter of the band, Sam Leach, describes the night “when Beatlemania began,” a show in New Brighton called “Operation Big Beat” in November 1961. Leach recalls how it looked to be a flop when he saw no one in the audience at the start; then he walked to the lobby and discovered a line as long as he could see waiting to get in.

Leach describes the symbiotic connection John and Paul had in their pre-fame performances:

“They were good mates, they’d help each other, and they never tried to upstage each other. While one was at the front of the stage, the other would do the backing, and vice versa. But whoever was doing the lead singing would put so much into it, that it was as though he was saying to the other, ‘Go on, follow that!’ That was the rivalry they created – they pushed each other on. But it was a very healthy rivalry.”

Accounts like this make McCartney worth a look for Beatles fans. What makes it no more than that is a matter of sourcing and focus. The more I read, the more I realized it was basically a clip job dressed up with some informative interviews with minor players that do engage and give you a sense of the man behind the image, but often run on too long. Salewicz seems a solid interviewer, but a poor editor.

The Beatles share their success with producer George Martin, who signed them to EMI. Martin is quoted by Salewicz describing his first impressions: "I thought the only one who could really play was Paul." https://www.dw.com/en/forget-it-john-george-martin-pushed-1960s-technology-to-forge-the-beatles-sound/a-19104169

In terms of focus, the more successful Paul becomes, the less Salewicz has to say about him. The Beatles years are a blur; Paul’s solo run, which had already gone on for considerably longer when this book was printed, takes up just the final 25 pages of a 252-page book.

The best information is on Paul as a student in secondary school, making good grades without effort before the distractions of rock ‘n’ roll suck him in. He was seen as having great promise, according to teachers who were still alive in the 1980s and willing to talk to the author:

No matter how much he modified his uniform or how many minutes of his morning milk breaks were spent in front of the washroom mirror perfecting his quaff, it was his cheery greetings and friendly smile that his teachers noticed. They resolutely refused to consider Paul a Teddy Boy, and would comment among themselves on how neat and smartly turned out he was; perfect material, they thought, for some provincial teachers training college that, from their conversations with this communicative boy, they had deduced he had set his heart on.

You can tell who Salewicz interviewed himself and who were pulled from other texts by a slight device he employs. When he got the quote himself, the source “says.” When he pulls it from a book, it’s “said.” His failure to better explain who he interviewed and what he picked up from other sources (his bibliography at the end lists just thirty books, many of them what Beatleologists would term “the usual suspects”) makes for a loose narrative where trivial bits are thrown up in the way of substance while large segments of McCartney’s life fly past undigested.

The Beatles in 1968, posing at Paul's home at St. John's Wood, London, with Paul's sheepdog Martha at left. Paul's home included his own "Mad Room" for playing music and a large bowl of marijuana on a mantelpiece for guests. Image from https://favim.com/image/173559/.

I suspect Salewicz started into this project with great gusto, then found himself hitting a roadblock as too many people declined to talk to him with a deadline fast approaching. [McCartney himself is not quoted, though he would give Salewicz a Q Magazine interview shortly after that suggests McCartney had read and liked this book.]

What you wind up with here is half a book. It’s not a bad half-book; Salewicz is a respected music journalist and really dives into Paul’s life before the Beatles. But that’s all it winds up being.

Salewicz looks at the cheery façade Paul presented to people long before he was rich and famous, determining that while he was never a phony, he could be quite a hard character, too, if not in the same famously-caustic way John Lennon was.

Lennon and McCartney's breakup as bandmates was fought in courts and on record. After Paul (left) took a couple of lyrical digs at John on his solo album Ram, Lennon (right) countered by mocking Ram's back-cover photo on his album Imagine. That same album also included a song describing Paul's solo work as "muzak to my ears." Image from http://www.feelnumb.com/2009/11/02/john-lennon-makes-fun-of-paul-mccartneys-ram-cover/

As a small boy, he would retreat into his parents’ bedroom after being disciplined and make small tears in their lace curtains. He would blow off press interviews arranged by Beatles publicist Brian Sommerville, then walk in while Sommerville was offering excuses to happily answer questions, pretending he hadn’t been informed.

Dezo Hoffmann, whose photographs of the Beatles made him famous, tells of how Paul would giggle encouragingly as John excoriated some unfortunate with his dagger-sharp wit:

“In a way Paul wallowed in it, because John always played up to his requirements. It’s a useful thing to have somebody like that, who’s capable of putting down people you don’t like.”

Yet Paul’s gentler side was no illusion. Salewicz describes how Lonnie Donegan, a star whose skiffle music Paul and John would emulate, took time out after a workday lunch show to write explanatory notes for his fans’ bosses. “The commendable, and rare, consideration that Donegan showed toward his fans struck Paul as the right way for stars to behave,” Salewicz writes.

Paul, center, with son James and wife Linda in the later 1970s. Salewicz notes that as both wife and mother, Linda was a perfect mate for Paul - and someone with whom he could feel as rooted as his own mother. https://www.nme.com/news/music/paul-mccartney-says-cried-year-wife-linda-died-2524658

Later, Paul would take time out to sit on a window sill to play his new song “Blackbird” for the many female fans gathered outside his home.

There is an aura of calculation here – singer Nick Lowe tells Salewicz how Paul once confided to him on a tour bus “all I had to do was to wink at them, or give a thumbs-up, and not only have I made their day, but I’ve got myself out of lots of trouble.” But Salewicz makes clear Paul’s nice-guy act is authentic, too. Just don’t mistake him for a lightweight.

McCartney would have been a worthy corrective to all the pre-Lewisohn Beatles books that downgraded him (e. g. Philip Norman’s Shout!) if only it had more to say about Paul after he hit it big. Instead, what begins as a fresh look at a familiar face stops much too soon.