"Though Sue and I had flirted on the edge of trendy London for some months, many of the people we met were condescending or arrogant or both, so it was a pleasant surprise to find someone like Paul who was as down-to-earth and unpretentious as you could get. He said that he was exploring himself in the arts. He seemed to know nothing about underground literature, music or radical politics, but wanted to learn. I lent him some copies of Evergreen Review and played him Call Me Burroughs. He became a regular visitor to our flat, hanging out, smoking pot and playing his way through our shelf of records. Favourite stoned listening included electronic music by Luciano berio; the IBM computer singing 'Daisy, Daisy'; John Cage's Indeterminacy - some stories were longer than others, but he read two-volume Folkways recording of a Japanese Zen ceremony - on one track a bell rang once a minute, nd it was always great when it finally rang; and lots of the latest swuels and shrieks from the ghetto: Albert Ayler's Bells and Spirits Awake; Ron Blake; Pharaoh Saunders; Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra; Eric Dolphy's honking bird imitations; Free Jazz by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet: two reeds, two bassists, two drummers, two trumpets, thirty-eight minutes of spontaneous collective improvisation with no preconceptions. It was while discussing this album that we came up with the idea that if you were in complete control of your consciousness, you would be able to differentiate between audio sounds so completely that you could release a record with Bethoveen on the left stereo and the Beatles on the right, playing simultaneously, and the brain could decide one to listen to, or to flip between one and the other. If I introduced Paul to a few things, I in turn learned about pop music from him. He gave me records he thought I should know, like 'Rescue Me' by Fontella Bass. He showed me how to identify James Jamerson's characteristic bass work with Motown - a player he regarded as his only serious rival - and recommended other artists such as Smokey Robinson. One time we were driving though Bayswater in Paul's brand-new Aston Martin DB4 and he turned on the radio. Listening to the BBC was normally like tuning into the early Fifties, so I was astonished to hear all kinds of amazing new R&B records and American releases. Not only that, but the DJ was really funny, presenting the records in a slick, humorous way that combined a parody of American Flash with Goon Show joked and humour. I asked which station it was, thinking it must be some new pirate ship I hadn't heard of. I was slow. It took me a while to realise the DJ was Paul and we were listening to a tape, made using all the records sent to him. The Philips cassette player had just come on the market and he had one installed in his car. Paul was such a good mimic that, even though I now knew it was him, I just couldn't associate that smooth delivery with the man at the wheel. It was uncanny. ... He enjoyed doing impersonations ... Privately he performed a cruelly accurate rendition of his friend Mick Jagger, perfectly capturing his facial expressions. 'He stole all the gestures from Joe Tex, you know,' Paul maintained." - In The Sixties by Barry Miles
i made a playlist with all of these if anybody wants a quick listen
Paul’s Christmas gift to his fellow Beatles was an acetate disc of a radio-style show that he’d taped at home featuring music tracks by artists he thought they should take note of, linked by Paul speaking in the style of a New York DJ. “It was something crazy, something left-field just for the Beatles . . . that they could play late in the evening,” he later explained. “It was called Unforgettable and started with Nat King Cole’s ‘Unforgettable.’ It was like a magazine programme full of weird interviews, experimental music, tape loops and some tracks that I knew the others hadn’t heard.” He was clearly hinting at the direction the Beatles might go when they reconvened in the studio, offering the sort of rich palette from which they might choose. Besides “Unforgettable” and the experimental sounds there was “Down Home Girl” by the Rolling Stones, “Don’t Be Cruel” by Elvis, Martha and the Vandellas singing “Heat Wave,” the Beach Boys with “I Get Around,” and the Peter and Gordon LP track “Someone Ain’t Right.” Reflecting on the record selection a few months later George said, “It was a peculiar overall sound. John, Ringo and I played it and realized Paul was on to something new. Paul has done a lot in making us realize that there are a lot of electronic sounds to investigate. If we’re in the studio we don’t mentally think that this is the Beatles making a new hit LP or single. It’s just us, four blokes with some ideas, good and bad, to thrash out.”
(Beatles '66: The Revolutionary Year by Steve Turner, 2016)
