Paul Serenades Me

I think i know what interview is that. Well, at least the part i’m thinking is very similar to the Good Morning America interview, i edited only this part to upload, is this it? 

Because in this Paul has a hard time holding himself together, he was very shaken and teary, he had talked about John positively and the reporter just went and crushed him with that. 0:49 he’s trying very hard not to cry, that ‘’smile’’. Yes, John is one of the few people, perhaps musically the only one, whose opinion Paul took to the heart. He seems lost, not knowing what he could say. I think Paul usually didn’t answer to John’s words to avoid making things worse because when they talked only the two of them it was one John but in the media and specially with Yoko by his side, it was another John. But it’s undeniable it hurt Paul. I wish John had had the time to fix it. 

John’s 1980 playboy interview in reference. Not that it’s an excuse for cruelty (’Paul died creatively’, ‘the last gasp from him’ omg) (wait lol Paul-is-dead-heads probably would love the phrasing), but John said many different things concerning Paul through the 70′s. He contradicts himself right in this interview: saying he doesn’t really listen to Paul, then begins analyzing his music and obscurity. It’s obviously much more complicated than it was being portrayed.

For his part, around the same time, in the press John dismissed the notion of a Beatles reunion as  “an illusion.” As ever, Lennon’s feelings toward McCartney were highly erratic. He confessed that he’d liked “Coming Up” but said he thought Paul “sounded like was depressed” on “Waterfalls.” “I don’t follow Wings,” he curtly told Newsweek. “I don’t give a shit what Wings are doing.” The journalist then apparently quoted Paul as saying that, in his opinion, Lennon had gone to ground because he had done everything else in his life “apart from be himself.” At this Lennon exploded. “What the hell does that mean?” he roared, accusing Paul of knowing nothing about his life during his-house-husband years. “He was as curious as everybody else was. It’s ten years since really communicated with him. I know as much about him as he knows about me, which is zilch.”

This wasn’t entirely true, since the pair would still sometimes talk. On October 9, John’s fortieth birthday, Lennon and McCartney spoke for the last time on the phone. John had just completed most of his return album, Double Fantasy. Paul called in the evening, and the pair — Lennon perhaps regretting his most caustic comments — discussed how they were always being baited to put each other down in the press.

“Do they play me against you like they play you against me?” John wondered. “Yeah, they do,” said Paul.

— Man on the Run

After this sweet phone call, John’s final interview in Rolling Stones has that well-known quote about working with Paul:

thinking about this tonight

Jack Sweeney: “Paul is a very complex person…Paul had this extraordinary dualism: at any given moment he could be so easygoing and so casual, yet there was also this toughness: he would hold the class entranced. He was a born leader, so gregarious, so popular (Salewicz McCartney bio p. 66)

Sweeney also observes that: “[Paul] was always insecure.” Chris Salewicz then goes on to say “Jack Sweeney is not alone in noting the insecurity and sensitivity behind Paul McCartney’s breezy facade. Alan Durband saw it also, and traces its first appearance to around the time of Mary McCartney’s death. But perhaps it was also the sense of inadequacy he felt as a boy from a housing project in this academic environment” (Salewicz McCartney bio 64)

Re: the Saint versus Devil versions of John Lennon

The fascinating thing is that on tumblr I see a lot of people bemoaning John’s “reputation” and complaining about all the internet randos calling him a racist abuser wife-beater and yet I have never ACTUALLY seen any of these internet randos!  I only see the John-is-a-God people (who are mostly boomers, apparently). 

January 8th, 1969: After John dismisses all of the songs he’s come up with for the Get Back/Let It Be sessions, Paul asks John if he has written anything new to make up for it. He hasn’t. No one is thrilled about this.   

WAIT

ARE YOU KIDDING ME 

January 13th, 1969 (Twickenham Film Studios, London): Over lunch, the remaining Beatles touch on George’s resignation from the band on the 10th, as well as a group meeting held the previous day which ended in less than desirable circumstances (with George leaving the room, frustrated by John’s persistently Yoko-filtered standard of communication). While Yoko contends that it would be easy for John (and Paul) to regain George’s favour, John points out that this is a more deeply-rooted issue than it may seem, compounded over the years by John and Paul’s treatment of George and his defaulted status within the group. Upon this problem of overriding egos, however, Paul suggests (passive-aggressively) that it isn’t just the Lennon-and-McCartney tandem that is causing George upset and consternation. 

PAUL: [bleak; joking] So where’s George?

RINGO: It smells like George is here. 

YOKO: [to John] Well, you can get back George so easily, you know that. You know, Paul and—

JOHN: But it’s not that easy, because it’s a festering wound—

PAUL: Yeah. 

LINDA: Yeah. 

JOHN: —that we’ve allowed to – and yesterday we allowed it go even deeper, but we didn’t give him any bandages. And it’s only because George, uh, when he comes up, when he is that part of him… We have egos. We can’t help but have—

RINGO: Well, it can be a burden on him. 

JOHN: I’ll have, you know—well, look, you do— [inaudible]

RINGO: [inaudible]

PAUL: Rosé.

YOKO: Can I have one too [inaudible]? But if you wanted it badly enough, you have to, you know—

MAL: What do you want, uh, Paul?

PAUL: Rosé, please, for me. Linda?

LINDA: No thank you.

JOHN: [inaudible] I wouldn’t say it’s my ego. It was yesterday, really – or, or even the day before when we went to George’s—

PAUL: I sure as hell know I wouldn’t like you to.

JOHN: What?

PAUL: Dig in your heels.

YOKO: Your ego’s great, by the way. 

PAUL: ’Cause if I’m to – if I’m to look at either of you, you know, I really don’t like to be smothered. You know—

YOKO: No, no no—

PAUL: You know, if I could – if you were in a shop on a shelf, I’d— [inaudible] —or whatever it is—

“I’m sure Paul wrote ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ with his father in mind. Jim [McCartney] loved music-hall stuff, corny popular songs, the kind of thing Paul normally wouldn’t tolerate. Nevertheless, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ was not a send-up but a kind of nostalgic, if ever-so-slightly satirical tribute to his dad.

Paul got around the lurking schmaltz factor by suggesting we use clarinets on the recording ‘in a classical way’…This classical treatment gave added bite to the song, a formality that pushed it firmly toward satire. Without that, the song could have been misinterpreted–it was very tongue-in-cheek. It is rather like, say, putting a Gerald Scarfe cartoon into a gilded frame, and hanging it in the National Gallery. The form brings you up short, makes you think more carefully about the content…

Most people think of ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ as a jokey song, a piece of tongue-in-cheek music-hall pastiche, which it is. Nor did the other Beatles take it seriously. The Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn describes it, accurately enough in so far as it goes, as ‘Paul’s vaudeville-style charmer.’

For my money, though, it has a little more to it than that…If you look at the lyrics you can see that underneath the jokiness they are saying, ‘Isn’t old age awful? Banality, tedium, nothingness, poverty, routine.’ It is Paul with his satirical tin hat on, a bit like, in film terms, Oh What a Lovely War. The bleak underlying vision is dressed up in this very gentle, rooty-tooty kind of charm…

When I heard ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ for the first time, I chuckled at the cleverness of the lyrics. They were so true. They reflected my own experience of family life, the  comfort and cosiness, so well…

John: Let’s stop going on tour

Paul: What?

John: Yeah, you know that electrifying soul strengthening perfect connection we have on stage when we’re performing, let’s not have that any more

Paul: Okay.

John: And all that sharing a room and living in each others pockets and being as close as it’s possible for two people to be, let’s just not do that any more

Paul: Right.

John: It’ll be amazing, nothing will change except we won’t have any of the things that hold us together and help us understand each other and keep my feelings for you from overwhelming me and sending me crazy

John: oh and you know the special sacred unbreakable two-ness of us writing songs together alone with no one else around just us singing eyeball to eyeball alone where no one can see us or hear us and it’s beautiful and safe

Paul: uh huh.

John: let’s never do that again

Profile on Paul McCartney, RAVE magazine, August 1965