toadbit the tumblr user

"I love you so much more Thank you will ever know"

That's not in the song, is it?

----

"check on" was originally "find out"

No one ever needs to find out What we do

[John] got much sweeter, too, once he settled in New York. Once he was reunited with Yoko, and they had Sean, he became this sweet personalty again then when he was more comfortable with himself. But the acerbic John is the one we know and love, you know, because he was clever with it, so it was very attractive.

But, for me, I have more than a slight affection for the John that I knew then, when we were first writing songs, when we would try and do things the old songwriters had done. I slightly regret the way John's image has formed, and because he died so tragically it has become set in concrete. The acerbic side was there but it was only part of him. He was also such a sweet, lovely man – a really sweet guy. ”

And would his songwriting partner have liked this album of standards and accompanying TV show? “Yes, he liked the songs of that era. He was brought up on them, too, and certainly we used to talk about them. One of his favourite songs was 'Little White Lies'. He would have liked some of the songs on this album. We thought of Lennon/McCartney as following on from Rodgers and Hammerstein.”

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.

Like a lot of this album, it’s about people enduring hardship and carrying on. There’s a risk of toxic positivity in that, of glorifying suffering. But (and again, this is a thread through the album) it gives real weight and space to the hardship. In “They couldn’t take any more / But they had to carry on”, Paul sings most of the lines as lead but leaves the last two words for the backing vocals. It’s like a stumble, a break that makes you notice how hard this is. Chugging rhythms underline the grind, the relentlessness of it. In the bridge, he spaces out “So - they - learned - to - carry - on - ”. It’s like someone putting one foot in front of the other, pushing themselves one step at a time.

But then there’s the jazz band. It’s glamorous and unpredictable: you never know quite when it’s coming, or how it’s going to interact with the main song. (I love when it brings its own handclaps.) And where the song is in 3/4, the band is in 4/4. In the Zane Lowe interview, Paul talks joyfully about the mix of rhythms, and how he wanted it to sound as if you’re hearing the band on the radio. This is music from somewhere else, an escape from the daily slog.

That rhythmic magic tells several stories at once. Putting the main song in 3/4 makes it feel nostalgic - it’s a rhythm more common in Paul’s parents’ generation than his own. From the 18th to the early 20th century, 3/4 was the most common rhythm for dance music (not just waltzes: polkas, mazurkas, minuets, polonaises, sarabandes…). After that, 4/4 became the dominant rhythm for popular song. The big shift happened over the course of the mid-century, and really bedded in in the 1950s, along with rock’n’roll. Of course, people still wrote in 3/4 and other time signatures (baby’s in black!) just as earlier composers had written 4/4 and more, but it was a real change in how popular music worked.

In Salesman Saint, the fantasy radio band is in 4/4. It’s a period sound, but it’s playing the rhythm of the future. Music was a comfort to his parents, but it would be Paul’s way out, his chance to escape into that other world.

I’ll admit I had low expectations for the new album but I’ve been incredibly impressed with the musicality and production of The Boys of Dungeon Lane. I’m in awe of Paul’s ability to pluck these melodies out of thin air, and after a listen or two, feel as if they have been in the McCartney catalog for decades. How can he hitting this great stride at 83 years old? It illustrates that getting older doesn’t mean you stop growing or that creativity dies. I hope all of us will be this lucky.

I’m really into a lot of songs on this record but I wanted to talk about Never Know because, not only is it my favorite, but a lyric triggered a connection that’s worth exploring, so here we go…

paul talking about the “secret code” part in days we left behind

Hello, dear anon! The Pipeline™ is, in brief, a framework by which I believe we can understand some of Paul's more... volatile and even toxic relationships. It runs from Jim McCartney through John and (hopefully) culminated with HM - with some weird little detours like Francie Schwartz and contributions from George and Ringo and other folks. Basically, what I posit is that Jim's forays into abusive behavior and the ways in which Paul was parentified - or at least positioned in his family unit as a caregiver to, in some respects, "replace" his mother (who I also hypothesize he resembles strongly in overall character, but with the dearth of information about Mother Mary, it's kind of tricky to support this beyond ~vibes~) - set the stage for Paul to not only tolerate but rationalize and accept people he loves treating him poorly, having incredibly high expectations and demands of him, behaving erratically and/or abusively, and the onus being on Paul to "fix" things (or otherwise massage the situation and appease the person) to avoid "punishment". It's why he always thinks he can make people "better" and that that's somehow his job. You can see this behavior throughout his relationships with John and HM in various ways. He excuses other people's behavior while minimizing his own trauma into oblivion and takes it upon himself to compensate for everyone else's shitty childhood, even if doing so is sending Paul himself off the rails into a nervous breakdown.

Here are at least some of my posts about The Pipeline™ - I feel like I started using that tag consistently pretty early on, but it's very possible that this is not a comprehensive collection, lol.