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Paul McCartney 2020 at his home in Sussex, England, photographed by his daughter Mary.
Photo: Mary McCartney / Beck
On September 16, 1969, Paul McCartney wrote the words "The End" in a round, psychedelically blurred font that was also found on many record covers of the time.
It was the day his congenial childhood friend John Lennon had told him that, after less than ten years, he wanted to end the cultural awakening that the Beatles had been for the 20th century.
McCartney won't have guessed it that evening in September, but that day would determine his next years, and in a way it continues to this day.
But first there is another entry on the calendar sheet for September 16, 1969: Dinner with Twiggy and Justin.
This refers to the sixties icon Twiggy with her manager Justin de Villeneuve, so it may not have been all uncomfortable that day.
You know all this because this week Paul McCartney has presented a two-volume literary work of more than 900 pages in which he has added 154 of his song texts - the first from 1957, the last from 2018 - to biographical essays and corresponding photos , Paintings, notes and calendar tears presented. Ideally, as McCartney suggests in the preface, these 154 essays on the lyrics add up to a kind of autobiography.
The essays are memories, associations or simply attempts by an artist to interpret his own work. And because McCartney can write lyrics for eternity, but seems to have more respect for the longer text form, he has made an interesting choice as a co-author: not one of the established rock biographers, not a decorated journalist, not a star of Beatles' exegesis, but rather a lyricist, after all, so obviously the self-confident assumption of the musician, with »Songlyrics« we move almost self-explanatory in the area of lyric poetry.
Paul Muldoon is perhaps one of the most distinguished living lyric poets, he comes from Northern Ireland, just like the McCartney family is of Irish descent, and has not only been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry, but also the Queens Medal of Poetry. He also teaches at Princeton University and heads the poetry department of the New Yorker (yes, there is). So you could say that Muldoon is definitely McCartney-like in his sphere. He likes, McCartney writes in the preface, that the other Paul "didn't hope to find out more about any alleged feud between me and John or Yoko" and "wasn't an exaggerated fan who wanted to translate every word spoken into scripture."
McCartney and Muldoon met for 24 sessions between 2015 and 2020 and recorded around 50 hours of conversation, mostly in New York, where McCartney lives on the Long Island peninsula in the very affluent beach town of East Hampton with his wife Nancy.
McCartney, too, often no longer knew what was meant
Some of the songs they bent over there were written by McCartney more than 60 years ago. McCartney sometimes didn't know what he meant either. The same applies to later Beatles songs that may have been made under drugs (McCartney: "I was the last in the band to take LSD. John and George pushed me to do it because they wanted me to catch up with them." ). Muldoon points out that in these cases McCartney's interpretation is as good or valid as anyone else's. The musician, writes Muldoon, takes a look at "what the French philosopher Roland Barthes called the death of the author."
That could mean that McCartney agrees when we read "Eleanor Rigby" as a ballad about a cleaning lady in a Liverpool church: "Eleanor Rigby / picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been / Lives in a dream" - McCartney himself calls these lines strange. The line about Eleanor Rigby's face, which she supposedly keeps in a jar near the door, is actually stranger ("wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door"). That, in turn, can explain McCartney. He had to think of Nivea cream that his mother always used, like a face that you can put on and take off.
If you read the essays next to the lyrics, you can think of these encounters between Paul the Beatle and Paul the poet as therapy sessions. Recurring in the argument are two losses. The first marks the beginning of the Beatles, the second loss the end. McCartney began his songwriting career in 1956 with the song "I Lost My Little Girl". He was 14 and his mother had just died. In the essay accompanying this text, McCartney does not talk about his feelings, but about how he built himself a cheap left-handed guitar and taught himself the first chords. But how do you start a text about the death of your own mother?
Fortunately, there are standards. McCartney went back to the classic blues opening: "Well, I wope up this morning ..." - and then anything can happen in the blues, but most of the time the girl is gone. And so it is with the 14-year-old McCartney, only he adds a delay: "... my head was in a whirl / and only then I realized / I lost my little girl".
McCartney also plays the descending chord progression from G, G7 and C major on the guitar. The melody for it, on the other hand, is ascending, a stylistic device that later became famous through the Beatles. And then, surprisingly, McCartney immediately comes to the Beatles in the essay on the song about his mother. He tells of the first meeting with John Lennon, which took place a little later, when Lennon, a year and a half older, performed with his band The Quarrymen in the back of a truck in front of St. Thomas Church in Liverpool. During a break, McCartney played Lennon Eddie Cochran's "Twenty Flight Rock," and the rest is - yes, this phrase fits for once: history. The connection between the death of the mother and the appearance of Lennon is interesting. The loss of the one important person hereeach other's gain there.
For this reason, too, the departure of John Lennon from Paul McCartney's life 13 years later is the other great trauma that appears again and again in the McCartney essays. It was difficult, writes McCartney, "
not
to admire
John
for his quick-wittedness and cleverness." But John had a difficult life, McCartney emphasizes again and again, his father ran away when John was three years and he grew up with his very strict aunt. McCartney was therefore ready to forgive him a lot.
On that September 16, 1969, the day of the separation, McCartney recalls: “John said: I'm not going with it, I'm getting out.
Bye.
Immediately afterwards he started to giggle and said how exciting he found it, like someone telling you they are divorcing you and then laughing. "
In the essay to the lyrics of "Another Day," his first solo song after the Beatles, McCartney writes about how sad he was and how afraid he was of John's reaction.
Rightly, as McCartney had to find out, because in fact the former friend not only said in an interview with "Rolling Stone" that the Beatles were "shit", but also made fun of "Another Day":
"The only thing you done was yesterday / And since you've gone you're just another day", Lennon sang in 1971 in "How Do You Sleep".
All McCartney could have managed was the Beatles hit "Yesterday", and since he left it was only "Another Day".
McCartney keeps coming back to the matter with John in the essays on different lyrics, even if the songs actually have nothing to do with it.
The song, which is actually about John Lennon, is from 1971 and is called "Dear Friend."
Paul McCartney asks him whether he was just scared or if it was really true that he meant all of this seriously, the injuries, the allegations.
He got no more correct answer.
They saw each other now and then, but it wasn't the same anymore.
Ten years after the Beatles ended, Lennon was shot dead in New York.
Paul McCartney says in this book that he made his peace with John Lennon.
Working on the great texts in it may have helped him.
Paul McCartney: Lyrics 1956 to date. Edited and introduced by Paul Muldoon. Translated from the English by Conny Loesch. CH Beck Verlag, 912 pages, 78 euros.