A bit past the midpoint of the last century, roughly from early 1967 to late 1969, a sizable number of human beings believed that Paul McCartney was the coolest man who ever lived. Compared with your average world-historical claim, this one was not unreasonable.
The evidence was strong. At 25, Paul McCartney was in the bloom of youth and one of the most famous men in the world. He was engaged to Jane Asher, the prettiest actress in Britain. The clothes he wore were unlike anyone else’s, Savile Row classicism tweaked with hippie casual. He had a farm in the Scottish highlands and a mansion in St. Johns Wood and a bungalow on call at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Wherever he went he left behind him puddles of adoring fans, to whom he was unfailingly kind. Academics wrote complicated, awestruck articles about his talent. His fellow musicians revered him. He drove an Aston Martin DB5 and owned a sheepdog straight from the pages of Dog Breeders’ Bible. He was richer than Croesus. And of course he was producing the most gorgeous popular music any of us could have hoped to hear. He was a Beatle.
McCartney’s youthful reputation may surprise anyone under the age of 50, certainly anyone under the age of 30. Paul McCartney has become their generation’s version of George Jessel—the world’s “toastmaster general,” an antique, unavoidable showbiz figure of long-ago achievement who pops up at every halftime extravaganza, charity concert, royal jubilee, White House PBS special, and lifetime award ceremony. You can almost hear the conversation in the promoters’ office: “You mean we have to let him sing ‘Hey Jude’ again?”
The descent from coolest-man-who-ever-lived to latter-day Jessel began not long after the Beatles broke up in 1970. McCartney’s decline wasn’t commercial; he was far the most successful of the post-breakup Beatles. The problem was commercialism itself, oozing out in a series of boneless hits like “Let ‘Em In” and “Silly Love Songs” and—the hands quiver to type the words—”Wonderful Christmastime,” the most annoying song ever written about our most annoying holiday. McCartney’s true decline in stature took place, instead, in the rarefied precincts beyond commercial culture, in the estimation of critics, hipsters, and the swelling ranks of boomer academics who managed to turn their teenage passion for rock music into a simulation of a scholarly discipline. (Academics who write about pop music are like sex researchers or vice cops: They disguise their unseemly obsession by pretending it’s a job.)
And as McCartney sank, his former bandmate John Lennon ascended—the “smart Beatle” (Paul was the “cute Beatle”) blossomed into an intellectual and wordsmith, a politically sophisticated artist who was in touch with the avant-garde and unafraid to push the boundaries of the bourgeoisie. Lennon’s mellow, preposterous anthem, “Imagine,” which never seems to go away, supercharged his reputation. His bloody martyrdom in 1980 sealed the deal. And cool Paul faded from memory.
But Philip Norman remembers. He was one of those besotted by the McCartney of the late sixties. A man can react to the overwhelming, field-sweeping coolness of another man in one of two ways: He can look on in stunned admiration or go green-eyed with envy. Back in the sixties, by his own admission, Norman chose option number two. In a foreword to his new, long, and not-particularly-necessary biography, Norman says that he spent much of his early journalism career—he’s near McCartney’s age—ardently wishing he could “swap lives” with the Beatle. He would have killed for the car. And for Jane Asher.
The ill will—all going in one direction—was a motive force behind Norman’s first Beatles book, a four-sided biography called Shout! published a few weeks before John Lennon’s death. It is still in print 36 years later, still judged to be the definitive biography of the Fab Four. In Norman’s account, McCartney appeared as a manipulative, hypocritical cutie-pie whose cunning and guile managed to obscure his relative lack of talent and Lennon’s position as the cornerstone of the band’s greatness. Promoting his thesis, Norman told interviewers that Lennon hadn’t been one-quarter of the Beatles, he’d been three-quarters—leaving the last quarter, presumably, to be divided between Paul and George Harrison, with some microscopic fraction going to poor Ringo. McCartney took to calling the book Shite.
Now, with his new biography, Norman has reassessed. He dismisses his earlier anti-McCartney hostility as a kind of derangement, almost an instance of Freudian projection. He writes: “Actually, if I’m honest”—always the best policy for a biographer—”all those years I’d spent wishing to be him had left me feeling in some obscure way that I needed to get my own back.” It took a while for his change of heart to take hold: In 2008, he published a biography of Lennon (also grandly subtitled “The Life”) and McCartney didn’t come off too well then, either, in contrast to Lennon, “the Beatle who had made us all think, the John Lennon who lifted us onto a higher plane of consciousness.”
Every benefit of doubt was granted the thinking Beatle, always to the cute Beatle’s disadvantage. Here, for example, is how the Lennon biography describes Lennon and McCartney’s relationship with a music publisher and his publicly traded company:
“Asserting his individuality” is a tidy euphemism. What Norman means is that Lennon and his new wife, Yoko Ono, were holding weeklong press conferences from their honeymoon bed, releasing an album with a cover photo of the two of them naked—truly the stuff of nightmares—and releasing a 51-minute slow-motion film of Lennon breaking into a big grin. I’d sell my shares, too.
In this new McCartney biography, however, Norman describes the same events like this: “Latterly, as John’s behavior had become more and more erratic—and especially since he’d teamed up with Yoko—[the stock price] had begun to fluctuate alarmingly.” This is much fairer and more accurate, and Paul is spared the snooty accusations of being “housetrained” simply because he wanted to keep the shareholders happy.
Having helped in the demolition, the aging Norman has now taken on the role of repo man, suggesting that, in Shout! and elsewhere, he and everyone who agreed with him got it wrong: “I’ve been able to uncover a Paul McCartney very different from the one the world thinks it knows,” he writes. The facts are hard to dispute. Lennon first formed the group that grew into the Beatles, but after the band stopped touring in 1966 and became creatures of the recording studio exclusively—which is to say, when they did their most enduring music—the Beatles were McCartney’s band.
Even back in Liverpool, he brought discipline and a showbiz gloss to the enterprise. From the start, he pushed for more rehearsal time and broadened their song selections, making the little skiffle band eligible for a wider variety of gigs. McCartney was the first to suggest that they all don uniforms; these evolved from cowboy shirts and string ties to all-black T-shirts and jeans to the collarless suits and pointy boots they were wearing when they caught the world’s attention. You can’t imagine (if you’ll excuse the expression) the Beatles performing in blue jeans or street clothes. Their seemingly limitless appeal, spanning generations, would have disappeared if they had fallen into the black hole of “authenticity” that swallowed so many late-sixties bands and dated them instantly. There’s something timeless about singing “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You” in coat and tie.
Much of the Beatles’ identity was the work of their manager, Brian Epstein, whom Norman credits with “an unerring instinct for the classy.” But it was McCartney who ensured that the music, too, would sound ageless. At the start, Lennon and Harrison’s taste ran to rock ‘n’ roll rave-ups and doo-wop, and not much beyond. McCartney’s father had been a player in a jazz band before World War II and he passed along to his son a reverence for pop standards to sit alongside the boy’s love for Elvis and Little Richard. Paul’s favorite song lyric, says Norman, was by Lorenz Hart: “Don’t change a hair for me / not if you care for me.”
“I wasn’t necessarily looking to be a rocker,” McCartney said later. “When I wrote ‘When I’m 64’ ”—at the age of 16!—”I thought I was writing a song for Sinatra.” The Beatles catalogue is littered with what Lennon called “Paul’s granny shit,” throwback ditties like “Your Mother Should Know” and “Honey Pie” that the other members of the band despised. Still, the songs suggested a wide-ranging musical curiosity and a sense of the past that no other rock band had shown. The cross-fertilization of English music-hall songs, Broadway show tunes, and early, mostly African-American rock ‘n’ roll bred songs not quite like anything that had come before. The art was at once adventurous and accessible.
And it’s McCartney’s doing, nearly all of it. In his life outside the Beatles, he was what critics took Lennon to be. Settling down, John and his other bandmates bought houses in the “stockbroker belt” in the London suburbs, embodying the bourgeois ideal and watching lots of TV until McCartney roused them to make another record. He bought the mansion in St. Johns Wood and lived the life of an arty bachelor in Swinging London. He subsidized an underground newspaper, invested in avant-garde galleries, befriended modernist composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, and built a private art collection filled with Magrittes and de Koonings. As the avant-garde scene flourished in London, much of it under McCartney’s sponsorship, it drew castoffs from New York. Among them was Yoko Ono, who was told that if she wanted a Beatle to invest in her “innovative” work, she should try McCartney. He declined and directed her to Lennon. The rest is herstory. Thanks, McCartney.
Meanwhile, as Norman shows, the work of his colleagues would be unimaginable without him; the reverse, however, is not true. He designed their album covers. He produced the idea for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts. The witty and stinging guitar parts from that album aren’t Harrison’s but McCartney’s. Lennon’s most popular song with the Beatles, “Come Together,” was a wan ripoff of Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” until McCartney introduced the bass riff that defines the record. He put together the “suite” on Side Two of Abbey Road. Only years later did it come out that what many of us took to be Ringo’s greatest performance—the frenetic drumming behind the last verse of “Dear Prudence” from the White Album—was played by Paul. We could go on and on.
Will Norman’s repo job succeed? It’s a stubborn myth, this idea of a progressive, hyper-talented John Lennon dragging the ball-and-chain of Paul McCartney into musical greatness. The myth rankles McCartney even now—even after his solo success, after his knighthood, after the endless sold-out tours that continue to gross more than $100 million a year. “A lot of the artistic and creative things that John got credit for were done by Paul,” his late wife Linda once said. “He still resents it.” And how: “I started to get frustrated,” McCartney said last year, “because people started to say, ‘He was the Beatles.’ ” His most recent album featured a song, “Early Days,” in which McCartney picks at the scab. It’s not a very good song, but anyway:
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
