All You Need Is Paul

Strange, but hardly surprising. By McCartney’s own account, his recently concluded tour had a set list of more than twenty Beatles hits (out of about thirty-six songs per show). They included “Hello, Goodbye” (which he opened with), “Fool on the Hill,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and “Lady Madonna.” That he plays such songs is the primary reason fans have come out in droves to see him. Despite tickets costing up to $250 a piece, the 27-date U.S. tour sold out at almost every venue–and at record speed: It took 19 minutes for tickets to sell out in Philadelphia, 15 minutes in Boston. At some sites, tickets were being sold at a brisk rate of 867 per minute. All told, McCartney raked in more than $50 million. And with little help from his friends.

Let’s face it: The hundreds of thousands of fans who came out to see the Driving USA tour didn’t spend all that cash to hear songs from the “Driving Rain” album (which received mediocre reviews and has sold about 300,000 copies nationwide). They came to hear “Hey Jude” and “We Can Work It Out.” They came as adoring fans, hoping to bring back some of that Magical Mystery. And had I been born when the Beatles were still a band, maybe I would feel the same way too.

But I’m a latecomer. I didn’t get into the Beatles until the 1980s, having only then discovered my parents’ vinyl recording of “Revolver” (one of the greatest albums of all time, and one that could have made an even greater double-album had it been paired with “Rubber Soul” as George Harrison once speculated it could have). I remember trying to slowly peel off the corner of the “Revolver” sleeve, having misunderstood the story about the pasted-over album cover on “Yesterday and Today.” In any event, between my sister and me, we own almost all the Beatles records available on CD. Listening to such hits as “We Can Work It Out,” however, makes me think of how talented and unique all the Beatles were, not just Paul McCartney. That Sir Paul is playing twenty of the greatest songs in rock ‘n’ roll with a band consisting of no-name (albeit highly professional) musicians strikes me as unseemly and downright inappropriate.

Beatles purists, I am guessing, would be against one man playing something that grew from the efforts of four. At this point, I understand the Paul loyalists are lining up their arguments; let me see if I can address them.

First, doesn’t Paul McCartney have a right to sing the songs he wrote, some of which were recorded without the aid of John, George, or Ringo? Sure. “Blackbird” is one. “Yesterday” and “She’s Leaving Home” work, too. But it is a slippery slope. Anything with percussion is questionable, as are songs featuring either rhythm or lead guitar. Suddenly you’re playing “Revolution” and “Come Together.”

Second, one can argue that it’s open season on performing all the hits since half the Beatles are now deceased, playing that big gig in the sky along with Stu Sutcliffe and Brian Epstein. In fact, some might argue that only one of the original Beatles is still alive.¹ But even when all four Beatles were alive, playing the old songs was generally considered taboo. Since I’m too young to remember what happened in those immediate post-Beatles years, I turned to one of the preeminent scholars of Beatleology, who has asked to remain nameless. Let’s just call him the Walrus. (Calling him my Maharishi is probably a bit much.)

According to the Walrus, Lennon “studiously avoided doing Beatles songs. When he did perform live . . . he played either rock ‘n’ roll classics like ‘Money’ or hideous later solo political screeds, like ‘John Sinclair’ or ‘Woman is the Nigger of the World.'” He tells me, however, that McCartney did start playing Beatles tunes by the time of his 1975 tour, including “Lady Madonna” and “Yesterday.” “But in the 1970s, he avoided the huge iconic Beatles songs, even those like ‘Let It Be’ or ‘Hey Jude’ that were undeniably ‘McCartney’ songs. This delicacy only contributed to their image as museum pieces, fit only for reverence from a distance and certainly not to be commodified on the concert stage.” The Walrus knows all. (Though I refuse to believe the Walrus was Paul.)

Following the breakup in 1970, there was an unwritten rule that whatever song you sang lead vocal on, you could continue singing to your lonely heart’s content. Hence the lion’s share went to McCartney and the tablescraps were left for George (“Here Comes the Sun,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Old Brown Shoe”) and Ringo (“Yellow Submarine,” “Octopus’s Garden,” “Yellow Submarine”). My friend the Walrus is fond to point out, however, that during George Harrison’s long-forgotten 1974 tour, “In My Life” (a Lennon song) was a popular staple.

Then again, it’s not George, but rather Paul, who has an estimated fortune of about $1.63 billion. It’s not that I don’t acknowledge the greatness of Paul McCartney. As an individual, he has done much for charitable causes, most recently raising $30 million for the victims of September 11. He is perhaps one of the most gifted songwriters of our time. (An April 1999 BBC poll named him “the greatest composer of the last 1,000 years”–I like him, but I wouldn’t go that far.) As my colleague Christopher Caldwell once wrote, “People will be singing ‘Penny Lane’ by heart 200 years from now just as people today can hum ‘Camptown Races’ or ‘Bicycle Built for Two.'” Paul was far more than just your average bass player too. Says music critic Mark Brown, “McCartney reinvented the way the bass was used in rock music; it was nearly always part of the song, not just an accompaniment.” And besides plucking the bass, he even played the drums for “Back in the USSR” and performed the guitar solo for “Taxman.”

But George Harrison was more than just your average guitarist and Ringo more than just your average drummer (listen to the seamless shifting beats in “Things We Said Today”). All four band members were indispensable components of the Beatles entity. It would have been unfathomable to have replaced one of the band members and still be seen in the public’s eye as the Fab Four (I know, tell that to Pete Best).

Another argument involves a comparison to other bands, such as the Police. First of all, no other band is like the Beatles. Nevertheless, after the Police broke up in 1984, only Sting became a star in his own right. And in concerts, he mixes the lineup a bit, though he still plays songs from his Police days, most notably “Roxanne” and “Every Breath You Take” (which bandmate Stewart Copeland noted was originally, under Sting, meant for a Hammond Organ and was only a smash hit after Andy Summers added the brilliant guitar picking). The point is, all three members were just as essential in the making of the Police as John, Paul, George, and Ringo were in the making of the Beatles.

I’ll even stoop lower and make the Van Halen argument: After lead singer David Lee Roth left the band, they kept on playing the hits “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love,” “Panama,” and “Jump”–but with Sammy Hagar on vocals. It’s just unseemly. (Funny how things turn out: Roth and Hagar, both having been kicked out of the band, recently performed together–but with a no-name performing the signature Eddie Van Halen guitar solos. Shame and indignity all around!)

Does this mean I would forbid Paul McCartney from ever playing a Beatles song again? Not exactly. Who’s going to gripe about him playing “Martha, My Dear” or “Rocky Raccoon”? And now that George Harrison has passed on, McCartney has included a touching tribute to him by playing “Something.” But if the two surviving Beatles, both in good health, were to reunite–assuming Ringo would rather be with Paul than with his All-Starr Band–the purists shouldn’t have any qualms about their playing anything from “Love Me Do” to “Let It Be.” It would be the biggest event in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. They could even call it the “Two of Us Tour.”

Victorino Matus is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.

¹Paul McCartney may have actually died around the time of “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Isn’t that a car crash on the right hand side of the album cover? Remember the shoulder patch with the letters OPD, as in Officially Pronounced Dead? And note the cover of Abbey Road: John in white as the Eastern symbol of death, Ringo in a dark suit as the pallbearer, George in denim as the gravedigger, and Paul out of step, cigarette in hand, and barefoot. Look at the license plate on the Volkswagen: 28IF–as in Paul would be 28 if he were alive. And what did Lennon say on “Strawberry Fields”? “I buried Paul.” The evidence is overwhelming.