Paul McCartney's friend and collaborator, Barry
Miles, summed up their early years by saying, "I think of the 60s as a
supermarket of ideas. We were looking for new ways to live." If Swinging
London in the 1960s represented a hurricane of cultural revolution, McCartney
was in the eye of the storm. On his 71st birthday, Spy Vibe looks back at the
art of Paul McCartney. Photo below in true space-age fashion by Richard Avedon.
Paul McCartney was born seventy-one years ago
today. His mother Mary (as in "mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of
wisdom") was a nurse. His father, James, was an amateur musician. He had
his own "Jim Mac's Jazz Band" back in the hot jazz days, and he
brought Paul and younger brother Mike up with an appreciation for all kinds of
music. The family listened closely to old 78 records and the radio, and
McCartney developed a keen ear and passion to make music of his own. After a
brief interlude with a trumpet that his dad gave him, he was inspired by the
skiffle craze to pick up the guitar. He swapped his horn for a Framus Zenith
acoustic model. It wasn't until he saw an image of Slim Whitman that he
realized he could restring the instrument backwards for easier playing as a
lefty. As Lonnie Donegan belted out Rock Island Line and other
skiffle hits, McCartney wrote his first tunes, including When I'm
Sixty-Four. In 1956, Paul found his "messiah" Elvis Presley. With
Elvis, the floodgates of Rock came rushing in with the likes of Fats Domino,
Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and the Everly Brothers. Photo of young McCartney
playing guitar in his yard by brother Mike McCartney (The Scaffold).
McCartney's childhood friend, Ivan Vaughan (also
born on June 18th), brought him to the Woolton County Fete on July 6, 1957,
where he formally met John Lennon for the first time. The two of them shared a
love for Rock n Roll, especially two rockabilly cats that would tour England
quite a bit in those early years, Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent (Vincent seen
below with Paul and John in matching leather gear). As the story goes of
that first meeting, McCartney impressed Lennon with Cochran's Twenty-Flight
Rock and Lennon played Vincent's Be-Bop-A-Lula for the first
time on stage. McCartney soon joined Lennon's band and history followed with
Hamburg, The Cavern, world tours, Sgt. Pepper's, Abbey Road, and beyond.
Although the movie A Hard Days Night created
an on-screen persona of McCartney as the cute, crooning Beatle, history shows
that McCartney and Lennon belted out rockers and ballads equally. McCartney's
musical background did broaden his pallet to include jazz and show
tune-influenced songs, which Lennon called Paul's "granny music". And
although Lennon embraced avant-garde projects in the later 1960s, it is not as
well-known that McCartney was a cultural trailblazer for the group in the
mid-1960s. While his band mates moved out to the suburbs, McCartney stayed in
Swinging London to feed his appetite for new avenues of creativity. See below
for more on experimental projects. Here is a sample of one of my favorite
McCartney pop tracks from the London days, Paperback Writer, which is fueled by
his infectious Epiphone guitar groove.
While juggling the busy Beatles schedule, McCartney was a man about town, soaking up inspiration from all corners of the arts. He helped Barry Miles start the underground London paper, International
Times, and they attended happenings at the Roundhouse with performances by
Beat Poets and The Pink Floyd. McCartney began to attend film screenings and to
make his own experimental films (his footage was later stolen). He also became
fascinated with John Cage and the creation of tape loops and sound collages,
which he called "electronic symphonies." He facilitated Lennon's
contribution of his hand-written lyrics to The Word, Yoko Ono's book
of graphic scores for John Cage. And McCartney helped to renovate and set up
the Indica Gallery (Miles and McCartney shown below at Indica), where Lennon
later met Yoko Ono. Moving with the in-crowd in Swinging London, it would prove
to be one of the most creatively fertile periods for both McCartney and The
Beatles.
McCartney's passion for experimentation fed back
into a number of Beatles projects, including the seagull-sounding tape loops
on Tomorrow Never Knows, The Sgt. Pepper's concept album, the
formation of an Apple subsidiary label devoted to poetry (including William S
Burroughs) and experimental music, and the Magical Mystery Tour film. McCartney
later teamed with Sgt. Pepper's cover artist Peter Blake, Super Furry Animals,
and others on an interesting album called Liverpool Sound Collage (2000). Here's
is the track Free Now, which contains samples from Beatles sessions.
Paul McCartney has continued to explore mainstream
and experimental projects each year since The Beatles disbanded in
1970. In the last twenty years, he has released many classical music
compositions, new electronic experiments, an anthology of poetry (including a
memorial to childhood pal, Ivan), and exhibited a large body of work as a
painter. How does he manage it? If lifestyle is any clue to his output,
jogging, family, laughter, music, and being meat-free seem to be the top of the
list. Spy Vibers will, of course, celebrate McCartney's addition to the world
of James Bond with his theme to Live and Let Die. Others may also applaud
him for his Swinging London style. It all comes back, however, to his deepest roots-
music. That kid playing guitar in the photo above is still driven by a love of
music and performing- a love that shines through during his epic three-hour
concerts. Spy Vibers can see for themselves during his current tour. In recent
years, McCartney has mentioned an interest in making another tape-loop project.
I'd love to contribute (I did get to make a re-mix and film for Yoko Ono a few
years back). Happy Birthday, Paul. Many Happy Returns from Jason at Spy Vibe.
Photos from Getty Images, Richard Avedon, Mike
McCartney, and press archives. If you are interested in seeing more of Paul
McCartney's experimental work, here are some favorite essentials:
Albums
Working Classical (1999)
Run Devil Run
(1999)
Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest (1993)
Rushes (1998)
Liverpool Sound
Collage (2000)
Electronic Arguments (2008)
Ballad of the Skeletons (Allen
Ginsberg/1996)
Hiroshima Sky is Always Blue (unreleased/w Yoko Ono/1995)
Good
Evening New York City (2009)
Kisses on the Bottom (2012)
Movies
Beatles Anthology (1995)
Live At the
Cavern Club (2001)
Wingspan (2001)
The Real Buddy Holly Story (2004)
My Old
Friend (1998)
Paul McCartney Live in Red Square (2005)
Magical Mystery Tour
(1967)
Music and Animation Collection (2004)
Live Kisses (2012)
Books
The Unknown Paul McCartney
(2002)
Many Years From Now (1998)
The Complete Beatles Chronicle (2010)
Paul
McCartney Paintings (2000)
Blackbird Singing: Poems and Lyrics 1965-1999 (2001)
The British Invasion (2009)
I have a spy novel coming out. Get ready to meet MIKI ZERO, a Japanese fashion model and spy from 1965! More info at Jason Whiton's website here.
Check Spy Vibe for recent posts about Batman '66 and Warhol, our fiendish villains archive, Cold War Comics, Sam Mendes back for Bond, Spy Vibe heroes and Wild Things, book design dopplegangers, Christopher Lee, Bettie Page, Dashiell Hammett, Miles Davis, WWII spy Krystyna Skarbek, recycled James Bond covers, interview with Fu Manchu author William Maynard, Man From UNCLE manga, Orson Welles the Shadow, rare Piero Umiliani Kriminal soundtrack, new Beatles Yellow Submarine game, James Bond audio book re-issues, Mid-Century Modern in Peanuts, Ralph Byrd Dick Tracy, my review of SKYFALL and more. Spy Vibe is now on Pinterest! Check out our image archives and follow us here.
Can you help to support Spy Vibe? Please make a small donation with our secure Paypal tip-jar link at the top left of the main page. Nothing is too small to help cover the increasing bills for the domain, web-forwarding and other costs to maintain the site. Thank you!
