Abbey Road Medley
THE CUTE ONE
Paul McCartney had the great (mis)fortune of rising to unprecedented pop fame alongside one of the greatest geniuses rock has seen. The Beatles changed the rules of rock music. Before them, popular singers weren’t expected to be both kit and kaboodle. With rare exception, you either wrote songs or you sang songs someone else wrote and looked good doing it. After the rock revolution of the mid 1960s (in the wake of Beatlemania), an artist had to write songs and sing, and preferably play an instrument and look good doing it.
But within the Beatles another tidal shift occurred, one even stranger to the popular song. Drawing inspiration from Bob Dylan and the folk movement, the Beatles started doing songs that mattered. They started writing more poetic, more intellectual and more obscure lyrics, addressing (at some times more vaguely than others) social issues of the day. “Importance” and “relevance” became de rigueur; songs had to matter. And while, sure, “Strange Fruit” was an important piece of social commentary and Pete Seeger was already 46 when Rubber Soul came out, being a rebel nearly became a prerequisite to rock’n’roll and being a passionate rebel was mandatory for hippie cred. Before then, commitment wasn’t a question. Let’s face it, nobody cared whether or not Noel Coward meant it.
It is here where our dear McCartney was left in the dust. By his early 20s he had shown himself to be a masterful craftsman with such perfectly sculpted silly love songs as “All My Loving” and “P.S. I Love You” to his credit (even if credited to both John and himself). But then the rules changed and Paul found himself having to be profound – not a good fit for him. Once he had to be worldly (“Michelle, ma belle / These are words that go together well”) or insightful (“blackbird singing in the dead of night / take these broken wings and learn to fly”) he really didn’t have a whole lot to say.
Fast forward a few years (in Beatle terms an eternity) and the band, along with western civilization, was tearing apart at the seams. The Fab Four – one of the primary artistic and financial cultural forces of the decade – was about to implode. Paul had been taking on a daddy role, serving as the band’s unappointed manager since Brian Epstein’s death in 1967, but by 1969 it was clear that the band’s demise was imminent. Let it Be, the Beatles’ penultimate statement, was handed over to Phil Spector to salvage while Paul went about stitching Abbey Road together into a fantastically imperfect swan song and to this date the best selling of all of the Beatles albums.
Abbey Road, and in particular side two of the LP, was where Paul made a discovery which would lead to him writing his greatest songs. Working with the band’s longtime producer George Martin, McCartney edited eight demos and incomplete takes the band had recorded over the previous couple of months into a 16-minute medley. In so doing, Paul set a course for some of his coming decade, and for an almost unprecedented style of pop craft. And this is where our discussion begins.
As the Beatles fell apart, Paul was already working on his first solo album. 1970’s McCartney is a quiet masterwork, finding a new folk form and hitting #2 in Britain and #1 in the States despite yielding no singles. In May of 1971, he followed up with the harder hitting Ram, credited to Paul & Linda McCartney, gaining the top spot on the UK album charts and managing a #1 single, the tuneful “Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey,” in the States. But Paul was a family man. He wanted a band. And by the end of that year, he would introduce his new group to the world.