Arranging What the Man Says (1975)

 

Arranging What the Man Says

By Lorna Read

Beat Instrumental 

November 1975

    "Paul McCartney doesn't really need an arranger, because he's a brilliant one himself. It's just that he can't put down on paper what he hears in his head. So he needs someone to do it for him."

     Actually, Tony Dorsey McCartney's co-arranger on the Venus and Mars album is being unnecessarily modest. It comes out in conversation that he really had quite an integral part in the overall sound, as well as leading the horn section on the recent Wings tour. 

    Tony is a keyboard player and trombonist from Macon, Georgia. He studied music at university and was aiming at being a music teacher, until he found out that he could make more money "selling pencils in New York." Then he joined the US Air Force as a trombonist in their band, and ended up spending four years as their arranger because they had nobody who could write out parts for pop music pieces to provide a bit of light relief from the interminable military marches and songs from the shows. 

    His next job was in Joe Tex's band. "I was 25 and wanted to travel around, and I've been traveling ever since," explained Tony, but at that time, thoughts of touring Australia and Japan with Paul McCartney were as far away as ---Venus and Mars!

    " At the time, I was put in touch with Paul. I had my own group called Magic, featuring my wife as lead singer. I was working in Nashville for Dial Records, doing some horn and string arrangements for them. When Paul came through to do some recording, he had "Sally G" and "Junior's Farm" and a few more tracks and wanted to add horns to them, but the Memphis Horns, who he had planned to use, were unavailable. The next thing I knew, I got a phone call asking how I'd like to do some arrangements for Paul McCartney. At that time, I'd heard a few of his songs, but not his albums, because for some reason, I never got into albums, not even Beatles ones. Yet some of Paul's songs, like "Yesterday " and "My Love," really came across to me. 

    "I went and met him, and we got along pretty good. I arranged the horns on two tracks for him, and thought that was the end of the whole thing, because he said, 'Nice meeting you. Best of luck'. And we shook hands, and that was it. Then last December, his manager called me and said, 'How would you like to do an album with Paul?'"

     The offer came at a difficult time for Tony. "When I started work on the album, I was working with Magic at weekends, and during the week, I'd fly off to Nashville to work on the arrangements," he explained. "I went up there in January and heard the material for Venus and Mars. Then Paul and I sat down and talked about it, and he started playing ideas to me on the piano."

     Paul's method of working now isn't substantially different from the way he was working during the making of Sgt. Pepper, when he stabbed out brass parts in the air with the first finger of his left hand, telling producer George Martin that that was what he wanted a certain instrument to play. According to Tony, doing the arrangements with Paul was really a collaboration. "He could come in with a tune and sit down at the piano, he'd play some bits and say, 'here's a bit, and here's that bit. And right now, I want to get from here to there. Do you have any ideas how I can do it?' So I'd think of something, and sometimes he'd say, 'okay,' and other times my suggestions would spark off an idea for him, and he'd leap to the keyboard and say, 'I've got it.'

     "This is what we'll do. So, although I was supposed to be the arranger, I ended up assisting him in all sorts of ways. For instance, when we were in the studio recording the album, I'd be in the control booth saying, 'No, that's not right yet. Do it again.' I completely got into the music and the people he had with him after we'd finished the mixing in. 

    "Paul's manager talked to me about the idea of going on tour with Wings. He said, 'Hang loose for a while. Don't make any commitments.' So I relaxed for a few weeks, and then he said they were putting a horn section together for the tour. At first, it was going to be a big thing, 20 strings plus a 12-piece horn section, but we got it down to six horns and four electric strings, which we had to drop as we couldn't get any string players. So it was just four horns."

     In the end, all four members of the horn section had worked with Wings in various capacities before, and they all got on together really well, "not like some jobs I had!" Tony commented. There were a few problems with the sound on the tour, like one night when the monitors failed, and Tony had to carry on playing when he couldn't hear anyone else and just prayed that his trombone was in tune. The audience, according to Tony, was split down the middle, half of them, 25 plus, and the other half, the kids, who were all down the front hollering. 

    I asked him whether, in his opinion, the audience had now accepted Linda McCartney as a musician. "She goes down well with the audience," he replies. "I just think she has a little problem with the press. They won't accept her and try to down her for being average. But there are average musicians in every group. The thing is that they don't know is she didn't start out as musician, but came into it much later. What they don't see is that one average musician in a band doesn't affect the whole. You need some outstanding people and some average in a group, because if they were all geniuses, they wouldn't work together. And every group needs one thing to hold them all together. 

    It's Paul who brings and holds Wings together, because everyone respects his singing and writing and the kind of person he is, if a guy gets angry or out of line, Paul will smooth it all over and ease what could have been a bad situation."

     At first, Tony decided that Jimmy McCullough was the best musician in the band. "Just when I thought I had it all figured out, there'd be another night on which Denny Laine would really shine. That's the sort of band it is. Everyone is equally good and has their moments. I think Denny has a lot of talent. He doesn't generally get a resignation because he's the easiest-going guy. You can say to him, 'We need someone to play bass on this because Paul is playing piano, and he'll always offer, even if he doesn't love playing bass. He never grumbles. He's a great singer and writer as well, and helps Paul with some of the songs."

     Apparently, there is nothing that annoys Paul more than having people put down the other members of Wings. "Wings is much more of a group effort than it's publicized to be," explains Tony. "The nucleus of the group is Paul, and the nucleus of the material is his. Then people pick this up and say that the rest of the guys would be nowhere without Paul, that they're just guys. He picked up. They don't see that Paul is in a position to do whatever he wants, and if he hadn't wanted them in particular, he wouldn't have them.

     "Paul could have kept on just selling records and never made another personal appearance if he didn't want to. But the whole object of entertaining is to know you're being appreciated, and you only know that if you're performing."

     Does this mean that Paul still feels the need to prove himself, to be reassured that his music is still appreciated? "I think so," Tony replied, "although I don't think he ever doubted himself.

     "To get back to the press, there are some people who will read an article and believe every word like gospel. So if the writer says Paul still 'hasn't lived up to what the Beatles did,' that real reader will believe him. That's what makes Paul so upset and angry, the fact that they won't let him get away from the Beatles things. He's not trying to forget the Beatles because he still likes all of them. They grew up from childhood to adulthood together, regardless of what goes down. They were very close, and they still are. Paul is not trying to say through Wings 'to Hell with the Beatles.' The Beatles are like a family.

     "When the child grows up and becomes an adult, he moves off from the family to his own thing, and Paul fails to see why people can't understand this. He finds the general attitude towards Wings very disturbing. He feels they are capable musicians and deserve better recognition, and he would like to see them getting that recognition. That's the only thing that gets to him, really."

     What is it that, in Tony's opinion, makes McCartney's song so special? To what technique and talent does he owe his fantastic success? "He breaks all the rules. He invents such unusual chord changes that the first time you hear them, you think, 'Did he really mean that?' His writing is so simple yet so meaningful. It's good, logical music.  There's good and bad in all music, and the trick is to be able to sort it out, to take the good and throw out the bad. This is what Paul does so well. When he plays the song, you can hear something there that's so old it goes way back, and then you hear something that's brand new, or leading the way towards things that are yet to come.

     "But for the most part, it will never be complicated. He never writes anything the average person couldn't play, but the end result is so simple, so effective, and so fitting that you wonder how on earth he came by it. He always ends up with something that was right there under your eyes all the time. And I wonder how he could have stopped at that. Because if he had, if it had been me writing it, I'd probably have kept right on trying to reach for something more dynamic and maybe ruin the whole thing."

     Paul writes all the time, backstage, on the road, in the hotel. He keeps all his ideas in his mind. He always carries an acoustic guitar with him when he's traveling, and there's usually a piano wherever he goes. Most times, he'll think of a melody first, fiddle around on the piano with it, then add the lyrics.

     Tony feels that this lucky break, the opportunity of working with Wings, should open a few doors for him. This also had a profound influence on his own music. "This is a great learning period for me. I think the reason why I never made it as a writer was that a few things were out of order, and being around Paul has shown me how to correct them. He's a great writer and a great person. I don't think success has changed him in any way. He seems well-balanced and very normal. As a matter of fact, he may be too normal under the circumstances. I would have thought that someone in his position would have been really different. But that's the thing that amazes me about Paul. I think, 'look at you, Paul. I'm talking to you, and it's just like talking to any other guy right now.'"

     Tony is fulfilling his ambition to travel by playing his way across Australia and Japan, with the hope of a tour of America and another Wings album ahead of him.

     Accompanying them on tour will be a well-known guest, one who is totally uninvited. "Paul has a fan from America who says she has dedicated her whole life to him for the last 10 years; she's only 21 now. She made every date of the '73 tour, and every single date on this tour, and she says she's going to be at all the gigs in Japan and Australia."

    "She isn't a groupie. She never has had any sex with anyone to do with the band. She's just dedicated. She's been pointed out to Paul many times, but he avoids her because he's embarrassed. He thinks she must be a bit weird. Just think, 10 years she's been following him, and they've never even spoken to one another."