The Man and His Music (1986)

 The Man and His Music

By Robert Palmer

NY Times News Service

September 4, 1986

    A funny thing happened to Paul McCartney on the way to making his next album, or, to be more specific, it happened to his co-producer Hugh Padgham. "When we started working on the record, Hugh came in one day and said he'd had a dream," McCartney recalled when he visited New York this week. "He dreamed he woke up one morning and had made this really bad syrupy album with me, an album he hated, and that it had blown his whole career." We took that as a little warning. 

    That's as good an explanation as any for the unexpected hard rock and psychedelic flavors of McCartney's album Press to Play, which will be in the stores next week. After signing a multi-million-dollar deal with CBS and making a series of albums for that company that were a bit syrupy and were successful but not hugely so, McCartney has returned to the harder textures and more emphatic rhythms of rock, and he has returned to Capitol, the label for which he first recorded as one of the four Beatles.

     "Sometimes it's nice to kick over the traces," McCartney said. "Sometimes you just need it, like in my case, I'm thought of maybe as being an ace balladeer. People know I do that; they don't know I also like to do harder stuff like "Angry" on the new album, or associate me with electronics and backward guitars, which we used on some of the other new songs. But at one time, I was in the avant-garde of what was going on around the time of the Sgt. Pepper album, which was largely my influence."

     McCartney feels he is being unfairly typecast in many of the histories of the Beatles and of rock in general that continue to flood the book market. "They make me out to be the ambitious, cold, ruthless half of the McCartney-Lennon songwriting team," he said, "and they make John out to be the happy-go-lucky, brilliant one.

     "I was reacting to one of those definite true story books on the Beatles recently," McCartney said, "and one of the things I told the journalist was they made me out to be a maneuvering swine, but John could be a maneuvering swine too. The next thing I know, there's a story: 'McCartney calls John Lennon a maneuvering swine' in papers all over the world. All I meant was that in our business dealings, John was good at maneuvering. There's nothing wrong with that. I suppose I shoot my mouth off, say what I think. But while I loved John, I don't think it's a good idea to just sanctify him. I don't think he would have liked that. He liked the truth."

     Whether he's been stung by criticism in books and the press, or is simply entering a new phase, McCartney seems much more like the rock and roller again after some years of churning out relatively insidious pop. In addition to the new Press to Play, which is his most creative and committed-sounding album in years, there have been live performances. McCartney performed at the Prince's Trust charity concert in London recently, not as the pop balladeer who wrote the Beatles ' song "Yesterday," but as the rocker who sang the Beatles' version of Little Richard's songs. 

    "They had a monster band," he recalled, with people like Eric Clapton, Elton John, Phil Collins... I came out there and did "I Saw Her Standing There," and "Long Tall Sally," which I hadn't sung in 20 years. I didn't know if I could still sing that high, but when I tried to put it in a lower key during rehearsal, it started to sound like Pat Boone! So I just went for it the way I'd originally done it."

     These songs were two of the most abandoned all-out rockers McCartney sang with the Beatles. His performance at the concert will be seen in the United States soon as part of an HBO cable television special. "The concert made me realize that I can do Beatles songs again," McCartney said. "The Beatles' breakup was kind of like a divorce. There was always the feeling afterward that none of us wanted to touch those songs, but time heals all, and besides, they're good songs. So now I'm kind of looking around for a band again. I don't fancy looking too hard at the moment. I just want some good players. That's all. No image to speak of. If they play good, it doesn't matter how they look. "

    McCartney said he hoped any band he put together wouldn't be compared with the Beatles or with this post-Beatles band Wings. "I suppose I shouldn't worry," said the ex-Beatle, whose familiar mop top is shot through with gray these days. "We used to joke about kids in a record store finding a Beatles album and saying, 'Hey, look, Paul was in a band before Wings.' Now it's true, and now I'm starting to get fans who were too young to remember Wings."