True Confessions From Paul (1991)

 True Confessions From Paul 

CP

September 18, 1991

    Paul McCartney says he was the weirdest member of the Beatles, and it was he who taught John Lennon how to make the group's most progressive music. "I was the far out one," McCartney said Monday in an interview with the Toronto Star and other journalists in London. "I hate kind of having to tell everyone this because I feel really weedy."

     He said the popular assumption that Lennon was the spark behind such avant-garde ideas as the landmark concept album Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the sound collage "Revolution Number 9" on the White Album is wrong. Although he acknowledged the White Album was put together by Lennon and Yoko Ono. 

    McCartney also says he was so immersed in drugs and sex during the 1960s, "I narrowly miss some lethal minds." He often wonders why it is that he survived when other big-name music stars didn't, but he says his carousing days are long over.

     "I think sometimes it was like a minefield for me-- the '60s," McCartney said the Beatles back in 1966 would have been content to remain as identical mop tops had he not insisted that the group start experimenting. He said Lennon had been happily leading the life of a golf-loving country manor lord with his first wife Cynthia, while McCartney was busy planning the Sgt. Pepper album. 

    "Then he changed. He met Yoko, and he totally threw over his marriage and all his golf clubs, and he got out of all that and became Mr. Avant-Garde." An image which has stuck.

     McCartney was pegged as the lover of sweet love songs, which he admitted is a big part of his style then and now.  He bristled at a suggestion that the songs Lennon wrote on his own, both as a solo artist and with the Beatles, were better than his. "I know Lennon's music isn't better. I'm not even sure it's as highly rated or more highly rated than mine. I think it's a fantasy in the minds of a few journalists."

     He admitted being puzzled that he made it to 1991, while so many other rockers didn't, including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison of the Doors.

     "There was a lot of stuff going around. A lot of my contemporaries were indulging in certain things I was trying to steer clear of, particularly heroin."

     But times have changed for McCartney 49, who will release his first extended work of classical music on October 7. His hair is noticeably gray, and he doesn't eat meat or smoke tobacco. "I'm grown up now," he said. "I'm not just primarily concerned with teeny bopper affairs anymore. I'm a father of four," McCartney said.

     He was a virtual stranger to most of classical music, even though he had helped to arrange the music for strings in such Beatles classics as "Eleanor Rigby" and "Yesterday." His new work, "Liverpool Oratorio", is a nostalgic look back on his hometown of Liverpool.

     "You just get bored writing pop songs after so many years of doing it because it's pretty much formula, "he said. 

    McCartney also said he's pleased to see Canadian Bryan Adams doing so well with his latest hit, "Everything I Do, I Do It for You," the theme song from the movie Robin Hood, that has surpassed any Beatles songs for the most weeks at number one on the pop charts. "He's cool, man. Really cool," McCartney said. "I like him. Good luck to him, I say."

Later Music Made 'Under the Influence'

Reuter

September 18, 1991

     Former Beatle Paul McCartney said in a recent interview that much of the rock group's later music was inspired by drugs. "From Rubber Soul in 1965 on, every Beatles album was produced under the influence of drugs, especially marijuana and LSD," McCartney told the German news magazine Der Spiegel.

     "Everything in the 60s was drug-inspired: music, literature, cinema. The Vietnam War was carried out under drugs," he said in the interview conducted in London.  Asked if he had been an alcoholic and drug addict, he said newspaper stories that he was a booze and heroin zombie were exaggerations. "I snorted heroin one single time. It's a wonder I didn't succumb to addiction."   McCartney said he was so involved in alcohol and other drugs that "I nearly perished. Who thinks about eating when there's LSD?"

     After the Beatles broke up in 1969, McCartney formed his own band and is still recording, touring, and writing songs. He said drugs were now a thing of the past. "I'm a very, very lucky person," he said. "Next year I will be 50, and I am constantly discovering new things."