At 50, Paul McCartney Transcends Age - and Rocks On
By Roger Catlin
The Hartford Courant
June 1992
In the 1960s when the Beatles represented youth and hair and the future of popular music, Paul McCartney never dreamed he'd be doing rock and roll at 50.
"You automatically presume that you would be over the hill by age 30," says the man who wrote "Fool on the Hill." "In my 20s, I had this image of myself at 35 doing things like the 'Oratorio', walking around in one of those jackets with patches on the elbows."
. He achieved that by writing the "Liverpool Oratorio" last year, which topped the classical charts here earlier this year. But the man who may forever be known as the cute Beatle is also working in rock as well, even as he turned 50.
"I certainly don't feel old," McCartney said in a written interview with the Courant on the eve of his half-century mark. "I feel there's still a lot for me to do."
In answers faxed from England, McCartney addressed the recent success of Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio and the recording of a second classical piece with his co-composer Carl Davis that should be out soon.
At the same time, McCartney described his forthcoming new solo album as harder rocking and more band-oriented, using most of the musicians who backed him on his 1989-90 World Tour, before 2.5 million fans.
He is already the most successful songwriter in US history, having written more than 32 number-one songs, and he has amassed 75 gold and platinum discs, more than anyone else. He regularly makes the list of the richest celebrities, reporting being worth $600 million. The Beatles may have been the most successful group ever, having sold more than 1 billion discs, according to the Guinness Book of Records. But McCartney has also gotten 17 gold albums during his post-Beatles solo and Wings career, all of which featured Linda McCartney, his American wife of 23 years, and he told the Courant he was surprised by how many Wings fans he encountered on the last tour. With one of the songs back on the radio, remade by Guns N Roses. (I love it. McCartney says)
He is also looking forward to getting on the road one more time, maybe to new places. McCartney has still never played Connecticut, although he came his closest with the proposed 1990 show that would have opened the Yale Bowl to rock concerts for the first time in a decade. The show came up against neighborhood opposition and was eventually tied up in city politics and finally canceled. After all that, McCartney suggested that fans keep a keener eye on elected representatives.
Perhaps still touchy from the volatile love-hate attitude of some fans, the most extreme example of which resulted in the assassination of his songwriting partner, John Lennon in 1980, McCartney failed to answer only one question-- about fans who have gone over the edge in the name of fandom, or who think his song speaks specifically to them.
Here is the text of the interview.
Q: Do you think the success of The Beatles will forever overshadow whatever new pop songs you come up with? Will people in concerts always prefer to hear Beatles songs to anything you come up with, no matter what it is? If so, is that frustrating ?
A: People obviously like the Beatles songs a lot, but not to the exclusion of anything else. When we were on tour, we found that there was a whole lot of Wings fans out there, particularly in the States, who prefer Wings to the Beatles.
The thing is that the hardest act to follow is yourself. I had to follow myself in the Beatles. I had to or I had to give up. But I've had success with songs since the Beatles. "My Love," "Jet", "Maybe I'm Amazed," "My Brave Face" have all done well, and "Mull of Kintyre" actually outsold any single The Beatles ever put out. But there's no frustration, because this is what I do. I write songs. If no record company ever wanted to record my stuff ever again, I'd still write songs. And I will keep on writing because there's a little bee in my bonnet that says, 'maybe I can write something that is really good.' One really good song, and that's what keeps me going.
Q: What do you think of the Guns N Roses version of "Live and Let Die"?
A: I love it.
Q: Your world tour was originally going to end here in Connecticut at the Yale Bowl in New Haven. Are you disappointed when local authorities can block a show that so many 1000s obviously want to see?
A: I'm sorry the fans were disappointed. I think the thing to remember with authorities is that they tend to be the people we elect, and we elect them because they say they're going to do what we want. So, if so many people want something, I think maybe they should ask how come their elected representatives ain't doing it?
Q: As someone who has had so many number-one albums in the past, how does it feel to have a number-one classical album?
A: It feels great. This was a new challenge for me. It took a long time to complete, and it's always a buzz when people who matter, the people who buy the records, encourage your efforts.
Q: Does this success encourage you to delve further into the classical field?
A: Yes, I'd like to write more stuff in this field. I thought about maybe doing a violin concerto or something classical for the guitar. I'd like to do more. In fact, Carl Davis and I already collaborated on another project, which has been recorded with an orchestra, and you should be hearing about that pretty soon.
Q: It was written once that you were working with John Lennon on a symphonic work as far back as 1968. Did something like that ever get started?
A: I've been dabbling with classical elements since "Yesterday", and "Eleanor Rigby."
Q: With this success, do you feel accepted in the classical field, or have you felt any visual snobbishness in the genre because of your pop past?
A: I'm very proud of my "pop past" and my "pop present" for that matter, I'm not going to start drawing up lines of which is better. It's all music, and the two fields, if you see them as distinct, can be complementary.
For instance, I've been toying with the idea of adapting some of my own rock shows. As far as any acceptance goes, I don't know. I'm still a rock and roller, and I'm not about to give that up. But the pleasure I get from hearing all these classical orchestras around the world want to perform the oratorio. It's been performed in Liverpool. It's been done in Carnegie Hall in New York. It's been done in Dublin. And now I'm told orchestras are planning to perform it in Scandinavia, Italy, and Japan, and I hear a lot of other countries are interested as well. So somebody seems up for accepting it.
Q: How similar was composing an oratorio to writing a new album's worth of material? Did you ever feel like there were similarities in melodic structures, or did you feel you were building something entirely different?
A: It was different and exciting, because for all my career, I've been used to mainly writing songs that said it all in three minutes. With an orchestration, you're dealing with something that says it in 95 songs.
The Oratorio was actually written while I was on my last world tour. I was on stage doing a rock show at night and writing this classical piece in hotels or whatever during the day. It took two years in all for Carl Davis and I to complete it, and there was a lot of work involved scoring it, doing the string section, the violin solo, the choir harmonies. And what I especially enjoyed was that writing for an orchestra was like using the ultimate synth, the ultimate synthesizer. You can get any note you want. You've got all this variety of sound at your command.
Q: Is it galling that this went to number one so easily, and Flowers in the Dirt, as good as it was, did not go higher than number 21 in the US charts, even with the mammoth tour?
A: Flowers in the Dirt was released quite a while before the tour, and we didn't really tour the album, but it did well. It went to number one in a lot of places around the world. I was pleased with it.
Q: How are you coming along on your new solo album?
A: We've been recording the album since after Christmas. It's not a solo album as such. I prefer to think of this one as a band album. It's sounding like quite a rocky little band album, with basically the same bunch of guys who were with me on tour. Linda and Wix are on the keyboard, Robbie McIntyre and Hamish Stewart are on guitars, and Blair Cunningham, our new drummer, joined us around the time that we did the all-acoustic Unplugged album. Hamish and I have co-written a couple of tracks together that have a kind of soul feeling to them.
Q: You seem well-suited to touring. Will there be another event of that magnitude following the next album? What is the timetable for its release?
A: I've said we'd like to tour this album, and I'd like to get on the road again. Maybe we'll go to new places this time.
Q: You're turning 50 this week. Any thoughts on continuing to create and perform in rock and roll at this stage? Is it anything you ever pictured yourself doing, or is it a notion of rock as a province of youth changing?
A: When I started out with the Beatles, you automatically assumed that the normal rules of show business would apply and you'd be clapped out by 30. But the thing about rock n roll is that it breaks the rules. I certainly don't feel old. I feel there's still a lot for me to do. And I think the only reason why rock n roll bands haven't tended to go on at our age is that rock n roll is too young as a musical form for any of us who came out of the 60s to have gotten that old yet.
I like the idea of being like the old bluesman and just carrying on. I mean, no one said Muddy Waters was too old to play. I don't believe that rock 'n' roll is just for younger bands, either. Someone suggested, when we were doing the last tour, that the 60s bands, us, the Stones, the Who, the Grateful Dead, who are all touring, were crowding out the younger bands. My attitude to that is, let the younger bands get better and have them try to crowd us out.
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