Recently I've been going through quite a Paul McCartney phase. Some might even say that is ill advised. I came late to The Beatles 'proper', having been initiated by my friend Steven when I was fourteen or fifteen but with the result of only liking the occasional track, which in most cases were the Lennon tracks or the Harrison tracks, generally finding Paul's music saccharine, and dare I say boring.
The songs which featured on this list of Beatles dislikes were the typical moon/spoon stuff along with 'Hey Jude', 'Let It Be', 'Eleanor Rigby', and 'Yesterday' and so on. The only time I'd ever been taken aback by the song Yesterday, was out of context in a Mantovani type string arranged segment which featured in the film Once Upon A Time In America in between Ennio Morricone's beautiful theme score, other than that I couldn't bear to hear it.
The songs I gravitated towards back then were the more mystical dreamlike Lennon songs like 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds', 'Julia', 'Across the Universe' or the sincere every-note-counts of Harrison's 'Something' or 'Here Comes The Sun'. As pieces of music and sentiments I found them somehow more endearing, more enduring and more heartfelt and soulful than I did of the McCartney material, one exception being oddly, 'I Will' (which as saccharine as a choice it may be) was something I heard first covered (even more saccharine) by Art Garfunkel!
Now, on the flip side one could equally say that Lennon's mystical dreamlike songs were as indulgent as McCartney's were bland.
Other than that most of my musical obsession was taken up for a good few years by Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, at least until I turned 21 and was knocked out of the addiction and flung fully into the world of the world of music 'outside' of the Bob Dylan cradle thanks to a broken heart and a new set of mates with more diverse tastes in music.
Anyway, several years ago, after having had a quite strident, 'not interested' opinion on the Beatles aside from the odd track, I began to take them more seriously.
I think the thing that often turns people off The Beatles is the hype surrounding them and the esteem with which they are held, so that even before you've heard their music you know who they are and everyone thinks they're great. The inner contrarian/cynic in me was immediately turned off and decided to avoid these horrific Beatles at all costs.
At some point I got to see A Hard Day’s Night, and began to realise that behind these - what I thought of as - throwaway nursery rhyme rock n' roll songs, or songs you find in a 'Complete Keyboard Player' book in the homes of middle class parents, or a school music teachers idea of 'good' music, were these really satirical, ironic and hilarious figures who were not the sanitised bollocks I'd always believed them to be.
I distinctly remember as a young teenager leafing through my granddad Gibb's 'teach yourself how to play keyboard' to find among 'When The Saints Go Marching In', 'Hey Jude' and 'Let It Be' and deciding from then that everything that was wrong with the world, with music and with people must have something to do with those fucking abhorrent songs and those fucking 'Complete Keyboard Player' books. To this day I still hate 'When the Saints Go Marching In', 'Michael Row the Boat Ashore' and hope they along with every fucking moron who has ever played those songs on a keyboard marches into a fiery furnace of misery.
Anyways, getting back to my love for the Beatles. Seeing A Hard Day’s Night opened my eyes. These chaps were funny and talented and swept up in a new kind of entertainment world which they would serve as future role models. They hadn't had their spirits kicked out of them, the way these despicable Reality-TV-talent-shows now currently murder kids' spontaneity and sense of instinct and when you watched them performing songs from the album the movie takes its name, you realise how effortless and brilliant those melodies were, which can only have come from a mixture of the Rhythm & Blues they'd heard from vinyl shipped in from the states down on the Albert Docks when they were still tear-away teddy boys in Liverpool to the 'granny music' John accurately described as Paul's 'influence' from his father.
When you combine those two elements, and John, Paul, George and Ringo's equal love for Rock n' Roll and Country Music, you have what at that point was the future synthesis and model for modern popular music obviously...
Now getting to McCartney. I can leave Lennon aside, as I had always preferred his music, always thought of it as more emotional, visceral, subversive and sincere.
My entry to McCartney's music was actually not via his Beatles output initially (I came to appreciate that again later), but his first - DIY - album McCartney and the second one Ram, which as far as I'm concerned are both brilliant. As far as DIY, McCartney set a standard, otherwise established as far as I can tell with Skip Spence's 1969 work Oar.
The linchpin without a doubt with McCartney was the song Junk, that beautiful nostalgic recollections of a junk shop where signs in the shop window wonder why. He gave the artefacts a humanity and married it with a beautiful sorrowful melody, and the fact that unlike some of his earlier work, it wasn't laden with gooey schlocky lushness, but was sparse, spare, a bit rough around the edges made it beautiful. Followed by 'Every Night', 'Oo You', 'Man We Was Lonely' and 'Teddy Boy' (a failed Beatles song Lennon hated, and which in another context I'd probably hate too). Again, taking the contrarian stance the typically honoured 'Maybe I'm Amazed' leaves me cold. Its shit Paul, shit.
So McCartney led me to Ram and the amazing 'Uncle Albert' et al, but most importantly to revisionism of his work with The Beatles and so began my appreciation of the man's music both as a writer and crucially as an arranger. You only have to hear his bass contributions to the other Beatles' work to see how he could lift a song up at the right places. Although Lennon was good at dropping a 'Spaniard' in the works with his wit and cynicism, his musical forms were far less advanced than Paul's, but at times they were equally spellbinding. 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun' is ample evidence of how great Lennon could be.
From there I went back to 'Penny Lane' and admitted to myself that I no longer hated it, I loved its nod to the Beach Boys. Then I decided I could stomach Paul's ode to the mysterious Eleanor (Rigby). Having previously thought it boring and farty to make up songs about imaginary people, their imaginary lives (although much evidence suggests she was real) and their lonely existence. Now I think of it as song craft, and admirable to a point. But further back you need only look at a song like Things We've Said Today, which has such a fantastic feel and melodically is gorgeous, never mind the obvious cliché choices people always comment on like 'Here, There and Everywhere', which is also a tremendous song.
I even came to almost like 'The Long And Winding Road' (mainly the piano playing), which had long been a song I had hated for its seemingly pointless sentiments leading to the irritating verse ending chords which cry out that 'daa daa, daa daa, daa'. McCartney certainly knows how to verge on elevator music and Lennon could bring him back from this abyss, but equally McCartney could save John from his indulgence of the self in song. Alas we have Ian Macdonald's book Revolution in the Head, so I may as well say no more on any of this.
The point I guess I'm trying to make is that although McCartney irritates me like the incessant drip in the bucket from a leaky ceiling, sometimes I think 'damn, that's a good fucking song'.
Aside from the first two records and obviously avoiding the utterly yuckifying Broad Street, I have steered clear of most of McCartney's other solo work and always kept a 'file for later' policy on 'getting into' more of his stuff. But in referring to the previous paragraph, sometimes I'm nicely surprised by a new song I had not heard before. Two examples of this were hearing 'Jenny Wren', from Chaos and Creation.. and 'Calico Skies'.
The guitar arrangement of the former song is in the classic Macca-Blackbird vein, but it's pretty, prettier than 'Blackbird', and a better song to boot (controversial?). The lyrics are pretty straightforward, but something about the song suggests it was an inspiration song, the guitar piece particularly. Although lyrically it could never match it, it somehow reminds me of how Dylan must have written 'Dark Eyes':
Like so many girls, Jenny Wren could sing
But a broken heart, took her song away
Like the other girls, Jenny Wren took wing
She could see the world, and its foolish ways
She saw poverty, breaking up her home
Wounded warriors, took her song away
For the guitar players out there, the song is down-tuned a tone and the change from Am to Cm is a beast, as is the standard picking change from Am to G to F on the 'breaking up her home' part.
Equally 'Calico Skies' had a similar effect on me. Again, like much of Macca's output the song could verge on the cheese-factor, specifically a video performance of it with him playing it by a crackling fire in a forest with his tracksuit bottoms on. Plonker. I've picked a live version to show below, because I enjoy the strings on it, more than the video footage of Paul playing it by a smoking fire! Although even the strings are slightly cheesy. Either way, great song Paul!
Interestingly, both songs, both just over two minutes in length and both seemingly inspiration songs which feel like they were written relatively quickly share a similiar sentiment about a cruel world outside, with Calico Skies referencing 'crazy soldiers' and 'weapons of war', and Jenny Wren, 'wounded warriors' and 'the broken world' and its 'foolish ways'.
Of recent there seems to be either a cunning PR campaign to revitalise his career or a general revisionism growing (or probably both) around McCartney's cultural role/impact in terms of an avant-garde musician with his interest in electronic music and his apparent love of early experimental music/music-concrete. I had been one who thought of this revisionism in the various music magazines, as rather annoying cynical ploys to reinforce his influence as the Beatles, sell more records and compete with Yoko Ono's genius John Lennon branding.
Having gone through my own revisionism of his work, it seems that in the mainstream at least there is no need to reinforce his credentials, as apart from the young muppets on Twitter asking 'Who the F&*% is Paul McCartney?' after his recent Grammy outing, most know who he is and certainly out of the mainstream enough people appreciate the best of his work. Yet even where I think the arguments (tied in with the 'Carnival of Light' debate) for this 'McCartney as the experimenting Beatle' are weak, there is some importance in this revisionism in that it reminds people that amongst the schlock and the clangers, there are some real diamonds that should be heard.
Having already expressed my hatred of 'The Complete Keyboard Player' manuals and the like I will step back slightly from that. One thing I think crucial about McCartney is how influential a piano player he is. Something that I haven't seen mentioned much. You can pretty much guarantee that students of music theory will have at some point learnt what I had viewed as those atrociously bland and boring songs 'Hey Jude' and 'Let It Be' at music lessons and that essentially the style in which they played those songs came directly from Paul McCartney’s own fingering technique.
Paul McCartney, a self-taught - dare I say - raw and 'natural' musician (whose musical scope and melodic ear is pretty astonishing) who in fact has probably influenced a million student piano players and future classically trained musicians and songwriters perhaps even unconsciously in their playing of piano and in their composition. There are positives and negatives to this obviously, on the negative someone boring like Jamie Cullum or even Chris Martin when that silly prat gets anywhere near a piano.
Even more crucially, McCartney is not hailed as a great piano player, yet most of the kids who learn piano will have within their playing style, especially if they follow the educational playbooks, something of McCartney’s instilled within their own, that unmistakeable piano sound that you hear on 'Hey Jude', 'Let It Be' or even 'The Long and Winding Road' have been the basis for many kids to learn piano. Even back when I was at secondary school you'd hear the trickles of those songs flowing down from the music rooms as the teacher tried to teach the kids a 'modern' song instead of a Mozart or whatever else. That's probably why I always hated those songs, because i associated them with institutions and establishments and they seemed to fit so nicely into the worst elements of taught music because they were not idiosyncratic, but in a sense definitive, concise and easy examples of 'how to play'. His playing is almost a lesson in instruction for piano, basic chord patterns, roots and fifths and the switches between them and underneath deceivingly simple and catchy melodies. Look at any musician, who was generally tutored whether at school or privately and somewhere within their style is Paul McCartney and the traces of his Granny Music.
Equally, the same can be said of his guitar style specifically on 'Blackbird'. These two points are something I can't imagine (no pun intended) apply in the same way to John Lennon or Bob Dylan or any other songwriter, although a couple of Lennon's songs, particularly 'In My Life' which have something of the McCartney feel, also have that classic Lennon trope, shift from major to minor on the IV chord (e.g. C to Cminor in the key of G) which has found it's way into the popular song.
So, sorry Paul for not giving you credit where credit was due sooner. I still think you need a kick up the arse sometimes, and although your songs don't always move me soulfully or emotionally you're one hell of a song crafter and musician and an absolutely necessary tonic to people in the John Lennon camp, who can be as loathsomely indulgent as you can sometimes be loathsomely bland.
There is constant twittering about Bob Dylan and Plagiarism and I've often found myself on both sides of the argument, at first on the wrong side, until I come to my senses that is.
There is a link somewhere on the expectingrain.com forum for Classic Interviews Vol.3 which cover the periods 78 to 81. In one of the 1981 interviews, Dylan explicitly talks of how European and particularly UK audiences appreciate his material, specifically his older material because they are inately familiar with the Scottish/Irish/English Ballad form.
He then goes on to state openly that many of his early songs are taken from those ballads. He lists Masters of War, The Times They Are A' Changin, Girl From The North Country... Of this we all know already, and there are many more significant songs we could add to Dylan's list.
Clearly Dylan has always used the folk process as a way of creating new works of Art. I think if you're as good as Dylan is it's possible to do this legitimately and thoroughly. He has taken the process and moved into the realms of both the popular and the obscure songs in his work and of course into painting and writing non-fiction (or is it fiction?) in Chroincles Vol I. There is no question that Chronicles was a delicately researched project as Scott Warmuth knows. A book "meticulously fabricated, with one surface concealing another, from cover to cover".
I write songs myself but have never adopted Dylan's process consciously as such, however I'd imagine that if I did I would probably benefit as much as my work would because I would become inspired simply by being immersed in it. I would find something new and interesting to say from existing threads. "Sewing new dresses out of old cloth", as he said in Floater, which again was said by someone else in another context altogether.
Unconsciously of course anyone who is in the business of being creative will find they have been influenced, or because of a measured amount of experience, been transported to a new place with which to write and contemplate and will therefore in some way have borrowed inocculuously. In all cases this is growth. It only becomes plagiarism to me when the person commiting the plagiarism has no deeper knowledge of the area they're plagiarising, nor any true artistic intent. In other words sheer laziness and dishonesty. We can certainly vouch for Dylan's artistic intent, we merely need to look at his body of work.
Clearly his immersion in these materials and his exposure to many different things fed into this 'wellspring of creativity' he spoke of (60 Minuted interview in 2004) which created those unique songs that he says he wrote unconsciously, Mr Tambourine Man, Its Alright Ma, Gates of Eden, Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands and so on. Of course by 1967 or 68 he claims the lights went out and he had to learn 'consciously to do what I had done unconsciously', giving Blood on the Tracks as his first successful proclamation of this new process. (This very process Dylan embarks on is in some ways covered in my favourite Jean Luc Goddard film Le Mepris, which is a self-conscious film of layers concealing layers.)
So Dylan's education and sensitivity, which must have exploded when he arrived in NYC in 1961, and his use of other sources along the way is the main reason we have Bob Dylan. Without it, he's not there, he's gone to borrow from his lost unfinished Basement Tapes gem I'm Not There. In effect, its those little threads that make us all who we are, new dresses from old cloth, or atomically stardust. Plagiarised, if you like, from the universe.
I came relatively late to the great Richard Thompson, and was even later in discovering how great a band Fairport Convention were. I remember watching him play beautiful lyrical guitar flourishes alongside a sleepy whimsical Bob Dylan at the Guitar Legends show in Seville, Spains in 1991 or 92 on an old VHS my Dad had when I was a just bairn. I thought he looked something like a curious, subtle rather shy and retiring Viking, keeping the as-ever unpredictable Bob Dylan boat afloat as it were.
I think the first song of his I remember hearing might have been what I could only describe as a Celtic-rockabilly song, Turning of the Tide, somewhere in the depths of a moment, when and where I do not recall any longer. I remember thinking, wow that is one fucking fantastic guitar lick. Maybe I first heard it in a pub somewhere, because it always felt like a song playing at the end of the night in a pub in the Highlands, when everyone is too drunk to dance, except for the kids who are on holiday kicking up the glitter dust and party poppers. The song is much more than that though.
Later I saw him on TV doing two songs in tribute to Joni Mitchell, and his guitar playing to my unsophisticated ears seemed almost free of scale, key and modes. The guy was and is an unreal, sweet, wild, subtle and enigmatic guitar player, with a voice wrapped in wit-licked Celtic croon.
A friend of mine a few years back turned me onto 'The End of the Rainbow', one of the saddest, funniest, and darkest lullabies I've ever heard. 'I feel for you, you little horror' goes the song and from there it only gets sadder and funnier. After hearing an opening line like that you know you're dealing with a major talent who has a way with words and isn't afraid to lay it down honestly. It's probably the best opening line of anything I can think of other than Charles Bukowski's "it began as a mistake", at the beginning of Post Office. With that song I found myself listening to all of I Want To See The Bright Lights, the album recorded with his then wife Linda Thompson. This led me to 'The Calvary Cross', which I had actually heard first as covered by Tortoise and Will Oldham on 2006's The Brave and the Bold. (While I'm on the subject they also do a sublime cover of Elton John's Daniel.)
This man who seems to live and breathe a mystical England, where witches, wizards, men with bread knives "four feet wide" walk side by side with the modern world, is also an absolute killer love song writer. After 'Bright Lights..' I got hold of Rumor and Sigh, which contains among others the great '1952 Vincent Black Lightening' a love song to a motorcyle and 'I Misunderstood', also covered unbelievably and rather exquisitely by Dinosaur Jnr.
Another album Sweet Warrior, features a tune called 'Sunset Song' , which when I first heard it, live at a gig in Durham a couple of years ago, blew my mind. The guitar accompaniment is elastic, medieval and spellbinding, stretches around the lyrics bouncing back and forth and drawing you into another place altogether. Again it's not just musicianship or craft with Richard Thompson, his lyrics are some of the best you'll hear. I love the way he sings, "the band's down on the jetty, If you cup your ear", and I think one of the great lyrics about selflessness and desperation in what I can only interpret as unrequited love is encapsulated in the lines:
"You said, if I hold my breath, dive down deep enough I might grow fins. Seems to me I've held my breath, held my breath to please you ever since."Stunning.
One of the things that strikes you about Richard Thompson is his effortless musical ability. His sense of timing and phrase as a guitar player, the tricks he can roll out would leave most guitarists in the dust. His advantage is the folk and modal traces he interjects with elements of jazz, rock 'n' roll and even elements of punk. Nobody sounds like him and in many ways I've often thought Mark Knopfler's melodic stratocaster picking style and sound might be influenced in some way by RT. He is without question one of the great guitar players. Al Kooper in a 1994 interview with my good friend, songwriter Peter Stone Brown (full interview here) described Thompson as a "giant if people could get used to his voice". Thompson's voice is in fact one of his great assets. He is an amazing singer.
Kooper on Thompson:
"He's a great fucking guitar player...play a long fucking guitar solo and kill me because you're the best guitar player walking the fucking earth... I can get my fix when I go see him live. Because he's the greatest fucking guitar player, he shreds. I'm like a groupie. Since Hendrix, he's the guy for me. He does things that no one else can do. And he's got a brilliant fucking mind musically speaking. He just kills me. It's right up my alley. I love it."Thanks for the music RT!
See www.richardthompson-music.com
If you like your John Fahey's, your Dave Van Ronk's and your Leo Koettke's and even further down the line you like your Derek Bailey's, Jim O'Rourkes' and David Grubbs', then you should listen to this guy - Stefan Grossman.
Grossman plays superb 'fingerstyle' guitar and spent the weekends of his youth with gospel singer/guitarist Rev. Gary Davis learning guitar. The man is a historian of great guitar music and an indexing point for all of the acoustic guitar greats, as well as a truly great talent in his own right.
In the video below he also wears a fantastic beard:
Grossman got to play and study under other seminal figures, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, and Mississippi Fred McDowell and in the sixties formed the Even Dozen Jug Band, of which several members went on to forge successful careers of their own, where Grossman remained relatively outside of the limelight. Although, he has the privilege of his own Martin Custom Edition guitar, the HJ-38 Stefan Grossman Custom Signature Edition and according to his Wikipedia entry is a market leader in instrument instruction. He resumed touring in 2006 and frequently visits the UK which is good news for me, as I will without a doubt attend one of his guitar workshops.
Here he is performing the 'Assassination of John Fahey':
Thanks to the online radio Pandora, (which I use daily) my listening tastes can be channelled through a particular style or artist, in this case Jim O' Rourke, leading me off into a world of good music that I may be hearing for the first time. Because of Pandora, I got to hear this guy for the first time and found myself in a familiar and comfortable world of guitar rags and guitar drones both traditional and experimental.
Although some may mourn the death in some cases - depending on geography - of hearing this music live, or swapping vinyls and tapes with avid collectors. This process is still occurring, if even on another level. Sites like Pandora or Spotify, although they don't allow us the opportunity to hold the album in our hands and run our fingers over the artwork or the vinyl, they do give us a window into a world, which was once governed by who you knew and where you lived at a certain point in history.
Playing Mississippi Blues in 1981 (great little back story as well):
Playing 'God Moves on The Water' (1972):
Access to this material at one time may have taken a music listener years to achieve and depend on a friend of a friend to provide a record and after much searching result in nights of bliss in front of their record player smoking pot reading the album sleeves. In my case as clinical as it may be, drinking coffee in the house on an afternoon with my laptop humming low I stumble upon Stefan Grossman. The hunt is not as majestic for the music, and beauty and yearning of the search may have died, but the beauty of the music is immediate and most importantly available.
Some who read this may already be aware of Stefan Grossman, and have discovered him in other ways perhaps more interesting, but the important point is discoveries are still personal, whether online, or in the real world.
Recommended link - http://www.guitarvideos.com/
Recommend listening - Yazoo Basin Boogie (album)
Others will far more knowledge than I could probably expand on this in the comments section...
