The Post-Beatles Explorations Of ‘Musical Magpie’ Paul McCartney

In a 1997 episode of the sitcom “I’m Alan Partridge,” the clueless radio DJ, played by Steve Coogan, declares his affection for the “classic rock” band Wings.

“Who’s Wings?” someone asks.

“They’re only the band The Beatles could have been.”

It’s a joke, and a good one, about Alan’s middle-of-the-road taste. Because — obviously — Paul McCartney had done his best work by the end of 1969.

Yes, it would be foolish to argue that, say, “C Moon” or, er, this are musical statements up there with “Here, There and Everywhere” or “Hey Jude.” But it seems equally foolish to assume that McCartney simply ceased making great and interesting music after The Beatles.

The recently released book “The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1,” by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair, picks up the story in 1969 and continues to 1973. In those years, McCartney delivered such timeless classics as “My Love,” “Band on the Run,” “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” and “Maybe I’m Amazed,” plus the explosive aural extravaganza of “Live and Let Die” — tracks that arguably are up there with the best of his work with The Beatles.

That’s not to mention the many, many album tracks that serious fans adore — and all of “Ram,” criminally underrated at the time.

In a recent interview, Allan and Adrian opened up about the new book and this relatively overlooked period of McCartney’s musical output.

Peter Jackson’s “Get Back” documentary showed The Beatles of 1969 largely getting along. With this book, should fans brace themselves for an account of The Beatles at their most bitter and ugly towards each other?

Allan: I don’t think I’d put it that way, but there is some significant battling in the early chapters, and the state of Paul’s relationship with the others is, inevitably, part of the backdrop against which Paul’s early career unfolds. Keep in mind that “Get Back” shows us the Beatles working together for about a month, January 1969 – at the end of which, John is seen filling George in on his initial meeting with Allen Klein. That was, in a very real way, the moment when everything changed, and the way it played out occurred after the “Get Back” period ended. John very quickly decided to make Klein his manager, and George and Ringo joined him to put Klein in charge of Apple, over Paul’s objections – objections based not only on his preference for the Eastmans, who were about to become his in-laws, but because of reports he had heard from other musicians about Klein’s business practices. So, for the rest of the year, and the early months of 1970, there are many ways in which the other Beatles undercut Paul, and vice versa – as well as times when everyone tried to smooth over the waters. But the bottom line for Paul was that if the Beatles were no longer to be a going concern – a decision made by John – he wanted to remove himself from Klein’s sphere of influence, which meant getting away from Apple. After all, all of Paul’s royalties, including those for his solo work, went into Apple’s coffers. Getting free of that meant dissolving the Beatles’ business partnership, and when he was unable to persuade the others to let him leave that partnership, his only recourse was to sue them. That was the reality, and we had to present it as it was.

What was the most interesting thing you learned about Paul as a songwriter during this period?

Adrian: Paul is the ultimate musical magpie. He possesses an astonishing ability to pluck ideas from the world around him, wrap them up poetry and melody, and capture them in song. When you have a mind as restlessly creative as Paul’s anything you witness can become poetry, from a dying lamb and a dragonfly fluttering into his Scottish country kitchen (which, together, informed “Little Lamb Dragonfly”), to a headline about the IRA (Irish Republican Army) “tarring and feathering” perceived traitors in Northern Ireland (which was the basis of “1882”). While researching this volume we discovered that the opening section of “Band On The Run” was inspired by George Harrison commenting: “Well, we’re all prisoners, kind of inside ourselves,” during a business meeting at Apple’s Saville Row offices in July 1973. And the character of “Admiral Halsey” – one of the two central protagonists in McCartney’s Billboard No. 1 hit ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’ – was inspired by actor James Whitmore’s character, Admiral William Frederick “Bull” Halsey Jr., in the 1970 World War II movie “Tora! Tora! Tora!” There are countless examples of this in Paul’s Beatles songbook (”Eleanor Rigby”’ and “Penny Lane” for example), and his ability to observe and document has continued to fill his lyric sheets for another five decades.

Allan: On the purely musical side, Paul’s fluency with a variety of style was something we’ve always known, but in looking closely at the five albums (and several singles) we cover in the book, I’ve been constantly struck by the inventiveness with which he brings his ideas to life. To choose an unusual example – for a song like “Kreen Akrore,” which was inspired by a documentary about a rainforest tribe in Brazil, he found both the spirit and the sounds he wanted by building a campfire in the studio, making animal noises, and buying a bow and arrow and setting up microphones across the length of the studio so that he could capture the sound of an arrow flying through the air. And this was for an instrumental track that he knew would be outlier on the “McCartney” album. On “Too Many People,” he decided, late in the process, that he wanted an aggressive percussive effect, so he sent out for some pallets and was recorded jumping on them – a sound tucked deep into the song’s texture, so you don’t hear it as jumping on pallets at all. There are many more examples of this, along with

Are there ways in which you would say Paul grew as a songwriter after The Beatles?

Allan: In some ways, Paul went through a complete re-set after the Beatles. When he started recording his first album, “McCartney,” he had only two new songs – “The Lovely Linda” and “That Would Be Something,” neither of which was a finished song, although both let him coast on his ability to write an attractive melody. For a few weeks, he recorded instrumentals and revived unused songs from the Beatles years, but as the process continued and his confidence grew, his muse returned to the point where he could produce something like “Maybe I’m Amazed,” a song as good as anything he wrote for Beatles. And from then on, it was as if a spigot opened. He recorded demos for more than 30 songs before he began work on “Ram.” And by the time he reached “Band on the Run,” the last album we cover in this volume, he was writing increasingly complicated, multi-part works that required moving through changes of mood and instrumentation – so songs like “Band on the Run,” “Picasso’s Last Words” and “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five” are like miniature operas.