Prospero | Musical biography

The story of Paul McCartney, no ear required

Philip Norman's biography is good on the Beatle's private life. Not so much on what made him a legend

By D.H.

PAUL MCCARTNEY is pure music, the first singer and multi-instrumentalist with sex appeal who breathed melody. He lived in our speakers and on our screens, and wrote the soundtrack of much of the 20th century. When John Lennon saw him in his big white sports jacket, black drainies, and ducktail, he thought he had discovered another Elvis, and felt that his recruitment of Mr McCartney was one of his finest achievements, the discovery of someone with whom he could not only write, but also harmonise, and in so doing, escape poverty and insignificance.

After Lennon’s murder in 1980, a generation of Boomers began a collective reexamination of their past, much of it tied to the rise and fall of one band. Presciently, Philip Norman’s “Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation” hit the shelves before the fog of disbelief over Lennon’s death had lifted. The mythology bonanza began, ensnaring new fans with each generation. For its time, “Shout!” was essential for Beatles followers, and Mr Norman’s research was carefully laid out. But Mr Norman rarely missed a chance for a dig at Mr McCartney while obvious in his admiration for Lennon, adding bad blood to shared grief.

With the success of “Shout!”, Mr Norman would turn his attention to the Rolling Stones, Buddy Holly, and Elton John with similar results. In 2008, he frittered the good will he had built with Yoko Ono on “John Lennon: The Life”, where he made headlines by casting Lennon as a gay Oedipus. Now he bookends modern music’s most successful songwriting team with “Paul McCartney: The Life”. Mr Norman anticipates his critics by making a mea culpa of sorts in the prologue, and making much of Paul’s own “tacit approval” of his new biography. But one senses that Mr Norman is still proud of his old zinger that “John Lennon was three-quarters of the Beatles”, even though he was four-quarters wrong.

“Paul McCartney” is, by comparison, fair and solidly researched, with only a few errors of fact. The author’s British class consciousness can be catty, but as a whole, it fits the Beatles’, and McCartney’s, story. At a net worth of $1.3 billion dollars, Sir Paul is perhaps the most spectacular example pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, going from manual labourer to superstar all before turning 21, and a national treasure for more than half a century since.

The Beatles story is foremost a very English one. Mr Norman proves a deft hand at evoking postwar Liverpool, the Goons, the Cavern, the many faces of the Beatles’ prehistory, the St. Peter’s Church fête that witnessed the frisson of John and Paul’s first encounter. As the scene shifts from Hamburg’s red-light district back to Swinging London, Mr Norman skillfully tours the reader through its clubs, galleries, and bookshops, peppering his narrative with the argot and tailored clothing of the times, and introducing non-Londoners to Aston Martins, Harrod’s, Abbey Road, Twickenham, Chiswick House, Lord’s Cricket Grounds, Claridge’s, Carnaby Street, Hyde Park, the West End, and Paul’s home Cavendish, providing a welcome and familiar air to the playground where its most famous residents composed their masterpieces.

With all the creative ferment of the 1960s, Lennon’s complaint that they “felt like extras in their own movies” carries over to Mr Norman’s book as well. Paul McCartney is undoubtedly the star of “Paul McCartney”, with the sad irony that his music, and the Beatles’ collective humour that suffused it, is what winds up as an “extra” in his tale.

Mr Norman’s tin ear for the music of his subjects is puzzling. Over and over, he glosses over Mr McCartney’s musical output in favor of hoary anecdotes, such as the long-suffering fact that it was he who introduced Lennon to the avant-garde and not the other way round. But to understand Mr McCartney, a biographer has to be completely in tune with his music, to join his family singalong. To understand his relationship to his father, Jim McCartney, requires a deeper dig into old ragtime and brass bands. To understand “Lennon-McCartney” the songwriting team, and the Beatles as a group, demands a more appreciative listen of the first wave of rock and roll. To understand Mr McCartney’s solo career requires an explanation of how he deliberately aimed not to be the Beatles through other modes. To understand Paul after the hits had dried up is to recognise him as the consummate showman, with a Zelig-like ability to turn up everywhere.

Occasionally, Mr Norman hits the right note. His assessment of “Eleanor Rigby” as a lost story from Joyce’s Dubliners, and his observation that Mr McCartney's Mellotron introduction in “Strawberry Fields Forever” evokes a dusty harmonium in an old church, open up new ways to hear those songs. But again and again, musical analysis deserts him. For example, Mr Norman points out that “Abbey Road” was the first time a Beatles album didn’t contain an obvious McCartney single, ignoring the fact that songs like “Something” and “Come Together” (by George Harrison and Lennon, respectively) live on Mr McCartney’s inventive and fluid lead bass-playing.

Mr Norman’s book also doesn’t aim for cultural biography, setting scenes when it must, but rarely leaving Mr McCartney’s side. This means missing out on his interactions with his contemporaries like Pete Townshend, Ray Davies, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Further, Mr Norman pays only lip service to Mr McCartney’s second act with the albums “McCartney”, “Ram”, “Band on the Run” and “McCartney II”, leaving the reader’s curiosity unsated.

For the most part, Mr Norman is a reporter and not an artist, eschewing literary turns of phrase and symbolism in favor of concise diction and exhaustive research. His coverage of the decline of Apple Corps in 1970 is an exception, lending that section of the book a more intimate quality. One masterly tableau describes the meeting room on the ground floor of 3 Savile Row, Apple’s Georgian townhouse, where stood a large, gold-lined oak table and four expensive “unmatched” armchairs, never used as they were intended.

Where Mr Norman’s book succeeds most is bringing the reader into Mr McCartney’s private life. Despite the book’s promotional claim to the contrary, there are many serious biographies about Paul McCartney, and Mark Lewisohn’s ongoing Beatles trilogy looks to be the definitive tale of the band. But few authors linger as long as Mr Norman does on Jim McCartney’s life after his son becomes a star, and Mr Norman extends the same detail and empathy to Paul’s long-term girlfriend, actress Jane Asher, and his wife of 30 years, Linda McCartney, showing sensitivity when the story needs it.

An 800-page reexamination of Mr McCartney’s life deserves the reader’s sympathy as well. Many Beatles’ insiders have died, and those living have mostly forgotten all but the most over-told stories. Mr Norman’s book is thorough, took him years to write and is naturally the most up-to-date account of Paul’s life to yet appear. In the end, he makes good on his promise not to write a hagiography. But it remains unclear if Mr Norman has come to like his subject, or merely to embrace him as a venerable British institution, worthy of attention—even respect—if not warmth.

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