Sixty years old
F major for gourmets: Paul McCartney as a young master, 1963
Quelle: Popperfoto via Getty Images
It’s true: Paul McCartney wrote his best songs as a young Beatle. But that was less due to the Beatles than to his first and second families. Six of his early pieces still outshine the life’s work of the 80-year-old.
AWhen Paul McCartney was 14, his mother Mary died and he wrote his first song on the guitar his father Jim had given him for his birthday. “I Lost My Little Girl” began with a G major chord. The young composer led the harmonies downwards like in the blues, from G to G7 to C. But grief wasn’t enough for him. He sought comfort and found it in the melody. As a singer he defied even the gravity of the music by letting his voice soar upwards. It wasn’t blues anymore, it was something of its own.
And it was the family: the McCartneys came from Liverpool’s lower class, they loved to sing and play music, Mary with the housework and Jim as a former pianist in a pub jazz band at the piano. Paul watched his fingers and caught the modulations and syncopations without anyone having to explain them to him. No one forced him to demonstrate the family’s social advancement with an instrument.
He met John Lennon at one of the garden parties at St. Peter’s Church in Woolton, played him “I Lost My Little Girl” and thus founded the Beatles. He left the Beatles and became the tallest ex-Beatle alive. To the greatest living musician and composer of all, because, even though he knows that he will never again write masterpieces like “For No One”, he has undauntedly continued to make music and compose for five decades. It is the curse of the prematurely accomplished, who at the age of 27 seemed older than he was and, unlike Rimbaud, Van Gogh and Mozart, has an extensive late work that began too early.
The artist in his chamber
Paul McCartney moved to London from Liverpool when he was 20. His girlfriend’s family took him in: Jane Asher was a child star in the cinema and on the stage, her mother Margaret taught at the Guildhall School of Music. He got the attic room with the piano by the bed and a home in the upper educated middle class. He blended in perfectly with his surroundings. Wearing a black turtleneck sweater, he composed “Michelle” as an existentialist chanson. He spiced up his F major with interesting additional tones and chromatic figures that were not intended for the beat of the sixties. And I Love Her was his first love song for Jane, a piece in E major that opened boldly in F sharp minor, rising to G minor midway through and ending in radiant F major.
In his artist’s closet, Paul McCartney received the tune for “Yesterday” in a dream (“I thought it was a classic at first”). Under the working title “Scrambled Eggs” he refined his work for weeks and had a baroque string quartet with blue notes arranged for him. The Beatles signed the handwritten score – and a fifth Beatle named “Mozart”. “Yesterday” became the test piece at Margaret Asher’s college. In her music room, McCartney wrote “Eleanor Rigby” about an elderly lady. Inspired by Indian music, he improvised over E minor and anticipated the string quartet in his head. “For No One” was his parting song for Jane, composed of two baroque melodies and a French horn solo, all the way up to the unplayable four-bowed F.
By 1966, Paul McCartney was assigned songs like “Here, There and Everywhere”, where a single E major chord develops into its own theory of harmony, the melodies of which sound so unusual even in everyday use, as if their tones were repeating themselves over and over again renew. Paul never concealed what and who inspired him. Sometimes it was the blues and sometimes it was Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys, who was only two days younger and also an early graduate.
As a highly gifted child of the northern English working class, McCartney was spared the rebellious behavior of young petit bourgeois in his urge for advancement, who were frozen in the schemes of their rock music – and in their eternal youth. After the Beatles, he continued to write and sing beautiful songs, but about such adult matters as his family, life in the country, and vacations with friends. He wrote oratorios and orchestral works with the means that were available to him when he was 20. On June 18, Paul McCartney celebrates his 80th birthday.