My ear was close to the radio when I heard the hits of the week in RIAS on Mondays, because neither my grandma nor my parents wanted to listen. I was 13 when the number two electrified me in particular: an outrageously hard and at the same time incredibly melodic sound – English choral singing, in which I suspected female voices. As expected it was I Want to Hold your Hand number one in the next week. This was the revolution in music, I told my school friend Barbara over the phone. Her parents had been in exile in England, so English matters were very familiar to her and she immediately confirmed: “Yes, of course, they’re the famous Beatles! Great four guys! And so incredibly pretty! ”Her England connections worked so well that she soon had lots of Beatles records and was able to give Beatles photos to her friends. A4 portraits of the mushrooms hung over my bed. It was about life size and my mother said she was shocked when she stepped into my room. Barbara had a crush on Paul McCartney and authoritatively assigned her three friends to a different Beatle. I would have preferred Paul too, but had to make do with George Harrison. Wera got Ringo Starr and Birgit got John Lennon. When I went to a party, Barbara generously lent me her records. The Beatles even changed dancing. If the twist had given a characteristic image that had to be practiced a bit, now there was complete freedom. You just twitched to the rhythm that suited you.
Screaming hysteria? Without me
Our Beatlemania was still fresh when we were invited to a party with Thomas Natschinski, the son of the well-known Schlager composer Gerd Natschinski. Thomas surprised us with a basement concert by his recently founded band, which was called Team 4. Amazingly, three of the boys presented electric guitars – where did they get them from? A fourth sat behind the drums. They played and sang several Beatles songs, which made a noise that was as grandiose as it was deafening in the small room. This increased even more when the wildly dancing party crowd suddenly began to scream loudly, as we knew it from television pictures of the English girls’ audience. I didn’t take part because it reminded me of the screaming hysteria of the “Third Reich”.
For a while I belonged to the closer fan club of Team 4, which presented 60 percent of German in-house productions at events, as dictated by the cultural bureaucracy. Since Walter Ulbricht had stated that the Beatles’ “Yeah-yeah-yeah” had nothing to do with it, it was not until 1965 that the GDR released a Beatles long-playing record. This was made possible by the note “They’re working-class boys!” By the musicologist Georg Knepler, who also came from an English emigration and whose son was part of Team 4. As John Knepler on a stage in the Ernst Thälmann pioneer park A Play With Me Is A Play With Fire it was clear that the Stones also produced great things.
Gradually more politically committed musicians became my idols: Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul & Mary. The show the Beatles put on suddenly seemed silly to me. But if you compare it with what later rock bands pulled off, it looks good from today’s point of view. Not to mention the sleek suits, shirts, and ties the Beatles wore for their early years. The fact that they soon switched to more casual clothing points to the cultural break that they embodied: first a bourgeoisized, then universalized working class in the intoxication of Fordism, which promised a happier life for everyone and actually brought it to many. The socialist world made this promise at the time, which is why the Beatles could only be rejected by the most stubborn ideologues.
Under the patina of what is already historical, every Beatles song that resounds today still activates the old magic. That was really, really great art. And the tremendous fun they themselves had playing was not played. Even in the hysterical disinhibition of the fans, which I don’t want to gloss over, there was possibly a bit of emancipation. Sexuality for everyone was also in the Fordist gift basket of “anything goes”. The large two-volume commentary published by Paul McCartney under the title Lyrics has now delivered to 154 of his songs, it brings – regarding Girls’ School (1977) – in a nutshell: “When we were teenagers, it wasn’t easy to get hold of girls (…) When the pill came on the market, all hell broke loose of course. Or maybe heaven. (…) I’m glad that there was this monstrous part of my life (…) By the time I wrote the song, I was of course much more sedate, had a family and meanwhile concentrated on other things . “In their wild times, the other Beatles didn’t get stuck either, but were able to establish deeper and longer relationships.
The four had deeper ties to each other, regardless of the well-known and – so writes McCartney – publicly exaggerated frictions and quarrels that contributed to the breakup of the band in 1970. If they had only thought commercially back then, they would have perpetuated the previous success story. Like Elvis Presley, that would have led them into fatal decadence. Although they had set new standards against the old hit kitsch, it was now also a liberation that Lennon no longer wanted to produce “kitsch for screaming girls”. In the course of the dissolution there were disputes and lawsuits over money. Nevertheless, the Beatles worked together again and again later, helped each other and got close again on a human level. In their solo careers they were able to develop stronger profiles of their own.
In the band, however, a unique bundling of natural talents had come about: “The four of us always knew how to get on and play with each other, and that was our real strength,” recalls McCartney. The “secret” of the Beatles was that they had taught themselves to make music. Neither of them had enjoyed taking piano lessons at a prescribed time. “We couldn’t read or write notes, we had to think up everything.”
When he and Lennon tinkered with songs, the musical and the linguistic were born together. Ballads didn’t come about like that. Inspirations from real life turned into high-sounding, sometimes surreal language breaks. Or one took up one of Ringo’s language accidents: “Who would have thought that the twisted phrase A Hard Day’s Night was Ringo’s slip of the tongue? Or Lovely Rita, a real policewoman I saw across from the Chinese Embassy on Portland Place? That I might never be without Hurricane Bob and a power outage on Long Island Calico Skies would have written? Or that ‘Do It Now’ was my father’s saying when he sent my brother and me out on the street to pick up horse droppings? ”They were used as fertilizer for the garden.
It’s hard to believe – McCartney also wrote an explicitly political song. In 1972, horrified by Bloody Sunday in Derry, he wrote: Give Ireland Back to the Irish. The song fell victim to English censorship and only exists in an American recording. Again and again McCartney had to assure that it was not a battle cry for the IRA. Terse but virtuoso texts also triggered great associations with the audience. If you take a relaxed approach to songwriting, McCartney says, “When it comes up on its own, there is a certain amount of fun going into what you write. There is a certain magic about it. So much of what we have done is more a result of deep amazement and not because of the knowledge we have acquired. “
Beyond the rules of music tradition, only with the joy of rhythms and tones – every branch of art needs such a return to the original roots from time to time. In order to use tradition again later. The Beatles also used classical orchestral tones and non-European music. In these two splendid volumes with many photos, McCartney tells a lot of little or no known information about the origins and survival of his songs. Facsimiles of the manuscripts that his wife Linda carefully archived also exude auratic quality in the reproduction.
Paul McCartney: Lyrics Paul Muldoon (Hrsg.) Conny Lösch (transl.), CH Beck 2021, 912 p., Approx. 647 ills., € 78
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