Paul McCartney Goes Too Far

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Paul McCartney Goes Too Far

by Chris Fox



ENGLAND. THE DEPTHS OF WINTER 1966. A member of the Beatles, the most popular band on earth, repairs to the Royal College of Art to witness a free-form performance by avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew and AMM, about whom he has read. The Beatle sits amongst a merry band who improvise a whirling dervish of sound on instruments - piano, violin, xylophone, accordion and celli, and otherwise - whistles, transistor radios, electric drills, and wind-up toys. And it is Paul McCartney who adds a simple ingredient to the discordant melange by running a penny up and down the coils of a steam radiator at his side.

With hindsight one would have expected it to have been John Lennon dipping his toe into such arcane waters. But this was before Yoko and psychedelia and some thirty months before Lennon constructed the most contentious track in the band's catalogue, the avant-garde 'Revolution 9'.

Brian Epstein had seen fit to accord the Beatles a sabbatical after three solid years' work during which the band had been thrust to the centre of the world's stage. The first months of 1966 was a time for holidays and parties. George married. Ringo played pool by day and hung out at the discotheques at night. John told a journalist his group was bigger than Christ.

For 23-year-old McCartney here was an opportunity to broaden his artistic horizons to as far afield as electronic music, the very antithesis of screaming girls and guitar-and-drum combos which until then was generally the only type of music heard coming from a Beatle's hi-fi.

For some time now Paul had been discovering unchartered, alien musical landscapes. With the same anticipation as when a schoolboy placing the latest Elvis 45 onto his turntable, McCartney listened to composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, a messiah in the world of electronic music but to the mid-60s pop star an unknown commodity. It was the German's 1956 'plick-plop' piece - as McCartney cursorily described it - Gesang der Junglinge, a boy's voice construed and converted with a panoply of electronic sounds, that inspired Paul to utilise his Brennell tape recorders for less conventional purposes, as Stockhausen himself had done the previous decade. Paul, an advocate of all things melodious, had undergone a reformation of thought, no longer subscribing to the ingrained belief that rhythm, time signatures and even melody were essential to his art.

By trial and error at girlfriend Jane Asher's Wimpole Street home, McCartney produced "Little Symphonies" after discovering that by removing the superimpose head on a tape machine the previous recording could not be wiped over. With this knowledge, Paul saturated layers of guitar, bongos, and ethereal voices before cutting up the tape and then, with a watchmaker's eye, indiscriminately gluing back the pieces, reversing some for backward sounds. A bohemian, Paul dallied with the idea of making a composite disc of Beatles' overlapped by Beethoven music: it would be the listener's onerous task of teaching his brain to separate the jumble of sounds until a pure, untrammelled piece entered the consciousness.

"Wait a minute, you've just been writing 'Here, There And Everywhere', now you've come up with Whooo-weee, plonk . . . !" (1)

Impassioned, on 14 February McCartney summoned the group's chauffeur to take him on a spree in which he snapped up gadgets and electronic instruments to add flavour to his home recordings. Days later he attended a Luciano Berio lecture at the Italian Institute. It was the composer's 1958 work Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) - a spoken piece so electronically bastardised it sounded to its incredulous listener like a chorus of demented birds at dawn - that had especially grabbed Paul. (As was the case with many of the works he heard, he could not say he found the experience enjoyable; the turn on for him was the composers' sheer inventiveness.) Afterwards, McCartney and Berio exchanged a few words in which the Italian exhibited an interest in the Beatles. Indeed, his wife Cathy Berberian would go on to release the Beatles Arias album, affording operatic treatments to songs like 'Here, There And Everywhere'.

It was this latter composition and others such as 'Eleanor Rigby' on which Paul was then working for the Beatles' upcoming sessions. A true eclectic, shortly after his returning home from a Klosters holiday in March (where he had penned the enchanting 'For No One') McCartney moved into his new St John's Wood abode. The witching hours were spent sequestered in his third-floor music room. The days were filled flitting around town in his Aston Martin and immersing himself in the left-field: afternoons examining avant-garde jazz with his friend Barry Miles, Paul most struck by controversial American tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler; evenings at the Knightsbridge pad of gallery owner John Dunbar and wife Marianne Faithfull where, with a congregation of artist friends, Paul would make impromptu music and rhapsodise about John Cage and the temerity of works like Imaginary Landscape No. 4 and 4' 33", three movements of silence tempered only by audience coughs and distant traffic.

As Paul told the NME, "All those silly bands - never again! . . . I was known as the cute Beatle, the ballad Beatle . . . John was the cynical one, the wise Beatle, the intellectual. In fact at that time it was wildly in reverse." (2)

After months of attending art exhibitions and hooking up with Antonioni, Bertrand Russell, and acting as noviciate to William Burroughs (manufacturing tapes of radio noise, animal grunts and backward sounds), Paul's vacation concluded when the Beatles convened at the studios on 6 April, their first session in five months.

A cultural busy bee, McCartney had been in the heart of a London that was starting to swing whilst Lennon had been hibernating at his Weybridge pile in a cloud of marijuana smoke. "John came in from the country and said, 'Wow!'" Paul recalled once he had summarily initiated his partner with Stockhausen, Cage and Morton Subotnick.

Lennon had penned a song inspired by Leary's The Psychedelic Experience. During the recording of track one for what became Revolver, he opined that a guitar solo overdub would fail to do Mark I, as it was known, justice. By now McCartney had coached all three, including Lennon, a dunce when it came to gadgets, how to adapt their Brennells and make experimental demos. Why not, he suggested, insert a compilatory mix of homemade loops into the song?

That night at their respective homes all four recorded handfuls of spools. The following day, armed with a plastic bag of his recent spoils, Paul walked the several hundred yards to Abbey Road. A logistical nightmare for their producer, requiring the assistance of a gang of studio employees, George Martin directed the feeding of tape spools into a controlled, live mix using five machines. The results were astonishing: a tornado of sound, squalling horns evoking the Middle East, a universe of noise crammed into a tiny space. It was hitherto one of the most breathtaking songs in pop's catalogue.

Coming just three years after 'From Me To You', the work on 'Tomorrow Never Knows', as it became known - avant-garde episodes against a 4/4 rock beat - diverted the Beatles down paths they would tread for the next two years. McCartney had picked up the baton but it was Lennon who ran with it. Thanks to Paul, though LSD would also be influential, John had rejuvenated his passion for all things offbeat.

With a flourish the Beatles applied surreal brushstrokes to their songs: Lennon oversaw pop's first known backward vocals on 'Rain' and dictated the cacophonous coda on the momentous 'Strawberry Fields Forever'. There was a side of Lennon who would have produced nothing but wonderfully preposterous pop, ostracizing the group in the process, but it was Paul who insisted they use such seasoning sparingly.

Soon the reviewers credited Lennon as the originator of such intoxicating, outre sounds. 'Carnival Of Light', recorded in January 1967, was a chance for McCartney to redress the balance. Organizers of the eponymous Roundhouse rave commissioned Paul to produce something freaky. With Martin usurped, McCartney governed the making of the Beatles' first entirely avant-garde recording: fourteen minutes of highly distorted instruments drenched in echo effect, alongside water-gargling and spinetingling ululations. To his later regret, the track was never released, too uncomfortable on the ear even to arise on the recent Anthology CDs.

Exoticism was rife in the group's 1967 work, replicating the effects Paul had begun manufacturing two years earlier. Their magnum opus Sgt Pepper (complete with Stockhausen's likeness on its revered cover, as selected by Paul) featured John's 'A Day In The Life', but it was his partner's idea for a forty-piece orchestra to improvise the apocalyptic, crescendic middle and finale. Animal sounds owed a debt to Burroughs. Fairground swirlaramas echoed Paul's erstwhile methods of reconstructing magnetic tape. There was the ad infinitum loop of garbled voices on the LP's run-out groove, another McCartney invention. Later that year a live BBC radio broadcast was fed into John's 'I Am The Walrus' (a la Cage), and by now his own eccentric home works, like 'Jessie's Dream', were being published.

"I remember once saying to John that I was going to do an album called 'Paul McCartney Goes Too Far'. He was really tickled with that idea. 'That's great, man! You should do it!' But I would calculate and think no, I'd better do 'Hey Jude'. (3)

As the Summer of Love became but a drug-hazed memory it was John who became, in the public's mind, the creative daredevil, thereby reinforcing the polarization of Messrs Lennon and McCartney. In June 1968, during early sessions for the so-called White Album, McCartney returned from America to find that John, with George Martin's resistance, George Harrison's help and Yoko Ono's influence, had compiled the audio-verite 'Revolution 9', a lengthy, dazzling collage of choirs, backwards orchestra, cooing babies, spoken gibberish et al, lavished with every effect known to science. Not only that, he intended to release it. Just days earlier John and Yoko had slept together for the first time, but not before recording the musique concrete Two Virgins, released in November within days of the Beatles' offering. Paul had not realized the wheels he had oiled by showing John how to manipulate a Brennell. By this time Lennon had probably forgotten having once said, "avant-garde is French for 'bullshit'."

Voracious, McCartney had been in those halcyon days a cultural sponge, his new obsessions adopted by his allies with alacrity. And yet all four were consistently astute in predicting, if not always inaugurating, elements of the Zeitgeist. As soon as the world caught up they would make conscious efforts to move on. Each Beatle had equal influence but while this diversity begat such a rich catalogue it also led to egotistic in-house fighting which was partly to blame for their 1970 split, made public by Paul in a press release supplementing his first solo album.

McCartney, the produce of a one-man band working very occasionally with wife Linda, contained the truncated cut 'Glasse', a sad, unworldly four-track recording based on earlier trials when Paul and the London set would create sound by circling wineglass rims with wet fingertips. Closing track 'Kreen-Akrore' was a drumming number overdubbed with heavy breathing, stamping hooves, and Paul's Onoesque bird-screeches.

The coming years saw a sporadic yield of soft avant-garde ventures, with nothing to equal the experimentation of Paul's private efforts. The chilling 'Loup (1st Indian On The Moon)' on Wings' Red Rose Speedway (1973) was a plodding, Moog-led curio with Stockhausenian whistles and 'plick-plops'. Wings' final offering, Back To The Egg (1979), contained the inexplicable 'The Broadcast' featuring poems (Hay's The Sport Of Kings and Galsworthy's The Little Man) read in the plummy tones of Harold Margory, owner of Lympne Castle where the band was recording, set off with a piano-led orchestral piece. And there was the Berioesque 'Reception', a collage including the voice of Mrs Margory, flourishes of operatic singing, an interview with a Deputy Sheriff, unintelligible remarks from a Negro, and backward swirls wedded to the persistent squeal of ill-tuned radios and a funky beat.

"I've got my own studio. I'll take a day every so often and I'll do stuff just for my own fun . . . It's liberating for me cause it says to me you don't have to be that Paul McCartney fellow that we expect all the time." (4)

The commercial 80s kicked off with the promising, eccentric McCartney II (a queer fish abundant with idiosyncratic vocals) and produced lots more hits. Late in 1989 Paul repaired to his studio with the intention, for his own pleasure, of laying down some minimalist music. What transpired was full-blown experimentation, uncontaminated by melody or vocals, fifteen minutes of which was later soundtracked to the animated featurette Daumier's Law, produced by Paul's company in a bid to recreate the drawings of French artist Honore Daumier. With its six atypical McCartney pieces the film premiered at Cannes in 1992.

Nobody had heard of the Fireman when they released their limited run album strawberries oceans ships forest in 1993. Sans sleeve credits, all the listener had was a 77-minute concoction of hypnotic ambient, dance, grunge, whale noises, whispering and sitar on recondite offerings like 'Transcrystaline' and 'Trans Lunar Rising'. Rumours circulated that it was the work of Apollo C. Vermouth (producer of 'I'm The Urban Spaceman'), the Frog Chorus, and Percy Thrillington (the ram-masked orchestra leader who'd made an MOR replica of Paul's Ram album). It was then confirmed that the CD was indeed the produce of a McCartney collaboration with remixer Youth, having metamorphosed album tracks on which Paul was working before concocting some original pieces.

More genuinely avant-garde, the Fireman released a second unpublicised CD in 1998. Rushes (a nod to Penny Lane lyric ". . . and the fireman rushes in . . .") contained eight sensual, trance-inducing soundscapes which were reminiscent of traditional New Age rather than techno. Paul's late wife can be heard talking overtop of UFO witnesses, trotting horses, squelching mud, plus the sex moans of a woman masturbating across the wires of a 1-2-1 line ('Fluid'). 'Bison' is avant-garde punk. 'Auraveda' is a deep, Indian themed piece and, unlike some other tracks, without a trace of the melodic phrase. Whilst '7am' is a heavily treated whirlpool of sound and 'Palo Verde' an aural, concrete wash evoking the great outdoors, Paul remains unable to resist adding the odd melody and watery beat along with tsunamis of reversed flute and tooting Mellotrons, an aural epitaph to that long gone, enthralling era.

"Without wanting to put John down, or look as if I was justifying myself . . . don't just put me down as an idiot . . . I wasn't just twiddling my thumbs while John was informing me of all this stuff." (5)

Despite scattershot experiments, the average person associates McCartney with wholesome balladeering, orchestral music, the hits that helped earn him a knighthood. This perception would be hard to alter. Avoiding being tagged pretentious, Paul releases his nonconformist suites without fanfare. As recently as August 2000 there emerged the barely promoted Liverpool Sound Collage, a Peter Blake exhibition soundtrack loaded with avant-garde trappings, electronic pulses and random, transmogrifying, spiralling vocalisations.

At his worst Paul is twee, yet how many are aware that for every 'Ode To A Koala Bear' there is a 'Peter Blake 2000' (a 17-minute tour de force of looped and distorted dialogue, some taken from Beatles' studio chat) and for every 'We All Stand Together' an 'Oobu Joobu'? And then there's the wealth of material, catchy and unorthodox alike, on reels of tape at his East Sussex studios.

When at his best Paul's genius emerges like the brightest star in the sky. He and his mate Lennon changed popular music and in so doing changed the world.

The off-beat would have found its way into the Beatles' music. These were revolutionary times with psychedelia crossing the Atlantic, but with great prescience Paul McCartney unearthed priceless threads the Beatles wove into their musical tapestries. R



NOTES

(1) 'McCartney On McCartney', BBC Radio One, 1989

(2) Barry Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Secker & Warburg 1997, p. 220

(3) 'In My Life: Lennon Remembered', BBC Radio One, 1990

(4) 'McCartney On McCartney', BBC Radio One, 1989

(5) Steve Richards, 'Paul McCartney: Meet The Beatle', New Statesman, 26 September 1997

Выражение "Paul McCartney Goes Too Far" впервые видимо прозвучало в интервью Роллинг Стоуну. Там не было упоминания Hey Jude и звучало все это так:

From Rolling Stone (Oct. 1986 )

I remember saying to John once, "I'm gonna do an album of this and call it, Paul McCartney Goes Too Far." And he said, "Yeah you've gotta do it, man !" So I was the one who introduced John, originally to do a lot of that stuff.

Факт примечательный по крайней мере тем, что Пол и Джон обсуждали (или пытались обсуждать) друг с другом свои возможные сольные работы. При этом Джона воодушевляло название (в первом русском переводе, помнится, "Пол Маккартни переборщил") - "Пол Маккартни заходит слишком далеко". Какой альбом на самом деле задумывал тогда Пол, уже не узнает никто. Возможно имелся в виду крутой закос под авангард (предыдущие 8 версий "Революции" :))) Но начальная идея была и напрямую высказывалась вслух.

И еще из Барри Майлза по поводу этого альбома

PAUL: We sat around. We got wrecked together. We discussed all these crazy ideas together. We put down these lines of research together. I'd come home from an exciting crazed sort of think meeting with Miles, a stoned think tank, which was great fun and I'd love it and I'd be very enthusiastic about all these ideas and I used to tell John about this stuff. I'd spew 'em all out the next day. John would say, 'Wow, wow, wow! Well, why don't you do that? Why don't you do that?' I remember saying to him I had an idea for an album title, Paul McCartney Goes Too Far. He said, 'Fantastic! Do it! Do it!' He always wanted me to do that.
I remember one of our ideas was to master two pieces of music on to a record, have two albums on one record, and all you would do in the future was switch out one of them with your brain. You'd say, 'I'm not listening to the Beethoven, I'm listening to the Beatles,' but they would be both going on. So this was ... cheap, cheerful, good value for money. You had to have the mental control to be able to switch one of them out ... Last night it happened, my album Paul Is Live was playing and Neighbours was on the telly, and the two playing together totally reminded me of the sixties! Linda said, 'God in heaven, that's terrible!' and I said, 'I rather like it.'