Happy Birthday, Paul McCartney

There’s this great line in Vanilla Sky, where Kurt Russell’s character tells Tom Cruise’s character about maturity and the realizations that go with growing older. On his list of things that indicate his maturity, he says: “My favorite Beatle was once John. Now it’s… Paul.” John is obviously kind of burned into folks’ minds because of his iconic musical messiah status – all Jesus needed was that last Rolling Stone interview, am I right? – but a big part of me has always kinda dug McCartney. Maybe that’s because of all that “bum-bum-bah“-ing he did when I was a kid.

Today marks his 70th birthday and I thought I’d commemorate it with a quick write-up on the last Beatle standing that isn’t Ringo Starr.

Clickity-Clack!

Nothing against Ringo, mind you. The guy gets a raw deal but there’s a lot to like in his odd résumé. No really, I kinda like ‘Octopus’ Garden’ and ‘Yellow Submarine’. Plus, you know what the name of the band Ringo Starr was in before he joined The Beatles? “Ringo Starr”! That guy’s a motherfucking icon. George is my mom’s favorite Beatle, and I’m pretty partial to him, too. Largely because he can bang out a pretty amazing jam on the sitar (seriously, listen to ‘Norwegian Wood‘). Then there’s John, who it’s pretty easy to love. The guy’s life reads like a Biblical fable, right down to it’s pariah/messiah conclusion where the hero dies. Of course, it’s also pretty fair to say he was kind of an asshole. I’m sure he had his reasons and his inner struggles, but let’s face it, without Yoko Ono to direct his latter day adventures, that dude was pretty much bound to stay a self-centered bastard forever.

But back to Sir Paul McCartney. Where, I think, Lennon’s strengths as a lyricist subtly laid the foundation for the self-aware, satirical approaches to music that birthed guys like Morrisey, McCartney had an altogether more approachable talent. He sort of managed to be the simultaneously intellectual and completely open and honest in his compositions. There’s an emotive everyman quality to his approach to lyrics. After all, it was him that threw in that line at the end of ‘Norwegian Wood'; the one about burning down the girl’s flat after she led you on and then made you sleep in the bath. There’s shades of a playful malevolence that I guess many people feel when they’ve been stood up, led on or strung up to dry by a (I guess not-so-) lover. Or am I the only psycho-bitch whose gone to this place in his head?

Obviously, all four of these guys brought something to the band, but McCartney is, in my mind, the quintessential pop musician of the group. It’s no surprise, I guess, that where John went on to marry a New Wave artiste and George could pal around with Eric Clapton, Paul became buddies with Michael Jackson. This may’ve made him a “sell out” or whatever it is we’re calling folks this day, but I refer you back to that quote up top and some realizations about maturity. There’s something incredibly self-involved and whimsically youthful about, say, John Lennon – probably helped along by the fact that we didn’t get to see him grow too old or even fully explore the mature themes he was beginning to engage with in his latter music. We’ve got an elder Paul McCartney though and so we get to see the embrace of growth and development in the man’s life, even if not in his music. And in a way, my interest in his work and his persona has a lot to do with, I suppose, aspiring to that sort of maturity. Hell, I dunno. Maybe I just like him cos he wrote the best James Bond theme song?