While many of us most commonly associate December 26 with Boxing Day or the start of Kwanzaa, for Fab Four Fans, the day after Christmas also marks the anniversary of Paul McCartney’s painful mishap that led to his iconic mid-1960s Beatles style.
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Indeed, one of the oft-forgotten perks of being one of the biggest rock stars of the time is that when you suffer a blunder that alters your physical appearance, you can start a whole trend around it.
Paul McCartney’s Blunder Led To Beatles’ Iconic Style
On December 26, 1965, Paul McCartney was visiting his family over the winter holidays when his friend, Tara Browne, paid him a visit. The Beatle, at the height of his fame and enjoying the trappings of the well-to-do rock star life, had a couple of mopeds at his disposal, so he thought he and Browne could take a joy ride together. While the friends rode to McCartney’s cousin’s house, the pair admired the scenery, including the night’s full moon.
“It was an incredible full moon. It was really huge,” McCartney later recalled in Anthology. “I said something about the moon, and [Tara] said, ‘Yeah,’ and I suddenly had a freeze-frame image of myself at that angle to the ground when it’s too late to pull back up again. I was still looking at the moon, and then I looked at the ground, and it seemed to take a few minutes to think, ‘Ah, too bad. I’m going to smack that pavement with my face.’ Bang!”
McCartney chipped his front tooth and split his lip but was otherwise okay. When he and Browne arrived at their destination, McCartney’s shocked cousin called a doctor, who stitched the Beatle’s lip sans anesthesia.
“That was why I started to grow a mustache,” he explained. It was pretty embarrassing. Around that time, you knew your pictures would get winged off to teeny-boppery magazines. So, I started to grow a mustache—a sort of Sancho Panza—mainly to cover my lip. It caught on with the guys in the group. If one of us did something, like growing his hair long, and we liked the idea, we’d all tend to do it. It all fell in with the Sgt. Pepper thing because he had a droopy mustache.”
The Painful Mishap Also Inspired Part Of “Rocky Raccoon”
Paul McCartney’s painful mishap didn’t just lead to a new Beatles style that would come to define their mid-1960s years. The experience also helped inspire one of the final verses in “Rocky Raccoon.” Remember the doctor who came in, stinking of gin, and proceeded to lie on the table to tell Rocky he had met his match? McCartney wrote that lyric about the doctor who paid a house visit to the Beatle’s cousin’s home to stitch his busted lip.
“He arrived stinking of gin,” McCartney recalled in The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present. “This guy was so drunk. He brings his black bag, and now he’s got to try and thread a little needle, a curved surgical needle, but he’s seeing three needles at least. I think I said, ‘Let us do it.’ And we threaded it for him. I said, ‘You’re just going to do this with no anesthetic?’ He said, ‘Well, I haven’t got any.’ I think I might have had a slug of scotch or something.”
When the doctor threaded the needle through McCartney’s lip the first time, the suture fell out of the needle, and the doctor had to try again. “I was trying not to scream,” the musician remembered. “To be honest, he really didn’t do a marvelous job.”
The doctor might not have done a marvelous job stitching McCartney’s lip on the evening of Boxing Day, but the Beatle did get an iconic new look and a song lyric out of the whole situation, so it wasn’t a total loss.
Photo by Cummings Archives/Redferns
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