Paul McCartney shows no signs of slowing down. He appears ready to head back out on the road once again, and it’s rare that too long a stretch goes by without news of some musical endeavor that he’s undertaking, whether it’s new music or some kind of reissue of older stuff. The guy is not one to stop too long to contemplate his legacy or influence. That’s for the music writers to do, and we’ll be glad to take that on.
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Here are five reasons that music is so much better because Macca is around.
His Melodic Bass
Paul didn’t exactly innovate the idea of using the bass guitar as more than just a rhythmic tool. When Music Radar interviewed him in 2017 and cited the way he popularized the bass, he was quick to share the credit: “Yeah, it became a bit more skillful. I wouldn’t personally credit myself, but thanks for that. But I think James Jamerson, him, and me, I’d share the credit there. I was nicking a lot off him.”
Jamerson was the main bassist for The Funk Brothers, the unofficial collective that played on Motown hits. You can hear the similarity between McCartney’s bass on many early Beatles smashes and those early Motown gems with Jamerson providing the bottom end. But McCartney would expand upon that. Listen to his playing on a song like “Something,” how he finds the pocket around Ringo Starr’s drums but also creates a melodic counterpoint to George Harrison’s lead guitar and vocals. McCartney basically gave rock bassists the license to do more than just sit back and plunk away, forever changing the sound of the genre in the process.
His Adherence to Meter
Why are Paul McCartney’s songs so instantly catchy? Well, for one, it’s because he rarely deviates from the meter when composing his lyrics. Again, this wasn’t new, with the Motown guys (Smokey Robinson, Holland/Dozier/Holland), Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly, among a few others, constructing songs in this manner. When Bob Dylan came along, with his willingness to overstuff lines with words so that he could get his point across, a lot of rock and pop songwriters moved in that direction. But McCartney never really did, consistently churning out songs with smooth, flowing lyrical lines.
Obviously, there is no right way or wrong way to write a song. But Paul’s style certainly was closely heeded by future hitmakers such as Paul Simon and Billy Joel. You could even follow it up to the modern era, where songwriters-for-hire like Max Martin have made a career by keeping things succinct and metrical with their words. That all traces back to McCartney.
His Handling of His Celebrity
Try to put yourself in Paul McCartney’s shoes: the demands on your time, people fawning over you and losing their minds instead of just talking to you as a human being, newshounds looking for a scoop on your private life. Let’s face it: There are massive celebrities, and then there are the Beatles. And yet, how many scandals have plagued Paul? How many times has he acted in an uncivil way in public? How many instances have there been of him seeming ungrateful, peevish, or rude? I bet you’re scrounging to try and come up with any. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find too many people who have dealt with Paul McCartney, either over a long period of time or even for just a few moments, and have anything bad to say about him. Even though those stereotypes were quite limiting, the people who called Paul the “Nice Beatle” were on to something. He has set an impressive standard for how one should deal with celebrity, which is all the more impressive and impactful when you consider that he’s one of the few people in the running for Biggest Celebrity on Earth.
His Willingness to Look Back
When The Beatles broke up, there was a brief period when the four men tried to shrug off the Fab Four association in any way possible. McCartney wasn’t any different, but he changed his tune when he went out on tour in the mid-’70s and started playing Beatles songs live with Wings for the first time. Those tours might have been massive anyway, as Wings had reached the peak of their popularity with Band on the Run. But Macca’s decision to acknowledge his former band’s legacy sort of opened up the door for other artists to do the same with their own back catalogs. And in the wake of the way-too-soon death of John Lennon, Paul’s stance provided a level of comfort to reeling fans. It also might have indirectly influenced scores of other rock artists with long musical pasts. There’s now a cottage industry for musicians that includes reissues, cutting-room floor excavations, and even re-recordings of past songs. In his own subtle yet important way, Paul McCartney helped make all that happen.
His Resiliency
Because his disposition is so reliably amiable, it’s easy to forget that there have been bumps in the road for Paul McCartney. His mother’s death when he was just a teenager, the Beatles pre-fame struggles, their acrimonious breakup, the occasional critical and commercial valleys of his post-Beatles music, Lennon’s death, his wife Linda McCartney’s long illness and death, George Harrison’s death, his divorce from his second wife Heather Mills, etc. Through all of that, McCartney has been able to compartmentalize and put one foot in front of the other when it comes to his music. There’s always been another song to write, another album to release, another tour to start. And by doing that, he has triumphed more often than not, serving as a positive role model not just for musicians, but for anyone going through crises. The man told us that we should “take a sad song and make it better,” and he has followed that advice for the world to see. That’s the kind of resilience to which we should all aspire.
(Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame )
