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About a Beatle, but without his input
By Suzanne Vega |
December 20, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
I was one of those little girls who loved the Beatles in the 1960s. Yes, Paul was my favorite Beatle back then, with Ringo in close second place. As I got older I appreciated John's wit and George's spirituality, but it all started with Paul and his dark beautiful eyes.
The book I relied on then was "The Beatles," by Hunter Davies. I could open it to any page, read the first line and know what the rest of the page was about.
This book was the authority on all things Beatle. From it we learned that their cool collarless suits came from Astrid Kirchherr, the German girlfriend of their original bassist, Stu Sutcliffe. I wanted to be her when I grew up. I wanted to be like the Beatles too, and write songs and play guitar in dark German clubs.
Well, girls (and guys), now we have "Paul McCartney: A Life," by Peter Ames Carlin, a former writer for People magazine and currently a culture reporter for The Oregonian.
This is a lovingly researched, unauthorized biography, which follows McCartney from prebirth family history through the arc of his life and career, right up to his recent tumultuous marriage and divorce from Heather Mills.
Carlin attempts to present McCartney as more artistically and intellectually complex °?°?-- and more ambitious -- than the sweet and bubbly caricature we have known.
Unfortunately, this book is wildly uneven in both its tone and the quality of its writing. The first chapter includes a fanciful account of an actual recent McCartney concert, in Liverpool. The whole experience is described as one huge flashback for both Paul and the audience:
"So dry your eyes and blow your nose, because now we're going back to the basements of our youth. Coming full circle to those sweaty young boys, so full of life and joy and not even suspecting where all of this is about to take them."
Yes, let's do that. Our eyes dry in a hurry as we careen from breathless fan-boy writing to dusty travelogue descriptions of Liverpool at the turn of the 20th century, while Carlin describes some immigrants flooding in and others flooding out, "departing for the untrammeled shores of the New World."
Yawn. Why are shores always untrammeled? No one ever seems to write about how trammeled most shores actually are these days.
What's missing here is the voice of Paul himself. Being unauthorized, the book suffers from an overabundance of secondhand sources and is studded with speculation about what Paul might have said or thought or felt.
There is only one original interview in the first chapter of just 14 pages with Paul's boyhood acquaintance Tony Bramwell, who, as a constant presence in McCartney's life, resurfaces at other points in the book.
These one-on-one interviews with peripheral characters are actually the strength of this biography, since they shed glimmers of new light on familiar material.
For example, later in the book, Bramwell talks about the EMI record company's response to "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," now widely considered to be one of the greatest albums of all time. McCartney dreamed of turning it into a movie, but according to Bramwell:
"The stingy people at EMI, bless them, the people in charge of the company at the time, actually didn't think 'SP' was a very good album, as such. It had already cost them so much money in the studio, they weren't sure it was going to recoup anything, so they wouldn't come up with budget for the film."
This is good stuff! Carlin deserves praise for uncovering it, and there are many similar anecdotes in the book.
But much of the writing is jarring, and important things go unexplained.
It is an entertaining book, although flawed, filled with complaints and throbbing purple prose.
Completists who have a need for every detail on the Beatles will want a copy. It would undoubtedly have been a better book with cooperation from Paul McCartney.
The book I relied on then was "The Beatles," by Hunter Davies. I could open it to any page, read the first line and know what the rest of the page was about.
This book was the authority on all things Beatle. From it we learned that their cool collarless suits came from Astrid Kirchherr, the German girlfriend of their original bassist, Stu Sutcliffe. I wanted to be her when I grew up. I wanted to be like the Beatles too, and write songs and play guitar in dark German clubs.
Well, girls (and guys), now we have "Paul McCartney: A Life," by Peter Ames Carlin, a former writer for People magazine and currently a culture reporter for The Oregonian.
This is a lovingly researched, unauthorized biography, which follows McCartney from prebirth family history through the arc of his life and career, right up to his recent tumultuous marriage and divorce from Heather Mills.
Carlin attempts to present McCartney as more artistically and intellectually complex °?°?-- and more ambitious -- than the sweet and bubbly caricature we have known.
Unfortunately, this book is wildly uneven in both its tone and the quality of its writing. The first chapter includes a fanciful account of an actual recent McCartney concert, in Liverpool. The whole experience is described as one huge flashback for both Paul and the audience:
"So dry your eyes and blow your nose, because now we're going back to the basements of our youth. Coming full circle to those sweaty young boys, so full of life and joy and not even suspecting where all of this is about to take them."
Yes, let's do that. Our eyes dry in a hurry as we careen from breathless fan-boy writing to dusty travelogue descriptions of Liverpool at the turn of the 20th century, while Carlin describes some immigrants flooding in and others flooding out, "departing for the untrammeled shores of the New World."
Yawn. Why are shores always untrammeled? No one ever seems to write about how trammeled most shores actually are these days.
What's missing here is the voice of Paul himself. Being unauthorized, the book suffers from an overabundance of secondhand sources and is studded with speculation about what Paul might have said or thought or felt.
There is only one original interview in the first chapter of just 14 pages with Paul's boyhood acquaintance Tony Bramwell, who, as a constant presence in McCartney's life, resurfaces at other points in the book.
These one-on-one interviews with peripheral characters are actually the strength of this biography, since they shed glimmers of new light on familiar material.
For example, later in the book, Bramwell talks about the EMI record company's response to "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," now widely considered to be one of the greatest albums of all time. McCartney dreamed of turning it into a movie, but according to Bramwell:
"The stingy people at EMI, bless them, the people in charge of the company at the time, actually didn't think 'SP' was a very good album, as such. It had already cost them so much money in the studio, they weren't sure it was going to recoup anything, so they wouldn't come up with budget for the film."
This is good stuff! Carlin deserves praise for uncovering it, and there are many similar anecdotes in the book.
But much of the writing is jarring, and important things go unexplained.
It is an entertaining book, although flawed, filled with complaints and throbbing purple prose.
Completists who have a need for every detail on the Beatles will want a copy. It would undoubtedly have been a better book with cooperation from Paul McCartney.
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