McCartney Comes Back

(4 of 8)

Listen to What the Man Said is a good tune, all right, with shrewdly alternated rhythms and a lyric that goes down easy.

. . . love is fine for all we know.

For all we know our love will grow—

That's what the man said.

So won 't you listen to what the man said?

Still, at his best McCartney writes words and music with the sort of unruffled brilliance and canny razzle-dazzle that can put both Sedaka and songs like Listen to What the Man Said straight in the shade. Take this example from Band on the Run:

Well the rain exploded with a mighty crash

As we fell into the sun,

And the first one said to the second one there

I hope you're having fun.

Even the brightest of his recent songs, however, carry their quality very lightly. "True, Paul's not innovative at the moment, but nobody is except Stevie Wonder," says Singer-Composer Harry Nilsson, a Beatles crony from way back, adding with some heat, "I don't buy all that crap about saccharine lyrics." Says Bhasker Menon, 41, president of Capitol, which distributes the McCartney records in the U.S.: "Paul is a consummate musician. When he does Yesterday it is one of the most beautiful songs I ever hear." Perhaps meaning to flatter, he adds with impolitic directness, "As a songwriter I would compare Paul to John Denver."

McCartney's roughest critic over the years was also his best friend. "He sounds like Engelbert Humperdink," said John Lennon of McCartney's first solo efforts. Later, in Lennon's remarkable album Imagine, he put it directly to Paul in How Do You Sleep?, a fierce song full of anger and injury:

A pretty face may last a year or two;

But pretty soon they'll see what you can do.

The sound you make is Muzak to my ears.

You must have learned something in all those years.

The song was less spiteful than revealing, fueled with the kind of fury that can come only out of friendship, injured perhaps irreparably, that refuses either to disintegrate completely or to mend. Wounds went deep, and they stayed open for a while. "I find that I have to leave all that behind," McCartney says now. "It's a decision you make, that's all. Otherwise I would have ended up thinking John was the most evil person on this earth . . . saying all that."

The reasons for the bitter dissolution of the Beatles, and the protracted legal brawling that followed, are all a matter of public record, if not common knowledge. Once they stopped touring in 1966, the Beatles began to grow in different directions. Their varying attitudes toward business affairs were as typical of these changes as the songs they wrote or the women they chose.

The Beatles did not own the rights to any of their songs. Their two major sources of income—record royalties and music publishing—were almost totally controlled by others. Without the friendship and advice of their manager, Brian Epstein, who died in 1966, the Beatles found themselves in a series of disastrous business deals. They lost their publishing company in a stock-exchange fight, then plunged into a series of financial misadventures through their management company, Apple Corps Ltd.