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Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney: That's my Beatle! When we did a skit in camp, I had to be Paul. I'm not ashamed to admit that I have a man-crush for him and I think he is the greatest musician of my or anybody elses life-time. Don't care if you still think he only wrote "Silly Love Songs"...don't care.
I've read enough of the books and heard enough of the tapes to know that this man was the driving force behind the band.
Seriously now, I've seen him live nine times and those are some of best moments in my life. Paul simply moves me...and I know I'm not alone. I've been at his concerts with over 200,000 other people feeling the exact same way. I never got to see the Beatles live as a group (I was ten when they played Shea), but I've seen each one of them individually live and there was just no comparing it.
So I proudly bring you Sir Paul McCartney and the things he said about the Beatles music, a video of him making mashed potatoes and of course, his biography along with tons of facts.
In His Own Words-
Paul McCartney on Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds:
I went up to John’s house in Weybridge. When I arrived we were having a cup of tea and he said “Look at this great drawing Julian’s done. Look at the title’. He showed me a drawing on school paper, a five by seven inch piece of paper, of a little girl with lots of stars, and right across the top was written, I think in pencil, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. So I said “What’s that mean?”, thinking Wow, fantastic title! John said “It’s Lucy, a friend of his from school. And she’s in the sky” Julian had drawn stars, and then thought they were diamonds. They were a child’s stars, there’s a way to draw them with two triangles, but he said diamonds because they can be interpreted as diamonds or stars. And we loved it and she was in the sky and it was very trippy to us. So we went upstairs and started to write it. People later thought ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was LSD. I swear we didn’t notice that when it came out.
John had the title and the first verse. It started off very Alice in Wonderland: Picture yourself in a boat, on a river…’ It’s very Alice. Both of us had read the Alice books and always referred to them, we were always talking about ‘Jabber-wocky’ and we knew, those more than any other books. And when psychedelics came in, the heady quality of them was perfect. So we went along with it. I sat there and wrote it with him: I offered ‘cellophane flowers’ and ‘newspaper taxies’ and John replied with ‘kaleidoscope eyes’. I remember which was which because we traded words off each other, as we always did. In our mind it was an Alice thing, which we both loved.
Paul McCartney on Norwegian Wood:
I came into John’s music room in the attic of his Kenwood house and he had the 1st stanza, which was brilliant: ‘I once had a girl…or should I say, she once had me’. That was all he had, no title, no nothing. I said “Oh yes, well ha, we’re there.’ And it wrote itself. Once you’ve got the great idea, they do tend to write themselves, providing you know how to write songs. I picked it up at the 2nd verse, it’s a story. It’s John trying to pull a bird, it was about an affair. It was completely imaginary from my point of view but in John’s it was based on an affair he had. So she makes him sleep in the bath and then in the final verse I had this idea to set the Norwegian Wood (pine wall paneling) on fire as revenge, so we did it very tongue in cheek. In our world the guy had to have some sort of revenge. It could have meant I lit a fire to keep myself warm. But it didn’t, it meant I burned the f_____g place down as an act of revenge.
Mashed Potatoes - "Paul-style"
Paul McCartney Biography
Sir James Paul McCartney MBE (b. June 18, 1942) is a multiple Grammy Award-winning English singer-songwriter, poet, composer, multi-instrumentalist, entrepreneur, record producer, film producer, painter, and animal rights activist. He gained worldwide fame as a member of The Beatles, with John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. Paul McCartney and John Lennon formed one of the most influential and successful songwriting partnerships and wrote some of the most popular music in rock and roll history. After leaving The Beatles, Paul McCartney launched a successful solo career and formed the band Wings with his first wife, Linda Eastman McCartney, and singer-songwriter Denny Laine. He has worked on film scores, classical music, and ambient/electronica music; released a large catalogue of songs as a solo artist; and taken part in projects to help international charities.
Paul McCartney is listed in Guinness World Records as the most successful musician and composer in popular music history, with 60 gold discs and sales of 100 million singles. His song "Yesterday" is listed as the most covered song in history - by over 3,700 artists so far - and has been played more than 7,000,000 times on American television and radio. Wings' 1977 single "Mull of Kintyre" became the first single to sell more than two million copies in the UK, and remains the UK's top selling non-charity single. (Three charity singles have since surpassed it in sales; the first to do so—in 1984—was Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?", whose participants included McCartney.)
His company MPL Communications owns the copyrights to more than 3,000 songs,[4] including all of the songs written by Buddy Holly, along with the publishing rights to such musicals as Guys and Dolls, A Chorus Line, and Grease. Paul McCartney is also an advocate for animal rights, vegetarianism, and music education; he is active in campaigns against landmines, seal hunting, and Third World debt.
When Lonnie Donnegan appeared in Liverpool and the Skiffle craze hit, Paul’s father, Jim McCartney scraped together £15 for a guitar for Paul. Paul's friend Ivan Vaughan invited Paul to Woolton to see the Quarrymen play in Woolton on July 6, 1957, but not really to hear the Quarrymen, it was because Vaughan had promised Paul it would be a great place to pick up girls, which Paul was already very interested in at the age of 14. Later in the afternoon, after hearing the Quarrymen play, Paul borrowed a guitar and impressed the boys with all the chords and the words to "Twenty Flight Rock". Paul's first impression of John was that he was drunk. But Paul wrote down the words for "Twenty Flight Rock" and "Be Bop a Lula" for him so that John could learn them. A few days later Pete Shotten told Paul the others wanted him to join the band.
Starting in May 1960, The Beatles were managed by Allan Williams, who booked them into Bruno Koschmider's Indra club in Hamburg. Paul McCartney's father was reluctant to let the teenage McCartney go to Hamburg until McCartney pointed out that he would earn £2/10s per day. As this was more than he earned himself, Jim finally agreed.
The Beatles first played at the Indra club, sleeping in small, "dirty" rooms in the Bambi Kino, and then moved (after the closure of the Indra) to the larger Kaiserkeller. In October 1960, they left Koschmider's club and worked at the "Top Ten Club", which was run by Peter Eckhorn. When Paul McCartney and Pete Best went back to the Bambi Kino to get their belongings they found it in almost total darkness. As a snub to Koschmider, they found a condom, attached it to a nail on the concrete wall of their room, and set fire to it. There was no real damage, but Koschmider reported them for attempted arson. McCartney and Best spent three hours in a local jail and were deported, as was Harrison, for working under the legal age limit. Lennon's work permit was revoked a few days later and he went home by train, but Sutcliffe had a cold and stayed in Hamburg, and then flew home.
The group reunited in December 1960, and on March 21, 1961, played their first of many concerts at Liverpool's Cavern club. Paul McCartney realized that other Liverpool bands were playing the same cover songs, which prompted him and Lennon to write more original material. The Beatles returned to Hamburg in April 1961, and recorded "My Bonnie" with Tony Sheridan. Sutcliffe left the band after the end of their contract, so McCartney reluctantly took over bass. After borrowing Sutcliffe's Höfner 500/5 model for a short time, he bought a left-handed 1962 500/1 model Höfner bass. On October 1, 1961, McCartney went with Lennon (who paid for the trip) to Paris for two weeks.
The Beatles were first seen by Brian Epstein at the Cavern club on November 9, 1961, and he later signed them to a management contract. The Beatles' road manager, Neil Aspinall, drove them to London on December 31, 1961, where they auditioned the next day, but were rejected by Decca Records. In April 1962, they went back to Hamburg to play at the Star-Club, and learned of Stuart Sutcliffe's death a few hours before they arrived. The Beatles were ready to sign a record contract on May 9, 1962, with Parlophone Records—after having been rejected by many record companies—but Epstein sacked Pete Best (at the behest of McCartney, Lennon and Harrison; Best's replacement was Richard Starkey, whose stage name was Ringo Starr, from Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, although he had already performed, occasionally, with the Beatles in Hamburg) before they signed the contract. "Love Me Do" was released on October 5, 1962, featuring Paul McCartney singing solo on the chorus line. Over the course of the next two years, McCartney and his band mates would rise from relative obscurity to international stardom, an unprecedented feat at that time for a rock-music combo.
All Lennon-McCartney songs on the first pressing of the Please Please Me album (recorded in one day on February 11, 1963…as well as the "Please Please Me" single, "From Me to You", and its B-side, "Thank You Girl", are credited to "McCartney-Lennon", but this was later changed to "Lennon-McCartney". They usually needed an hour or two to finish a song, which were written in hotel rooms after a concert, at Wimpole Street, at Cavendish Avenue, or at Kenwood (Lennon's house). Paul McCartney also wrote songs for other artists, such as Billy J. Kramer, Cilla Black, Badfinger, and Mary Hopkin -and most notably he wrote two hit songs for the group Peter & Gordon-launching their career. One song, "World Without Love", became a #1 hit in the U.K. & U.S. (Peter was the brother of Jane Asher, Paul McCartney's girlfriend at the time).
When he was eleven he used a school prize to buy his first modern art book, including works by Dali and Picasso. Then at fourteen he won an art prize for a drawing of St Aidan's Church on the Speke housing estate where he lived. See more about Paul McCarney's artwork here.
Other Members of The Beatles include:
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