MUSIC: Paul McCartney Q&A
I spoke to Paul McCartney a few weeks back, to advance his upcoming stop in town at The Joint on Sunday. He was such a fun, gracious guy to talk to, that I ended up having tons of extra quotes that didn't fit into my piece on McCartney that runs in Friday's Neon section in the R-J. Read on, for more on Paul McCartney in his own words.
On playing a venue as small as The Joint when he’s used to performing in arenas and stadiums:
“You realize you’re not going have big production stuff, but in a way, that’s quite nice. In truth, it takes me back to earlier days, when we had zero production. You took your own amp on the stage and got on with it. I like it. It’s a little bit retro for me to do that. I like to play in a bit more intimate setting. It does alter how I think of it. We’ll just do numbers that will hopefully suit the more intimate setting.”
On creating his new Fire Man album, “Electric Arguments,” with producer Youth:
“This time, it was kind of different. At one point, (Youth) said, ‘Well, how about a bit of vocal?’ So I said, ‘OK.’ Then he said, ‘Well, what about lyrics, now?’ I said, ‘Well, I haven’t gotten any.’ He gave me a look which meant, ‘Surely you can think of something.’ So we just started scouring little poetry books we had — we’re both into poetry. I just grabbed a couple of words here, a couple of words from there, sort of stuck them all together, and found some kind of lyric. It was that spontaneous. I likened it to improvisational theater, which I’ve never done, but I know I’d probably like that. It’s this idea of conjuring something out of absolutely nothing. Your brain is cooking away, and it’s slightly scary, but it’s great.
“The nice thing was, with the way we work, Youth is like the DJ/producer — he’s a DJ, he’s a mixer and a musician, as well. So I would sometimes say, ‘OK, well I’ve thrown enough at you, now you just pick the bones out of that.’ And he’d pick some stuff out, and he might loop something into a chorus that I knew was a good bit, but I’d come back in the next day and he would have made it into a proper format. It was like, ‘Wow, man, it’s a song.’
“You get a bit of an out of body experience doing that, because you really are just throwing this stuff out. I had to say to the engineers before we started the process, I said, ‘Look guys, this could really be embarrassing for me.’ Because if you think about it, if you stood up to a mic in a recording studio, you’d vaguely like to know what the song was, and in this case, I had no idea. I likened it to friends of mine who are actors, and they say that a recurring dream they have, is that they’re opening in a play, and they step up to the footlights, and they realize they don’t know what play they’re in. It’s like, ‘Ahhh!’ And they’d wake up in a sweat. Well, it’s a bit like that. There is a bit of a scary edge. But this method is one of the great methods, no doubt about it. You just push yourself out of your comfort zone, rely on your team to help get you there, and you suddenly find, ‘What the hell did I just say?’”
On being a grown-up kid:
“Obviously I’ve got a business to run, I’ve got a family, I’ve got kids, so there are a lot of points in my life where I am grown up, but to me the most important thing, even in all of that stuff, is to retain this sense of childlike wonder. You look at the cutting edge of science now, quantum mechanics, it’s all that. I’m reading this cool book at the moment, ‘The Holographic Universe,’ and it’s so far out, it’s like it’s taking me back to the ’60s. It’s like, ‘What?’ They’re talking about the microscopic, super, super molecular level, what forms matter. One of the theories is that these things don’t exist when they’re not being observed. It’s uncanny, man. We are such solid-matter thinkers. I think it’s this childlike wonder. You’d better keep it, because it’s changing anyway. Science is changing. That’s pretty far out stuff.”
On being on the “Stephen Colbert Show”:
“I went on there and just had the best time. It was so irreverent, so un-interview, it was just like a couple of mad guys hanging out, like we had a drink too many. I was so loving it.”
On keeping in touch with his more whimsical side:
“To look at what I’ve been doing since I was a kid, there’s always been this thread of whimsy. As the Beatles got to develop, later on, we were doing tape loops and all this backwards stuff, and then I went on from that and did loads of stuff. I’ve done some poetry, some painting. To me, the whole idea is to keep it fresh. If it’s exciting for me, then it’s exciting for the onlooker. Or that’s the theory, anyway.
“When I think about it, I’ll remember being with the Beatles, and on the same record — or in the same period — doing ‘Helter Skelter’ and then doing ‘Black Bird,’ which are completely different. One’s this little folky acoustic thing, the other is this sort of rampant, metal rocker.
“There are two sides of me, two aspects of my makeup, that I’ve always had, really. In the Beatles, I used to do a love song like ‘Til There was You,’ and then at the same time, be doing ‘Long Tall Sally,’ a Little Richard screamer type of thing. I am a Gemini, and they do say that a Gemini is two-sided, you know.”
On Cirque Du Soleil’s “Love”:
“My new girlfriend hasn’t seen it, so I’m really looking forward to taking her some time when we get a minute. We’re thrilled with the success of it and with how the show turned out. I think the Cirque guys did a really great job. The performers do a hell of a job, and I think the music sounds so super fab, the way it’s been mashed and the way the sound system is in the room, it’s a thrill, man. People say to me that it’s still the top show in Vegas. You know, c’mon, give it up. Imagine if you had the top show in Vegas. How ya gonna feel?”
On how much input he had in the production:
“We did have quite a bit of input into it, actually. The Cirque people were cool enough to listen to us, and gracious enough to take a few of our ideas onboard.”
On being inspired by an Elvis remix disc prior to the creation of “Love”:
“I thought, ‘Wow, that is nice, I like that, someone’s allowed Elvis to be treated that way, and it works to my mind.’ I figure, you can get the pristine, original versions anyway. It’s not like they go away. Now, you add to it and you introduce to it a whole new bunch of people. So I was secretly wishing that we had an excuse to do that with the Beatles, but thinking, ‘No, we can’t, there’s not a good enough excuse.’
“So when the Cirque show came along, that was one of my first comments to George Martin and his son Giles, who were going to do the music, I said, ‘Look guys, we can do this. We should put the ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ drums behind an unlikely track.’ That’s a hell of a drum sound, it gets very copied by young groups these days.
“I was very keen to encourage the guys to be totally irreligious and not listen to any Beatles fans who would say, ‘Oh no, you can’t do this.’ Because the originals exist. You can go get the mono vinyl if you want to be a purist. The guys picked up the ball and ran with it. Ringo and I would go in every so often, give them a couple of weeks to make some creative efforts, we’d go into the studio at Abbey Road where they were making it, and Giles would somewhat shyly say, ‘Um, well, do you want to listen to this that I’ve done? I don’t know if you’re going to like it.’ And we’d go, ‘This is rockin’ man, do more, take it further out.’ They did a fine job. I do love to be able to see things take new shapes, because the old shapes still exist.”
