Transitioning to Bass and Musical Evolution

This is an iHeart Podcast, guaranteed human . On Christmas Eve 1995, author Miguel Ángel Hernandez's best friend murdered his sister and took his own life by jumping off a cliff. Crime forgotten. Twenty years later, Miguel returns home in an attempt to reconstruct that tragic night that marked the end of his adolescence. But revisiting the past will awaken personal ghosts. Based on true events, the pain of others is a raw and moving novel that fuses a police thriller with compelling reportage. Find the Pain of Others at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or at Audible, Spotify, or wherever you get your audiobooks. Hi everyone, it's Paul Muldoon. Before we get to this episode, I wanted to let you know that you can binge all twelve episodes of McCartney A Life and Lyrics right now ad free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin Plus on the McCartney A Life and Lyrics show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin .fm slash plus We had guitars we played we did the occasional gigs but one thing you used to do was you would you would go to a party and you would take your guitar with you . Now, John being older and at art school would go to art school parties , which me and George normally wouldn't have an entree into . But I remember going to one and I took my guitar so I'm sitting enigmatically in the corner with my b lack polar neck sweater on trying to look French trying to look interesting to this older crowd and um so one of the weapons that I used was to play this sort of Frenchy sounding song and sort of make guttural noises. Kind of half thinking that someone will think, well , he's French probably. An intellectual. Yes. It wasn't necessary once the Beatles were going to to try and look enigmatic. It just was no longer necessary . I'm Paul Muldoon. For a while now, I've been fortunate to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of the era. And will you look at me? I'm Bon tour. I'm actually a performer. That is Sir Paul McCartney. We worked together on a book looking at the lyrics of more than 150 of his songs. And we recorded many hours of our conversations. It was like going back to an old snapshot album. Looking back on work . I hadn't ever analyzed . This is McCartney: A Life in Lyrics, a Masterclass, a Memoir, and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic figures in popular music. In this episode, Mich elle . When Paul McCartney was trying to look French at art school parties, he would have been playing a guitar he bought from Hesse's guitar shop, the main music store in Liverpool. We would go in the shop and it to us it was like Valhalla, just all these guitars . There's no finer shop than a guitar shop. And I still find that today, I still there's just the beauty, there's the magic of all this potential music surrounding you, you know, and all this rock and roll suggested by these shops and everything gleaming and looking beautiful and shiny and So we'd used to love going in the shop just to go in the shop and we would pay our dues with our little books at a counter and I still actually have my book, my little payment book. Hesi es was manned by the shopkeeper Jim Gretty, who let customers pay for their instruments in monthly installments. With the purchases, he also offered some f ree instruction. He would often stand there with his guitar, he was a bit of a jazz guitarist, and he would often be sort of playing a bit of guitar. Like guys in music shops too. We liked him. We admired his skills on the guitar 'cause he was far in advance of us. And there was this one chord that we heard him play, was a particularly lush chord. We said, What's that? What chord is that? And so he took the trouble to point it out to us. It was what we knew as an F chord, simple F shape down at the first position, down at the knot . But he used two one of his fingers to cover the first two strings up on the fourth fret, which would be an A flat and an E flat . And those gave a very jazzy chord. You've got your F chord, your normal F chord. But with these, it just was very lush and very exotic. So the good thing was when he showed it to two of us, we were bound to remember it. Because you know, if George forgot it, I'd remember it similarly, vice versa. Anyway, we knew this chord and we worked it into quite a few things. We wrote it into the Beatles version of Till It Was You . Because we just thought it was juicy and it showed that we knew a bit . It showed us this F Demente d or whatever it was called and I was making this song in C . Dung Chung which turned out to be the French song that I would do at the party. And to to to the second chord, I use this Jim Gretti chord, this F chord with the added notes. We'll have an official title. It will be F augmented 9th or something. But we didn't deal in such luxurious as titles and names of chords. It was just that one Paul McCartney was constantly collecting a chord here, a progression there. It was all part of an attempt to be a cool French intellectual to impress John's friends. Everything he took in was inspiration for his party piece . Then I progressed through , put in another nice little chord we knew, which again I don't know the name of, but we got this chord off the coaster's record called Along Came Jones I flopped down in my easy chair and turned on channel two a bat gun slinger calls off this hammer with a chase He trapped her in the old sawmill and said with an evil laugh If you don't give me the key to your ranch, I'll saw you all in half. And then he grabbed her, he tied it And then he tied her down. And then he tied her. Uh-uh. And then along came Joe. And then along came Joe . But there's this Jeff Lynn calls them naughty chords, which are a slightly naughty chord, that's out of our normal realm. So I used these two little chords and had this melody, which I say I used to make French grunts to and it was kind of half a joke really. Then years later, when the Beatles was starting to become popular and I was looking for ideas, songs to do, Edith Piaf had a big hit with a song called Mil ord , which was interesting, it was a big hit because it was out of left field. Whereas all the other songs, you sort of knew what genre they were . This one was French and had it this interesting no no no no mil de was a soira mat able il a fait si formoir The idea of a girl sort of talking to a guy about my lord , we didn't quite get it, but it was nice. And then she slows down. Does that tree? I took all of this in. All of this was like just I just fill in my tank all this stuff. As the band brainstormed for the album that would become Rubber Soul, John Lennon remembered Paul 's French party piece from more than five years earlier and encouraged him to pick it back up. So I went away and thought something Bam Bam me lord me h so I I vote Michel that's nice it's French nice sound Michel Michel These are words that go together well . My mission On Christmas Eve 1995, author Miguel Ángel Hernández's best friend murdered his sister and took his own life by jumping off a cliff. The investigation was closed and the crime forgotten. Twenty years later, Miguel returns home in an attempt to reconstruct that tragic night that marked the end of his adolescence. But revisiting the past will awaken personal ghosts.ed Bas on true events, The Pain of Others is a raw and moving novel that fuses a police thriller with compelling reportage. Find the Pain of Others at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or at Audible, Spotify or wherever you get your audiobooks. In his quest to be a believable Frenchman and to write a song like Edith Pieff's, McCartney would need help to overcome the langu age barrier. I never took French in school. I took Spanish, German, and Latin. Strangely, good most English people took French. Yes. No, no, that's it is odd. Was it offered in the school? Yeah. It seemed like everyone else took it. John took it, but he couldn't remember any of it. I love you, I love you, I love you . That's all I want to say Until I find a way I will say the only words I know that you under stand I had a friend called Ivan Vaughan, probably my my best friend in school, even though he wasn't in my class. He was born on the same day as I was exactly in, Liverpool, eighteenth of june forty two. So we had that in common. Sense of humor, he was a crazy guy. Turned out he was the guy to introduce me to John Lennon. It was a conduit put us together. So I I was still very good friends with Ivan, who by then had been a Cambridge scholar, classics. And he and his wife lived in Islington, Jan, his wife. And I used to visit them, just go to dinner, we'd go out the pub, whatever. And so I was talking to her, and I knew she taught French. So I said, Jen , what rhymes with Michelle ? Two syllables . Can you think of anything? She said, well Ma Bell? I said, love it. What's that mean? Well my beauty. Oh okay. That's lovely. I said, we're going together, going together, well they fit, don't they nicely they rhyme? Something like that. She said, Son des mots qui vont très bien ensemble bleu. You must say ensemble bleu. I would have said ensemble. I would have too. So um I said that's brilliant. Wrote it down, went back and started working on the song with the idea now that I'm talking to a girl called Michelle, she's my belle and oh by the way these words go together well look at me I'm speaking French Pian on song, the piano song I need to, I need to, I need to , I need to make you see and so that gave me the idea for the song, which was going to be I Love You, I Need You, I Need You. And until we get together and get it on, I'll say these words. And this is all you need to know just for now . And the rest was in English, I love you, I need you, you know, I want you As was often the case for the Beatles in the mid-1960s, the recording session for Michelle was extremely fast. They put the whole thing together in an hour and a half. Luckily we came in prepared. We knew it all. So I played the guitar, did that. George made a lovely solo on electric gu itar and the rest of the guys were filled in. And then it came time for me to play the bass on it. And again, these little tricks that had sort of got loaded in my sort of consciousness, like all my life, just musical ideas that I'd heard that I could pull from my subconscious and reuse them. What I like particularly on that is where the chords are descending in the C minor thing that it is now the verse. Boom ch om toom toom. While that's happening, don't join joo chun chun j I go om instead of kind of going boom boom or boom boom boom So they're going with it. I go against it with the bass which I was very satisfied with. I mean the bass was coming to the fore in a number of songs in that era, I think, wasn't it? Uh-huh. I'd been very inspired by J Jamesames on, the Motown bass player, who was very melodic. It encouraged me and millions of others to move away from the root notes. Traditionally in country and westerns of you just play boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom , boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, those two notes are all the way. That's your bass part basically. And that's why it had no glamour attached to it at all. But James Jameson then started playing around with And I was massively inspired by him. And so I started to thinking, ah, mm-hmm , there's room for movement here. And I started to experiment a little. On Christmas Eve 1995, author Miguel Ángel Hernández's best friend murdered his sister and took his own life by jumping off a cliff. No one ever knew why. The investigation was closed and the crime forgotten. Twenty years later, Miguel returns home in an attempt to reconstruct that tragic night that marked the end of his adolescence. But revisiting the past will awaken personal ghosts . Based on true events, The Pain of Others is a raw and moving novel that fuses a police thriller with compelling reportage. Find the pain of others at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or at audible , Spotify, or wherever you get your audiobooks. In the beginning, before the Beatles were the Beatles, Paul had gravitated toward playing lead guitar Right. And what had happened with my guitar playing was I was good at it at home. And John's Aunt Mimi used to say, oh, it was much better than John. Mind you, when I first met John, he played banjo chords. He didn't play guitar because I had to show him guitar courts because he'd been taught by his mum and she only knew banjo course. What happened to me was we played a place called the Conservative Club which was above a shop in Broadway, Liverpool. We had this gig and it was like one of the first thing I ever played and I was lead guitar player, John was rhythm. And I had a solo and I totally froze. I could not move my fingers. Yeah, let's go! And it was like just so embarrassing. My lead guitar playing career melted And I said well I'm not doing this again. This I'm not cut out for this, I'm no good. McCartney still played guitar, he just avoided the solos, but when the Beatles trained for more than two years in Hamburg. It was the guitar that wasn't cut out for him. I had from Hessy's Jim Gretty, what I was paying off on was a little guitar called a Rosetti Lucky 7, which is a the cheapest thing you could buy, but it looked pretty. It was red and it was a sort of electric guitar, but it was really just a plank of wood, very badly made. But it kinda looked alright, so I thought it looked good in the photos and on stage. But I took it to Hamburg and the stress of Hamburg was just too much for it and it fell apart. Basically it just fell apart. It wasn't well made. Guitars have this truss rod going through. This didn't. This was just a neck attached to a body and it was a terrible little thing. Anyway it fell apart. So and there was no retrieving it. It was we didn't know someone who could fix it. And we couldn't fix it. So that was dumped and I became the pianist because there was a piano on stage. This was 1961 and at the time the band consisted of Paul, John, George Harrison, drummer Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe, a best player whom John had met at art school. Well he wasn't very musical, Stuart. He loved his music, but he just wasn't. All of us had played guitar, so the transition to go to bass wasn't too hard. Stuart hadn't, so he had to learn from the ground up and we showed him sort of things. But we actually used to have to ask him to turn his back to the camera if there were any photos being taken because we knew that people could see he wasn't necessarily playing in the same key as us. But he was a lovely guy, and he fell in love with a photographer called Astrid Kirshner in Hamburg, and Stuart told us one day he was going to stay. So now we didn't have a bass player. Now the rumour since has been that I edged him out of the band, because we certainly did have our difficulties. For me, it was mainly because I didn't think he was a very good musici an, which he wasn't, and he admitted it. So for me that caused problems. Because uh being a I mean you could say being a perfectionist, but actually asking the bass player to play the same key as us isn't really looking for perfection. While it's been rumoured that McCartney wanted Stuart Sutcliffe gone so he could play the bass, he remembers there not being much competition for the role. Well not me. Ringo, or maybe it wasn't Ringo at that point, I think it was still Pete Pest, said not me, and that left me. With a guy who didn't have a guitar and was now playing piano. So I had to switch to bass. So I bought myself the Hoffner bass, which is a lovely instrument. It fulfilled all my requirements. It was cheap, available, and light. Light I think is important, isn't it? Lightweight. I didn't realise till later how important it was. But it actually really affects your style of playing. So I got that for thirty quid or thirty marks. Something 30 something. In Hamburg, down by the Al ster, where there was some instrument shops. McCartney had become a venerable bass player, creating bass lines that did much more than back up the other instrumentation. The end, which came off on the Beatles Right seeming like a bit of a mistake . We sort of tried to slow down, but our hearts weren't in it like the French people liked that trick. I don't think the guys liked that trick too well. So you'll hear it sounds like the record just slows down. Me shell slows down a little bit ma bell. But it doesn't go me shell ma bell. No, don't rapidly accelerate. And had that been part of the thinking at some point that it would mirror more of the French tradition? Yeah, exactly. Da da da da da So you will hear at the end of the record Michelle just slows down a little bit but it sounds just like there's something wrong with the record. We didn't use it to great dramatic effect. As the Beatles rose to f ame. There was no longer a need for McCartney to pretend he was French in order to impress. In twenty ten, however, he played the song to impress at a very different r