McCartney Times

Some years ago, a letter addressed to Paul McCartney and his wife Linda surfaced at an online auction in Boston. It had been typed and though its contents were disjointed, the message was clear…and angry.”Do you really think most of today’s art came about because of The Beatles?” wrote John Lennon. “I don’t believe you’re that insane – Paul – do you believe that?”Lennon was responding to correspondence he had received from McCartney’s wife, Linda, in which she had criticised Lennon for failing to openly announce his departure from The Beatles in 1970.”…about not telling anyone that I left The Beatles,” he continued, “PAUL and [then Beatles manager Allen] Klein both spent the day persuading me it was better not to say anything – asking me not to say anything because it would ‘hurt The Beatles’ – and ‘let’s just let it petre [sic] out’ – remember? So get that into your petty little perversion of a mind, Mrs McCartney – the c**** asked me to keep quiet about it.”Yoko Ono was widely blamed for Beatles splitting33Yoko Ono was widely blamed for Beatles splittingLennon had a right to be a little cross with McCartney. A year earlier, McCartney’s statement regarding the end of his collaboration with the other three Beatles, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr came in a press release that included copies of his debut solo album, McCartney, which was released the following week.In the release McCartney spoke about the future of the Fab Four and explained his reasons for going solo, citing “business and musical differences” as the major factors. On the surface, at issue was who should manage the group. Linda’s father and brother, Lee and John Eastman, or the former Rolling Stones’s manager, Allen Klein, but the root causes ran far deeper than that.”Paul had tried everything he could to keep them together,” says Mick Lynch, co-author of The Beatles and Ireland, “and then when it became apparent that it was over, he had to make the announcement so he could sort of officially move on and do his own thing.”The dream was over and though the next decade was full of rumour and speculation that it would, at some stage, be lived again, Lennon’s tragic death ended all hope of a reunion.It had all started so innocently. This Thursday marks the 60th anniversary of the day John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met at a church fete in the affluent Liverpool village of Woolton.That day, John was playing a concert with his skiffle band The Quarrymen. Decked out in a checked shirt and jeans, he wore his hair with an Elvis-like quiff and held his guitar as he always did – as if it were some kind of machine gun ready to shoot the audience with rock’n’roll. He was just 16 years old and yet he commanded the stage. A friend and sometime band mate, Ivan Vaughan, had told Lennon about a school friend who could play the guitar and suggested he bring him to the gig. When The Quarrymen had finished their set, the group sat down in the village hall and talked.”It was in the evening time after the fete that they actually met,” says Pete Brennan, founder of The Beatles Fan Club Ireland. “John was a little patronising towards Paul and looked down on him a little. So Lennon basically said to him ‘what have you got?’ and because Paul was left-handed he had to turn the guitar upside down and they were laughing at him but McCartney played Twenty Flight Rock and John said ‘I’ll be in touch’.”advertisement”We spent about 20 minutes talking,” recalled one of the original Quarrymen Pete Shotton. “John liked to suss people out like that. He never made the first move. People had to come to him. Anyway, a few days later we were walking home together and John asked me what I thought, should we get him in? And I said ‘yeah’.” Luckily for McCartney he bumped into Shotton a few weeks later and luckily for the history of music he accepted his invitation.It was years before the final line-up of John, Paul, George and Ringo was settled upon. Indeed, the years leading up to their first big break, Love Me Do, Pete Best was the drummer and slogged it out with the band in dingy nightclubs and bars of Hamburg, where fuelled by the stimulant Preludin the group honed their craft with five-hour sets and cultivated the friendships and humour that would sustain them through Beatlemania.When he was asked once by a reporter what it was like growing up in Liverpool, John Lennon replied: “I didn’t grow up in Liverpool, I grew up in Hamburg.”By the time they had reached the German port city, Lennon and McCartney had already begun to write songs together. Nobody is quite sure when the deal that saw them splitting the songwriting credits was set in stone, but the 1960 recording of You’ll be Mine is credited as being the first. Dozens of songs followed and most of them are part of the global subconscious songbook.Speaking about I Want to Hold Your Hand, Lennon once said: “Paul hits this chord, and I turn to him and say, That’s it! Do that again! In those days, we really us

Source: It was 60 years ago today… the birth of a musical legend – Independent.ie