Word: mccartneys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...simple tune hammered onto the regulation aaba pop-song structure. But the boys found their conventional sound and juvenile verses stultifying. Says Paul McCartney: "We didn't like the idea of people going onstage and being very unreal and doing sickly songs. We felt that people would like it more, and we would like it more, if there was some-reality...
...even sharper departure from Big Beat banalities came as Tunesmith McCartney began exhibiting an unsuspected lyrical gift. In 1965, he crooned the loveliest of his ballads, Yesterday, to the accompaniment of a string octet-a novel and effective backing that gave birth to an entire new genre, baroque-rock. Still another form, raga-rock, had its origins after George Harrison flipped over Indian music, studied with Indian sitar Virtuoso Ravi Shankar, and introduced a brief sitar motif on the 1965 recording Norwegian Wood. Now everybody's making with the sitar...
...theatrical bit of all--an epilogue which wipes the grin off the face of a wildly contented audience and sends them home with the willies. A "Day in the Life" is no joke; all the buoyant comic comment finally gives way to a flood of tristitia mundi. Paul McCartney's sweet, detached, phantasmic voice begins, "I read the news today, oh boy,"--a strange, sad phrase which grows heavier as the song grows more hallucinatory. At first the news is about the Guiness heir, son of a Beer peer, dying in his Lotus elan, sad waste of youth, but comic...
...performers who dress up in Edwardian band costumes to comment on modern times? First of all, when you talk about the Beatles, you mostly mean John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who write nearly all the words and tunes, and producer George Martin, who writes the rest of what you hear on the record. Martin knows all the musical technique anyone will ever need: as a musicologist, he has at is command every classical trick in the book, as a record producer, he knows how to make piano strings sound like the winds of Hell. He can conjure up anything...
...found acquaintances range from Ravi Shanker, who is teaching Harrison the entirely non-Western discipline of the sitar, to the Amadeus String Quartet (unsurpassed even by the Budapest), which recorded the background for "Eleanor Rigby" and which has leant the Beatles some of the Western tradition. Lennon and McCartney read voraciously, and they might borrow inspiration as easily from Eugene O'Neill as from Dylan or Ginsberg. The important thing is that being open-minded borrowers, the Beatles will be producing new, but slightly derivative, kinds of music long after the strictly original geniuses of their generation have choked...