There aren’t too many people who really need to take a swipe at Paul McCartney for any reason.
The man is one of the main reasons why pop music sounds the way it does today, and even if not every one of his songs is a home run, his work with The Beatles will forever be beyond anything that most modern songwriters could even attempt. But Macca knew what he was about more than anyone, so he was bound to be pissed when revisionist history started taking place.
Because if we look at the raw data, McCartney was far more innovative than he’s given credit for. If you were to ask a random music fan about what The Beatles were like, most people would have called McCartney the soft balladeer who wrote songs even grandmothers could love, but when looking at his track record, he was even more adventurous than John Lennon in many respects.
You have to remember that McCartney was the first one to dip his toes into the avant-garde, and even when working on Lennon tracks like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, it was his idea to throw on those strange sound effects and tape loops throughout the piece. He was always experimenting with new sounds even as late as his Fireman albums, but I guess when you’ve written a tune like ‘Ebony and Ivory’, people put you in that box for eternity.
It’s not like he couldn’t rock, either. ‘Helter Skelter’ and his solo hits like ‘Jet’ and ‘Junior’s Farm’ proved that he could write as good a rock songs as his previous bandmates, and even as far back as the days playing in the Cavern Club and in Hamburg, he was the one shredding his voice every single night when it came time for the Little Richard tunes.
He could put his voice through its paces as well. Since the band needed to get music recorded as quickly as possible back in the day, that meant having to do multiple songs in one day, and while a tune like ‘I’m Down’ would have destroyed anyone else’s voice, McCartney managed to record a version of his bluesy tune alongside ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ and ‘Yesterday’ at the same session. But when he started seeing movies pop up regarding the band’s legacy, he couldn’t help but see a few inaccuracies.
There has been no shortage of Beatles biopics over the years, but when looking at Backbeat, McCartney felt slighted listening to what his onscreen counterpart did, saying, “In the film Backbeat, they gave ‘Long Tall Sally’ to the John character to sing. There’s revisionism as we speak. No wonder I get a bum rap. I was really pissed off when the John character sang ‘Long Tall Sally’. There’s no need for that.. There are a million songs that John sang just as well, which they could have given him. But they just didn’t bother … it was just slack of them really. It’s a bit of a nuisance … they’re robbing you of your history.”
It might seem like a petty gripe to dwell on, but listening to McCartney’s solo track ‘Early Days’, you can tell why it bothers him so much. Here is a man who has had a microscope on him ever since he was in his 20s, and yet he has no control over what everyone else says about him or what they want to pick apart regarding his career.
While Backbeat is far from a terrible movie and does at least have a few great moments where the Fab rapport is nailed down, there’s a good chance any new Beatles biopic will take a lot better care of the band’s legacy. Lennon was definitely willing to make whatever strange sound came into his head, but McCartney always found time to keep up with his musical soulmate as well.
