There’s a good chance no one’s ever going to figure out the magic behind what Paul McCartney did in The Beatles.
You could say that it was the magic of the songs that he wrote with John Lennon or the way that all of their songs were about unifying themes like peace and love, but when you break everything down, it all comes back to the fact that every member brought their own special ingredient to the band that made them perfect. They may have made the world feel feelings that they didn’t know they had, but that was nothing compared to what Macca heard in the early days of rock and roll.
Then again, McCartney’s reputation as a rock and roller tends to get lost along the way more often than not. Most people only like to look at him as the soft-hearted balladeer behind most of their work, compared to Lennon, but are we all just going to ignore all of the classic and rock tracks that McCartney brought to the table as well?
‘Paperback Writer’ came from him, ‘Helter Skelter’ helped invent heavy metal over the course of a few minutes, and even when Lennon was getting credit for being the avant-garde artist, McCartney was the first to delve into the avant-garde world. He was the one going to exhibitions and had even turned Lennon onto that way of thinking about music, which probably explains why some of the strangest effects on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ come from ‘The Cute One’ experimenting with tape loops.
But even with his strangeness getting buried, McCartney could rock with the best of them during their days in Hamburg. Chuck Berry may have been the model that Lennon was trying to copy half the time, but in McCartney, the band had their resident Little Richard every time they took to the stage. His voice could reach up into the rafters every single time he performed, but it wasn’t only about singing as high as you could in those days.
It was about showmanship, and in the entertainment world, there was no greater giant than Elvis Presley when they got started. There had been plenty of idols that they had to look up to, but Presley managed to look like a god before his music was even a year old. He could turn any stage inside out with the way that he was moving his body, and while it may have sent parents into a fury watching him on the Ed Sullivan Show, McCartney felt that seeing him was his own version of Beatlemania.
He knew exactly what he wanted to be when he saw Presley, and even from a raw singing perspective, he felt that no one could compare with what ‘The King’ could do, saying, “I love Elvis so much that for me to choose a favorite would be like singling out one of Picasso’s paintings. I have my days when I’ll only listen to early Elvis and, when I do that, I’ll be telling myself that nothing comes close to him in terms of brilliance.”
And that’s what’s so often forgotten when talking about Presley. Despite being one of the single greatest performers in history, he was one of the greatest singers of his generation as well. Even when he came back in 1968 with that signature leather jacket on, you could tell that he still had every ounce of power that he had in the old days when he started singing tunes like ‘Jailhouse Rock’ all over again.
Some of the shine may have been taken off of him when The Beatles first hit it big, but it was never a case of them trying to take down Presley by any stretch. McCartney was always a fan before anything else, and there was no way that anything that he did with The Beatles would be able to leave a dent in anything he heard from ‘The King’.
