THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER18, 2021 45
McCartney heard Joey Dee’s hit “Pepper-
mint Twist” and answered it, writing
“Pinwheel Twist.” But the seeds of orig-
inality were there. Lennon had worked
out “One After 909,” which ended up
on the “Let It Be” album, when he was
about fifteen. “Fancy Me Chances with
You,” a comic song they slapped together
in 1958, ended up on the “Get Back”
tapes, complete with exaggerated Scouse
accents. What was clear from the start
was that writing would be a matter of
Lennon and McCartney.
“I remember walking through Wool-
ton, the village where John was from,
and saying to John, ‘Look, you know, it
should just be you and me who are the
writers,’” McCartney recalled. “We never
said, ‘Let’s keep George out of it,’ but it
was implied.”
A
s the Beatles gained a following,
the sophistication of their song-
writing deepened. McCartney, for in-
stance, was taken with epistolary songs
like Fats Waller’s “I’m Gonna Sit Right
Down and Write Myself a Letter.” On
a tour bus, he thought of the impera-
tive phrase “Close your eyes” and went
on from there. “We arrived at the venue,
and with all the hustle and bustle around
me—all the various bands and tour crews
running about—I made my way to the
piano and then somehow found the
chords,” he recalls in “The Lyrics.” At
first, it was “a straight country-and-
western love song,” but then Lennon
provided a unique swing to the verses
by strumming his guitar in a tricky trip-
let rhythm. The result was “All My Lov-
ing.” The Beatles recorded the song in
1963, and when they came to New York
the following year they played it on
“The Ed Sullivan Show.” More than
seventy million people watched. Within
two months, they had the Top Five
songs on the Billboard charts and Beatle-
mania was under way.
The Beatles revelled not only in their
music but in the fun, the just-us cama-
raderie, the inside jokes. “I don’t actu-
ally want to be a living legend,” Mc-
Cartney once said. Fun had been the
idea. “I came in this to get out of hav-
ing a job. And to pull birds. And I pulled
quite a few birds, and got out of hav-
ing a job.” Lennon compared their tours
to Fellini’s “Satyricon.”
What was striking about the Bea-
tles was the inventiveness of their mel-
odies and chord progressions. Every
month, it seemed, they became more
distinct from everyone else. The devel-
opment from album to album—from
three-chord teen-age love songs to in-
tricate ballads to the tape loops and syn-
thesizers of their psychedelic moment—
both caught the Zeitgeist and created
it. And they had a sense of style to match:
the suits, the boots, the haircuts all be-
came era-defining. Even classical ma-
vens were impressed. Leonard Bern-
stein went on television to analyze the
structure of “Good Day Sunshine.” Ned
Rorem, writing in The New York Re-
view of Books, compared a “minute har-
monic shift” in “Here, There and Every-
where” to Monteverdi’s madrigal “A un
giro sol,” and a deft key change in “Mi-
chelle” to a moment in Poulenc.
McCartney waves away such high-
flown talk, but he isn’t above suggesting
that the Beatles worked from a broader
range of musical languages than their
peers—not least the Rolling Stones. “I’mnot sure I should say it, but they’re a
blues cover band, that’s sort of what the
Stones are,” he told me. “I think our net
was cast a bit wider than theirs.”
The Beatles worked at a furious pace.
Their producer, George Martin, brought
deep experience to the process, along
with an unerring ability to help the band
translate their ideas into reality. As Mc-
Cartney recalls, “George would say, ‘Be
here at ten, tune up, have a cup of tea.’
At ten-thirty you’d start.” Two songs
were recorded by lunch, and often two
more afterward. “Once you get into that
little routine, it’s hard, but then you
enjoy it. It’s a very good way to work.
Because suddenly at the end of every
day you’ve got four songs.”
By 1966, the Beatles had tired of the
road. The fans nightly screaming their
hysterical adulation sounded to Mc-
Cartney like “a million seagulls.” As the
band came to think of themselves more
as artists than as pop stars, they saw
performing in stadiums as an indignity.
“It had been sort of brewing, you know,“ You know, it’s not too late to go back to school, sweetie,
and become a statue of law or medicine.”