Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney plays the bass like a second singer. From Rubber Soul onward his bass guitar began carrying a tune of its own, a countermelody threading under the song, and usually it was the last thing added: he would overdub the bass after everything else so it could answer the vocal line note for note.¹ He had taken the idea from James Jamerson at Motown and from Brian Wilson, and it let him turn the instrument that anchors a band into one that lifts it. That same instinct, to make the supporting part sing, runs through everything he did. By the count of charts and covers he is the most successful songwriter who ever lived; he is also one of pop’s restless experimentalists, and the distance between those two reputations is the most interesting thing about him.²

Influences and inheritance

The music came from his father first. Jim McCartney led a ragtime and jazz outfit, Jim Mac’s Band, in 1920s Liverpool, and the house was full of standards and old show tunes; that inheritance is why a rock songwriter could write “When I’m Sixty-Four” without irony and reach for a clarinet trio as easily as a guitar.³ Then came the loss that shaped him as much as any record. His mother, Mary, a midwife, died of an embolism after breast-cancer surgery in October 1956, when Paul was fourteen — the wound that surfaces in the “Mother Mary” of “Let It Be” and in the plain ache under his prettiest melodies.⁴

The records he learned from pulled in two directions, and he kept both. From Little Richard he took the scream, the full-throated rock-and-roll holler he still produces on command. From the Everly Brothers and the Brill Building he took close harmony and the discipline of a tight, hook-first song. The last and most consequential lesson was the one that came through the bass: the Motown rhythm section, Jamerson above all, where the bass was a melodic voice rather than a metronome. McCartney heard that and rebuilt his whole approach to the instrument around it.

Core musical identity

His first bass was a cheap Höfner 500/1, the little violin-shaped instrument he bought for about thirty pounds in Hamburg in 1961, when he was handed the role nobody else wanted; its symmetry let it pass strung left-handed, and he played it through hundreds of club nights and the early hits. In 1965 he added a Rickenbacker 4001 for the studio, and the lines grew bolder as he did, walking and countersinging beneath “Something” and “With a Little Help from My Friends”. The Höfner was stolen from a van in 1972 and gone for half a century, until a fan-run hunt found it in 2024 and put it back in his hands at the end of that year’s tour.⁵

The bass was only his first instrument. McCartney plays guitar, piano, and a loose, musical drum part too, and three times in his life he has made an album entirely alone, every sound on it his own. Inside the Beatles he took the drum stool on “Back in the U.S.S.R.” and “Dear Prudence” when Ringo Starr had walked out, and he built “Blackbird” from a fingerpicked figure and a tapping foot.

The voice has the same range as the hands. It floats “Yesterday” and tears the paint off “Oh! Darling” and “Helter Skelter”, the last a song he wrote in 1968 as a deliberate run at the loudest, ugliest thing on the radio, and one historians now file near the headwaters of heavy metal.⁶ The tenderness and the violence are a single instrument pushed to either end, which is the root of both the case against him and the case for him.

His half of the Beatles

Within the partnership credited to Lennon-McCartney, McCartney’s signature is melodic reach and an organizing drive. He wrote the songs that left the rock band behind entirely — “Eleanor Rigby” for a string octet, “Yesterday” for a string quartet and one acoustic guitar — and the singalong epics, “Hey Jude” chief among them. After George Martin and the manager Brian Epstein could no longer hold the group’s direction, it was McCartney who supplied the projects that kept it moving, from the Sgt. Pepper’s conceit to the Abbey Road medley he stitched into a suite. The myth that he was the safe one, the melodist to Lennon’s radical, gets the period backward: McCartney was the Beatle living in the center of London and going to the galleries, the one reading about Stockhausen and John Cage, making tape loops at home and carrying them into “Tomorrow Never Knows”.⁷ The full band story lives in The Beatles and the partnership’s mechanics in Lennon-McCartney; what matters here is that the craftsman and the experimenter were never two different people.

The solo years: Wings and the long argument

McCartney met the breakup by stripping everything back. McCartney (1970), recorded almost entirely alone on a four-track at home, is rough and small on purpose, a man playing every part in his kitchen; critics found it slight, except for the one undeniable thing on it, the slow-burning “Maybe I’m Amazed”.⁸ Ram (1971), credited to Paul and his wife Linda, was savaged on arrival — Jon Landau and Robert Christgau among the harshest — even as its single “Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey” gave him his first solo American number one. One of its songs, “Too Many People,” needled Lennon, who answered with the broadside “How Do You Sleep?”; decades on, Ram is widely heard as the homemade, genre-hopping record its first reviewers missed.⁹

Then he did the unlikeliest thing a departing Beatle could do: he started a new band from nothing and made it earn its place. Wings, built around Paul, Linda, and the guitarist Denny Laine, was a shambles at first, but it produced Band on the Run (1973), cut under near-farcical duress at EMI’s studio in Lagos after two members quit on the eve of the trip and the McCartneys were robbed at knifepoint of the demos, which they rebuilt from memory. It came back his most acclaimed post-Beatles record and a worldwide number one.¹⁰ Wings filled stadiums for the rest of the decade; “Live and Let Die” became the first James Bond theme nominated for an Oscar, with Martin scoring the orchestra, and the bagpipe ballad “Mull of Kintyre” outsold every single in British history to that point.¹¹ When the critics kept calling his songs lightweight, he answered them on the charts, with a number one called “Silly Love Songs” whose title dared them to say it again.¹²

The experimenter never went away; it just worked in the margins. McCartney II (1980), another one-man home recording, is a strange synthesizer record full of tape tricks and drum machines, dismissed at the time and now prized by electronic musicians, with “Coming Up” as its sped-up, off-kilter hit.¹³ After Wings dissolved he reunited with Martin for Tug of War (1982) and rode the new decade with two blockbuster duets, “Ebony and Ivory” with Stevie Wonder and “Say Say Say” with Michael Jackson, both American number ones — the latter still his last.¹⁴ Those same years drew his worst reviews, the sentimental streak running unchecked, even as he kept a hidden second career going: classical commissions, and an ambient-electronica alias, the Fireman, with the producer Youth.¹⁵

He has simply never stopped. Knighted in 1997, widowed the next year when Linda died of breast cancer, he kept writing and touring into his eighties, and in the pandemic year of 2020 he shut himself in again to play everything himself on McCartney III, which entered the British chart at number one — fifty years after the homemade debut it answers.¹⁶

Legacy, and the reckoning

McCartney’s first bequest is the one he is least credited for: he made the electric bass a melodic instrument, a part to be composed in its own right, and almost every inventive rock bassline since works in the space he opened. The second is the songbook. Guinness has named him the most successful songwriter in history, “Yesterday” is the most covered song ever recorded, and the sheer breadth of it, from music-hall pastiche to synthesizer experiments, is a range no rival in the form has matched.¹⁷

The reckoning is about that breadth, and about a long shadow. For decades the consensus held McCartney to be the lightweight of the Beatles, the writer of pretty trifles next to Lennon’s truth-telling, and his own worst habits gave the charge something to feed on; “Ebony and Ivory” and the softest Wings filler are as slight as the critics said, the same melodic ease behind “Yesterday” curdling into greeting-card sentiment when nothing pushed back on it.¹⁸ The comparison was never fair, though, and Lennon’s murder froze it in place — the martyr against the knighted survivor, raw honesty against mere craft. The reappraisal that has gathered since corrects the picture without pretending the slight songs away: the bassist who reinvented his instrument, the maker of Ram and McCartney II, was the avant-gardist of the partnership all along. Craft, it turns out, ran deep.

MAP

Explorer

Paul McCartney

Influences and inheritance

Core musical identity

His half of the Beatles

The solo years: Wings and the long argument

Legacy, and the reckoning

See also

MAP

Explorer

Paul McCartney

Influences and inheritance

Core musical identity

His half of the Beatles

The solo years: Wings and the long argument

Legacy, and the reckoning

See also

Footnotes