Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hi, everyone, it's Paul Moldoin. Before we get to
Speaker 1: this episode, I wanted to let you know that you
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Speaker 2: The Castle's Last Words, Yes.
Speaker 3: Was a dare.
Speaker 4: Justin Hoffman said to me, can you write a song
Speaker 4: about anything? I said, Wow, I don't know. Maybe you know,
Speaker 4: He said, just a minute, and he ran upstairs. He
Speaker 4: came back down with the newspaper article about the death
Speaker 4: of Picasso, and he said, see what Picasso's last words were.
Speaker 2: His last words to his friends were drink to me.
Speaker 2: Drink to my health. You know I can't drink anymore.
Speaker 2: You drink to me.
Speaker 4: Dream do my health?
Speaker 2: You know I can't dream. Getny move.
Speaker 1: I'm Paul muldoon. For a while now, I've been fortunate
Speaker 1: to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of
Speaker 1: the era.
Speaker 2: And will you look at me, I'm going on to it.
Speaker 2: I'm actually a performer.
Speaker 1: That is Sir Paul McCartney. We worked together on a
Speaker 1: book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours
Speaker 1: of our conversations.
Speaker 4: It was like going back to an old snapshot album
Speaker 4: looking back on work I hadn't ever analyzed.
Speaker 1: This is McCartney, a life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir,
Speaker 1: and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic
Speaker 1: figures in popular music. In this episode Picasso's last words
Speaker 1: drink to Me. McCartney met Dustin Hoffman on a nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three trip to Montego Bay, Jamaica, where Hoffman and
Speaker 1: Steve McQueen were filming the historical prison drama Papillon. Hoffman
Speaker 1: had invited Paul and his wife Linda to his home
Speaker 1: for a dinner party, and after dinner, the actor issued
Speaker 1: the song writer a musical challenge. He read them an
Speaker 1: article that had been published in Time magazine earlier that year.
Speaker 5: Right up to the end, Piquestu lost no time. The
Speaker 5: day before he died, I had been a day like
Speaker 5: many others at Notre Dame de vill his Hiltop villa
Speaker 5: at Mouja on the French revia. Late in the afternoon,
Speaker 5: the artist had taken a walk in the little park
Speaker 5: that surrounds his sprawling stonehouse, overlooking the reddish foothills of
Speaker 5: the Maritime Apps.
Speaker 1: It was Adare. Hoffman wanted to know if the legendary
Speaker 1: musician really could make music from anything, so.
Speaker 4: She could you write a song about that? I did
Speaker 4: happen to have my guitar with me, so I record
Speaker 4: and started singing a melody to those words. And he
Speaker 4: was flabbergasted. His then wife, he's not with her anymore
Speaker 4: any I think it was.
Speaker 2: Annie, Annie, come here, can we listen to this?
Speaker 4: Listen?
Speaker 2: List look at this. I just came. Listen. Listen.
Speaker 4: He's got so brandot buh less.
Speaker 6: He's painting.
Speaker 5: Later that evening, Piso and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends
Speaker 5: for dinner. Pikasu was in high spirit.
Speaker 4: He bad us well, said.
Speaker 2: Night to us.
Speaker 5: A drink to drinking my health.
Speaker 2: He urged, drinking.
Speaker 4: Drink too much.
Speaker 5: You know, I can't drink anymore.
Speaker 4: Dream more.
Speaker 5: At eleven thirty, he rose from the table and announced,
Speaker 5: and now I must go back to work.
Speaker 3: You know I can dream any.
Speaker 1: In an interview, Hoffman recounted what it was like to
Speaker 1: see McCartney write the song before his eyes.
Speaker 7: I swear by all that's holy that he began singing
Speaker 7: this song of the story that I had just told
Speaker 7: him about Picasso. It just came out of him. Drink
Speaker 7: to me, drink too, my health. You know I can't
Speaker 7: drink anymore three o'clock in the morning. It's right under
Speaker 7: childbirth in terms of great events of my life. I mean,
Speaker 7: I was at the birth of something. The fact is
Speaker 7: that he didn't come back the next day. He didn't
Speaker 7: even start fiddling around. It was literally immediate I finished
Speaker 7: the story and he strummed his guitar.
Speaker 4: It was a sort of you know, can you write this?
Speaker 4: It was almost he set me a little task and
Speaker 4: I like the words. So then I thought, well, I've
Speaker 4: got to kind of set it up. The grand old
Speaker 4: painter tired last night his paintings on the wall four
Speaker 4: twenty bad as well, and say good night to us all.
Speaker 2: So then that's his this quote.
Speaker 6: May I just say something about that we're talking about
Speaker 6: drama earlier on. You know, the fact that the speaker
Speaker 6: of the song Yeah is in the scene is very
Speaker 6: important Yeah, because he bad us well it's not he
Speaker 6: bad them, well, he bad us well, and when it's us, well,
Speaker 6: the beauty of that is I suppose that not only
Speaker 6: is the speaker involved, but they bring in the listener,
Speaker 6: so we're all there immediately.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I haven't thought of it like that, but that's true.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: In recent weeks he had been working especially hard preparing
Speaker 5: for a big show of his latest paintings at the
Speaker 5: Book's Palace in a in May. On this night, before
Speaker 5: he went to bed, he painted until three am.
Speaker 1: Three club in mine.
Speaker 3: I'm getting very bad.
Speaker 1: I suppose that one could set one could musicalize quote
Speaker 1: unquote any sentence any English language.
Speaker 6: Maybe not any, but many. I mean, the language has
Speaker 6: its own intrinsic musicality.
Speaker 1: I supposed how often quote yes.
Speaker 6: How often does the rhythm of the words themselves influence
Speaker 6: how the let's call it the melody might turn out.
Speaker 2: All the time, all the.
Speaker 4: Time, all the time. You want to get something that
Speaker 4: rolls along naturally and that's interesting at the same.
Speaker 2: Time, but that fits with the music you're hearing with it.
Speaker 4: So sometimes you have to alter a word because it
Speaker 4: just doesn't quite work with them either. So you look
Speaker 4: for something that says the same thing, but just it's
Speaker 4: an alternate word. Maybe it's now it's a two syllable
Speaker 4: word instead of the one syllable word.
Speaker 2: That didn't work all the other way around.
Speaker 1: But I'll be waiting by you waiting, I'll be waiting
Speaker 1: for you there.
Speaker 4: So yeah, it's very important that the rhythm sounds natural.
Speaker 2: When it isn't, it kind of sticks out of the
Speaker 2: sort of thumb.
Speaker 3: I know how.
Speaker 1: Paul McCartney took inspiration from everywhere. Talking to him that day,
Speaker 1: I remembered a poem by the seventeenth century poet Ben Johnson.
Speaker 1: It had been covered by Johnny Cash, Drink to me
Speaker 1: only with thine eyes and I will play with.
Speaker 6: My Would you have been conscious of Ben Johnson's or
Speaker 6: some version of Ben Johnson's song Drink to me only with.
Speaker 1: Thine eyes or whatever it is?
Speaker 3: Yes, an yes, ancient drink to me, I will drink too. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: I've heard it.
Speaker 4: I mean, yeah, I didn't think of that, because the
Speaker 4: whole thought here was just the challenge of doing it
Speaker 4: for Dustan, you know. So I was just concentrated on
Speaker 4: the words he stuck in front of me, And I
Speaker 4: think what was nice was that he obviously seeing it,
Speaker 4: stroke heard it.
Speaker 1: As melodic, so he recognized that probably had possibility.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he recognized the I think, don't you if you
Speaker 4: think about it. You know, he's an actor anyway.
Speaker 1: Well, right, he's a singer really, I mean, he's a vocalist.
Speaker 4: Those rhythm of words, and I think when he read
Speaker 4: the quote, most people would probably think, wow, so that's
Speaker 4: what he said. But I think, Dustin, I'm guessing here,
Speaker 4: but I would guess that he would think, oh no,
Speaker 4: this flows beautifully. Drink to me, drink to my health.
Speaker 4: You know, I can't drink any more. Pump po pump,
Speaker 4: pump pump. You know, there's like a nice little mathematical equation.
Speaker 4: Well so, yeah, so it was a pleasure. It was
Speaker 4: a great pleasure to do it, just to shut off.
Speaker 1: Dream any more. Dustin Hoffmann remembered reading the article about
Speaker 1: Becasso's last words and talking with Paul McCartney about the
Speaker 1: famous pinter.
Speaker 7: And I was so struck by that sentence that I thought, well,
Speaker 7: he must mean that he can't drink anymore because he
Speaker 7: doesn't want to get too high, because he has to
Speaker 7: go back and work. And in some strange way, you know,
Speaker 7: I can't drink anymore. Also means it's the last time
Speaker 7: I'm going to be doing this with my friends, because
Speaker 7: I'm going to die in a few hours.
Speaker 1: Do you know.
Speaker 2: Any more?
Speaker 4: I like that that it was probably just something ordinary
Speaker 4: that was said earnestly, you know, farewell to his friends. Well,
Speaker 4: it becomes his last words. Then it becomes a quote
Speaker 4: in an article. Then Dustin reads it and makes it
Speaker 4: more than a quote and suggests it's a poem, it's
Speaker 4: a lyric. Then he shows it to me, and I
Speaker 4: agree with his suggestion, and I for music to it.
Speaker 4: So it's a nice little way for things to happen.
Speaker 1: Because the song starts with the story of Picasso's last words,
Speaker 1: but after a minute or two it splinters into a montage.
Speaker 1: Among other things, there's a clip from an advertisement for
Speaker 1: a French tourism service offering French language programs and farm
Speaker 1: houses available for visitors to rent. Picasso lived much of
Speaker 1: his life in France, but it's not immediately obvious what
Speaker 1: the connection is in the song. Why does the song
Speaker 1: move into such abstraction. One might wager that it was
Speaker 1: a pinlely choice by McCartney. He himself is a photographer
Speaker 1: and pinter, and he's learned a thing or two about
Speaker 1: abstract art from other practitioners, especially the Dutch American expressionist feelining.
Speaker 4: When I started painting for years before, I'd had this
Speaker 4: idea that it must be meaningful the painting, it just
Speaker 4: had to have some significance, some significant meaning, and it
Speaker 4: stopped me completely.
Speaker 2: I could never paint. I'm going what significant idea am
Speaker 2: I coming up with?
Speaker 4: I'm looking at the garden that's lovely, but it's not
Speaker 4: really significant. So it stopped me, stopped me stopping. And
Speaker 4: then I met to Cooning and I asked him about
Speaker 4: what one of his paintings was and he said, I
Speaker 4: don't know. It looks like a cut hunt and I
Speaker 4: just thought Jesus, and it blew my mind open. In
Speaker 4: this context and in the song context, this idea of
Speaker 4: it not having to mean something is quite liberating. M hm.
Speaker 1: We can hear this liberation in the second half of
Speaker 1: Becasso's Last Words. The song departs from its initial subject,
Speaker 1: veering into samples from other songs on the album Band
Speaker 1: on the Run. The first is from wings hit single Jet.
Speaker 2: When did you know or did you ever know that
Speaker 2: Jet was going to be in it.
Speaker 4: When it came to Jet or Band on the Road,
Speaker 4: I had thads of tricks that I could use.
Speaker 2: One of the tricks with Jet is shouting. Yeah, that works.
Speaker 2: It's always a good opener for any song. Choose a
Speaker 2: word you run.
Speaker 4: You've got to you better get out of here.
Speaker 2: Run. It works. It's the shouting.
Speaker 6: It's funny you should say that now, because I was
Speaker 6: reading a review yesterday, I think of a new translation
Speaker 6: of BeO Wolf and the first word of BeO Wolf
Speaker 6: is something like what what? And they think you know?
Speaker 1: There are various ideas that's what that means, but yet
Speaker 1: it's yet.
Speaker 6: No, seriously that it was meant to represent.
Speaker 1: I think at some level the first strum on the
Speaker 1: lyre from the poet kicking off, but it's not a
Speaker 1: similar idea.
Speaker 4: Jet was actually the name of a pony we had, yes,
Speaker 4: a little little Shetland pony we had for the kids.
Speaker 2: Medv J.
Speaker 1: The other sample is in the outro, which borrows from
Speaker 1: Missus Vanderbilt, that upbeat track from Band on the Run
Speaker 1: about McCartney's rejection of an aristocratic lifestyle.
Speaker 4: We used to get asked when we're first in the Beatles,
Speaker 4: are you worried that you've joined the established, but we
Speaker 4: didn't know. We thought it was a club, which it
Speaker 4: was in London. I mean, we didn't.
Speaker 2: Really know what they meant, and we knew what they
Speaker 2: meant you were, you've gone a bit society. Yeah, you
Speaker 2: weren't a desperate at or yeah, you know, that's right.
Speaker 4: And it was like, na, we're not. We're we know
Speaker 4: a few posh people yet. But to me that missus
Speaker 4: Vanderbilt embodied richness and she was a famous like Rockefeller.
Speaker 4: If you needed to refer, you know, quiz programs and
Speaker 4: give me five rich people's names, it would have been Nabel, Rockefeller, Getty.
Speaker 4: You know, there's certain ones you just know because they're
Speaker 4: in the newspapers. So that was what she was. And
Speaker 4: my idea is.
Speaker 2: It's again, it's the same throwing over of the rules.
Speaker 2: I don't want that.
Speaker 4: I know it's money, it's rich and everything, but what
Speaker 4: comes with it.
Speaker 2: Is bothersome.
Speaker 1: H The connection between Picasso's Dying words, a French tourism manual,
Speaker 1: a character based on a Shetland pony, and an American
Speaker 1: aristocrat is not particularly clear. Beyond the context of the music.
Speaker 1: The meaning is slippery, so that bit's from other songs,
Speaker 1: has the notion of all songs being one song.
Speaker 2: All songs.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Well, I'm prompted partly because in the literary sphere
Speaker 6: is strictly literary sphere. One of Stevens thinks of his
Speaker 6: poems as being one poem, the whole of harmonium, he
Speaker 6: calls it. It's all one thing. He spent his whole
Speaker 6: life writing one big phone. I mean, obviously they're discreeted
Speaker 6: their bi severic things, but I mean, does it mean
Speaker 6: anything to you at all that Stevens might have thought
Speaker 6: in those terms that you're doing one song, your life
Speaker 6: is about writing one song? Or is that just too
Speaker 6: crazy and fanciful.
Speaker 4: You know, as a bit of a stretch for me,
Speaker 4: because my stuff's quite varied, and I think that kind
Speaker 4: of suggests it isn't one song, right, It's a lot, right, a.
Speaker 2: Lot of them.
Speaker 4: They don't neatly fit together, you know. If you've got
Speaker 4: something like high Ie High next to al and A,
Speaker 4: it's quite a difference.
Speaker 1: Like many songs in McCartney's catalog, Picasso's Last Words doesn't
Speaker 1: strive for cohesion. It brings together fragments to juxtapose them.
Speaker 1: The edges between the samples are sharp. It's a form
Speaker 1: of musical cubism, the very style that Picasso pioneered.
Speaker 7: Hell Hell.
Speaker 1: Picasso's last words drink to Me from Wings album Band
Speaker 1: on the Run, released in nineteen seventy three. In the
Speaker 1: next episode, Love.
Speaker 4: I was being accused of just writing silly love songs
Speaker 4: and was in danger of starting to buy into this
Speaker 4: idea that you should just be a bit tougher and
Speaker 4: a bit more worldly. But then askerly realized that's exactly
Speaker 4: what love is. It's worldly, a.
Speaker 1: Polemical love song to the skeptics. That's next time on
Speaker 1: McCartney A Life in Lyrics. McCartney A Life in Lyrics
Speaker 1: is a co production between iHeartMedia, NPL and Pushkin Industries