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 1: Lyrics right now, add free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber.
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Speaker 2: We had guitars, we played, We did the occasional gigs.
Speaker 2: But one things you used to do was you would
Speaker 2: you would go to a party and you would take
Speaker 2: your guitar with you. Now, John, being older and at
Speaker 2: art school, would go to art school parties, which then
Speaker 2: George normally wouldn't have an entree into. But I remember
Speaker 2: going to one and I took my guitar. So I'm
Speaker 2: sitting enigmatically in the corner with my black pole and
Speaker 2: neck sweater on, trying to look French, trying to look
Speaker 2: interesting to this older crowd. And so one of the
Speaker 2: weapons that I used was to play this sort of
Speaker 2: frenchy sounding song and sort of make gottural noises, kind
Speaker 2: of half thinking that someone will think, well, he's French.
Speaker 2: Probably intellectual it's probably intellectual. It wasn't necessary. Once the
Speaker 2: Beatles were going to try and look enigmatic, it just
Speaker 2: was no longer necessary.
Speaker 1: I'm Paul muldoone for a while now. I've been fortunate
Speaker 1: to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of
Speaker 1: the era, and.
Speaker 2: 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 2: It was like going back to an old snapshot album
Speaker 2: 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, Michelle, when Paul
Speaker 1: McCartney was trying to look French at art school parties,
Speaker 1: he would have been playing a guitar he bought from
Speaker 1: Hesse's Guitar Shop, the main music store in Liverpool.
Speaker 2: We would go in the shop and to us it
Speaker 2: was like Valhalla, just all these guitars. There's no finer
Speaker 2: shop than a guitar shop. And I still find that today.
Speaker 2: Still it's just the beauty. It's the magic of all
Speaker 2: this potential music surrounding, you know, all this rock and
Speaker 2: roll suggested by these shops, and everything gleaming and looking
Speaker 2: beautiful and shiny. And so we used to love going
Speaker 2: in the shop, just to go in the shop, and
Speaker 2: we would pay our dues with our little books that
Speaker 2: a counter, and I still actually have my book, my
Speaker 2: little payment book.
Speaker 1: Hessis was manned by the shopkeeper, Jim Gretti, who let
Speaker 1: customers pay for their instruments in monthly installments. With the purchases,
Speaker 1: he also offered some free instruction.
Speaker 2: He would often stand there with his guitar. He was
Speaker 2: a bit of a jazz guitarist and he would often
Speaker 2: be sort of playing a bit of guitar like guys
Speaker 2: in music shops too. We liked him, We admired his
Speaker 2: skills on the guitar because he was far in advance
Speaker 2: of us. And there was this one chord that we
Speaker 2: heard in play was a particularly lost chord. We said,
Speaker 2: what's that? What chorde is that? And so he took
Speaker 2: the trouble to point it out to us. It was
Speaker 2: what we knew as an F chord, simple F shape
Speaker 2: down at the first position, down at the nuts, but
Speaker 2: he used one of his fingers to cover the first
Speaker 2: two strings up on the fourth fret, which would be
Speaker 2: an A flat and an E flat, and those gave
Speaker 2: a very jazzy cord. You got your F cord, your
Speaker 2: normal F code, but with these it just very lush
Speaker 2: and very exotic. So the good thing was when he
Speaker 2: showed it to two of us, we were bound to remember,
Speaker 2: because you know, George forgot it, I'd remember similarly vice versa. Anyway,
Speaker 2: we knew this chord and we worked it into quite
Speaker 2: a few things.
Speaker 3: There were bounds on a hill, but I never heard
Speaker 3: them ringing.
Speaker 2: We wrote it into the Beatles' version of Till There
Speaker 2: was You.
Speaker 4: Till there was you.
Speaker 2: There were because we just thought it was juicy and
Speaker 2: it showed that we knew a bit. He showed us
Speaker 2: this F demented or whatever it was called, and I
Speaker 2: was making this song in c It was turning out
Speaker 2: to be the French song that I would do at
Speaker 2: the party. And to the second chord, I used this
Speaker 2: Jim Grette chord, this F chord with the added notes
Speaker 2: we'll have an official title. It will be f Augmented
Speaker 2: ninth or something. But we didn't deal in such luxurious
Speaker 2: as titles and names. Of course. It was just that one.
Speaker 1: Paul McCartney was constantly collecting a chord here, a progression there.
Speaker 1: It was all part of an attempt to be a
Speaker 1: cool French intellectual, to impress John's friends. Everything he took
Speaker 1: in was inspiration for his party piece.
Speaker 2: Then I progressed through put in another nice little chord
Speaker 2: we knew, which again I don't know the name of,
Speaker 2: but we got this chord off the coasters record called
Speaker 2: along came Jones.
Speaker 5: I dropped down in my either tear and turned on
Speaker 5: channel too, a bad gunsling of them over the taste
Speaker 5: and post me.
Speaker 4: Soon he tapped her in the old arm meal and.
Speaker 1: Said with a nave a lad, if you don't give
Speaker 1: it a due to your ranch, I'll thaw you all
Speaker 1: in half.
Speaker 2: And then he grabbed her good, and then he tied
Speaker 2: it down, and then he had a good And then
Speaker 2: along came Joan has been alone, but there's this Jeff
Speaker 2: lincles them naughty chords, which were slightly naughty chord that's
Speaker 2: out of our normal realm. So I used these two
Speaker 2: little chords and had this melody which I say, I
Speaker 2: used to make French grunts too, and it was kind
Speaker 2: of half a joke really. Then years later, when the
Speaker 2: Beatles were starting to become popular and I was looking
Speaker 2: for ideas songs to do, Edith Piaff had a big
Speaker 2: hit with a song called Milord, which was interesting. It
Speaker 2: was a big here because it was out of left field.
Speaker 2: Whereas all the other songs you sort of knew what
Speaker 2: genre they were, this one was French and had this interesting.
Speaker 4: No lord aswell.
Speaker 5: For one.
Speaker 4: Easy second bless him.
Speaker 2: The idea of a girl sort of talking to a
Speaker 2: guy about mill Lord. We didn't quite get it, but
Speaker 2: it was nice, and then she slows down, do come well,
Speaker 2: Lord does that train? I took all of this in.
Speaker 2: All of this was like just I just fill in
Speaker 2: my tank, all this stuff.
Speaker 1: As the band brainstormed for the album that would become
Speaker 1: Rubber's Soul, John Lennon remembered Paul's French party piece from
Speaker 1: more than five years earlier and encouraged him to pick
Speaker 1: it back up.
Speaker 6: So I went away and thought something bomb bomb me Lord.
Speaker 6: So I've bought Michel that's nice French, nice sound.
Speaker 2: Michellell Mabel.
Speaker 3: These arm words that go together, well, my Michelle.
Speaker 4: Be these shell Mabel, these.
Speaker 3: Arm words that go to gether well, my missill.
Speaker 1: In his quest to be a believable Frenchman and to
Speaker 1: write a song like Edith Piaf's, McCartney would need help
Speaker 1: to overcome the language barrier.
Speaker 2: I never took French in school. I did Spanish, German
Speaker 2: and Latin. Strangely, you get most English people talk French. Yes,
Speaker 2: British people.
Speaker 7: No, that's it is odd. It wasn't offered in the school.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like it seemed like everyone else took it. John
Speaker 2: took it, but he couldn't remember any of it.
Speaker 4: I love you, I love you and love you. That's
Speaker 4: all I wanted to say until that bad I will
Speaker 4: say that you understand.
Speaker 2: I had a friend called Ivan for probably my best
Speaker 2: friend in school, even though he wasn't in my class.
Speaker 2: He was born on the same day as I was,
Speaker 2: exactly in Liverpool, eighteenth of June forty two, so we
Speaker 2: had that in common sense of humor. Was crazy guy.
Speaker 2: Turned out he was the guy to introduced me to
Speaker 2: John Lennon. It was a conduit put us together. So
Speaker 2: I was still very good friends with Ivan, who by
Speaker 2: then had been a Camber scholar classics, and he and
Speaker 2: his wife lived in Islington. Jan his wife and I
Speaker 2: used to visit them, just go to dinner, we go
Speaker 2: out the pub, whatever. And so I was talking to
Speaker 2: her and I knew she talked French. So I said, Jan,
Speaker 2: what rhymes with Michelle? Two syllables? Can you think of anything?
Speaker 2: She said? Mark Bell said, I love it. What's that
Speaker 2: meaning with my beauty? Okay, mis Mark Bell, I think
Speaker 2: that's lovely. I said, we're going together. They're going together
Speaker 2: where they fit, don't they nicely? They rhymes something like that.
Speaker 2: She said, son demo givonne prepian enseans bleu. You must
Speaker 2: sons on blur. I would have said on some. So
Speaker 2: I said, that's brilliant, wrote it down, went back and
Speaker 2: started working on the song with the idea now that
Speaker 2: talking to a girl called Michelle, she's my girl. And oh,
Speaker 2: by the way these words goes it wegether. Well, look
Speaker 2: at me, I'm speaking French.
Speaker 3: Liivon cbo clabr ansome.
Speaker 4: I need you and need you and need you. I
Speaker 4: need to make you see.
Speaker 2: And so that gave me the idea for the song,
Speaker 2: which was going to be I love you, I need you,
Speaker 2: I need you, and until we get together and get
Speaker 2: it on, I'll say these words and this is all
Speaker 2: you need to know, just for now and the rest
Speaker 2: of us in English, I love you, I need you.
Speaker 1: You know I want you, I love you, as was
Speaker 1: often the kiss for the Beatles in the mid nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty is. The recording session for Michelle was extremely fast.
Speaker 1: They put the whole thing together in an hour and
Speaker 1: a half.
Speaker 2: Luckily we came in prepared, we knew it all. So
Speaker 2: I played the guitar, did that, George made a lovely
Speaker 2: solo on electric guitar, and the rest of the guys
Speaker 2: who filled in wol.
Speaker 4: I think you know my now.
Speaker 2: And then it came time for me to play the
Speaker 2: bass on it. And again these little tricks that had
Speaker 2: sort of got loaded in my sort of consciousness, like
Speaker 2: all my life, just musical ideas that i'd heard that
Speaker 2: I could pull from my subconscious and reuse them what
Speaker 2: I like, particularly on that is where the chords are
Speaker 2: descending in the C minor thing that it is now
Speaker 2: the verse until I don't know, I'm saying no, no, no, No,
Speaker 2: it goes bom boom boom boom boom doom. While that's happening,
Speaker 2: don't you, don't you? I go doom doom, doom, doom doom.
Speaker 2: Instead of kind of going boom boom or boom boom boom,
Speaker 2: so going with it, I go against it with the bass,
Speaker 2: which I was very satisfied with. I'll get to use somehow.
Speaker 4: Until doom. I'm telling you.
Speaker 2: So you.
Speaker 7: The basse was coming to the fore and a number
Speaker 7: of psalms in that era, wasn't it.
Speaker 2: I'd been very inspired by James Jamieson, the Motown bass player,
Speaker 2: who was very melodic. It encouraged me and millions of
Speaker 2: others to move away from the root notes traditionally, in
Speaker 2: contrary wessons, have you just played boom boom boom boom
Speaker 2: boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. Those
Speaker 2: two notes are all the way that's your base part basically,
Speaker 2: and that's why they had no glamor attached to it
Speaker 2: at all. But James Jamison then started playing around with
Speaker 2: and I was massively inspired by him, and so I
Speaker 2: started thinking, Ah, the room for movement here, and I
Speaker 2: started to experiment a little.
Speaker 1: In the beginning. Before the Beatles were the Beatles, Paul
Speaker 1: had gravitated toward playing lead guitar. He had learned chords,
Speaker 1: some from that music store proprietor Jim Gretty, and then
Speaker 1: passed them on to John Lennon.
Speaker 2: Could have been one of the guitar players, but there
Speaker 2: were two already, right. And what had happened with my
Speaker 2: guitar playing was I was good at it at home
Speaker 2: and John Jant Mimi used to say, oh, it was
Speaker 2: much better than John, mind you. When I first met John,
Speaker 2: he played banjo coats. He didn't play guitar because I
Speaker 2: had to show him guitar coats because he'd been taught
Speaker 2: by his mom and she only knew banjo couts. What
Speaker 2: happened to me was we played a place called the
Speaker 2: Conservative Club, which was above a shop in Broadway, Liverpool.
Speaker 2: We had this gig in it was like what the
Speaker 2: first thing I ever played and I was lead guitar player.
Speaker 2: John was rhythm and I had a solo and I
Speaker 2: totally froze. I could not move my fingers Let's go,
Speaker 2: And it was like just so embarrassing my lead guitar
Speaker 2: playing career melted at that moment, and I said, well,
Speaker 2: I'm not doing this again. This, I'm not cut out
Speaker 2: for this. I'm not good.
Speaker 1: McCartney still played guitar, he just avoided the solos, but
Speaker 1: when the Beatles train for more than two years in Hamburg,
Speaker 1: it was the guitar that wasn't cut out for him.
Speaker 2: I had from Hess's and Jim Gretty. What I was
Speaker 2: paying awful was a little guitar called a Rosetti Lucky seven,
Speaker 2: which is quite the cheapest thing you could buy. But
Speaker 2: it looked pretty. It was red and it was a
Speaker 2: sort of electric guitar, but it was really just a
Speaker 2: plank forward, very badly made. But it kind of looked
Speaker 2: all right, so I thought it looked good in the
Speaker 2: photoson on stage. But I took it to Hamburg and
Speaker 2: the stress of Hamburg was just too much for it.
Speaker 2: Then it fell apart, basically just part. It wasn't well
Speaker 2: made guitars have this trush rod going through. This didn't.
Speaker 2: This was just a neck attached to a body and
Speaker 2: it was a terrible little thing. Anyway, it fell apart,
Speaker 2: so there was no retrieving it. It was We didn't
Speaker 2: know someone who could fix it and we couldn't fix it,
Speaker 2: so that was dumped and I became the pianist because
Speaker 2: there was a piano on stage.
Speaker 1: This was nineteen sixty one and at the time the
Speaker 1: band consisted of Paul John, George Harrison, drummer Pete Bez,
Speaker 1: and Stuart Sutcliffe, a bass player whom John had met
Speaker 1: at art school.
Speaker 2: Well, he wasn't very musical, Stuart. He loved his music,
Speaker 2: but he just wasn't. All of us had played guitar,
Speaker 2: so the transition to go to bass wasn't too hot.
Speaker 2: Stuart hadn't, so he had to learn from the ground up,
Speaker 2: and we showed him to the things, but we actually
Speaker 2: used to have to ask him to turn his back
Speaker 2: to the camera if there were any photos being taken,
Speaker 2: because we knew that people could see. He wasn't necessarily
Speaker 2: playing in the same key as us. But he's a
Speaker 2: lovely guy and he fell in love with a photographer
Speaker 2: called Astroude Kirshner in Hamburg, and Stuart told us one
Speaker 2: that he was going to stay. So now we didn't
Speaker 2: have a bass player. Now. The rumor since has been
Speaker 2: that I edged him out of the band, because we
Speaker 2: certainly did have our difficulties. For me, it was mainly
Speaker 2: because I didn't think he was a very good musician,
Speaker 2: which he wasn't and he admitted it. So for me
Speaker 2: that caused problems because being a I mean, you could
Speaker 2: say being a perfectionist, but actually asking the bass player
Speaker 2: to play in the same key as us isn't really
Speaker 2: looking for perfection. It's quite a mild request.
Speaker 1: Well, it's been rumored that McCartney wanted Stuart Sutcliffe gone
Speaker 1: so he could play the bass. He remembers there not
Speaker 1: being much competition for the role.
Speaker 2: When Stuart left. We said who wants to be BASSI
Speaker 2: and Johnson will not me? George were not me Ringo,
Speaker 2: or maybe it wasn't Ringo at that point I think
Speaker 2: it was still Pest said not me, and that left
Speaker 2: me the guy who didn't have a guitar and was
Speaker 2: now playing piano. So I had to switch to bass.
Speaker 2: So I bought myself the Hofner bass, which is a
Speaker 2: lovely instrument. It fulfilled all my requirements. It was cheap,
Speaker 2: available and light light.
Speaker 7: I think it's important.
Speaker 2: It's life weight. I didn't realize till later how important
Speaker 2: it was, but it's actually really affect your style of playing.
Speaker 2: So I got that for thirty quid or thirty marks
Speaker 2: something thirty something in Hamburg, down by the Ulster where
Speaker 2: there was some instrument shops.
Speaker 1: By the time he wrote the lyrics too Michelle. Several
Speaker 1: years after Hamburg, McCartney had become a venerable bass player,
Speaker 1: creating bass lines that did much more than back up
Speaker 1: the other instrumentation.
Speaker 2: The end which came off on the Beatles Road. It
Speaker 2: seeming like a bit of a mistake. We sort of
Speaker 2: tried to slow down, but our hearts weren't in it.
Speaker 2: Like the French people liked that trick. I don't think
Speaker 2: the guys like that trick to us. So you'll hear
Speaker 2: it sounds like the record just slows down. Michelle slows
Speaker 2: down a little bit. Well, but it doesn't go me
Speaker 2: show well, it don't rapidly accelerates.
Speaker 7: So had that been part of the thinking at some
Speaker 7: point that it would bear more of the French tradition.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So you will hear at the end of
Speaker 2: the record of Michelle just slows down a little bit,
Speaker 2: but it sounds just like there's something wrong with the record.
Speaker 2: We didn't use it a great traumatic effect.
Speaker 1: As the Beatles rose to fame, there was no longer
Speaker 1: a need for McCartney to pretend he was French in
Speaker 1: order to impress. In twenty ten, however, he played the
Speaker 1: song to Impress at a very different engagement when he
Speaker 1: was receiving an honor from President Obama. The first Lady
Speaker 1: Michelle Obama was there as well.
Speaker 2: The next song We Like to Do is a song
Speaker 2: I have been itching to do at the White House,
Speaker 2: and I hope the President will forgive me if I
Speaker 2: sing this one. Marbles that words.
Speaker 1: Go to get Michelle, released in nineteen sixty five on
Speaker 1: The Beatles Rubber So in the next episode, once There
Speaker 1: was Away.
Speaker 4: To get back.
Speaker 1: Home, longing for the way things used to be, and
Speaker 1: knowing you can never truly re turn home.
Speaker 4: Get back home. Sleep pretty darn, do not cry, and
Speaker 4: I will sing another.
Speaker 5: By gold.
Speaker 4: Snub must be cry.
Speaker 5: Small way you wear Rise, Sleep Pretty Dark, do not Cry.
Speaker 1: In the season finale of McCartney A Life in Lyrics,
Speaker 1: Golden Slumbers, Carry that with and the end. McCartney A
Speaker 1: Life in Lyrics is a co production between iHeartMedia NPL
Speaker 1: and Pushkin Industries.