Part 4
PAUL: Ok, but it'll just be off the top of my head.
PLAYBOY: Understood. What do you remember about one of your earliest songs, Love Me Do?
PAUL: Love Me Do--the first song we recorded, like, for real. First serious audition. I was very nervous, I remember. John was supposed to sing the lead, but they changed their minds and asked me to sing lead at the last minute, because they wanted John to play harmonica. Until then, we hadn't rehearsed with a harmonica; George Martin started arranging it on the spot. It was very nerve-racking.
PLAYBOY: Do You Want to Know a Secret?
PAUL: Nothing much; a song we really wrote for George to sing. Before he wrote his own stuff, John and I wrote things for him and Ringo to do.
PLAYBOY: All My Loving.
PAUL: Yeah, I wrote that one. It was the first song I ever wrote where I had the words before the music. I wrote the words on a bus on tour, then we got the tune when I arrived there. The first time I've ever worked upside down.
PLAYBOY: I Wanna Be Your Man.
PAUL: I wrote it for Ringo to do on one of the early albums. But we ended up giving it to the Stones. We met Mick and Keith in a taxi one day in Charing Cross Road and Mick said, "Have you got any songs?" So we said, "Well, we just happen to have one with us!" I think George had been instrumental in getting them their first record contract. We suggested them to Decca, 'cause Decca had blown it by refusing us, so they had tried to save face by asking George, "Know any other groups?" He said, "Well, there is this group called the Stones." So that's how they got their first contract. Anyway, John and I gave them maybe not their first record, but I think the first they got on the charts with. They don't tell anybody about it these days; they prefer to be more ethnic. But you and I know the real truth.
PLAYBOY: What about Not a Second Time?
PAUL: Influenced by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.
PLAYBOY: Please Mr. Postman.
PAUL: Influenced by the Marvelettes, who did the original version. We got it from our fans, who would write PLEASE MR. POSTMAN on the back of the envelopes. "Posty, posty, don't be slow, be like the Beatles and go, man, go!" That sort of stuff.
PLAYBOY: I Should Have Known Better.
PAUL: You should have studied before you took this Interview! I Should Have Known Better was one of John's; it was in Hard Day's Night.
PLAYBOY: If I Fell.
PAUL: This was our close-harmony period. We did a few songs--This Boy, If I Fell, Yes It Is--in the same vein, which were kind of like the Fourmost an English vocal group , only not really. . . .
PLAYBOY: So you took things from other groups; you heard what other pop groups were doing
PAUL: Oh, yeah. We were the biggest nickers in town. Plagiarists extraordinaires.
PLAYBOY: And I Love Her. Was that written for anybody?
PAUL: It's just a love song; no, it wasn't for anyone. Having the title start in midsentence, I thought that was clever. Well, Perry Como did And I Love You So, many years later. Tried to nick the idea. I like that--it was a nice tune, that one. I still like it.
PLAYBOY: Can't Buy Me Love.
PAUL: We recorded it in France, as I recall. Went over to the Odeon in Paris. Recorded it over there. Felt pround because Ella Fitzgerald recorded it, too, though we didn't realize what it meant that she was doing it.
PLAYBOY: Help!
PAUL: John wrote that--well, John and I wrote it at his house in Weybridge for the film. I think the title was out of desperation.
PLAYBOY: You've Got to Hide Your Love Away.
PAUL: That was John doing a Dylan--heavily influenced by Bob. If you listen, he's singing it like Bob.
PLAYBOY: Nowhere Man.
PAUL: That was John after a night out, with dawn coming up. I think at that point in his life, he was a bit . . . wondering where he was going.
PLAYBOY: In My Life.
PAUL: I think I wrote the tune to that; that's the one we slightly dispute. John either forgot or didn't think I wrote the tune. I remember he had the words, like a poem--sort of about faces he remember. . . . I recall going off for half an hour and sitting with a Mellotron he had, writing the tune. Which was Miracles inspired, as I remember. In fact, a lot of stuff was then.
PLAYBOY: Taxman.
PAUL: George wrote that and I played guitar on it. He wrote it in anger at finding out what the taxman did. He had never known before then what could happen to your money.
PLAYBOY: Eleanor Rigby.
PAUL: I wrote that. I got the name Rigby from a shop in Bristol. I was wandering round Bristol one day and saw a shop called Rigby.. And I think Eleanor was from Eleanor Bron, the actress we worked with in the film Hep! . But I just liked the name. I was looking for a name that sounded natural. Eleanor Rigby sounded natural.
PLAYBOY: Here, There and Everywhere.
PAUL: I wrote that by John's pool one day.
PLAYBOY: Did you write a lot of your stuff at John's house in that period?
PAUL: Some of it. When we were working together, sometimes he came in to see me. But mainly, I went out to see him.
PLAYBOY: Of the songs you composed on your own, Yesterday is obviously your greatest hit. Where did Yesterday come from?
PAUL: It fell out of bed. I had a piano by my bedside and I . . . must have dreamed it, because I tumbled out of bed and put my hands on the piano keys and I had a tune in my head. It was just all there, a complete thing. I couldn't believe it. It came too easy. In fact, I didn't believe I'd written it. I thought maybe I'd heard it before, it was some other tune, and I went around for weeks playing the chords of the song for people, asking them, "Is this like something? I think I've written it." And people would say, "No, it's not like anything else, but it's good." I don't believe in magic as far as that kind of thing is concerned. I'm not into "Hey, what's your sign?" or any of that. But, I mean, magic as in "Where did you come from? How did you become the successful sperm out of 300,000,000?"--that's magic I believe in. I don't know how I got here, and I don't know how I write songs. I don't know why I breathe. God, magic, wonder. It just is. I love that kind of thought: All the information for a tree was in an acorn--the tree was somehow in there. . . .
PLAYBOY: All right, from the sublime to the . . . less sublime: How about Yellow Submarine?
PAUL: I wrote that in bed one night. As a kid's story. And then we thought it would be good for Ringo to do.
PLAYBOY: Good Day Sunshine.
PAUL: Wrote that out at John's one day--the sun was shining. Influenced by the Lovin' Spoonful.
PLAYBOY: When you wrote, did you have difficulty deciding who would play what and who would sing what? Or did you just agree you would sing your own songs?
PAUL: Normally, you just sang your own songs, and you played whatever you wrote.
PLAYBOY: For No One.
PAUL: I wrote that on a skiing holiday in Switzerland. In a hired chalet amongst the snow.
PLAYBOY: Got to Get You Into My Life.
PAUL: That's mine; I wrote it. It was the first one we used brass on, I think. One of the first times we used soul trumpets.
PLAYBOY: Tomorrow Never Knows.
PAUL: That was one of Ringo's malapropisms. John wrote the lyrics from Timothy Leary's version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was a kind of Bible for all the psychedelic freaks. that was an LSD song. Probably the only one. People always thought Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was, but it actually wasn't meant to say LSD. It was a drawing that John's son brought home from school. Lucy was a kid in his school. And we said, "That's a great title," and we wrote the psychedelic song based on it. It's a natural, isn't it? You know, it was that sort of time. Like all that Abbey Road cover stuff, you know. Paul is dead, because he hasn't got shoes on, you know? It was a period when they used to read into our lyrics a lot, used to think there was more in them than there was. We didn't bother pointing out.. . .
PLAYBOY: Did your taking LSD make any difference in your writing?
PAUL: I suppose it did, yeah. I suppose everything makes some kind of difference. It was a psychedelic period then, so we were into that kind of thing. But . . . we didn't work with LSD--ever.
PLAYBOY: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
PAUL: It was an idea I had, I think, when I was flying from L.A. to somewhere. I thought it would be nice to lose our identities, to submerge ourselves in the persona of a fake group. We would make up all the culture around it and collect all our heroes in one place. So I thought, A typical stupid-sounding name for a Dr. Hook's Medicine Show and Traveling Circus kind of thing would be Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Just a word game, really.
PLAYBOY: Getting Better.
PAUL: Wrote that at my house in St. Johns Wood. All I remember is that I said, "It's getting better all the time," and John contributed the legendary line "It couldn't get much worse." Which I thought was very good. Against the spirit of that song, which was all superoptimistic--then there's that lovely little sardonic line. Typical John.
PLAYBOY: Fixing a Hole.
PAUL: Yeah, I wrote that. I liked that one. Strange story, though. The night we went to record that, a guy turned up at my house who announced himself as Jesus. So I took him to the session. You know, couldn't harm, I thought. Introduced Jesus to the guys. Quite reasonable about it. But that was it. Last we ever saw of Jesus.
PLAYBOY: She's Leaving Home.
PAUL: I wrote that. My kind of ballad from that period. My daughter likes that one. One of my daughters likes that. Still works. The other thing I remember is that George Martin was offended that I used another arranger. He was busy and I was itching to get on with it; I was inspired. I think George had a lot of difficulty forgiving me for that. It hurt him; I didn't mean to.
PLAYBOY: Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!
PAUL: That was taken directly off a poster John had. A circus poster. We stretched it a bit.
PLAYBOY: What about When I'm Sixty-Four?
PAUL: Who knows? Yeah, I wrote the tune when I was about 15, I think, on the piano at home, before I moved from Liverpool. It was kind of a cabaret tune. Then, years later, I put words to it.
PLAYBOY: In his Playboy Interview, John said that was a song he didn't like and never could have written.
PAUL: Who knows what John liked? You know, John would say he didn't like one thing one minute and the next he might like it. I don't really know what he liked or didn't like, you know! It would depend on what mood he was in on a given day, really, what he would like. . . . I don't care; I liked it!
PLAYBOY: What about Lovely Rita?
PAUL: Yeah, that was mine. It was based on the American meter maid. And I got the idea to just--you know, so many of my things, like When I'm Sixty-Four and those, they're tongue in cheek! But they get taken for real! Sarcastic "Paul is saying, 'Will you love me when I'm 64?'!" But I say, "Will you still feed me when I'm 64?" That's the tongue-in-cheek bit. And similarly with Lovely Rita--the idea of a parking-meter attendant's being sexy was tongue in cheek at the time. Although I've seen a few around, come to think of it. . . .
PLAYBOY: You're licking your chops.
PAUL: Well, this is PLAYBOY talk!
PLAYBOY: Right. Good Morning, Good Morning.
PAUL: Good Morning--John's. That was our first major use of sound effects, I think. We had horses and chickens and dogs and all sorts running through it.
PLAYBOY: A Day in the Life--John's, of course. Right?
PAUL: That was mainly John's, I think. I remember being very conscious of the words "I'd love to turn you on" and thinking, Well, that's about as risque as we dare get at this point. Well, the BBC banned it. It said, "Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall" or something. But I mean that there was nothing vaguely rude or naughtly in any of that. "I'd love to turn you on" was the rudest line in the whole thing. But that was one of John's very good ones. I wrote . . . that was co-written. The orchestra crescendo and that was based on some of the ideas I'd been getting from Stockhausen and people like that, which is more abstract. So we told the orchestra members to just start on their lowest note and end on their highest note and go in their own time--which orchestras are frightened to do. That's not the tradition. But we got 'em to do it. Actually, we got the trumpets to start on the lowest note, and the violins started a little later; violins tend to follow one another, they're like sheep. Trumpets are a bit more adventurous; they're drunk! Trumpeters are generally drunk. It wets their whistle.
PLAYBOY: Back in the U.S.S.R.
PAUL: I wrote that as a kind of Beach Boys parody. And Back in the U.S.A. was a Chuck Berry song, so it kinda took off from there. I just liked the idea of Georgia girls and talking about places like the Ukraine as if they were California, you know? It was also hands across the water, which I'm still conscious of. 'Cause they like us out there, even though the bosses in the Krelmin may not. The kids do. And that to me is very important for the future of the race.
PLAYBOY: Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.
PAUL: A fella who used to hang around the clubs used to say Jamaican accent , "Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on," and he got annoyed when I did a song of it, 'cause he wanted a cut. I said, "Come on, Jimmy, it's just an expression. If you'd written the song, you could have had to cut." He also used to say, "Nothin's too much, just outa sight." He was just one of those guys who had great expressions, you know.
PLAYBOY: It's pretty clear how much you like to work off other people. It's as if you need someone else to be fully creative with. True?
PAUL: Well. . . .
PLAYBOY: For instance, earlier you said you really missed those three sounding boards, John, Ringo and George. Whom can you use today as sounding boards?
PAUL: My kids. I'll play some new tune on the piano. If it's real good, "I'll notice the kids will pick up on it and start humming it. I remember, when I wrote So Bad, the lyric was "Girl, I love you / Girl, I love you," which I sang for my little girls--and they sang it back. Then my little boy, James, who is six, looked at us doing this, and I began singing the lyric as "Boy, I love you / Boy, I love you"--I didn't want to leave my boy out of a love song!
PLAYBOY: What about the other singer/composers with whom you're collaborated? How are they as sounding boards?
PAUL: You mean Stevie Wonder and Michael Jacksons? I loved working with them. I admire their voices and their talent. But it wasn't what I'd call serious collaboration; it was more like we were singing on one another's records. Michael and I happened to write a couple of songs together. But we never actually sat down and thought, We're now a songwriting team. I think Michael and I both treated it as a kind of . . . just a nice thing to do. He started out ringing me up and saying he wanted to see me. So I said to him, "What's all this for?" you know? Like, why? It was all very nice, but . . . he said, "I wanna make hits." I said, "Great, lovely." So I don't take that kind of thing that seriously.
PLAYBOY: Do you take Michael Jackson seriously as a songwriter?
PAUL: No, I don't particularly admire him as a writer, because he hasn't done much. I admire Stevie Wonder more. And Stephen Sondheim. Probably one of the best.
PLAYBOY: Sondheim? You mean as in Broadway musicals?
PAUL: Sure. You know, when we started with the Lennon-McCartney thing, you know, 50-50 with a handshake, it was like a Rodgers and Hammerstein trip. For me it was, anyway. That romantic image of collaboration, all those films about. New York songwriters plugging away at the piano--"We'll call it Alligator Symphomy; what a great idea!"--and they all go to California and get drunk. That always appealed to me, that image. Lennon and McCartney were to become the Rodgers and Hammerstein of the Sixties; that's the way that dream went.
PLAYBOY: Then is there a part of you that's still looking for a new partner--someone you can write with the way you did with John?
PAUL: I'm not looking. . . . I'm not, because I didn't look for John, either. But I think if I happened to fall into a situation where I felt comfortable writing with someone, I definitely wouldn't say no to it. I like collaboration, but the collaborartion I had with John--it's difficult to imaging anyone else coming up to that standard. Because he was no slouch, that boy. . . . He was pretty hot stuff, you know. I mean, I can't imagine anybody being there when I go sings : "It's getting better all the time." I just can't imagine anybody who could chime in sings : "It couldn't get much worse."