More Shelf Life
When it comes to biographies, sometimes the first cut is the deepest. After all, people are still diving into Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson more than 200 years later, and it's unlikely that Beth Peters' True Brit: The Story of Singing Sensation Britney Spears will ever be deposed as the definitive portrait of that subject. Sometimes, though, the best profiles show up late, after the dust and hot air of previous efforts have settled enough for a clear image to emerge. Peter Carlin's Brian Wilson bio, Catch a Wave, was such a book. Paul McCartney: A Life might be one too.
If you've already made up your mind about the Cute Beatle one way or the other (featherweight optimist vs. Lennon's creative and intellectual equal), this book may not change your mind. There's plenty of ammo here for both sides of the argument, which is actually part of the achievement of Paul McCartney. Carlin lays out the data, in detail, with strikingly good writing, and lets the reader decide. Like everyone else, Macca's a complex personality--awfully consistent, frequently contradictory. The story of who he is, however, is interesting chiefly because of what he's done.
Carlin is, unlike many biographers of musical figures, up to the task of telling this tale. He doesn't just get the facts and arrange them into a compelling narrative; he's a good rock critic. Writing about Wings' 1976 LP London Town, he finds "the vast majority of the songs are either ill-conceived, unfinished or both... ‘I've Had Enough' has all the righteous outrage of a man who can't find his slippers." Paul and Yoko's intermittent bouts make them "the Itchy and Scratchy of Pepperland, off on another great adventure in celebrity enmity."
Best of all, we get to see McCartney, especially in his early years, enraptured by music: its power to move him and the power it conferred on him to move others. When a fellow Quarryman told them about a guitarist across town who could play a B-dominant seventh chord, John and Paul "grabbed their guitars and took the 40-minute bus trip to get to the guy's doorstep. They took an even longer trip, with not one but two transfers, to chase down (and purloin) a copy of the Coasters' ‘Searchin'." Here too are fascinating accounts of one of pop's best teams writing together, weathering the storm of sudden fame, wondering just what the hell they've got themselves into, soldiering on, breaking and making up. It is to McCartney's credit that, despite the personal and professional downpours (band breakups, deaths and family tragedies, Heather Mills), he does manage to keep his sunny side up, always by turning back to music. Its curative properties rarely fail him.
A Life sags a little, as it must, near the end, as the tally of Pipes of Peace, Press to Play, Flowers in the Dirt and Flaming Pie totes up. Carlin wonders if McCartney's become "a prisoner of his own past, doomed to spend the rest of his life as an increasingly faded version of himself in more glorious times." Maybe so, maybe not. What's beyond questioning is that his music made for glorious times. Paul McCartney: A Life is a potent reminder of that. It sent this reader directly to his CD library.
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