The 1967 album Paul McCartney called his best bass playing: “A highpoint in many ways”
When Paul McCartney first started The Beatles with John Lennon, no one expected them to last more than a few years.
There was hardly any rock and roll band that lasted more than a couple of years before fading out of view, but when you look at the kind of songs that they were writing, there were few musicians on the pop charts that were taking as many twists and turns as he and John Lennon were. But when looking at the biggest moments that Macca ever wrote for The Beatles, his role as the bass player of the band tends to get overlooked a little bit when looking at his best tunes.
Sure, the bassist is never known to be one of the most in-demand roles that any rock band ever needs, but what McCartney did was beyond just laying down the groove with Ringo Starr. Every one of his songs was a chance for him to support the low end in a different way, and from Rubber Soul onward, he went from sticking to simple root notes to creating the kind of melodic touches that no one would have thought of.
That might have been because of him listening to giants like James Jamerson back in the day, but there are certain lines of his that are hooks unto themselves. Everyone likes to pick out lines like ‘Come Together’ as the best line that he ever wrote, but are we really going to overlook tunes like ‘Something’ or when he busted out his best impression of John Entwistle on ‘Hey Bulldog’?
McCartney could do nearly anything on bass and still sound great, but as the band started to make the studio their home, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was the first time that their songs took on a different tone. His bass line was great, but if he was going to be able to compete with Lennon’s artsiness, he was going to need a concept that was a lot bigger than what everyone else was thinking of.
Granted, it’s not like everyone in the band considered Sgt Pepper to be a groundbreaking masterpiece. Lennon and George Harrison did like a handful of songs on the record, but by and large, this was McCartney’s vision through and through, and even on some of his friends’ songs on the record, McCartney felt that a lot of his best moments on the bass came from when he was adding to everyone else’s songs.
Compared to every hook on the record, McCartney knew that his bass playing was perfectly tasteful on almost every song on the record, saying, “Right around that period, it was the most inventive. Take a track like ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, with the sort of independent bass line that wanders off as its own little tune. And I got away with it – John [Lennon] didn’t tell me off!”
“I think Pepper was a highpoint in many ways: in clothes, in songs, in concepts for albums, as well as in bass playing. I was looking for something different, for somewhere to go, really, that I hadn’t been before.”
Paul McCartney
He wasn’t going to have the help of The Wrecking Crew like Brian Wilson did, but ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ is the perfect example of him working like a musical orchestrator. His bass on that track almost sounds like a tuba in the way it dances around the changes, and even on the deeper cuts on the album, ‘Getting Better’ is one of the bounciest bass lines that he ever made.
McCartney was ready to show the world he could do a lot more on Pepper, but when you listen to his bass playing, it’s easy to realise why he was most inventive with a four-string in his hand. The piano and guitar may have been where he started, but sometimes the greatest artists are defined by their limitations on any of their instruments.
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