‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!’: Paul McCartney’s most musically complex Beatles song
“That’s another McCartney. Smells a mile away, doesn’t it?” John Lennon didn’t exactly hold his tongue when tension was starting to build within The Beatles. The creative differences between the songwriters were protruding. Paul McCartney liked to write pop songs that people would enjoy listening to, while John Lennon wanted something more complex than that.
“An attempt to write a single,” Lennon continued when discussing the track ’Hello, Goodbye’, “It wasn’t a great piece; the best bit was the end, which we all ad-libbed in the studio, where I played the piano.”
This difference between the two songwriters has often seen Paul McCartney dubbed one of the least adventurous Beatles when it came to exploring musical complexity. When he wrote, he did so with a beautiful melody in mind, so all of his greatest efforts with the band are songs that people like to sing and nod along to. While this is an achievement in itself, he isn’t often dubbed the most experimental songwriter in the world.
While you can understand the origin of some of these criticisms, they seem a bit harsh. Paul McCartney was a master songwriter, and while his songs might not have been the most experimental, what he could do with simple chord progressions was unlike anything anyone had done before and has done since. Why step into more experimental territory when you can already achieve so much with so little?
“Their incredible simplicity and their incredible melodic structure is stunning to this day,” said Graham Nash when he was talking about the band’s adventurous nature, “With all due respect, within this western scale of music, there’s what? Twelve notes? Are you kidding me? The Beatles were unbelievable, and I think we all knew it.”
Of course, their mastery over these simplistic structures was challenged later in the band’s tenure. When they decided to stop touring, the albums that came after were more experimental than their previous offerings, as they dived further into the idea of concepts and used some effects that they might have worried about using beforehand when they had to bring the show to the stage. It was during this period that we saw Paul McCartney try some of his more complex ideas, and rather than use a range of effects, he just wrote a more complicated melody, knowing that it wouldn’t need to be played live.
“Ask a bass player who sings. It’s contrapuntal, man! It really is,” he said, “I’ve got to sing a melody that’s going to one place, and then I’ve got to play this bassline that’s going to other places. It’s a concentration thing. But that’s half the fun of the show. I’m still practising, still trying to figure it out.”
With this in mind, it would be easy to pick one of The Beatles that uses some different effects and recording techniques and label it as McCartney’s most complex offering; however, the reality is that his most complex songs lie at the foundation of the track, buried within their melody and how they can be played. For this reason, ‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite’ is his most complex song, given the bassline is so haphazard and a complete contradiction compared to some of the other songs he sang. McCartney even admitted this himself, saying that ‘Mr Kite’ was one of his hardest songs.
“Probably my favourite bass line is Mr. Kite, ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’,” said McCartney. “Because it’s complicated. It’s kind of difficult bass line. And what’s really difficult is to sing it and play the bass at the same time, because your head goes that way and your fingers go [the other]. It’s really sort of strange combination to do it, but it’s a melodic bassline and I like it.”
