The classic rock and roll songs burned into Paul McCartney’s soul
It’s one thing to like a song or to even love a song, but it’s a whole other thing to feel like a certain tune is so integral to you that it is burned into your soul. They’re the songs that make up our material as people, that soundtracked our core memories and truly essential moments. For Paul McCartney, there is a list of tracks that play over and over in his heart as tracks that he’d never be the same if he’d never heard them.
This feels especially apt for a music maker. In any documentary about any artist, there is usually a kind of lightbulb moment for them in their lives. Maybe it’s hearing a certain artist or a certain song or going to a certain concert, but they often talk about this breakthrough moment where the fog seems to lift and reveal their dreams and destiny. After hearing music so powerful and impactful that it can’t be denied, they suddenly become completely certain that music is all they want to do with their life.
McCartney had a few of those moments. Growing up during the 1940s and coming of age in the 1950s, he was primed at the perfect time to witness things changing first-hand. He was witnessing the birth of rock and roll live as he heard the first songs float across the atlantic and land on UK radios as something new and completely thrilling. When he started hearing these new sounds, he traded in the trumpet he’d been bought for an acoustic guitar, making his first move towards becoming a history-shaker and breakthrough moment-maker himself.
But the soundtrack to his own was not a unique one as he recognises the impact of two key artists, especially, as a global thing as well as a deeply personal impact. “I still owe a great debt to Little Richard and a lot of those guys just because they turned us on,” he said, picking Little Richard out as a leader amongst his pack. “It’s something when people turn you on, something I don’t think you ever forget,” he continued, almost incapable of adequately explaining how it felt to first hear this music.
To him, though, youth plays a big part. He heard Little Richard as a teenager, as well as all these other early rock and roll acts, and back then, when the glow of youth was bright and exciting, things seemed to affect him easier. “It’s so deep when you’re young, too. The turn-on, when you’re younger, is so intense,” he said. Back then, these weren’t just songs and artists he liked or enjoyed; they were changing him as a person, putting him on his own path and staying with him as essential songs that shaped him.
“It burns itself into your soul, hearing ‘That’ll Be the Day’ and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and ‘What’d I Say?’”, he said, picking out songs by Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley and Ray Charles.
All capturing a key corner of McCartney’s early influences, from pure rock and roll to rockabilly to rhythm and blues, the three songs, as well as Little Richard’s impact, feel like a kind of recipe to make early Beatles work. Utterly integral, McCartney still carries them with him today as he said poetically, “They burned themselves into my being.”
