“A huge influence”: The artist Paul McCartney claimed to completely steal from
No band can claim to come out with something original. Although they might dress something up differently than anyone else, it’s easy to look at any song on the charts and tell what the artist was listening to and even what songwriters were focusing on when trying to capture the right feeling for their songs. While Paul McCartney twisted the formula for what pop songs could be with The Beatles, he wasn’t above pulling from this rock icon when he started his solo career.
Because listening back to the Fab Four’s early days, all they were doing was copying what they heard on the radio. Whereas most Liverpool acts followed in the footsteps of people like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, McCartney claimed to listen to everything, whether that meant looking to the past for his ‘granny music’ songs or the soulful sounds of R&B when sculpting a ballad.
Some of the inspirations were a bit more on the nose than other ones, but it didn’t matter as long as McCartney was writing alongside John Lennon. While their heroes, like Elvis Presley, were singing songs that sounded like they were written by a committee or pulled wholesale from another artist, what the Nerk Twins did had to be their own, which came from their love of Buddy Holly.
While people had a good idea of what a rockstar looked like when watching Presley on television, Buddy Holly was the inverse of everyone’s expectations. His wire-rimmed glasses didn’t make him the most eye-catching rockstar on the scene, but it didn’t matter as long as he could make people dance with tracks like ‘That’ll Be The Day’ and ‘Words of Love’.
And unlike his peers, Holly knew how to subvert expectations a little bit whenever he picked up a guitar. Listening back to ‘Peggy Sue’, the whole song feels fairly straightforward until the bridge, where he throws in an F chord, which gives the whole song a more exotic flavour than the traditional 12-bar blues chords.
Although McCartney had grown exponentially since listening to Holly as a kid, he admitted to going to him when recording ‘Eat At Home’ off of RAM, saying, “From a musical perspective, ‘Eat At Home’ owes much to the example of Buddy Holly, a huge influence on The Beatles when we were growing up. One of the aspects I rather enjoy is that I modified Buddy Holly’s tendency to mimic a speech hesitation by introducing a sheep’s baa into the phrase ‘eat in be-e-e-e-d’.”
Considering how much RAM is about going back to the homespun way of writing songs, though, it makes all the sense in the world for McCartney to go back to the artists who encouraged him to write in the first place. And since the tune is fairly simplistic, it also helped give Linda a bit more wiggle room, given her limited experience behind the microphone.
While ‘Eat At Home’ shouldn’t get any awards for being the most original thing in the world, hearing McCartney getting back in touch with his roots is almost a glimpse at the kind of record that Let It Be could have been had The Beatles fleshed it out. But for now, we will have to settle for this little piece of domestic bliss.
