The artist who intimidated Paul McCartney: “I was thrown in the deep end”
Anyone who has ever jammed with Paul McCartney in the past few decades will probably tell you how intimidating it is to play with a legend.
As much as Macca has been one of the most friendly presences in the world of rock and roll, he seems to almost exude music from every single pore in his body whenever he picks up a guitar or sits down at the piano. It’s not hard for him to sit down and pump out a catchy tune every now and again, but he felt that he was in for an education when he found musicians who were miles better than him when he entered the studio.
Because even though he has spent years trying to become a better musician, McCartney never claimed to know the first thing about proper music theory. He didn’t want to spend his time running scales and learning the ins and outs of the guitar neck, but if he could find that one chord that no one else had stumbled upon, it didn’t take him long to turn the whole thing into a song. But there was always a part of himself that wanted to explore the more sophisticated side of music.
After all, that’s what his “granny” tunes were all about. Some of his fondest memories from his childhood was watching his family sing songs around the house, and while some of those old standards weren’t necessarily cut out to be rock and roll tunes, it didn’t matter to McCartney if he could go from a song like ‘Rock Show’ to ‘You Gave Me the Answer’ within a few minutes on the same album.
Those tracks may have driven John Lennon up the wall every single time Macca played them, but after spending years trying to emulate those crooners, there had to be a point where ‘The Cute One’ actually tried his hand at making sophisticated music. He had already done some work in the classical field with Liverpool Oratorio and even composed the music for a ballet, but when working with the jazz musicians behind Kisses on the Bottom, he was entering a whole different realm.
Granted, he had known some of these songs like the back of his hand for a long time, but singing them with the best jazz musicians in the world was bound to be a little intimidating. There was no real room for error, and while he was channelling people like Nat King Cole whenever he sang some of these tunes, he did feel a little bit of trepidation going into making the record.
When looking back on that time, McCartney was both scared and grateful to have those kinds of musicians there with him in the studio, saying, “I was thrown in the deep end, because I’m not a jazz player. I didn’t have a guitar or a piano to hide behind. I was just put on what the engineers told me was Nat King Cole’s mic, which was amazingly intimidating! In front of jazz musicians, which again was pretty intimidating. I just had to find my way through this. And once I’d got over the intimidated feeling, it became a very pleasurable way to work.”
Admittedly, this isn’t the kind of record that you would put on when you were looking to hear some of the best rock music McCartney ever made. This was his excuse to scratch that itch that had been pestering him ever since writing tunes like ‘Honey Pie’ and ‘Here There and Everywhere’, and getting the chance to make this kind of album suited his older voice a lot better than the fruit cadence he used to have during his Wings days.
But if there’s anything that makes Kisses on the Bottom a worthy inclusion in McCartney’s catalogue, it’s that it showed him to be much more willing to learn even after years of playing perfect rock and roll. There was always going to be his classics to fall back on, but it takes a true artist to realise that they can improve in areas that they didn’t even think they were capable of performing in.
