The one singer Paul McCartney said America never forgave: “He’s gonna bop him”
One of the biggest hurdles that Paul McCartney ever faced with The Beatles was trying to break America.
They vowed never to play a single show on American soil until they had a number-one hit, and when the albums started storming up the charts, the timing couldn’t have been better when they set forth on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first ime. But for all of the great music that they made during their prime, McCartney couldn’t help but feel bad for the kids that never got the chance to have the same impact that they could.
And that’s not only talking about the kind of buzz that the rest of the British invasion got, either. It was clear that the Fab Four were a cut above the rest when looking at the quality of their songs, but if you look at the whirlwind road they were on every single time they played, chances were that a lot of bands couldn’t have been able to take the stress of being on a constant cycle of album and tour while fans were going insane everywhere you looked.
So when they broke up, it was almost like a relief for the rest of the band. They no longer had to be shackled to their three friends for the rest of their lives, but Macca wasn’t looking to roll over and make slop for the rest of his life. He wanted to keep experimenting, and listening to what he did with Wings, he was at least willing to try and make another stab at the big time when he made records like Band on the Run.
They were never going to be as big as The Beatles, but there’s no way they could have been. The times were changing, and by the time that Back to the Egg came out, the rest of the musos of the world were gravitating towards a little genre known as punk. Sex Pistols had already turned it into one of the biggest forces in modern music in the UK, but after they fizzled out way too quickly, McCartney was interested in what Elvis Costello was doing to provoke people.
Then again, Costello was the kind of person that went a little too far in his need to be infamous. He was already going in that direction when talking about the ugly side of corporate rock on ‘Radio Radio’, but when he started making a few derogatory comments about people like Ray Charles and wrote a song featuring a racial slur, McCartney said that Costello never managed to pick himself back up again.
He was still making great tunes, but it wasn’t until Macca collaborated with Michael Jackson that he realised how quickly Costello had fallen, saying, “Michael said, ‘that stuff was big trouble. They still won’t forgive him for that.’ They (the Americans) totally misread it. From what I understand, Elvis was doing this typically British kind of humour — if someone says, ‘Do you love me?’ you answer, ‘You? I wouldn’t love you!’ which means ‘Yes, of course I do!’ They do this bluff-double bluff thing. So he got misinterpreted, and apparently, if Quincy Jones ever catches up with Elvis, he’s gonna bop him.”
Even when Costello tried his best to make nice with a collection of soul songs, it still was never enough to get him anywhere across the pond. He might have had a fair bit of help when McCartney eventually started working with him in the late 1980s with songs like ‘My Brave Face’, but in terms of being a mainstream star, Costello never felt cut out to be an American pinup anyway.
There was no way he would whore himself out to get the best opportunities he could, so it was better that he remained a secret for some of the underground artists across the pond. He might not have looked the part as a punk artist, but when listening to every single move he made, his mentality of doing anything that he fancied every time he played was more authentic that nearly anything John Lydon.
