“That’s the way the dream went”: The songwriters Paul McCartney modelled his career on
For any great musician, songwriting is always more of a craft than a proper job. Even though it takes a lot to pull ideas out of the air, most artists are in tune with their artistic sensibilities to pull songs out on a whim and capture that magic moment in the same amount of time it takes most of us to make a half-decent lunch. Although Paul McCartney took years to mould himself into a great songwriter, he felt that these two songwriters were who he aspired to be when starting his partnership with John Lennon.
When the ‘Nerk Twins’ first began writing tunes together, the idea of a rock artist strictly writing original material was still unheard of. There had been a handful of rockstars that would throw originals into the picture every once in a while, but outside of Buddy Holly, Lennon and McCartney were among the first to take most of their pop gems to the mainstream without having to go through a middleman.
That said, it’s not like they knocked it out of the park right out of the gate. McCartney’s early songs, such as ‘Like Dreamers Do’ and Lennon’s ‘In Spite of All the Danger’ are clearly first drafts of half-decent bluesy pop songs, and even if they hit the ground running with ‘Love Me Do’, they were still mining the same kind of bluesy swagger that Little Richard and Chuck Berry had taken to the top.
But the beauty behind The Beatles was that they never said ‘no’ to one specific genre of music. To get through those marathon sessions in Hamburg, that meant listening to everything, whether that meant picking up on jazzy chords from their contemporaries, learning classic Motown songs, or even the odd country song here and there. If they were going to please everybody, it would mean breaking out the show tunes, and Rodgers and Hammerstein were the absolute masters of the medium.
Even though they were from the professional side of songwriting in America, it’s hard to really argue with the pedigree both of them had together. Looking at their songs on Broadway, tracks like ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ or ‘Do-Re-Mi’ from The Sound of Music became modern classics for kids of McCartney’s generation who were about to get turned on to music as their new religion.
Although Macca always had time for contemporary music like Michael Jackson or Stevie Wonder, he felt that the goal had always been to follow in the Broadway legends’ footsteps, saying, “When we started with the Lennon-McCartney thing, you know, 50-50 with a handshake, it was like a Rodgers and Hammerstein trip. For me, it was, anyway. That always appealed to me, that image. Lennon and McCartney were to become the Rodgers and Hammerstein of the Sixties; that’s the way that dream went.”
And as much as Lennon may not have liked to admit, that kind of approach is what informed a lot of McCartney’s greatest “granny” songs. There are still some animated moments in Lennon’s discography, but a tune like ‘Penny Lane’ sounds like someone who has internalised all of those lessons from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway productions and applied them to a pop song.
While that style can get to be a little bit corny depending on how many times they come on the radio, it’s hard to really argue the fact that McCartney has grown into the iconic role for pop stars that Rodgers and Hammerstein were for Broadway. Many can dream of writing one great song, but Macca has reached the point where he feels like the culmination of everything a well-rounded musician should be.
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