The ultimate 1960s song, according to Paul McCartney: “The weather was always good”
It’s impossible to tell the story of the 1960s and not think about what Paul McCartney was doing with the rest of The Beatles.
They may have started out as the typical pop-rock outfit when they started, but from 1965 onward, every single one of their records seemed to be a new adventure into new territory that rock and roll had never seen before. But even when everyone was putting flowers in their hair and preaching about peace and love, Macca felt that some of the best music that he heard from around that time needed a little bit more groove behind it for him to give it the green light.
Which shouldn’t come as a surprise, coming from one of the greatest bass players in the world. McCartney may have inherited the instrument from Stu Sutcliffe when he was let go from the band, but when you look through every single one of their albums, McCartney is always using the instrument in a much different way. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life playing root notes, and from the minute that he kicks off a song like ‘All My Loving’, that walking bass line is one of the greatest hooks of the entire song.
But even on their early masterpieces like A Hard Day’s Night, McCartney’s bass was normally taking a back seat. It’s no surprise that he ended up playing a lot of the lead guitar on some of his songs out of sheer boredom half the time, but once they made Rubber Soul, they started to have a much better idea of what they wanted to be when they heard what was coming out of the folk movement.
John Lennon had already tried on his Bob Dylan impression on one album before, but a lot of the greatest songs in their catalogue by that point came from internalising all types of music. No one had heard a sitar when they first heard ‘Norwegian Wood’, but on that album is also the moment where McCartney began coming into his own as a bassist. A lot of the walking lines in those tunes drove the song half the time, and while a lot of that came from the band pushing each other, it wasn’t called Rubber SOUL by accident.
A lot of the greatest tunes that they were listening to around that time had come from the world or R&B, and when listening to a tune like ‘Hitch Hike’ by Marvin Gaye, McCartney felt like he was hearing the sound of his generation, saying, “To me, this kind of sums up the 1960s. The 1960s felt like the weather was always good. It probably wasn’t, but it felt like it was. And to me, this song, ‘Hitch Hike’, Marvin, the whole thing, it’s just one of my favourite Motown tracks. And James Jamerson was my big influence on bass. If I had to pick a bass player, ever, it was him.”
McCartney might not have been able to capture Jamerson’s ability to play everything with one finger when he played, but the fact that he could make the same melodic bass lines like he did was perfect for every song. No one would have thought to make the bass the driving force on a song like ‘Taxman’ or make it sound like a tuba on ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’, but a lot of what McCartney was doing involved him thinking about music the same way that a soul musician might have.
And when you look at the history behind everything, it’s not like the band was ever afraid to wear those influences on their sleeve. Even when they were working on tunes for Revolver, they had the idea of making the entire album outside of Abbey Road Studios for the first time and cut the record in the US, but even if they couldn’t get around all of the fees behind everything, they could still make songs that sounded perfect for the time.
So while ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ would be great time capsules of what the 1960s sounded like, ‘Hitch Hike’ was the perfect choice for what Macca wanted out of his music. He was the eternal optimist throughout every point in his career, and even if things weren’t always going according to plan, he could always remember there being hope around the corner whenever Gaye was singing.
