For one reason or another, I started reading up about Paul McCartney today (probably because he just received the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song — the American government's highest honor for pop music). I grew up listening to and loving The Beatles. Their songs were simple, short, and the quartet seemed to symbolize all that was fun and groovy about the sixties when I fancied myself a sort of budding hippie flower child.
A successful and talented poet is able to sum up truths we all know succinctly and beautifully. Each and every word seems to pack more meaning than the average paragraph and I think this is why The Beatles, and especially Paul, were so successful. They said a lot without saying too much.
In one of the bios I was reading on Paul, I learned that in their 30-year marriage (1969-1998) Linda and Paul spent one night apart from one another (when Paul was jailed in Japan).
“I always think of Linda still as my girlfriend. That's how we started out in the '60s, just as friends. Whenever I was working late somewhere, I just never fancied it. I thought: Well, I could stay overnight in this posh hotel, or I could go home to Linda. And it was always the brighter of the two options: Yeah, go home to Linda. It was just I liked being with her, quite frankly.”
Sometimes (okay, well at lot of the time) I find myself dreaming of the simpler America. The America that really was a place of hopes and dreams; of new ideas, no internet, and civil unrest. True, the grass really does always seem greener, but with the debt crisis, oil spill, volcano, earthquake, war…the world at large does seem to be getting a little melancholy if you really stop and think about it.
“When we went for a drive, Linda always wanted to get lost. I had an in-built panic about being lost. I always want to know where London is. I don’t want to get to, say, Staines and not know my way back. We would go down to the most obscure places, have a great time, find a little tearoom or a riverbank. She taught me little things like that, to relax and be down to earth. It was very valuable to me then, a great part of the healing process after The Beatles broke up ... Linda was a very natural woman. She loved the fresh air and the freedom and the privacy of the countryside ... She was just a great person to hang out with: very funny, very smart and very talented.”
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