Paul McCartney 

  Hey Jude  

  UPDATED: 02/12/06 08:56 - 

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 Paul McCartney 

   Hey  Jude    

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 Hey Jude    -   This record, Hey Jude, written totally by McCartney was a little dig at Lennon as it referred to Julian Lennon, John's first son. Lennon had left his first wife and ultimately Julian, to go off with Yoko Ono. Paul was trying to some way be perceived, as the kind uncle. 

Lennon-McCartney was not only the greatest song-writing relationship, it was also a great love-hate relationship. Hey Jude, has become an anthem for the freedom of the sixties; when a lot of people over 40 hear it, it invokes happy or sad memories of a lost youth. The fade out part, the bit where everyone sings along is nearly two thirds of the songs length.

Hey Jude, along with Imagine by Lennon and Bohemian Rhapsody by Mercury of Queen fame, rival each other as to which of these three classics is the greatest musical composition of the last century.

CONTACT US - Tell us your memories.

There was some rumor early in their careers that Paul had died and been replaced by a look-a-like. On the Pepper Album Paul had his back to the camera, but this was just Paul trying to be funny. This later invoked a classic lyric from Lennon: " Those straights were right, when they said you were dead! "

 Here he tries to prove he is still alive, but we still do not know for sure.

The now famous meeting at Woolton fete on Saturday the 6th July 1957, at a church picnic, St. Peter's Church Fete, Woolton, McCartney was introduced to the great John Lennon, by  Ivan Vaughan. John had a little skiffle band called the Quarrymen. Ivan had been at primary school with John. At 11 Ivan went to the Liverpool Institute and John to Quarry Bank High School. At the Institute Ivan became friends with Paul. he took Paul to the fete where the Quarrymen were playing. Ivan asked Paul if he’d like to come along and watch this skiffle group play at a church fete. Paul wasn’t particularly struck on the idea, but Ivan said that it would be a great place to pick up girls, so the two of them cycled along that afternoon. 

Pete Shotton later asked Paul if he’d like to join the group. Paul joined the group and, along with John, became its principle songwriter. Paul's first gig was at The New Clubmoor Hall, Liverpool, on October 18th. By 1960  the group evolved into the Beatles, with Paul switching to bass. McCartney and Lennon agreed early on to share all songwriting credits, even though they directly collaborated on only a handful on songs; throughout the Beatles years McCartney and Lennon, as Lennon-McCartney, wrote and sang the vast majority of Beatles tunes. George was a friend of Paul's whom he introduced to John somewhat later.

Sadly Ivan Vaughan is no longer with us. he contracted Parkinson's disease and died in 1992. Paul wrote a poem about him and was prompted to publish a book of his poems "Blackbird singing". It was he that considered Paul to be talented enough to meet John, and said: "I only ever brought great fellows to meet John".

Paul was not only talented, he was crafty. Even though his melodies sounded brilliant he would enhance his voice by doubling it up. This means he would record the song and then play it back whilst singing along side it. This made him sound much better.

As one of the several million   " . . . the Beatle's Best fan",  and somebody who saw Lennon as a divine being, even I must reluctantly admit that Paul McCartney is the greatest and unsurpassed musical composer of the Twentieth Century. Paul McCartney is allegedly to be the most commercially successful rock composer of all time, both as a solo performer, with his '70s band Wings  and, more notably, as a member of the Beatles. 

So even if McCartney's songs have sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide; is he really the greatest appreciated composer of all time? After all he has only earned a Billion Dollars from his efforts.

After the Decca record company rejected the Beatles as a passing phase, in 1962, the Fab-Four signed up for EMI instead. The Beatles began releasing a string of hit singles, mostly Lennon-McCartney originals, and became the most popular band in Britain. By 1964 "Beatlemania" had spread to the U.S., and they were soon the most popular band in the world, producing copious commercially successful and increasingly artistic albums over the next decade. As human nature decrees, difficulties began to emerge and in 1968, big disagreements between all four members, John, Paul, George and Ringo began.

On March 12, 1969 Paul married American photographer Linda Eastman. Although Eastman was hated by a generation, and blamed for many ills, she was a good and loyal wife and since her death has curried much affection among Beatles fans new and old.

Real Name: James Paul McCartney
Birth date: 6/18/1942
Education: High school
Relationships: Linda Eastman, 1969 (deceased, 1998); Heather Mills, 2002
Children: Heather, 1962 (stepdaughter); Mary, 1969; Stella, 1971; James, 1977; Beatrice, 2003
Fact: When he wanted to use 'Yesterday' in his 1984 film 'Give My Regards to Broad Street,' he had to apply to the publishers for its use; he no longer owned the copyright of the most recorded song in history (over 2,500 cover versions exist).
Musical Styles: Motown, Pop/Rock, Soft Rock

This is one of the last pictures taken of Linda McCartney before her sad death. It was taken by her daughter, Mary.

John Lennon was once asked if Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the World. And Ringo had been voted The Best Drummer in the World, on several occasions. 

Lennon replied: Ringo is not even the best drummer in the Beatles.

Of course the best pop-drummer of the twentieth Century was without doubt, the late great, Keith Moon of The Who.

Hey Jude - Words & Music by Paul McCartney.

Hey Jude, don't make it bad.
Take a sad song and make it better.
Remember to let her into your heart,
Then you can start to make it better.

Hey Jude, don't be afraid.
You were made to go out and get her.
The minute you let her under your skin,
Then you begin to make it better.

And anytime you feel the pain, hey Jude, refrain,
Don't carry the world upon your shoulders.
For well you know that it's a fool who plays it cool
By making his world a little colder.

Hey Jude, don't let me down.
You have found her, now go and get her.
Remember to let her into your heart,
Then you can start to make it better.

So let it out and let it in, hey Jude, begin,
You're waiting for someone to perform with.
And don't you know that it's just you, hey Jude, you'll do,
The movement you need is on your shoulder.

Hey Jude, don't make it bad.
Take a sad song and make it better.
Remember to let her under your skin,
Then you'll begin to make it
Better better better better better better, oh.

Da da da da da da, da da da, hey Jude...

Paul & John

Four of the Greatest Albums ever made.        |  BOOKMARK  |

The BEATLES - British musical quartet and a global icon for the hopes and dreams of a generation that came of age in the 1960s. The principal members were

Paul McCartney -  Sir James Paul McCartney; b. June 18, 1942, Liverpool, Merseyside, England.

John Lennon born October 9, 1940, Liverpool, assassinated December 8, 1980, New York, New York, US.

George Harrison born February 25, 1943, Liverpool, died November 29, 2001, Los Angeles, California, U.S.

Ringo Starr - Richard Starkey; born July 7, 1940, Liverpool.

Other early members included Stuart Sutcliffe - June 23, 1940, Edinburgh, Scotland to April 10, 1962, Hamburg, West Germany

and Pete Best born November 24, 1941, Madras [now Chennai], India

Formed around the nucleus of Lennon and McCartney, who first performed together in Liverpool in 1957, the group grew out of a shared enthusiasm for American rock and roll. Like most early rock-and-roll figures, Lennon, a guitarist and singer, and McCartney, a bassist and singer, were largely self-taught as musicians. Precocious composers, they gathered around themselves a changing cast of accompanists, adding by the end of 1957 Harrison, a lead guitarist, and then, in 1960 for several formative months, Sutcliffe, a promising young painter who brought into the band a brooding sense of bohemian style. After dabbling in skiffle, a jaunty sort of folk music popular in Britain in the late 1950s, and assuming several different names (the Quarrymen, the Silver Beetles, and, finally, the Beatles), the band added a drummer, Best, and joined a small but booming “beat music” scene, first in Liverpool and then, during several long visits between 1960 and 1962, in Hamburg—another seaport full of sailors thirsty for American rock and roll as a backdrop for their whiskey and womanizing.

In autumn 1961 Brian Epstein, a local Liverpool record store manager, saw the band and fell in love. Unshakably convinced of their commercial potential, Epstein became their manager and proceeded to bombard the major British music companies with letters and tape recordings of the band, finally winning a contract with Parlophone, a subsidiary of the giant EMI group of music labels. The man in charge of their career at Parlophone was George Martin, a classically trained musician who from the start put his stamp on the Beatles, first by suggesting the band hire a more polished drummer (they chose Starr) and then by rearranging their second recorded song (and first big British hit), "Please Please Me," changing it from a slow dirge into an up-tempo romp.

Throughout the winter and into the spring of 1963, the Beatles continued their rise to fame in England by producing spirited recordings of original tunes and also by playing classic American rock and roll on a variety of British Broadcasting Corporation radio programs. In these months, fascination with the Beatles—at first confined to young British fans of popular music—breached the normal barriers of taste, class, and age, transforming their recordings and live performances into matters of widespread public comment. In the fall of that year, when they belatedly made a couple of appearances on British television, the evidence of popular frenzy prompted British newspapermen to coin a new word for the phenomenon: Beatlemania. In early 1964, after equally tumultuous appearances on American television, the same phenomenon erupted in the United States and provoked a so-called British Invasion of Beatles imitators from the United Kingdom.

Beatlemania was something new. Musicians performing in the 19th century certainly excited a frenzy—one thinks of Franz Liszt—but that was before the modern mass media created the possibility of collective frenzy. Later pop music idols, such as Michael Jackson in the mid-1980s or Garth Brooks in the 1990s, sold similarly large numbers of records without provoking anything approaching the hysteria caused by the Beatles. By the summer of 1964, when the Beatles appeared in A Hard Day's Night , a movie that dramatized the phenomenon of Beatlemania, the band's effect was evident around the world as countless young people emulated the band members' characteristic long hair, flip humour, and whimsical displays of devil-may-care abandon.

The popular hubbub proved to be a spur, convincing Lennon and McCartney of their song writing abilities and sparking an outpouring of creative experimentation all but unprecedented in the history of rock music, which until then had been widely regarded, with some justification, as essentially a genre for juveniles. Between 1965 and 1967 the music of the Beatles rapidly changed and evolved, becoming ever more subtle, sophisticated, and varied. Their repertoire in these years ranged from the chamber pop ballad "Yesterday" and the enigmatic folk tune "Norwegian Wood" (both in 1965) to the hallucinatory hard rock song "Tomorrow Never Knows" (1966), with a lyric inspired by Timothy Leary's handbook The Psychedelic Experience (1964). It also included the carnivalesque soundscape of "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" (1967), which featured stream-of-consciousness lyrics by Lennon and a typically imaginative arrangement (by George Martin) built around randomly spliced-together snippets of recorded steam organs—a tour de force of technological legerdemain quite typical of the band's studio work in this era.

In 1966 the Beatles announced their retirement from public performing to concentrate on exploiting the full resources of the recording studio. A year later, in June 1967, this period of widely watched creative renewal was climaxed by the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album avidly greeted by young people around the world as indisputable evidence not only of the band's genius but also of the era's utopian promise. More than a band of musicians, the Beatles had come to personify, certainly in the minds of millions of young listeners, the joys of a new counterculture of hedonism and uninhibited experimentation—with music and with new ways of life. (Various members of the band in these years flirted with mind-expanding drugs such as LSD and also with exotic spiritual exercises such as transcendental meditation, a technique taught to them by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a barnstorming guru from India.

In those years the Beatles effectively reinvented the meaning of rock and roll as a cultural form. The American artists they admired and chose to emulate—Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, the pioneering rock composers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the influential soul songwriter Smokey Robinson, and, after 1964, folksinger and topical songwriter Bob Dylan—became widely regarded as canonic sources of inspiration, offering “classical” models for aspiring younger rock musicians. At the same time, the original songs the Beatles wrote and recorded dramatically expanded the musical range and expressive scope of the genre they had inherited. Their close vocal harmonies, subtle arrangements, and clever production touches, combined with an elemental rhythm section anchored by Starr's no-nonsense drumming, created new standards of excellence and beauty in a form of music previously known for amateurism.

After 1968 and the eruption of student protest movements in countries as different as Mexico and France, the Beatles insensibly surrendered their role as de facto leaders of an inchoate global youth culture. They nevertheless continued for several more years to record and release new music and maintained a level of popularity rarely rivalled before or since. In 1968 they launched their own record label, Apple; hoping to nurture experimental pop art, they instead produced chaos and commercial failure, apart from the work of the Beatles themselves. The band continued to enjoy widespread popularity. The following year Abbey Road went on to become one of the band's best-loved and biggest-selling albums.

Meanwhile, personal disagreements magnified by the stress of symbolizing the dreams of a generation had begun to tear the band apart. Once the collaborative heart and soul of the band, Lennon and McCartney fell into bickering and mutual accusations of ill will. By now millions of dollars were at stake, and the utopian aura of the performers was in jeopardy, given the discrepancy between the band's symbolic stature as idols of a carefree youth culture and their newfound real status as pampered plutocrats.

In the spring of 1970 the Beatles formally disbanded. In the years that followed, all four members went on to produce solo albums of variable quality and popularity. Lennon released a corrosive set of songs with his new wife, Yoko Ono, and McCartney went on to form a band, Wings, that turned out a fair number of commercially successful recordings in the 1970s. Starr and Harrison, too, initially had some success as solo artists. But, as time went by, the Beatles became as much of a historical curio as Al Jolson or Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley before them.

In 1980 Lennon was murdered by a demented fan outside the Dakota, a famous apartment building in New York City known for its celebrity tenants. The event provoked a global outpouring of grief. Lennon is memorialized in Strawberry Fields, a section of Central Park across from the Dakota that Yoko Ono landscaped in her husband's honour.

In the years that followed, the surviving former Beatles continued to record and perform as solo artists. McCartney in particular remained musically active, both in the pop field producing new albums every few years and in the field of classical music—in 1991 he completed Liverpool Oratorio, in 1997 he supervised the recording of another symphonic work of large ambition, Standing Stone, and in 1999 he released a new classical album, Working Classical. McCartney was knighted by the queen of England in 1997. Starr was also very visible in the 1990s, touring annually with his All-Star Band, a rotating group of rock veterans playing their hits on the summertime concert circuit. Beginning in 1988, Harrison recorded with Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison in a loose amalgam known as the Traveling Wilburys, but for most of the 1980s and '90s he had a low profile as a musician while acting as the producer of several successful films. After surviving a knife attack at his home in 1999, Harrison succumbed to a protracted battle with cancer in 2001.

Earlier in the 1990s McCartney, Harrison, and Starr had joined to add harmonies to two previously unreleased vocal recordings by Lennon. These new songs by “the Beatles” served as a pretext for yet another publicity blitz, aimed at creating a market for a lavishly produced, quasi-historical series of archival recordings assembled under the supervision of the band and released in 1995 and 1996 as The Beatles Anthology, a collection of six compact discs that supplemented a 10-hour-long authorized video documentary of the same name. A compilation of the band's number one singles, 1, appeared in 2000 and enjoyed worldwide success, topping the charts in such countries as England and the United States. The afterglow of Beatlemania may have disappeared, but the iconography of an era of youthful tumult had been reverently preserved for posterity.

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Wait and PAUL will sing Hey Jude!