We All Stand Together - The Paul McCartney Appreciation Thread | Page 10 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

I want to talk about Paul the survivor for a second.  I consider him like a phoenix rising from the ashes.  He pulled himself out of a crippling depression post-Beatles and embarked on an epic solo career that’s been full of pushing the envelope and breaking the rules.  He stretches himself out of his comfort zone and keeps pushing himself to improve, even now. 

He put up with critics bashing him for decades and stuck his proverbial middle finger up and did his thing anyway.  He put up with the guy he considered his best friend (John) publicly minimizing his accomplishments in interviews (and I don’t have an axe to grind with John, I love John, but he did come off this way in so many interviews in the 70’s), and then he put up with critics and journalists, and even FANS bashing him after John’s death for not grieving sincerely enough, or not saying the “right thing.”  When he tried to adapt his approach by being more careful about how he responded, he was accused of making things up or trying to “rewrite history.”  Where is the bar, here?  So if he’s blunt about things (like so many people admire John for being, mind you), he’s so mean, but if he accentuates the positive he’s lying.  He’s held to such an unfair double standard to this day. 

Like, people don’t have the compassion to realize that his best friend was shot in cold blood, and that might not exactly be the easiest thing to process, that the grief process isn’t linear.   A lot was made about the “It’s a drag,” reaction after John’s death, and then some remarks he made to Hunter Davies in 1981 in a private, off the record conversation that should have never been shared (Davies published it in his 1985 reprint of the book, ugh, so tasteless and the press ran away with it and he got trashed so hard for it of course).  Paul shares with him that he was hurt by something Yoko said, about Paul being the person who hurt John the most, and Paul was angry about that, and still had some residual anger towards the way John could sometimes treat him.  He was like, “Well what about all the times I helped John, and what about the times John hurt me?”  She had previously said that John really cared about him, and Paul was one of the first people she spoke to on the phone after it happened, so I can understand why him reading those remarks from Yoko were confusing and disturbing to him. 

People reacted as though he didn’t love his friend because he had these feelings and voiced them to someone he considered a friend (you have to remember that him and Hunter had a friendship, their families would have holidays together and such, so he didn’t feel like he was talking to a journalist in that moment, and Hunter wrote the conversation down without his knowledge).  It reminds me a bit of John discussing with Maureen Cleve how the Beatles were more popular than Jesus and when it was printed was taken entirely out of context by the press, and the next thing you know people are burning Beatles records.  The same thing kind of happened with this conversation.  I’ve read some discussion on another forum and someone said that Paul was being naive by talking with Hunter, a journalist, about this sort of stuff.  One could argue that John was being naive in sharing his opinion on the Jesus thing with Maureen Cleve.  But naive as it may have been, he did consider Hunter a friend, it had been a horrible year for him, and he was really vulnerable at this time.  When do we hold the journalist accountable for using discretion and exercising ethics when it comes to what they decide to share? Honestly, even though I’m kind of psychoanalyzing this whole thing, I feel like those private thoughts were not something the public should have ever seen.  Hunter could have just as easily said that he had a conversation with Paul that indicated Paul was very much in pain and conflicted about the aftermath of John’s death and some comments that were made to the press by various people.  Job done, and you don’t compromise your loyalty to your friend or breach your job as a journalist of being ethical.

I think a major problem with how we view celebrities and pop culture icons is that we expect them to be superhuman, and they can’t be.  People don’t get that it actually is quite normal to have some residual anger towards a deceased person, even if you love them very much.  The “anger” phase of the grieving process can and often does include some anger towards the deceased.  It’s happened to me, and I had to work to exorcise those bad feelings so that my memory of the person I lost could center around the things I loved about them.  But it is a process.  I can tell you, it’s confusing and upsetting for the person doing the grieving.  But Paul was callously accused of only caring about his legacy, which is a patent untruth.  People around him at the time will tell you that he was a total wreck after losing John, and Paul still really misses him to this day.  I find actually that for some reason, people love to nitpick every little imperfect thing Paul has ever said or done over the years, blow it way out of proportion, and use it as a club to beat him with forever.  It’s totally unfair.  

Then he loses Linda and George.  The death of Linda hits him hard enough he needs a grief counselor.  Then SHE who shall not be named comes along and we all know that story.  People also forget, like John, that he lost his mother in his teens.  So yeah, we have a whole lot of reasons why nobody would begrudge Paul McCartney for being a very broken man, but he has been that perennial phoenix, rising from the ashes time and time again, and I, for one, find him really inspirational for it.  

sir walter raleigh said
Paul has certainly been through his ups and downs, but these are the tribulations that come with living a full and complete life. Without ‘friends and lovers’, none of the grief would be there, but then again neither is the joy. Regardless, Paul’s journey is still a lot less bleak and depressing than John’s. 

Good post her_magesty. Always great to try and break down the grandiose persona to try to humanize these musicians.   

Thank you! I agree that life is beautiful because of the ups and downs.  If we didn’t have the darker moments we wouldn’t appreciate the happy times. 

I like psychoanalyzing the Beatles a bit.  And humanizing them is usually my goal.  I admit it’s an odd hobby, but I just think they’re so neat I want to at least hazard at guesses as to why they are the way they are.  Also, I think it’s better to look at people like them as human rather than idols or gods.  I think it’s more inspiring to stay aware that humans, clay feet, imperfections and all, accomplished what they were able to accomplish.  And they turned out WAY less messed up psychologically than a lot of other famous people out there.  If they can do those things with their fragile human selves, we can all do something wonderful.

I will stay on topic about Paul rather than going off on a John tangent, but I think Paul didn’t suffer from the same attachment issues that John did, because even though his mum passed away, he had both her and his dad during the crucial years of his early childhood development.  As a result his ability to bond and stay bonded with people, and his resilience through challenging and painful periods was stronger.  I do think John was the perfect yin to his yang personally and creatively for the time they were close; try having two Pauls in one group, or two Johns, it’s just not going to work well.  I think Paul also really understood John on an intuitive level, and it was easy for him not to take John’s emotional undulations too personally (although I’m sure at times it was painful).  They weren’t super different from each other, but the differences they had worked as a nice balancing agent for the years they did spend together professionally and as close friends.  I wish they’d been able to really work on their issues before John died. 

I think Paul just tries to take comfort in the fact that they were back on warm terms and was hopeful that had John gotten to live, they’d have continued to work on it.  There were different expectations regarding male bonding and communication back then than there are now.  It was totally OK for 2 dudes to get all angry at each other, but to let walls down, be emotionally vulnerable, and apologize or “hug it out” weren’t even things men were conditioned to think of doing with other men, even in the late 70’s.  I think Paul has a lot of regret about not being more open and frank with John about how important he was to him and just how much he cared when he was still alive.  I think he likes to impart to young people in interviews and at his shows that you should tell your loved ones how much you love them now, because it could be too late.  It gets me every time.

Sorry if I’m harping too much about this.  I think it also gets to me because I lost a really close friend about 9 years ago now.  We weren’t creative partners, but we were hanging out multiple times a week for hours at a time, and until the guy started drinking a lot were inseparable.  I dealt with some survivor’s guilt because I had begun to distance myself a little from my friend because he was drinking too much (and didn’t take kindly to people saying they were concerned), but I still loved and cared for him.  We were still friendly and hanging out semi-regularly, but the Friday before he died I canceled some plans we’d had to hang out because I thought he might want to drink and I didn’t want to, and he was the kind of person it’s really hard to be sober around because his drunk self is annoying.  When he died in an accident the following Monday, I dealt with guilt and regret from that for quite some time.  The phone conversation we had that Friday was brief but really warm, and the Thursday before that we’d been chatting through texts and he said he was hungry and stuck at work, so I surprised him with some lunch delivered to his office.  You’d better believe I hung on to every strand of positive last interaction I had with him.  Paul very much does the same, and that’s normal.  I also went through a period of feeling some anger towards him because he was only 27, his family and all of his friends were suffering greatly (he was really a great person to know, just had been going through a bad period), and he died because of his carelessness that night.  I had to work out my anger feelings because it’s impossible to stay mad at at a dead guy forever, but anger is part of the grief process, whether it’s anger at the mere fact that the person died, or some residual anger at the deceased.  I can certainly feel that Paul might have still felt some resentment from unresolved issues between John and himself, and he had to work through that.

So when I read that conversation with Hunter Davies, I really felt for Paul.  It just sucks because as someone in his position, he didn’t have the luxury of privacy in those thoughts.  In a bad time he turned to the wrong person to vent to.  Yoko’s comments were the trigger, he remembered that John wasn’t exactly a victim in the whole scenario either, and he was just venting.  The person he vented to exploited him.  More psychoanalyzing: I think he went to Hunter because Hunter had spent a good chunk of time with the Beatles for their bio in the 60’s, so he knew both J and P, and knew Paul quite well at that point because they were friends, but Hunter wasn’t immediately involved in “Beatle family life.”  He didn’t want to unload such stuff on anyone too close to the Beatles family, and he wanted Hunter to act as a balanced sounding board.  That’s just me speculating and playing armchair psychologist.  I’ll stop now.  But yeah, this issue kind of hits me because I went through something at least somewhat similar.  And when “fans” try to pit a man they don’t know against his dead best friend in YouTube comments and the like, I find it upsetting. 

@Father McKenzie – thank you for the condolences!  9 years later (nearly), and I still miss him.  At present time, I can think about him now mostly with a smile and gratefulness that I got to share time with such a good friend.    I’ll  now: Paul is the man!  I listened to McCartney II yesterday, and that album is such an under-appreciated gem.