April 10, 2024 • 26 mins
“Michelle” from 1965’s Rubber Soul started as a kind of light-hearted party piece. But in McCartney’s quest to turn it into a legitimate Beatles song, he went on a bit of a journey to sound not only like a believable French chanteur but also to expand his approach to bass playing, taking inspiration from Motown’s James Jamerson.
“McCartney: A Life in Lyrics” is a co-production between iHeart Media, MPL and Pushkin Industries.
The series was produced by Pejk Malinovski and Sara McCrea; written by Sara McCrea; edited by Dan O’Donnell and Sophie Crane; mastered by Jason Gambrell with assistance from Jake Gorski and sound design by Pejk Malinovski. The series is executive produced by Leital Molad, Justin Richmond, Lee Eastman and Scott Rodger.
Thanks to Lee Eastman, Richard Ewbank, Scott Rodger, Aoife Corbett and Steve Ithell.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin. Hi everyone, it's Paul Moldoin. Before we get to
this episode, I wanted to let you know that you
can binge all twelve episodes of McCartney A Life and
Lyrics right now, add free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber.
(00:35):
Find Pushkin Plus on the McCartney A Life and Lyrics Show,
pedge in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, slash Plus.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
We had guitars, we played, We did the occasional gigs.
But one things you used to do was you would
you would go to a party and you would take
your guitar with you. Now, John, being older and at
art school, would go to art school parties, which then
(01:10):
George normally wouldn't have an entree into. But I remember
going to one and I took my guitar. So I'm
sitting enigmatically in the corner with my black pole and
neck sweater on, trying to look French, trying to look
(01:30):
interesting to this older crowd. And so one of the
weapons that I used was to play this sort of
frenchy sounding song and sort of make gottural noises, kind
(01:54):
of half thinking that someone will think, well, he's French.
Probably intellectual it's probably intellectual. It wasn't necessary. Once the
Beatles were going to try and look enigmatic, it just
was no longer necessary.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
I'm Paul muldoone for a while now. I've been fortunate
to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of
the era, and.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Will you look at me, I'm going on to it.
I'm actually a performer.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
That is Sir Paul McCartney. We worked together on a
book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred
and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours
of our conversations.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
It was like going back to an old snapshot album
looking back on work I hadn't ever analyzed.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
This is McCartney, a life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir,
and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic
figures in popular music. In this episode, Michelle, when Paul
McCartney was trying to look French at art school parties,
(03:18):
he would have been playing a guitar he bought from
Hesse's Guitar Shop, the main music store in Liverpool.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
We would go in the shop and to us it
was like Valhalla, just all these guitars. There's no finer
shop than a guitar shop. And I still find that today.
Still it's just the beauty. It's the magic of all
this potential music surrounding, you know, all this rock and
(03:48):
roll suggested by these shops, and everything gleaming and looking
beautiful and shiny. And so we used to love going
in the shop, just to go in the shop, and
we would pay our dues with our little books that
a counter, and I still actually have my book, my
(04:09):
little payment book.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Hessis was manned by the shopkeeper, Jim Gretti, who let
customers pay for their instruments in monthly installments. With the purchases,
he also offered some free instruction.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
He would often stand there with his guitar. He was
a bit of a jazz guitarist and he would often
be sort of playing a bit of guitar like guys
in music shops too. We liked him, We admired his
skills on the guitar because he was far in advance
of us. And there was this one chord that we
heard in play was a particularly lost chord. We said,
(04:47):
what's that? What chorde is that? And so he took
the trouble to point it out to us. It was
what we knew as an F chord, simple F shape
down at the first position, down at the nuts, but
he used one of his fingers to cover the first
(05:09):
two strings up on the fourth fret, which would be
an A flat and an E flat, and those gave
a very jazzy cord. You got your F cord, your
normal F code, but with these it just very lush
and very exotic. So the good thing was when he
(05:32):
showed it to two of us, we were bound to remember,
because you know, George forgot it, I'd remember similarly vice versa. Anyway,
we knew this chord and we worked it into quite
a few things.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
There were bounds on a hill, but I never heard
them ringing.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
We wrote it into the Beatles' version of Till There
was You.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
Till there was you.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
There were because we just thought it was juicy and
it showed that we knew a bit. He showed us
this F demented or whatever it was called, and I
was making this song in c It was turning out
(06:31):
to be the French song that I would do at
the party. And to the second chord, I used this
Jim Grette chord, this F chord with the added notes
we'll have an official title. It will be f Augmented
ninth or something. But we didn't deal in such luxurious
(06:52):
as titles and names. Of course. It was just that one.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Paul McCartney was constantly collecting a chord here, a progression there.
It was all part of an attempt to be a
cool French intellectual, to impress John's friends. Everything he took
in was inspiration for his party piece.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Then I progressed through put in another nice little chord
we knew, which again I don't know the name of,
but we got this chord off the coasters record called
along came Jones.
Speaker 5 (07:41):
I dropped down in my either tear and turned on
channel too, a bad gunsling of them over the taste
and post me.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Soon he tapped her in the old arm meal and.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Said with a nave a lad, if you don't give
it a due to your ranch, I'll thaw you all
in half.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
And then he grabbed her good, and then he tied
it down, and then he had a good And then
along came Joan has been alone, but there's this Jeff
lincles them naughty chords, which were slightly naughty chord that's
(08:21):
out of our normal realm. So I used these two
little chords and had this melody which I say, I
used to make French grunts too, and it was kind
of half a joke really. Then years later, when the
(08:43):
Beatles were starting to become popular and I was looking
for ideas songs to do, Edith Piaff had a big
hit with a song called Milord, which was interesting. It
was a big here because it was out of left field.
Whereas all the other songs you sort of knew what
(09:05):
genre they were, this one was French and had this interesting.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
No lord aswell.
Speaker 5 (09:18):
For one.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
Easy second bless him.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
The idea of a girl sort of talking to a
guy about mill Lord. We didn't quite get it, but
it was nice, and then she slows down, do come well,
Lord does that train? I took all of this in.
(09:44):
All of this was like just I just fill in
my tank, all this stuff.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
As the band brainstormed for the album that would become
Rubber's Soul, John Lennon remembered Paul's French party piece from
more than five years earlier and encouraged him to pick
it back up.
Speaker 6 (10:05):
So I went away and thought something bomb bomb me Lord.
So I've bought Michel that's nice French, nice sound.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Michellell Mabel.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
These arm words that go together, well, my Michelle.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
Be these shell Mabel, these.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Arm words that go to gether well, my missill.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
In his quest to be a believable Frenchman and to
write a song like Edith Piaf's, McCartney would need help
to overcome the language barrier.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
I never took French in school. I did Spanish, German
and Latin. Strangely, you get most English people talk French. Yes,
British people.
Speaker 7 (11:11):
No, that's it is odd. It wasn't offered in the school.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Yeah, like it seemed like everyone else took it. John
took it, but he couldn't remember any of it.
Speaker 4 (11:20):
I love you, I love you and love you. That's
all I wanted to say until that bad I will
say that you understand.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
I had a friend called Ivan for probably my best
friend in school, even though he wasn't in my class.
He was born on the same day as I was,
exactly in Liverpool, eighteenth of June forty two, so we
had that in common sense of humor. Was crazy guy.
Turned out he was the guy to introduced me to
John Lennon. It was a conduit put us together. So
(12:03):
I was still very good friends with Ivan, who by
then had been a Camber scholar classics, and he and
his wife lived in Islington. Jan his wife and I
used to visit them, just go to dinner, we go
out the pub, whatever. And so I was talking to
her and I knew she talked French. So I said, Jan,
(12:26):
what rhymes with Michelle? Two syllables? Can you think of anything?
She said? Mark Bell said, I love it. What's that
meaning with my beauty? Okay, mis Mark Bell, I think
that's lovely. I said, we're going together. They're going together
(12:48):
where they fit, don't they nicely? They rhymes something like that.
She said, son demo givonne prepian enseans bleu. You must
sons on blur. I would have said on some. So
I said, that's brilliant, wrote it down, went back and
started working on the song with the idea now that
(13:09):
talking to a girl called Michelle, she's my girl. And oh,
by the way these words goes it wegether. Well, look
at me, I'm speaking French.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Liivon cbo clabr ansome.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
I need you and need you and need you. I
need to make you see.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
And so that gave me the idea for the song,
which was going to be I love you, I need you,
I need you, and until we get together and get
it on, I'll say these words and this is all
you need to know, just for now and the rest
of us in English, I love you, I need you.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
You know I want you, I love you, as was
often the kiss for the Beatles in the mid nineteen
sixty is. The recording session for Michelle was extremely fast.
(14:14):
They put the whole thing together in an hour and
a half.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Luckily we came in prepared, we knew it all. So
I played the guitar, did that, George made a lovely
solo on electric guitar, and the rest of the guys
who filled in wol.
Speaker 4 (14:35):
I think you know my now.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
And then it came time for me to play the
bass on it. And again these little tricks that had
sort of got loaded in my sort of consciousness, like
all my life, just musical ideas that i'd heard that
I could pull from my subconscious and reuse them what
(15:02):
I like, particularly on that is where the chords are
descending in the C minor thing that it is now
the verse until I don't know, I'm saying no, no, no, No,
it goes bom boom boom boom boom doom. While that's happening,
don't you, don't you? I go doom doom, doom, doom doom.
(15:26):
Instead of kind of going boom boom or boom boom boom,
so going with it, I go against it with the bass,
which I was very satisfied with. I'll get to use somehow.
Speaker 4 (15:41):
Until doom. I'm telling you.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
So you.
Speaker 7 (15:49):
The basse was coming to the fore and a number
of psalms in that era, wasn't it.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
I'd been very inspired by James Jamieson, the Motown bass player,
who was very melodic. It encouraged me and millions of
others to move away from the root notes traditionally, in
(16:18):
contrary wessons, have you just played boom boom boom boom
boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. Those
two notes are all the way that's your base part basically,
and that's why they had no glamor attached to it
at all. But James Jamison then started playing around with
(16:50):
and I was massively inspired by him, and so I
started thinking, Ah, the room for movement here, and I
started to experiment a little.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
In the beginning. Before the Beatles were the Beatles, Paul
had gravitated toward playing lead guitar. He had learned chords,
some from that music store proprietor Jim Gretty, and then
passed them on to John Lennon.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Could have been one of the guitar players, but there
were two already, right. And what had happened with my
guitar playing was I was good at it at home
and John Jant Mimi used to say, oh, it was
much better than John, mind you. When I first met John,
he played banjo coats. He didn't play guitar because I
had to show him guitar coats because he'd been taught
by his mom and she only knew banjo couts. What
(17:57):
happened to me was we played a place called the
Conservative Club, which was above a shop in Broadway, Liverpool.
We had this gig in it was like what the
first thing I ever played and I was lead guitar player.
John was rhythm and I had a solo and I
totally froze. I could not move my fingers Let's go,
(18:23):
And it was like just so embarrassing my lead guitar
playing career melted at that moment, and I said, well,
I'm not doing this again. This, I'm not cut out
for this. I'm not good.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
McCartney still played guitar, he just avoided the solos, but
when the Beatles train for more than two years in Hamburg,
it was the guitar that wasn't cut out for him.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
I had from Hess's and Jim Gretty. What I was
paying awful was a little guitar called a Rosetti Lucky seven,
which is quite the cheapest thing you could buy. But
it looked pretty. It was red and it was a
sort of electric guitar, but it was really just a
plank forward, very badly made. But it kind of looked
(19:12):
all right, so I thought it looked good in the
photoson on stage. But I took it to Hamburg and
the stress of Hamburg was just too much for it.
Then it fell apart, basically just part. It wasn't well
made guitars have this trush rod going through. This didn't.
This was just a neck attached to a body and
(19:33):
it was a terrible little thing. Anyway, it fell apart,
so there was no retrieving it. It was We didn't
know someone who could fix it and we couldn't fix it,
so that was dumped and I became the pianist because
there was a piano on stage.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
This was nineteen sixty one and at the time the
band consisted of Paul John, George Harrison, drummer Pete Bez,
and Stuart Sutcliffe, a bass player whom John had met
at art school.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Well, he wasn't very musical, Stuart. He loved his music,
but he just wasn't. All of us had played guitar,
so the transition to go to bass wasn't too hot.
Stuart hadn't, so he had to learn from the ground up,
and we showed him to the things, but we actually
used to have to ask him to turn his back
to the camera if there were any photos being taken,
(20:38):
because we knew that people could see. He wasn't necessarily
playing in the same key as us. But he's a
lovely guy and he fell in love with a photographer
called Astroude Kirshner in Hamburg, and Stuart told us one
that he was going to stay. So now we didn't
have a bass player. Now. The rumor since has been
that I edged him out of the band, because we
(21:00):
certainly did have our difficulties. For me, it was mainly
because I didn't think he was a very good musician,
which he wasn't and he admitted it. So for me
that caused problems because being a I mean, you could
say being a perfectionist, but actually asking the bass player
to play in the same key as us isn't really
(21:21):
looking for perfection. It's quite a mild request.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Well, it's been rumored that McCartney wanted Stuart Sutcliffe gone
so he could play the bass. He remembers there not
being much competition for the role.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
When Stuart left. We said who wants to be BASSI
and Johnson will not me? George were not me Ringo,
or maybe it wasn't Ringo at that point I think
it was still Pest said not me, and that left
me the guy who didn't have a guitar and was
now playing piano. So I had to switch to bass.
So I bought myself the Hofner bass, which is a
(22:00):
lovely instrument. It fulfilled all my requirements. It was cheap,
available and light light.
Speaker 7 (22:09):
I think it's important.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
It's life weight. I didn't realize till later how important
it was, but it's actually really affect your style of playing.
So I got that for thirty quid or thirty marks
something thirty something in Hamburg, down by the Ulster where
there was some instrument shops.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
By the time he wrote the lyrics too Michelle. Several
years after Hamburg, McCartney had become a venerable bass player,
creating bass lines that did much more than back up
the other instrumentation.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
The end which came off on the Beatles Road. It
seeming like a bit of a mistake. We sort of
tried to slow down, but our hearts weren't in it.
Like the French people liked that trick. I don't think
the guys like that trick to us. So you'll hear
it sounds like the record just slows down. Michelle slows
(23:17):
down a little bit. Well, but it doesn't go me
show well, it don't rapidly accelerates.
Speaker 7 (23:27):
So had that been part of the thinking at some
point that it would bear more of the French tradition.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Yeah, exactly. So you will hear at the end of
the record of Michelle just slows down a little bit,
but it sounds just like there's something wrong with the record.
We didn't use it a great traumatic effect.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
As the Beatles rose to fame, there was no longer
a need for McCartney to pretend he was French in
order to impress. In twenty ten, however, he played the
song to Impress at a very different engagement when he
was receiving an honor from President Obama. The first Lady
(24:11):
Michelle Obama was there as well.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
The next song We Like to Do is a song
I have been itching to do at the White House,
and I hope the President will forgive me if I
sing this one. Marbles that words.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Go to get Michelle, released in nineteen sixty five on
The Beatles Rubber So in the next episode, once There
was Away.
Speaker 4 (24:59):
To get back.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Home, longing for the way things used to be, and
knowing you can never truly re turn home.
Speaker 4 (25:11):
Get back home. Sleep pretty darn, do not cry, and
I will sing another.
Speaker 5 (25:23):
By gold.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
Snub must be cry.
Speaker 5 (25:35):
Small way you wear Rise, Sleep Pretty Dark, do not Cry.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
In the season finale of McCartney A Life in Lyrics,
Golden Slumbers, Carry that with and the end. McCartney A
Life in Lyrics is a co production between iHeartMedia NPL
and Pushkin Industries.
Pushkin. Hi everyone, it's Paul Moldoin. Before we get to
this episode, I wanted to let you know that you
can binge all twelve episodes of McCartney A Life and
Lyrics right now, add free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber.
(00:35):
Find Pushkin Plus on the McCartney A Life and Lyrics Show,
pedge in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, slash Plus.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
We had guitars, we played, We did the occasional gigs.
But one things you used to do was you would
you would go to a party and you would take
your guitar with you. Now, John, being older and at
art school, would go to art school parties, which then
(01:10):
George normally wouldn't have an entree into. But I remember
going to one and I took my guitar. So I'm
sitting enigmatically in the corner with my black pole and
neck sweater on, trying to look French, trying to look
(01:30):
interesting to this older crowd. And so one of the
weapons that I used was to play this sort of
frenchy sounding song and sort of make gottural noises, kind
(01:54):
of half thinking that someone will think, well, he's French.
Probably intellectual it's probably intellectual. It wasn't necessary. Once the
Beatles were going to try and look enigmatic, it just
was no longer necessary.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
I'm Paul muldoone for a while now. I've been fortunate
to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of
the era, and.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Will you look at me, I'm going on to it.
I'm actually a performer.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
That is Sir Paul McCartney. We worked together on a
book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred
and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours
of our conversations.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
It was like going back to an old snapshot album
looking back on work I hadn't ever analyzed.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
This is McCartney, a life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir,
and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic
figures in popular music. In this episode, Michelle, when Paul
McCartney was trying to look French at art school parties,
(03:18):
he would have been playing a guitar he bought from
Hesse's Guitar Shop, the main music store in Liverpool.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
We would go in the shop and to us it
was like Valhalla, just all these guitars. There's no finer
shop than a guitar shop. And I still find that today.
Still it's just the beauty. It's the magic of all
this potential music surrounding, you know, all this rock and
(03:48):
roll suggested by these shops, and everything gleaming and looking
beautiful and shiny. And so we used to love going
in the shop, just to go in the shop, and
we would pay our dues with our little books that
a counter, and I still actually have my book, my
(04:09):
little payment book.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Hessis was manned by the shopkeeper, Jim Gretti, who let
customers pay for their instruments in monthly installments. With the purchases,
he also offered some free instruction.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
He would often stand there with his guitar. He was
a bit of a jazz guitarist and he would often
be sort of playing a bit of guitar like guys
in music shops too. We liked him, We admired his
skills on the guitar because he was far in advance
of us. And there was this one chord that we
heard in play was a particularly lost chord. We said,
(04:47):
what's that? What chorde is that? And so he took
the trouble to point it out to us. It was
what we knew as an F chord, simple F shape
down at the first position, down at the nuts, but
he used one of his fingers to cover the first
(05:09):
two strings up on the fourth fret, which would be
an A flat and an E flat, and those gave
a very jazzy cord. You got your F cord, your
normal F code, but with these it just very lush
and very exotic. So the good thing was when he
(05:32):
showed it to two of us, we were bound to remember,
because you know, George forgot it, I'd remember similarly vice versa. Anyway,
we knew this chord and we worked it into quite
a few things.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
There were bounds on a hill, but I never heard
them ringing.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
We wrote it into the Beatles' version of Till There
was You.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
Till there was you.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
There were because we just thought it was juicy and
it showed that we knew a bit. He showed us
this F demented or whatever it was called, and I
was making this song in c It was turning out
(06:31):
to be the French song that I would do at
the party. And to the second chord, I used this
Jim Grette chord, this F chord with the added notes
we'll have an official title. It will be f Augmented
ninth or something. But we didn't deal in such luxurious
(06:52):
as titles and names. Of course. It was just that one.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Paul McCartney was constantly collecting a chord here, a progression there.
It was all part of an attempt to be a
cool French intellectual, to impress John's friends. Everything he took
in was inspiration for his party piece.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Then I progressed through put in another nice little chord
we knew, which again I don't know the name of,
but we got this chord off the coasters record called
along came Jones.
Speaker 5 (07:41):
I dropped down in my either tear and turned on
channel too, a bad gunsling of them over the taste
and post me.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Soon he tapped her in the old arm meal and.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Said with a nave a lad, if you don't give
it a due to your ranch, I'll thaw you all
in half.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
And then he grabbed her good, and then he tied
it down, and then he had a good And then
along came Joan has been alone, but there's this Jeff
lincles them naughty chords, which were slightly naughty chord that's
(08:21):
out of our normal realm. So I used these two
little chords and had this melody which I say, I
used to make French grunts too, and it was kind
of half a joke really. Then years later, when the
(08:43):
Beatles were starting to become popular and I was looking
for ideas songs to do, Edith Piaff had a big
hit with a song called Milord, which was interesting. It
was a big here because it was out of left field.
Whereas all the other songs you sort of knew what
(09:05):
genre they were, this one was French and had this interesting.
Speaker 4 (09:13):
No lord aswell.
Speaker 5 (09:18):
For one.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
Easy second bless him.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
The idea of a girl sort of talking to a
guy about mill Lord. We didn't quite get it, but
it was nice, and then she slows down, do come well,
Lord does that train? I took all of this in.
(09:44):
All of this was like just I just fill in
my tank, all this stuff.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
As the band brainstormed for the album that would become
Rubber's Soul, John Lennon remembered Paul's French party piece from
more than five years earlier and encouraged him to pick
it back up.
Speaker 6 (10:05):
So I went away and thought something bomb bomb me Lord.
So I've bought Michel that's nice French, nice sound.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Michellell Mabel.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
These arm words that go together, well, my Michelle.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
Be these shell Mabel, these.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Arm words that go to gether well, my missill.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
In his quest to be a believable Frenchman and to
write a song like Edith Piaf's, McCartney would need help
to overcome the language barrier.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
I never took French in school. I did Spanish, German
and Latin. Strangely, you get most English people talk French. Yes,
British people.
Speaker 7 (11:11):
No, that's it is odd. It wasn't offered in the school.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Yeah, like it seemed like everyone else took it. John
took it, but he couldn't remember any of it.
Speaker 4 (11:20):
I love you, I love you and love you. That's
all I wanted to say until that bad I will
say that you understand.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
I had a friend called Ivan for probably my best
friend in school, even though he wasn't in my class.
He was born on the same day as I was,
exactly in Liverpool, eighteenth of June forty two, so we
had that in common sense of humor. Was crazy guy.
Turned out he was the guy to introduced me to
John Lennon. It was a conduit put us together. So
(12:03):
I was still very good friends with Ivan, who by
then had been a Camber scholar classics, and he and
his wife lived in Islington. Jan his wife and I
used to visit them, just go to dinner, we go
out the pub, whatever. And so I was talking to
her and I knew she talked French. So I said, Jan,
(12:26):
what rhymes with Michelle? Two syllables? Can you think of anything?
She said? Mark Bell said, I love it. What's that
meaning with my beauty? Okay, mis Mark Bell, I think
that's lovely. I said, we're going together. They're going together
(12:48):
where they fit, don't they nicely? They rhymes something like that.
She said, son demo givonne prepian enseans bleu. You must
sons on blur. I would have said on some. So
I said, that's brilliant, wrote it down, went back and
started working on the song with the idea now that
(13:09):
talking to a girl called Michelle, she's my girl. And oh,
by the way these words goes it wegether. Well, look
at me, I'm speaking French.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
Liivon cbo clabr ansome.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
I need you and need you and need you. I
need to make you see.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
And so that gave me the idea for the song,
which was going to be I love you, I need you,
I need you, and until we get together and get
it on, I'll say these words and this is all
you need to know, just for now and the rest
of us in English, I love you, I need you.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
You know I want you, I love you, as was
often the kiss for the Beatles in the mid nineteen
sixty is. The recording session for Michelle was extremely fast.
(14:14):
They put the whole thing together in an hour and
a half.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
Luckily we came in prepared, we knew it all. So
I played the guitar, did that, George made a lovely
solo on electric guitar, and the rest of the guys
who filled in wol.
Speaker 4 (14:35):
I think you know my now.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
And then it came time for me to play the
bass on it. And again these little tricks that had
sort of got loaded in my sort of consciousness, like
all my life, just musical ideas that i'd heard that
I could pull from my subconscious and reuse them what
(15:02):
I like, particularly on that is where the chords are
descending in the C minor thing that it is now
the verse until I don't know, I'm saying no, no, no, No,
it goes bom boom boom boom boom doom. While that's happening,
don't you, don't you? I go doom doom, doom, doom doom.
(15:26):
Instead of kind of going boom boom or boom boom boom,
so going with it, I go against it with the bass,
which I was very satisfied with. I'll get to use somehow.
Speaker 4 (15:41):
Until doom. I'm telling you.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
So you.
Speaker 7 (15:49):
The basse was coming to the fore and a number
of psalms in that era, wasn't it.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
I'd been very inspired by James Jamieson, the Motown bass player,
who was very melodic. It encouraged me and millions of
others to move away from the root notes traditionally, in
(16:18):
contrary wessons, have you just played boom boom boom boom
boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. Those
two notes are all the way that's your base part basically,
and that's why they had no glamor attached to it
at all. But James Jamison then started playing around with
(16:50):
and I was massively inspired by him, and so I
started thinking, Ah, the room for movement here, and I
started to experiment a little.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
In the beginning. Before the Beatles were the Beatles, Paul
had gravitated toward playing lead guitar. He had learned chords,
some from that music store proprietor Jim Gretty, and then
passed them on to John Lennon.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Could have been one of the guitar players, but there
were two already, right. And what had happened with my
guitar playing was I was good at it at home
and John Jant Mimi used to say, oh, it was
much better than John, mind you. When I first met John,
he played banjo coats. He didn't play guitar because I
had to show him guitar coats because he'd been taught
by his mom and she only knew banjo couts. What
(17:57):
happened to me was we played a place called the
Conservative Club, which was above a shop in Broadway, Liverpool.
We had this gig in it was like what the
first thing I ever played and I was lead guitar player.
John was rhythm and I had a solo and I
totally froze. I could not move my fingers Let's go,
(18:23):
And it was like just so embarrassing my lead guitar
playing career melted at that moment, and I said, well,
I'm not doing this again. This, I'm not cut out
for this. I'm not good.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
McCartney still played guitar, he just avoided the solos, but
when the Beatles train for more than two years in Hamburg,
it was the guitar that wasn't cut out for him.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
I had from Hess's and Jim Gretty. What I was
paying awful was a little guitar called a Rosetti Lucky seven,
which is quite the cheapest thing you could buy. But
it looked pretty. It was red and it was a
sort of electric guitar, but it was really just a
plank forward, very badly made. But it kind of looked
(19:12):
all right, so I thought it looked good in the
photoson on stage. But I took it to Hamburg and
the stress of Hamburg was just too much for it.
Then it fell apart, basically just part. It wasn't well
made guitars have this trush rod going through. This didn't.
This was just a neck attached to a body and
(19:33):
it was a terrible little thing. Anyway, it fell apart,
so there was no retrieving it. It was We didn't
know someone who could fix it and we couldn't fix it,
so that was dumped and I became the pianist because
there was a piano on stage.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
This was nineteen sixty one and at the time the
band consisted of Paul John, George Harrison, drummer Pete Bez,
and Stuart Sutcliffe, a bass player whom John had met
at art school.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Well, he wasn't very musical, Stuart. He loved his music,
but he just wasn't. All of us had played guitar,
so the transition to go to bass wasn't too hot.
Stuart hadn't, so he had to learn from the ground up,
and we showed him to the things, but we actually
used to have to ask him to turn his back
to the camera if there were any photos being taken,
(20:38):
because we knew that people could see. He wasn't necessarily
playing in the same key as us. But he's a
lovely guy and he fell in love with a photographer
called Astroude Kirshner in Hamburg, and Stuart told us one
that he was going to stay. So now we didn't
have a bass player. Now. The rumor since has been
that I edged him out of the band, because we
(21:00):
certainly did have our difficulties. For me, it was mainly
because I didn't think he was a very good musician,
which he wasn't and he admitted it. So for me
that caused problems because being a I mean, you could
say being a perfectionist, but actually asking the bass player
to play in the same key as us isn't really
(21:21):
looking for perfection. It's quite a mild request.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Well, it's been rumored that McCartney wanted Stuart Sutcliffe gone
so he could play the bass. He remembers there not
being much competition for the role.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
When Stuart left. We said who wants to be BASSI
and Johnson will not me? George were not me Ringo,
or maybe it wasn't Ringo at that point I think
it was still Pest said not me, and that left
me the guy who didn't have a guitar and was
now playing piano. So I had to switch to bass.
So I bought myself the Hofner bass, which is a
(22:00):
lovely instrument. It fulfilled all my requirements. It was cheap,
available and light light.
Speaker 7 (22:09):
I think it's important.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
It's life weight. I didn't realize till later how important
it was, but it's actually really affect your style of playing.
So I got that for thirty quid or thirty marks
something thirty something in Hamburg, down by the Ulster where
there was some instrument shops.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
By the time he wrote the lyrics too Michelle. Several
years after Hamburg, McCartney had become a venerable bass player,
creating bass lines that did much more than back up
the other instrumentation.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
The end which came off on the Beatles Road. It
seeming like a bit of a mistake. We sort of
tried to slow down, but our hearts weren't in it.
Like the French people liked that trick. I don't think
the guys like that trick to us. So you'll hear
it sounds like the record just slows down. Michelle slows
(23:17):
down a little bit. Well, but it doesn't go me
show well, it don't rapidly accelerates.
Speaker 7 (23:27):
So had that been part of the thinking at some
point that it would bear more of the French tradition.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Yeah, exactly. So you will hear at the end of
the record of Michelle just slows down a little bit,
but it sounds just like there's something wrong with the record.
We didn't use it a great traumatic effect.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
As the Beatles rose to fame, there was no longer
a need for McCartney to pretend he was French in
order to impress. In twenty ten, however, he played the
song to Impress at a very different engagement when he
was receiving an honor from President Obama. The first Lady
(24:11):
Michelle Obama was there as well.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
The next song We Like to Do is a song
I have been itching to do at the White House,
and I hope the President will forgive me if I
sing this one. Marbles that words.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Go to get Michelle, released in nineteen sixty five on
The Beatles Rubber So in the next episode, once There
was Away.
Speaker 4 (24:59):
To get back.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Home, longing for the way things used to be, and
knowing you can never truly re turn home.
Speaker 4 (25:11):
Get back home. Sleep pretty darn, do not cry, and
I will sing another.
Speaker 5 (25:23):
By gold.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
Snub must be cry.
Speaker 5 (25:35):
Small way you wear Rise, Sleep Pretty Dark, do not Cry.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
In the season finale of McCartney A Life in Lyrics,
Golden Slumbers, Carry that with and the end. McCartney A
Life in Lyrics is a co production between iHeartMedia NPL
and Pushkin Industries.
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