Paul McCartney: When He Fought Grief With Rock and Roll
I remember being in the press room for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 1999; Paul McCartney was being honored that night as a solo act, and some of us were surprised that he came back to talk to the press. Often, the bigger artists decline to hit the press room; after all, it was their big night to celebrate their entire career. They may have had a few, and most artists know that that may not be the best time to face a room full of people with cameras and recorders.
The ceremony took place on March 15; Linda McCartney had passed away eleven months earlier. Paul was still, understandably, mourning her. The year 1999 marked 30 years since they’d been married. In fact, their anniversary was three days earlier. But he did come backstage to answer a few questions.
Someone asked what his next album would be like; there were rumors that he was working on another classical music piece. He’d done Liverpool Oratorio in 1991 and Standing Stone in 1997. Other rumors had him working on another Fireman record, his collaborative electronic music project with Martin Glover, aka Youth (from the band Killing Joke).
“No,” he said. “My next record is rock and roll.” He wasn’t kidding.
In October of that year, he released Run Devil Run, an album paying tribute to the rock and roll songs that the Beatles grew up loving. It wasn’t a confessional album that one might expect, addressing the devasting loss that he’d suffered and was still working through. Instead, he was reconnecting with the music that brought him joy as a kid. And that music clearly still brought him joy.
Paul no longer had a band, so he assembled a new group of players to join him for these sessions. The core musicians were Paul on bass, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd on guitar, Mick Green (formerly of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates) on guitar, and Ian Paice of Deep Purple on drums. Green shared history with McCartney; he used to be in a band that played shows with the Quarrymen, an early version of the Beatles. These were guys who shared musical references. Paice had asked what songs they needed to rehearse for the sessions. “No homework,” McCartney recalled saying, in an interview included in the liner notes of the album. “I really wanted this to be fresh, like it was at the Cavern,” he said, referring to the legendary club where the Beatles played over 200 gigs from 1961 through 1963, before they were superstars.
“I’d say to the guys, ‘Anybody know [Larry Williams’] ‘She Said Yeah?” They’d say no, becuase they were slightly obscure choices,” McCartney recalled. “I’d say, ‘Okay, this is how it goes.’ We’d take five or ten minutes. That’s how we did it in the Beatles. Because how many times can you go through a song without everyone getting bored?”
Surely, other musicians who have worked with Paul would note that he might have been a bit more demanding on other albums. But Run Devil Run wasn’t about capturing perfection; it was about capturing the fun of rock and roll. It was probably also about Paul recapturing fun. He’d been through a trauma. The last three years of Linda’s life, during which she battled cancer, were surely extremely difficult.
There were hints of sadness on the album. “No Other Baby,” by a skiffle band called the Vipers (who were, coincidentally, produced by future Beatles producer George Martin) is a ballad. Paul allegedly recorded a version in 1987 that has never been released. But the lyrics surely hit him differently in ’99: “I don’t want no other baby but you/Cause no other baby can thrill me like you do.”
Ricky Nelson’s 1958 hit, “Lonesome Town” had simple lyrics, but got its point across: “Going down to Lonesome Town/Where the broken hearts stay/I’m going down to Lonesome Town/To cry my troubles away.”
Paul wrote a few original songs for the album, that fit in the style of the era. “Try Not To Cry” is a rocker, but is also quite moving. As he told USA Today at the time, “Guys try not to cry. I just let it all hang out. I thought, there’s no other way around this. I just did what I had to do. And then I got back into the swing of things, and it feels good.“
“What It Is” is another original; it’s a love song but it’s not a ballad, it’s another rocker. Paul belts out, “You are what it is that makes the world go around for me/You are what I need, you make me feel good about myself.” As he said in an interview at the time, “I actually wrote that when Lin was still alive. So it was a nice song to sing to her. ‘You are what it is.’ I wrote it for her.” It’s a good reminder to tell people how you feel about them, today. (Go do it now!)
Most of the songs don’t have such deep meanings: the title track, another original, is one of Paul’s most rocking tunes ever. Much of the rest of the album is just fun: Gene Vincent’s “Blue Jean Bop,” Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up,” “(Let’s Have A) Party,” “I Got Stung,” and Chuck Berry’s cleverly coded “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man.”
I’m not suggesting that it was only rock and roll that got Paul through that unimaginably difficult time. As Paul said in the USA Today interview, “People say, ‘Oh, my dad died, so I know exactly what you’re going through.’ I say, ‘No, you don’t.’ A girlfriend of 30 years? The tightness and intimacy and stuff we went through? You don’t know. It’s different. Both my parents have died, and this is nothing like that. We were supposed to be on a porch in rocking chairs when we were 80. Suddenly, that’s all taken away.“
Before he could return to being the icon, he had to be able to sit with himself and sleep by himself in an otherwise empty bedroom. He surely had support from his family and friends. That was most likely more important, at that point, than the adoration of millions.
He told USA Today that he gave himself nerly a year to sit with what had happened and to give himself time to process it. Run Devil Run helped to get him back to doing what he loved. And, as it turns out, it’s a blast to listen to a quarter of a century later.
