" Thanks Joey. "
" December 4, 2010 -- Huffington Post
by Martin Lewis
Many Years From Then: Sir Paul McCartney Receives the Kennedy Center Honor
On Sunday December 5th, Sir Paul McCartney receives America's most prestigious tribute bestowed upon creative artists -- the Kennedy Center Honor. Beatles historian Martin Lewis, who has known Sir Paul and worked with him on several projects over the past quarter-century, has written this new appreciation of McCartney to mark the occasion. The Kennedy Center Honors event will be aired on the CBS network on Tuesday December 28th.
My mentor and first employer, former Beatles publicist, the late Derek Taylor, once described The Beatles as "the 20th Century's Greatest Romance." His poetic encapsulation of the majestic achievements of the lads from Liverpool was astute, and in that interpretation, Paul McCartney is the charismatic Aramis of the four musketeer-musicians who captured the world's heart.
Sir Paul McCartney has traveled a long and winding road from his childhood in Liverpool to the summit of receiving his Kennedy Center Honor in Washington D.C. By the age of just 27, with his three bandmates in The Beatles, he had already completely revolutionized popular music and created a canon of work that is heralded and unsurpassed in both critical acclaim and public popularity to this day. In the 40 years since the break-up of The Beatles, he has developed into a Renaissance Man for our times. A legacy of compositions and recordings in popular music, acclaimed classical works, poetry, paintings, award-winning animated films and a pioneering presence as an activist in many spheres -- including the instigation of the Concert For New York after the 9/11 attacks.
Born James Paul McCartney on June 18th, 1942 in war-bombed Liverpool to Mary a nurse and Jim a cotton salesman and jazz band aficionado, he grew up in municipal housing, in blue-collar districts on the outskirts of Liverpool. At the age of 14, he lost his mother to breast cancer, and he and his younger brother Michael were thereafter raised by his father with the support of extended family. Shortly after his mother's passing he taught himself to play the guitar and wrote his first song, I Lost My Little Girl.
One Saturday afternoon in July 1957, his friend Ivan Vaughan took him to the local church fete. Another of Ivan's pals was playing in a skiffle group that day in front of 400 villagers. (Skiffle was the British equivalent of homemade jug-band music.) McCartney watched the Quarrymen and in particular their scruffy leader, John. After the performance, Ivan introduced his two mates. It was the Big Bang that led directly to The Beatles. If that sounds like an exaggeration, consider this: Almost ten years later to the day Paul and his new pal John -- together with two other chums called George and Ringo, were performing live to 400 MILLION members of the global village on the world's first-ever satellite TV hook-up. "All You Need Is Love" was what they sang that day. Love in all its forms was, and remains, the touchstone of Paul McCartney's work and family life.
Though John was older by nearly two years, Paul's comparative mastery of the guitar and knowledge of songs of the emerging rock 'n' roll from America placed him ahead of his new pal in musical craft and in the very early years Paul helped John's nascent musicianship emerge. So began a creative partnership and friendship that literally changed the world. Spurred on by a natural sibling-style rivalry, each drove the other to higher and higher creative achievements. Paul's innate gift for melody informed John's compositions. Lennon's affinity for words inspired McCartney to write ever more evocative lyrics ("wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door"). The teenage Paul had already started composing, and as he encouraged John to do the same, they became a writing team. They wrote together "eyeball-to-eyeball" in their earliest years. From 1964 onwards they primarily composed songs on their own -- yet they almost always turned to each other to polish and improve their songs.
In the span of a few years McCartney composed literally dozens of songs that became instant classics and have embedded themselves into the world's collective DNA. Songs such as "Can't Buy Me Love," "Yesterday," "Eleanor Rigby," "Here, There and Everywhere," "Penny Lane," "Hey Jude" and "Let It Be." As his three Beatle colleagues all married and settled in the Surrey countryside, it was McCartney who stayed in the heart of England's capital in the mid-60s and immersed himself in London's burgeoning counter-culture. He imbued theater, foreign films, art, Stockhausen, John Cage, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg. This eclecticism manifested itself in The Beatles' landmark Sgt Pepper album in 1967 -- a song cycle very much driven by Paul's vision. In these years, McCartney also became the first Beatle to score a movie -- the Hayley Mills film The Family Way, and he was the driving force behind their ahead-of-its-time Magical Mystery Tour film -- which impressed (among many) a young film student called Steven Spielberg...
After The Beatles broke up at their peak in 1970, McCartney elected to restart his musical career from a virtual ground zero by creating a new band that included his wife Linda. Wings grew slowly, but by the end of the 1970s had become one of the major musical attractions of the decade, with a slew of memorable hits and world tours under its span. McCartney had proven that he could start and lead a new band on the run to the top. His humanitarian side started to manifest itself with the landmark Concerts for Kampuchea in 1979, which he helped organize and at which he performed with many stellar peers.
The world changed after the tragic loss of John Lennon in December 1980, and Paul made changes in his life. He disbanded Wings and focused more on recordings and family than live performance -- though he gave one of the highlight performances at 1985's Live Aid. His 80s recordings included hugely popular collaborations with younger performers who McCartney was always happy to work with including Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Elvis Costello.
It was in the 1980s and 1990s that McCartney broadened the creative canvas he worked on. He made a series of award-winning animated short films, re-kindled his love of painting and poetry. He also started composing acclaimed classical works. His philanthropy and passion for giving back led him to work with a team in transforming the derelict building that had housed his high school and turn it into LIPA (Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts) -- which has become Britain's finest such academy.
Post break-up, The Beatles had defied the laws of celebrity physics and they had never gone out of fashion. They were discovered afresh by each new generation. When McCartney returned to live performance in 1989, he discovered that in addition to his loyal fans from the 1960s and 1970s, he had a new fan-base that had grown up on his solo recordings in the 1980s and had also discovered him through the omnipresent recordings of his first group -- the one he was in before Wings... Since returning to the concert stage, he has made live performance a staple of his life -- touring the world frequently and bringing together multiple generations at every show. "
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