Author - TIME Paul McCartney

Contents

Writing with John Lennon or solo, Paul has been a melody maker without peer. Beatles expert Bob Spitz picks the best.

When Paul attends a church fete in 1957 and sees Johns band, the Quarrymen, his life is changed forever.

In a red brick British factory town that welcomes American rock n roll, the beginnings of Beatlemania emerge.

At a remarkably quick pace, Paul pushes the Beatles from their cute phase into an era of experimentation.

As the Beatles spin apart, a grieving Paul discovers the joys of domestic life and, eventually, a new career of his own.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR James Kaplan, a novelist, journalist and biographer, has written seven books, including his best-selling 2010 life of Frank Sinatra, Frank: The Voice . He is the recipient of a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Love Me Do

The extraordinary life of an ordinary manPaul McCartney, at 70, still rocks our world

Meet the future Beatles: In 1958, while still known as the Quarrymen, George, John and Paul play for a Liverpool wedding reception at the home of Pauls aunt. George, the youngest, is about 15 at the time.

PHOTO MIKE McCARTNEY

He is the most ordinary of extraordinary men: a historical figure with a common streak, a genius whos still not entirely sure where it all comes from, or came from.

Ive always had this thing of him and me, Paul McCartney told Barry Miles, his authorized biographer, in 1996. He goes onstage, hes famous, and then me; Im just some kid from Liverpool this little kid who used to run down the streets in Speke collecting jam jars, damming up streams in the woods. I still very much am him grown up.

Occasionally, I stop and think, I am Paul McCartney hell, that is a total freak-out! You know, Paul McCartney! Just the words, it sounds like a total kind of legend. But, of course, you dont want to go thinking that too much because it takes over. And yet, when I go on tour, Im glad of the legendary thing, he said. I wouldnt want to try and entertain 60,000 people in a Texas stadium with just the guy next door.

No, that wouldnt do at all. And sostill, in 2012he steps out on the stage of whatever arena he may be playing, in whichever corner of the worldit scarcely matters where or what language they speak; everyone knows him and loves him, everyone knows the words to all the songsand, as the roar rises to the rafters, begins singing, for the umpteenth time and with undiminished joy:

Roll up, roll up for the magical mystery tour,

step right this way

On June 18inconceivably he turns 70, and hes still rolling. Fast. In the months before the big day, he seemed to be everywhere at once: touring in Helsinki and Moscow and Liverpool. Getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Playing at the MusiCares benefit (where he was honored as Person of the Year). Playing at the Grammys. Attending his daughter Stellas fashion show in Paris. Vacationing in St. Barts with his wife Nancy Shevelland then touring some more, in Rotterdam and Zurich and London.

It was almost as though, if he moved fast enough and squeezed in enough events, he might sideslip the 18th of June altogether and proceed to the next golden stage, untouched and untallied. Exactly the kind of dream a little kid running down the street in Liverpool might dream.

Except that no one, in his wildest imaginings, could have dreamed all that had happened to him in the years between then and now.

All four of them had remarkable faces, but only his was beautiful, the big-eyed, long-lashed looks saved from mere prettiness by a persistent, perhaps willfully untended, five-oclock shadow and those asymmetrical, ironically arched brows, which seemed to say, Ive got the goods. No, really. Think Im kidding?

He had the goods, and then some. Oh, beyond measureon a Mozart level, the musician and record producer Peter Asher told time recently, speaking of the musical gifts of the brash young Liverpudlian who, beginning in 1963, dated his sister Jane and, though already famous, bunked in the attic of the Asher familys town house on Wimpole Street: the attic where the melody of Yesterday came to him one night in a dream.

That, of course, was many yesterdays ago. And while Paul McCartneys youthful beauty has gone the way of youth, the immense musical talent endures, along with, at the biblical three score and 10, something perhaps even more remarkable: He keeps on going, says another longtime acquaintance, the writer and director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. He doesnt have to. Hes got all the money and all the success, and hes written some great songs. In Tennessee Williams Camino Real theres [a line]: Make voyages, attempt them; theres nothing else. I think thats Paul.

At 70, he voyages still, maintaining a schedule that would give pause to a man half his age: a 30-concert tour in 2011-2012, from the Bronx to Bologna, Moscow to Montevideo to Mexico City. My wife says hes an alien from the Planet Fab, says Paul Wix Wickens, the keyboardist in the band that has backed McCartney for the past 10 years. (The band also includes bassist Rusty Anderson, guitarist/bassist Brian Ray and drummer Abe Laboriel Jr.)

If youre enjoying it, why do something else? McCartney asked Rolling Stone , rhetorically, earlier this year. His pleasure in his art and his craft seems as pure as it was when he first picked up a guitar almost 60 years ago. He absolutely loves music, Wickens says. He loves to play. And he loves being involved. Hes always doing something. When we [in the band] are not working, he is not not-working. He does relax, and he does take holidays. But he puts his head into other places, not just pop music, because he likes a challenge, he likes just to be doing it.

Last fall the New York City Ballet premiered McCartneys fifth classical work, Oceans Kingdom ([I]n no way an important addition to the corpus of ballet music, but it has plenty of color and melody, said the New York Times ); this February he released a well-received CD of American Songbook standards, Kisses on the Bottom . Under the pseudonym The Fireman, he has made three albums of ambient electronic music.

But love remains his great subject. Though Oceans Kingdom is cloaked in a cautionary ecological messagethe undersea good guys are threatened by terrestrial baddiesits still the story of a couple trying to make it against the worlds intrusions. McCartney knows what that feels like. His first two marriages were largely conducted in the spotlights glare: his late first wife, Linda Eastman McCartney, performed with him for over 25 years, both as part of Wings and afterward; he and his second wife, Heather Mills, were tabloid fodder during their brief and turbulent union and their highly public divorce.

Now, on the strength of his third marriage, Paul McCartney seems to be trying to get the him-and-me thing right at last. Fifty-one-year-old Nancy Shevell is that rarest of all birds in Pauls life, an intensely private figure. Unlike his first two wives, she is neither blond nor buxom; unlike Linda and Heather, who were outspoken about their causes (vegetarianism, in Lindas case; land mines and amputees, in Heathers), the slim, dark-haired Shevella survivor of breast cancer, the disease that killed Pauls mother and first wifedoesnt speak for the public record.