Paul McCartney’s insight that the bass line could be a secondary melody rather than merely fleshing out the drumming is evident throughout his career.
McCartney’s insight that the bass line could be a secondary melody rather than merely fleshing out the drumming is evident throughout his career.
A s he celebrates his 80th birthday tomorrow, Paul McCartney’s compositional genius, and his eagerness to please as a pop star, may be his most noticeable qualities, but if he had never sung or written a single song, he’d still be among rock’s greats. His career as a bass player rivals the late John Entwistle’s for its imaginative potency and its continuous tendency to surprise and delight.
Take “Silly Love Songs,” much scoffed at from the day of its release in 1976. I’ve always loved the song for the summery feel of that horn section, and it’s an early example of what later became a pop obsession — a sly commentary on itself. Far from supporting the cliché that McCartney is shallow and unreflective, the song’s lyrics proved he was the rare rock superstar who could poke fun at himself (if Lennon or George Harrison ever did this, I must have missed it).
But it was only a couple of years ago that I started to savor the song’s marvelously loopy bass line. Below the typical mid Seventies synthesized strings, and the celebratory brass that makes it a kind of delayed sibling to “Got to Get You Into My Life” (which, after being included on Revolver in 1966, was not released as a single until right after “Silly Love Songs,” in the spring of 1976), its bass is a riot. It makes me think of a frisky puppy, bounding far off the path set by the melody but always returning. You could start over from that bass and wind up in a completely different place.
If it hadn’t been for the accident of the Beatles’ original bass player Stu Sutcliffe departing the group in 1962, McCartney would have happily continued as a rhythm-guitar player. Instead, he took a guitarist’s creative instincts and applied them to the bass. Again and again, McCartney’s bass-playing in key songs takes the recording to an unworldly level. And although he was strong from the beginning — check out his work on “Paperback Writer,” which makes the song a bit better without asserting itself much — he got even more skilled as he went along.
McCartney’s 1979 hit “Goodnight Tonight” — the closest he ever came to going disco, when that genre was at its zenith — is a pleasant-enough Latin-inflected dance-pop number with a rapidly strummed flamenco-guitar part. But what really stands out on it is the zinging, attacking, fat, and funky bass line, which, typically for McCartney, works beautifully despite sounding like the lead-guitar part for a completely different song. McCartney’s genius is in that tendency to mash things together, to build a soaring sonic edifice out of seemingly unrelated musical ideas. Far from falling into the trap of coasting off a single riff or hook to death for three minutes, he is such a Mozart-level genius that his songs overflow with his ideas. McCartney’s sometimes-awkward disdain for lyrics (he was capable of blurting out sheer nonsense on, for instance, “Jet”) is really the flip side of his having access to so many melodies that he just couldn’t generate enough words to keep up.
McCartney’s bass on “With a Little Help from My Friends” is so inventive that it (as producer Rick Rubin pointed out in the Hulu documentary about McCartney) somehow becomes the lead instrument on what otherwise would be a very musically repetitious track. It’s McCartney’s spectacular bass in “Come Together” that created the hardest-rocking sound on any of the Beatles’ big hits, and his muddy licks on “Rain” work with the reverse-tape Lennon vocals and Ringo Starr’s aggressive drums to turn what might have been a routine track into a monument of Sixties psychedelia. Around the same time, McCartney contributed one of the Beatles’ sharpest, angriest guitar solos to Harrison’s “Taxman” even as his sardonic, jittery bass line stole focus from Harrison’s lead guitar. McCartney considerably improved Harrison’s “Something” with one of his most mature and reflective efforts on the bass. His playing on that song “sets up a counter-melody” that is “more like a lower vocal harmony than a bass,” writes Zach Blumenfeld in Consequence of Sound.
McCartney’s insight that the bass line could be a secondary melody rather than merely fleshing out the drumming is evident throughout his career. Note how much his bass adds to the lead melodies in the Abbey Road medley, or how he plays off the piano’s lead in “Hey Bulldog.” In “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” his bass starts out rumbling, barely noticeable, in the background but gradually takes over the song. On the Wings tune “Mrs. Vandebilt,” the sprightly bass gives an otherwise so-so song considerable life. On Memory Almost Full from 2007, his bass-playing on, for instance, “Feel Your Sunshine” is unobtrusive but brightly melodic.
McCartney never did learn to read music, relying on his instincts for his playing, and his bass work sometimes gives off the sense of a born improviser who’s just out to have fun without worrying too much about sticking to the plan. It’s starting to look like he may never lose that youthful unruliness — like he may never grow up.