“Taxman” was recorded about a week later. “Paperback Writer,” however, was recorded quite a bit earlier, on April 13 and 14, 1966, during the Revolver sessions. Hendrix did some gigs right away before the Experience formed, but my guess is Paul didn’t see him until at least a little later than September. That Epiphone Casino has been a constant companion throughout my life.”Ĭool, but McCartney wouldn’t have seen Hendrix until late September 1966 at the earliest, which is when Jimi moved from New York to London. So that became my favorite electric guitar, and I used it on the intro riff to ‘Paperback Writer’ and the solo in George’s song ‘Taxman,’ as well as quite a number of other pieces through the years. It was a really good little guitar, a hot little guitar. “The guitar shop staff said, ‘This is probably the one that will feedback best, because it has a hollow body and they produce more volume than a solid body guitar.’ So I took it to the studio, and it had a Bigsby vibrato arm on it, so you could play with the feedback and control it, and it was perfect for that. I was so lucky to see him at one of his early gigs in London and it was just like the sky had burst… I went into the guitar shop in Charing Cross Road in London and said to the guy, ‘Have you got a guitar that will feedback, because I’m loving what Jimi Hendrix is doing.’ I’m a big admirer of Jimi. On page 91: “My favorite electric guitar is my Epiphone Casino. There might be literally millions of Beatles fans who’d spot this switcheroo, which just shows that followers of celebrities often know more about such details than the stars who actually experienced them. It’s odd that McCartney switches the order of events that did happen very close to each other, but where one (their first US visit) was much more famous and important to the group’s career than the other (their visit to Paris). They also performed the last of their three Sullivan spots this month in Miami. The Beatles did go to Miami in mid-February 1964, only a couple weeks after recording “Can’t Buy Me Love,” for a short vacation after their famous initial American appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show and concerts in Washington, DC and New York’s Carnegie Hall. In fact, only George Harrison had been to the United States, and he didn’t go to Florida during his trip there (mostly to see his sister in the Midwest) in late 1963. The Beatles hadn’t been in Florida before this session. The error is the first of several chronological ones in the book that might seem trivial to plenty of people, but are certainly mistakes. However, “Can’t Buy Me Love” was indeed recorded in Paris on January 29, 1964, while the Beatles were playing shows in the city for almost three weeks. To those not steeped in the history of Beatles recording sessions, it might seem like the mistake is that the hit was recorded in Paris, not London, where they cut almost all of their records. On page 64: Remembering recording “Can’t Buy Me Love” in Paris in January 1964, Paul muses, “The irony here is that just before Paris, we’d been in Florida where, if not love, money certainly could buy you a lot of what you wanted.” But here are ones I caught, if anyone’s interested in treating these as sort of corrective footnotes. Not that I’m so special there are probably thousands of fans who could have done so, and will while they’re reading the book. So no, they didn’t ask me or, it seems, others who could have caught mistakes to go over the text. What does surprise me is that the publisher-a big one, with a very prestigious project-apparently didn’t care enough to do the kind of fact-checking that might be considered routine if this was a book on a major political figure or movement, rather than a mere celebrity musician who did more to change the world than most politicians. Some of these things happened fifty to sixty years ago. It doesn’t surprise me that Paul misremembers some incidents, and particularly gets some order of what happened when wrong. Was it unimportant to McCartney and the publisher to make the relatively modest effort necessary to catch those?” To quote from my review: “There are a few, if not many, factual mistakes that I’m surprised made it through the editing process…There are many, many Beatles fans besides myself who could have spotted such errors, and the essence and primary points of the stories could have been retained if they’d been fixed. It’s sort of a fact-check on some of its text. This post, however, is not another review of Paul McCartney: The Lyrics.
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