Reading the lives of David Bowie and Paul McCartney

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Reading the lives of David Bowie and Paul McCartney
Looking at the legends — different takes on two of the most important figures in 20th century music.
By PETER GODDARD
Visual Arts
Sun., June 19, 2016


Bowie on Bowie by Sean Egan, Chicago Review Press, 432 pages, $34.95.
(CHICACO REVIEW PRESS)

For just about ever, David Bowie has been a mystery; sexually unfathomable and digressive intellectually enough to flirt with fascism. Paul McCartney over the same time has emerged as gullible; a gifted melodist but patronizing toward his fans.

Well, welcome to the new age of rock revisionism. Bowie on Bowie, interviews from 1969 to 2003 collected by prolific rock journalist Sean Egan, shows the late master of multiple personae as engaging, intelligent, and — whoa — a happily settled husband and father. Paul McCartney: The Life, hints at a musical genius obscured by the barrage of facts filling every page of Philip Norman’s industriously-researched biography.

The watershed in Bowie’s life came when he kicked his cocaine habit in late ’70s, allowing him to wrestle with the massive insecurities drugs helped mask. “It was a terribly traumatic time,” he told Allan Jones in an Oct. 29, 1977 edition of Melody Maker. “I was in a terrible state. I was absolutely infuriated that I was still in rock and roll.”


Paul McCartney: The Life, by Philip Norman, Little, Brown, 853 pages, $32
(AMAZON/TNS)

Paul McCartney: The Life — not to be confused with Paul McCartney: A Life, an impressionist accounting of “the cute Beatle” by America writer Peter Ames Carlin — covers familiar territory trodden flat by herds of previous Beatle historians. Yes, Paul was intimidated by John Lennon. Yes, he became such a control freak that both Ringo Starr and George Harrison threatened to quit. Yes, Paul fought Allen Klein, the Beatles’ aggressive wannabe new manager, over control of the band’s soul and cash flow.

Norman’s 1981 Beatles bio, Shout! The Beatles in their Generation lauds John Lennon as the brains of the outfit. So this hagiographic McCartney bio is being seen as an effort to kiss and make up. Yet while tallying his subject’s multiple lives — vegan-father, pot-loving millionaire and all the rest — Norman’s portrait leaves unexplained the greatness of McCarney’s accomplishment. “Yesterday”’s unique melancholy is presented as a problem of “how to record it,” says Norman, but not as a sample of songwriting that defied every musical convention at the time while yet sounding so familiar.

John Lennon had few peers writing a rock tune. Or performing it. Or being it. But Paul was his equal in this regard — and was something else again. McCartney channelled every music around, from whimsical musical hall patter to clangorous electronic music from the German avant-garde’s Karheinze Stockhausen. Out of this he formed his own musical voice.

McCartney flew beyond barriers: separating British folk and Broadway, separating the silly and profound or those drawing the line between the major and minor keys. And as he soared he lifted the Beatles higher.


Peter Goddard is a freelance writer and the Star’s former rock critic.