Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut (16 page)

“Hey, R.E.M., do you live in the truck?”

“Do you got a girl in the truck?”

“A naked girl?”

“Hey, R.E.M., do you sell any dimebags, man?”

“Gimme something free, R.E.M.!”

Nobody else was allowed to sass me.

I would sell to girls around town I had crushes on, girls whose communions at St. Mary’s I had gazed upon as an altar boy, now girls who bought ice cream from me. It would have been nice if any of these girls had noticed me. It would have been even nicer if they’d said, “Excuse me, Mr. Ice Cream Eye Candy, but I’m having trouble getting my tongue warmed up—could you spare a girl some practice licks? I don’t know, I guess I’m feeling a little . . .
fros-tay
!”

This never happened.

On weekends, I parked by the Public Garden, or near the Boston Tea Party Ship. I sat in the truck and read Kafka’s
The Trial
or some depressive shit like that, waiting for tourists. I snickered at English people for calling popsicles “ice lollies.” On the Fourth of July, my friend Barak and I parked the truck by the Esplanade for the Boston Pops concert and made an absolute killing. On the way home, traffic was backed up so far that people were getting out of their cars to come buy something, or passing bills from car to car. By the end of the night, we were tossing free ice cream cones out the window, since we’d bought more than we could store in the freezer. God bless America. (Nobody bought any Bomb Pops, however.)

To tell the truth, I was a little bit drunk on my new popularity. Nobody wanted to antagonize the ice cream man, because they knew I would never stop on their street again. So I was treated like a visiting king. It’s fair to say I lost perspective. I began referring to myself in the third person, even when I was mumbling to myself in the truck, saying things like “The ice cream man will now stop for lunch,” or “The ice cream man could use another Hoodsie.” Even driving my crappy old Chevy Nova home, I would announce, “The ice cream man is signaling to switch to the left lane. Stand back lest ye melt!” My sisters began grumbling and calling me Snow Miser.

It was the closest I’d ever come to being a star, the kind that Prince was in
Purple Rain
, riding that motorcyle around with Apollonia on the back, cruising Lake Minnetonka, suffering the hard work of being so beautiful that people bombard you with attention day and night. I was already a big fan, but watching
Purple Rain
, I thought, this is my life. Finally, someone else gets it. I felt like Prince could understand what I was going through. We’d have to hang out some time. He could play me some tasty new tracks, and maybe I could serve him a Hoodsie.

1984

 

 

 

 

It was Paul McCartney who warped my young brain with the idea that not worshipping a girl was a waste of time, an idea that has caused about 88 percent of the misery in my life. (The other 12 percent was caused by “Say Say Say.”)

Paul McCartney is one of the central mysteries of my universe. He’s the only Beatle people really argue about. The other three, for better or worse, are fixed in their roles—John as the caustic rebel, George as the religious one, Ringo as the drummer. But Paul is the loose cannon, the danger Beatle, the X in the fab equation. He’s the only one you can mention in a bar to start an argument. Nobody really knows what to do with Paul, which is why I think about him all the time.

Paul was the bitchiest Beatle. Everybody knows the other Beatles thought he was bossy. Even in the interviews for the 1990s
Anthology
documentaries, George Harrison physically bristles in his company. But he was the Beatle who worked hardest, who forced the others to finish their songs and show up to the studio.

Paul is the bossy Irish sister in the Beatles. Every Irish family has one of these, and it’s always the oldest girl. My cousin Graine in Dublin explained to me that this sister is called “the Alsatian,” which is the British Isles term for the breed of dog that Americans call a Doberman. “I’m the Alsatian in my family,” she explained at one family dinner. We were standing against a wall watching our cousins congregate from all over Ireland, noting the uncanny pattern—every family seemed to have a gang of sisters. “Yes, but there’s only one of
us
per family,” she told me. “The Alsatian—the enforcer. I’m the one who stirs the pot and speaks my mind. I’m the Alsatian in my family. Ann is the Alsatian in yours.”

Any Irish brother can recognize what Paul was doing in the Beatles. He was the Alsatian. He kept coming up with more work for them to do, dreaming up big, daft ideas, sometimes brilliant (
Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road
), sometimes involving walrus costumes (
Magical Mystery Tour
). He got mad if he didn’t think they were pushing hard enough. It always cracks me up that some people describe “Getting Better” as a cheerful, optimistic song. Nagging the other Beatles about how things could be better, a little better, all the fucking time—that sounds like Paul to me.

Paul was the girliest Beatle, the prettiest star with the long eyelashes. He was one of the original rock-and-roll gender-benders, which is why he was the most new-wave Beatle. But if his prettiness helped create the Beatles, it was his bitchiness that kept them alive, and it isn’t much of an exaggeration to say that the Beatles were his fantasy—every time the others were burned out and felt like trying something different, not being Beatles anymore, it was Paul who would herd them back into the group. John dismissed his tunes as “granny music.” Exactly—I bet Paul’s granny was one tough Irish broad who could beat up any bartender in Liverpool. And I also bet she had some terrified brothers.

That’s why he still bugs people. His image might be the pop softie, the crowd-pleaser who plays nice for the old ladies, the one who plays it safe. But paradoxically, he’s the only Beatle that people despise. Beatles histories tend to agree about everything
except
the Paul Question, which is where they get contentious. Countless bands have styled themselves in opposition to the Beatles, as the “bad boys” of rock: the Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Sex Pistols, etc. These bands set out to piss people off. But there’s no way they could possibly piss people off the way Paul does.

Paul’s girl worship will always be the most disturbing and mysterious thing about him. It is strange, no matter how you look at it, that he likes them so much, considering the time and place when he became a rock star. He waltzed into a life where, by the time he was twenty-two, he knew for a fact that no whim would ever be refused him, whether it was sex, drugs, cars, gurus or druids. (Football teams—I think lots of English rock stars buy those.) Paul chose to be a husband. In nearly thirty years together, he and Linda famously never spent a night apart, except when he was in jail for smuggling weed into Tokyo.

The Stones suggested that if you dabble in decadence, you could turn into a devil-worshipping junkie. Paul McCartney suggested that if you mess around with girl worship, you could turn into a husband. So Paul was a lot scarier.

He didn’t just sing about the way love messes up your mind—he lived it out. He even let his wife, Linda, join the band. Everybody made fun of him for that; everybody knew the joke, “What do you call a dog with wings?” There’s no way Paul didn’t know the whole world was laughing at him for giving his wife so much of his attention—he just didn’t care. Or maybe he did it to annoy people. (And it is both weird and impossible not to notice that all four Beatles had absurdly long-lived marriages, second marriages in most of their cases—did any other major rock band spawn such notoriously doting husbands?)

Paul has been called many things—sappy, sentimental, complacent, a pothead, a mama’s boy, dead, the Walrus. But never a misogynist, which definitely makes him stand out from the other rock stars of his generation. As early as 1968, the first biographer to write a book about the Beatles, Hunter Davies, noted that Paul was the one with “modern” attitudes about women. (He compared some of the others to Andy Capp.) Even before he married Linda, he was squiring the actress Jane Asher, making him one of very few ’60s rock stars whose choice of female companion was another creative artist. He was always vocal in giving her credit for helping to introduce him to things like classical music and modern art, the things that influenced Beatles albums like
Sgt. Pepper
and
Revolver.
And he fawned over his wife, so he spent the Boogie Nights era on an organic farm in Scotland, raising four kids and eating her steamed wheatgrass casseroles.

In his music, even from his earliest days, Paul liked girls so much that he sounded phony when he tried to be mean. The only time he ever sang an “it ain’t me babe” song, he came up with “Another Girl,” which is laughably insincere. And even then he disses one chick because he met another who “will always be my friend.” He became insanely famous by singing about how he liked girls, but once he got famous, he just seemed to go right on liking them.

You have to admit, there aren’t many stories like Paul McCartney’s in the annals of rock and roll, or showbiz in general. This was the most ardently desired male on earth, not to mention one of Britain’s top earners. Most of us would not have made the sexual choices he made, given his options. I have no idea how he treated his groupies in the ’60s—although maybe it has to signify something that none of them ever sold him out to the tabloids. But if it was ever a pain in the ass to be married to Linda, who by all accounts was as tough-minded and stubborn as he was, the world never heard about it. And when John and Yoko split up in the early 1970s, guess who Yoko sent to L.A. to go talk to John?

People have spent many years trying to figure out what happened to Paul McCartney, but maybe we’re not really asking the right questions. His flaws are actually not that hard to figure out. (“Maybe he used to smoke dope every waking moment” explains a lot of them.) It’s his virtues that seem profoundly fucked up. He was a man deranged by love, driven to madness by a happy love affair, a deeper madness than other rock stars got from their unhappy ones. By the late 1970s, most of his peers were making their divorce albums, but McCartney was knocking out increasingly crazed nondivorce albums, and nobody ever enjoyed being a husband more than this man. “Maybe I’m Amazed” is an infinitely freakier song than “Revolution Number 9.” Linda seemed like nobody’s idea of an obsession-worthy muse, just some random hippie chick Paul liked. It would have been one thing if he’d married Elizabeth Taylor or Jackie Kennedy. But he married a photographer who did the album cover art for Tommy James and the Shondells.

I’m not claiming to like all the music—far from it. “Let ’Em In” is some kind of high-bongwater mark for how zonked and sedated a grown man can sound when things are going too smoothly. Songs like this terrify me. I mean, Keith Richards has some impressive vices, and I always love hearing gossip about them. But they only disturb me in theory. In real life, I’m not in any danger of turning into Keith Richards, and neither are my friends.

But turning into Paul McCartney? It could happen to
anybody.
Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.

Two of my friends have met him, neither one affiliated with the music biz or the media in any way, and both used the same word to describe him. I hate admitting that the word was “dumb,” and I hate recalling I was unreasonably aggressive both times in defending him. But I know what they mean. A lot of smart people think Paul McCartney is dumb, and it’s easy to see why. He doesn’t worry about looking cool. He doesn’t have the defensive armor we expect in people who have been visible all their lives. Like a lot of naturally intense people, he seems to have overcompensated with an almost cartoonishly easygoing manner. His moronic public actions get more attention than his smart ones. I mean, there are great songs on his recent albums, but who the hell listens to them? Nobody. Meanwhile, millions of people around the world watched the Super Bowl when Macca showed up and sang an impromptu duet with Terry Bradshaw of “A Hard Day’s Night.”

Indeed, his flaws are a nonstop source of comic delight. He has no apparent ability to feel shame. If Terry Bradshaw wants to sing, Paul’s game. If he wants to release hit singles so cringingly awful I would rather gnaw off my fingers than type the titles, he goes for it. He sponsored an authorized biography where he detailed how much harder he worked than the other Beatles—he wrote 65 percent of this song, 70 percent of that song. Somebody really should have talked him out of that. Also, during the period he was married to the unspeakable Heather Mills, the
Give My Regards to Broad Street
of Beatle wives, she was clearly goading him into being more of a bitch than he normally is, telling him she’d never heard of songs like “Get Back.” (You’re married to Paul McCartney! Google the man!) That was when Paul began his deeply embarrassing campaign to change the songwriting credit from Lennon-McCartney to McCartney-Lennon.

When he divorced this nightmare of a second wife, her lawyers claimed that, among other cruelties, Paul had gotten angry at her for breastfeeding, allegedly telling her, “They are
my
breasts!” I love that story. Yeah, right—Paul raised his kids on an organic farm with the crunchiest hippie mama who ever lived, so I suspect he was familiar with the concept of nursing. The lawyers should have tried something believable, like “He fell asleep and left the baby on the plane” or “He wrote ‘Say Say Say.’ ”

Of course, anyone can sympathize with the other Beatles. If you’re George, and you wrote a great song like “Taxman,” you have every reason to be furious that Paul dubbed his guitar solo over yours. But so what? Paul just played it better. Paul didn’t even care about claiming the credit—99 percent of listeners assume George played the “Taxman” solo, and apparently that’s always been fine with Paul. (I had no idea until a few years ago, when the Beatles’ engineer Geoff Emerick revealed it in his book
Here, There and Everywhere
.) He let George take the credit; all he wanted was to play the damn thing. “Let It Be”? Not really his style.