Overview
Between 1962 and 1970, Paul McCartney sold 140 million albums throughout the world: co-authored with John Lennon twenty-six US and UK number one singles: recorded the first rock album (Revolver) and took the whole thing to a pinnacle (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band). As a member of the most important rock band ever, Paul McCartney convinced millions of fans to pick up electric guitars and others to denounce him as a degenerate — or worse. He helped usher in the Love Generation, took a personal stance on the "drug problem," and left the world dumbfounded when the Fab Four called it quits in the early seventies. However, to this day McCartney remains one of the most beloved and respected of musicians, and the biggest box office draw in the world. McCartney is a tale of self-destruction and epic excess, as well as creative genius and brilliant music. The Beatles' bloody infighting, the sex, drugs, and McCartney's extraordinary marriages are revealed here in full. This book remains a celebratory feast for millions of fans, capturing the glorious rush of the best songs and revealing the untold stories behind them.
Synopsis
Between 1962 and 1970, Paul McCartney sold 140 million albums throughout the world: co-authored with John Lennon twenty-six US and UK number one singles: recorded the first rock album (Revolver) and took the whole thing to a pinnacle (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band). As a member of the most important rock band ever, Paul McCartney convinced millions of fans to pick up electric guitars and others to denounce him as a degenerate — or worse. He helped usher in the Love Generation, took a personal stance on the "drug problem," and left the world dumbfounded when the Fab Four called it quits in the early seventies. However, to this day McCartney remains one of the most beloved and respected of musicians, and the biggest box office draw in the world.
McCartney is a tale of self-destruction and epic excess, as well as creative genius and brilliant music. The Beatles' bloody infighting, the sex, drugs, and McCartney's extraordinary marriages are revealed here in full. This book remains a celebratory feast for millions of fans, capturing the glorious rush of the best songs and revealing the untold stories behind them.
Publishers Weekly
McCartney's success has long affronted rock aesthetes as proof that facile talent and showmanship trump soulfulness, an opinion that will be complicated, but not reversed, by this serviceable biography. Sandford, a music journalist and biographer of Kurt Cobain and other rock stars, considers McCartney the Beatles' true visionary, the driving force behind Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and other artistic milestones and a perennially interesting pop innovator throughout his Wings period and recent solo efforts. In contrast, Sandford's unremittingly negative portrait of John Lennon paints the deep one as a musical philistine as well as a morose, spiteful personality, regularly drunk, stoned or strung out on heroin. Nonetheless, McCartney feels far less compelling than his music. He emerges as an ambitious, disciplined artist, a hardheaded businessman and "a genuinely nice, down-to-earth fellow," but his Mozartean gift for melody seems unrooted in any profundity of character. The author has trouble imparting an arc to his story, and the post-Beatles narrative devolves into a busy but aimless routine of record releases, tours, reunion rumors, minor marijuana busts and an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of lawsuits pitting various Beatles against each other and assorted managers, publishers, record companies, memorabilia vendors and copyright violators. Sandford offers more of a comprehensive chronicle than a coherent character study. (Feb. 1) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.