I may disagree with him on some issues, but he is not a liar or the usual liberal hypocrite- he is the definition of cool!
I just wish him and John would have collaborated on some more before he died- they had a synergistic effect on each others’ music (the sum is greater than the individual parts)
The sum was greater than the parts because George Martin was writing the music.
He made a very rude and unnecessary comment at the Whitehouse when Obama was giving him some award. Something to the effect of “Nice to have a President who’s seen the indice of a library.” It was a very low-class jab at Bush (who’s wife, ironically, was a librarian)
In the Playboy interview shortly before his murder, Lennon gives an example of their collaboration on lyrics. Paul wrote the line “we can work it out” and he wrote the bridging segment “life is very short and there’s no time....” McCartney was the optimist, Lennon the pessimist. Just compare the Christmas songs they each did in their post-Beatles careers. One is as light and fluffy as can be and the other is the darkest Christmas song ever written. Someone who worked them both in their solo careers in the ‘70s said they couldn’t have been more different as people.
The synergy they worked out together was definitely amazing, balancing out the light and the dark side to create fun songs that still had emotional complexity and resonance. But it’s easy to understand why there was tension there and why each of them might have felt that working together was holding them back from what they really wanted to do.
Nowadays I think popular artists are less wary to walk away from a successful formula to do something different. Maybe because things are more competitive than ever and finding success a second time through a different avenue is clearly unlikely. In the past you had George Lucas cutting the Star Wars movies from 6 films to 3 because he was tired of it and wanted to do other things. You had Christopher Reeve trying hard to prove himself as an actor outside of the Superman films. And you had Shelley Long and David Caruso leaving TV shows at the height of their popularity to try for movie careers. Now we have neverending sequels to any popular movie and actors who are willing to sign on for life to play any superhero character.
It seems like commercial success is more valued than ever in artistic endeavors. Maybe it’s because the profits have just become too big to ignore, especially now that home and digital distribution has shown that a successful project can live on for decades and continue delivering royalties, far beyond what anyone thought they ever could 25 years ago.
I used to think that too, but his body of work since 1972 has pretty much destroyed all the cool he earned prior to 1972.
And then there was that whole sucking up to Obozo and slamming GWB at the White House a couple of years ago.