Allan Kozinn > Quotes

“No Words,’ for example, was two songs that became one song.54 I wrote the first few verses and couldn’t get any further. I took them to Paul, and he added his little bit of magic.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“But the experience was also fulfilling: Paul’s new album had the variety that was his hallmark, with ballads and rockers, acoustic tracks, and high-energy electric cuts. But most importantly, where each of his post-Beatles releases had tracks that Paul knew were throwaways—throwaways that he liked, or that struck him as having a personality that earned them a place on an album, but throwaways all the same—Band on the Run had an energizing consistency, track for track.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“I woke up,” Paul recalled, “and I could remember dreaming that the Rolling Stones were onstage doing this amazing number called ‘No Values.’ It was a song I pictured them doing and it suited them down to the ground.20 And then I woke up and thought, ‘What’s that one?’ and they had never recorded it.”21 After discovering that ‘No Values’ was not a Jagger-Richards original, but rather something he had dreamt up, Paul noted the chord progression for a later date.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“Paul wanted to shoot the sessions on videotape, rather than film, probably because he intended it principally for his own use in assessing the band, and video, unlike film, allowed for immediate playback, with a full soundtrack.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“In response, he repurposed an unfinished song that had been kicking around since 1969, originally titled ‘Since You Came to Me,’ and fashioned a response. Composing new lyrics that put Paul directly, and identifiably, in the crosshairs, he transformed his old tune into ‘How Do You Sleep?”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“At the time, Paul was engaged to the actress Jane Asher. Not that he was in any way exclusive—certainly not when the Beatles were touring, and not even when he was in London, despite Jane’s having moved into his house in 1966. Jane’s acting career took her out of town frequently, and though that was a point of contention between them—Paul’s preference was that she give up her career and become a more traditionally domesticated wife and mother—her absences also suited Paul, a man in his twenties with a seemingly insatiable libido and a black book full of willing playmates.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“I say to people, ‘Well—do you like it?’ And that’s how the decision gets made. Unless I’m very passionate about [a particular song]. With things like ‘Get Back,’ the Beatles record, I didn’t spot it as a single. I didn’t think it was anything special. It was the other guys who said, ‘No, it’s great—Jo-Jo, it’s great, pure.’ So, I don’t really think of myself as a great spotter of what’s good and what’s not, in my work. You can’t actually learn how to do it. It’s all instinct.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“The orchestral session came off almost, but not entirely, without a hitch. Through several takes, the principal cellist seemed to be having difficulty phrasing the short cello obbligato in ‘Live and Let Die.’ The part was not that difficult, and Paul, noticing that it was 4:50 P.M., just ten minutes before overtime rates would kick in, walked down the long staircase from the Studio Two control room and took Newman aside. “He wants to go into overtime, doesn’t he?” Paul asked. “Do you mind if I take over?”27 Newman handed Paul the baton, and Paul told the cellist, “Right, I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I’ll sing it, and you play it.” He then sang the cello line, using the names of the chords as lyrics, leaving the player no recourse but to play the line as Paul sang it before doing a final take. “It was so fucking brilliant,” Litchfield marveled, “that when he finished, the entire orchestra stood up and gave [Paul] a standing ovation. The cellist got outgunned. It was wonderful; it was a private piece of musicianship the like of which I’d never seen before, and certainly never since.”28”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“As a guitarist, though much of the world didn’t know it, since the Beatles’ album credits rarely mentioned who played the solos, he contributed some of band’s most virtuosic playing, including the stinging solo on lead guitarist George Harrison’s ‘Taxman.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“They began a new version of ‘Baby’s Request’ the next day. The song has been likened to ‘Honey Pie,’ a pastiche in a 1930’s pop style, but there is a difference. While ‘Honey Pie’ was a sly parody of the style, ‘Baby’s Request’ is a straightforward adaptation of the style’s hallmarks, commissioned by a vocal group that specialized in it. It also suited one side of Paul’s compositional sensibility at the moment: except for the overt punk-influenced tracks, a growing number of his recent compositions used a harmonic language more germane to jazz than rock. In ‘Baby’s Request,’ augmented chords, and chords with added sevenths and ninths are plentiful and support a gentle, eminently croonable melody.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“Paul turns up and he says, ‘Ah, great. You obviously want to hear the results of your labor.’ And he played ‘Mull of Kintyre,’ which I thought was awful. Just fucking dreadful. So he played it again. And again. And again—he must have played it about 14 times. I said, ‘No, I give in, I like it!’ And he said, ‘I know you don’t. But I’ll tell you, this is going to be the biggest hit record of all time.’ “Then he pulled out of the back pocket of his Levi’s another cassette tape and slammed it in. It was ‘Girls’ School,’ which is a rock and roll number. And he said, ‘That’s for you—that’s my way of saying thank you for doing the job.’ I thought it was a really sweet gesture.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“I just pulled together Paul’s ideas,” Arrowsmith said. “When you work with Paul, you know, he has very strong ideas about what he wants.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“But there was a fly in the ointment. Because of his inexperience, Litchfield did not realize that U-matic tape was the wrong medium for a proper documentary. “You couldn’t edit the stuff,” he explained. “It was totally wild. You couldn’t sync it. The only thing it had going for it was that you could put a soundtrack down, so the quality of the sound on all the stuff that I did with him is absolutely brilliant, but the quality of the vision is shit. I had to [transfer the material] from video to film to edit it, and once you’ve gone down one generation, the quality just disappears. “But he was happy to experiment if I was, and I was. Neither of us knew what the fuck we were doing. We had a disagreement one day over the direction the video was taking, when we were editing it, and Paul said, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I said, ‘Neither do you,’ and he said, ‘No, I know—it’s sort of our private film school, really, isn’t it?’”30”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“On Friday, January 12, Wings met in MPL’s boardroom to map out their immediate future. It was an unlikely scene, for a rock band. “We all sat around one of those big boardroom tables with notepads and glasses of water,” Laurence recalls, “and we talked about what the next step was going to be.”2 The next step, Paul told them, was to release a single. “What did the Beatles do when they needed a single?” someone asked. “We’d write one over the weekend,” Paul replied. Steve remembered Paul proposing a full-band contest. “I remember him saying, ‘I challenge you all to go home and write your best effort, and we’ll review them all on Monday. And whoever’s written the best song is the one we record.’ I honestly don’t remember what I did, but I know I put something together and Denny put something together, and Laurence, and we all came in and one by one played what we had. And then I remember Paul saying, ‘Well, I wrote this,’ and that was ‘Daytime Nighttime Suffering.’ And we all collectively went, ‘Ahh, okay. Well, let’s record that one then!’”3 Linda offered a closer look at Paul’s side of the competition. “He’s actually incredible,” she enthused to Ray Connolly four months later. “On Friday he decided he needed a new single, on Saturday and Sunday he messed around the house writing it, on Monday he explained to the group how it should go, on Tuesday we recorded it. He just never stops. Ideas seem to come to him all the time.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“After one too many drinks, John and Paul also paid a late-night visit to David Bowie at the Pierre Hotel. “I got a knock at the door,” Bowie recounted. “It was about three in the morning and John was there and he had Paul with him! The two of them had been out on the town for the evening. And John says, ‘You won’t believe who I’ve got here,’ and I said, ‘Wow I thought you two had . . .’ and he said, ‘Oh no, all that’s going to change.’ It was great! We just spent the evening talking. . . . They actually asked me if I’d join the two of them and become a trio with them, and we’d change the name to something like David Bowie and the Beatles because they liked the idea of it being DBB. But, you know, the next morning it just never came to anything.”74”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“final syllable of Bowie’s ‘Suffragette City’—the word suffragette being, perhaps not coincidentally, among the McCartney song’s lyrics).”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“The band spent much of June 29 jamming and playing through ‘To You,’ the song Paul wanted to record once the studio was set up and tested. If having two new band members wasn’t enough of a wild card for Paul, there was also his decision to bring Chris Thomas in to co-produce. Paul had mixed feelings about producers, George Martin excepted. It was handy having another pair of trusted and experienced ears in the studio, and in theory having someone who would challenge you could yield a better album. But Paul was secure enough in his ideas that challenges were often batted away. “I don’t care what you think, this is what we’re going to do.” The few times Paul tried working with a producer, post-Beatles, had ended in grief. Jim Guercio, brought in to help get Ram over the line, lasted only a few days. Glyn Johns left the sessions for Red Rose Speedway early, complaining that Wings were unfocused.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“It was a bit lonely [after the Beatles broke up],” he confessed. “You get very aware that the pressure’s on you all the time, and it’s nice to be able to spread it a bit.3 The first stage appearance I ever made was at Butlins when I was 11 and I went up with my guitar and sang ‘Long Tall Sally.’ But I had to haul our Mike up on stage with me, although he had a broken arm in plaster and was just wailing along with me. Maybe I’m shy or something, but I work better with someone else on stage with me. To me I don’t care what the band’s called.”4”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“When Wings toured Britain, Europe, Australia and North America between 1972 and 1976, Paul made a point of setting aside hefty rehearsal periods and working until the arrangements were tight and the performances were polished. But in October 1979, with a British tour set to begin at the end of November, Wings had barely rehearsed. And the British tour was just the start of what promised to be an extended touring period, with a visit to Japan planned for January pending the approval of the band’s visas—still a matter of concern, given the Japanese government’s refusal to allow Wings into the country in 1975 because of Paul’s earlier pot busts. Now, barely a month before their British tour was set to open, Wings did not even have a setlist. Paul had been able to suppress his feeling of discontent with Wings—not its current incarnation, particularly, but the idea of fronting a permanent band—while he was working on his solo project, and through all the activity in the weeks that followed. The question now was whether he could rekindle his love for the concept. The fact is, leading a band had been more of a slog than he bargained for, and the natural chemistry he had with the Beatles—developed as they grew from adolescent amateurs into stage-tested adults—had been impossible to replicate with a group of experienced players. He had been so desperate to have a band, after the Beatles broke up, that he approached it naively, believing it could be a band of equals. It took the departure of Henry McCullough and Denny Seiwell—the implosion of Wings Mark I—for him to realize that this was implausible. As the only marketable star in the band, it would never be equal, and more crucially, equality was not something he was suited for: he always had a clear idea of what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it, and he was unwilling to brook any opposition. When Jimmy McCulloch, Geoff Britton and then Joe English joined the band, they were younger and the power relationships were clearer. But in Wings Mark II, Paul found himself having to sort out his young charges’ personal problems, and while he was generally there for them, the combined role of musician and guidance counselor grew tiresome. Laurence Juber and Steve Holley were excellent players and entirely professional, but Back to the Egg had not won critical accolades, and there were some in Paul’s circle who thought Juber and Holley lacked their predecessors’ rock and roll rawness.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“What he missed was “the lack of great sounding boards like John, Ringo, George to actually talk to about the music.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“The problem, the Eastmans told him, was that the Beatles were Apple. They were bound together by the 1967 partnership agreement from which Apple emerged, and worse, that agreement governed aspects of their EMI deal—for example, how they were to be paid. Under the EMI agreement, whatever any of the Beatles recorded was considered “Beatle product,” the proceeds paid to Apple.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“I really wanted the backing [track] to be burning the balls off the whole thing,” said Paul. “We came to do it and we had a lot of trouble, actually, with the drumming. We ended up with Jimmy overdubbing a track and he had much more of a dirty feel—he was out of his skull at the time—but he helped to give it a dirty feel.”14 While McCulloch was making his recording debut as a drummer, Paul sat in the control room, his bass plugged into the console, and played along. By the end of the session, ‘Rock Show’ was complete.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“jovial perfectionist,”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“page headline trumpeting the maiden commercial voyage of the Concorde. The supersonic jet had completed its first commercial flight between London and Bahrain, with roundtrip tickets on what the Daily Mail called “The World Shrinker” costing £676 ($1,370). The paper noted that the jet made its journey at the speed of sound—and Paul, having scanned the ether in search of an album title in recent weeks, suddenly had one—Wings at the Speed of Sound.*”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“Ça ne fait rien”4 (or “It does not matter,” more loosely translated as “Don’t worry, we’ll sort it”). Paul and Linda heard Richards’s comment as “San Ferry Anne,” a phrase they adopted to mean “don’t worry,” and true to form, McCartney began toying with the phrase as the title for a new song.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“This was a song with a clear beginning and a viable verse structure, but without a bridge. The keys of the two fragments were close—‘Another Day’ was in G major, but quickly moves toward a wistful, E minor feeling, and ‘So Sad’ was in E minor. Where ‘So Sad’ was in 3|4 time, ‘Another Day’ was in 4|4—but that hardly mattered: rather than alter ‘So Sad,’ Paul would just shift at the point where the two sections meet, and then shift back when the verse returned.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“His goal now, he continued, was to write “just kind of songy songs that the milkman can whistle.”4”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“But over the course of the session, which ran from 2:30 p.m. to 12:15 a.m., they also discussed John’s departure and the group’s future, as Paul remembered. “I sat around wondering what I was going to do, and whether I was just going to be an ex-legend. I asked George and Ringo if they thought we might get back together again and they said we might, but we’d have to give John a bit more time. The time kept passing and I decided I wasn’t going to sit around and do nothing.”3”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“An album of Paul’s music was selected as the first rock album to be released officially by Melodiya. Technically, the album chosen for release was Band on the Run, but because the title track was replaced with ‘Silly Love Songs,’ the album was renamed ПОЛ МАККАРТНИ+Ансамбль (Wings)—Paul McCartney + Ensemble (Wings). The release, EMI cautioned Paul, would not make him appreciably more wealthy: as classical musicians who toured in Russia already knew, fees and royalties were paid in rubles, which were not freely exchangeable for Western currency. Classical players found that they were best off spending their fees in Russia and returning to the West with fur coats, vodka or other Russian goods.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“I heard Paul’s messages in Ram,” Lennon fumed in an interview with Crawdaddy magazine. “Too many people going where? Missed our lucky what? What was our first mistake? Can’t be wrong? Huh. I mean Yoko, me, and other friends can’t all be hearing things.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73