Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hi, everyone, it's Paul muldoon. Before we get to
Speaker 1: this episode, I wanted to let you know that you
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Speaker 2: The Castle's last words, Yes.
Speaker 3: Was a dare.
Speaker 4: Justin Hoffmann said to me, can you write a song
Speaker 4: about anything? I said, Wow, I don't know. Maybe you know,
Speaker 4: He said, just a minute, and he ran upstairs. He
Speaker 4: came back down with the newspaper article about the depth
Speaker 4: of Picastle, and he said, see what Pocasta's last words were.
Speaker 4: His last words to his friends were, drink to me.
Speaker 4: Drink to my health. You know I can't drink anymore.
Speaker 1: You drink to me.
Speaker 4: Dream do my health.
Speaker 5: You know I can't dream any move.
Speaker 1: I'm Paul Wildon for a while now, I've been fortunate
Speaker 1: to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of
Speaker 1: the era.
Speaker 3: And will you look at me, I'm going on to it.
Speaker 3: I'm actually a performer.
Speaker 1: That is Sir Paul McCartney. We worked together on a
Speaker 1: book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours
Speaker 1: of our conversations.
Speaker 4: It was like going back to an old snapshot album
Speaker 4: looking back on work I hadn't ever analyzed.
Speaker 1: This is McCartney, a life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir,
Speaker 1: and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic
Speaker 1: figures in popular music. In this episode Picasso's last words
Speaker 1: drink to Me. McCartney met Dustin Hoffman on a nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three trip to Montego Bay, Jamaica, where Hoffman and
Speaker 1: Steve McQueen were filming the historical prison drama Papillon. Hoffman
Speaker 1: had invited Paul and his wife Linda to his home
Speaker 1: for a dinner party, and after dinner, the actor issued
Speaker 1: the song a musical challenge. He read them an article
Speaker 1: that had been published in Time magazine earlier that year.
Speaker 6: Right up to the end, picquetulst no Time. The day
Speaker 6: before he died, I had been a day like many
Speaker 6: others at Notre Dame de vill his Hiltop villa at
Speaker 6: Mouja on the French Revivia. Late in the afternoon, the
Speaker 6: artist had taken a walk in the little part that
Speaker 6: surrounds his sprawling stonehouse, overlooking the reddish foothills of the
Speaker 6: Maritime Apps.
Speaker 1: It was Adare. Hoffman wanted to know if the legendary
Speaker 1: musician really could make music from anything.
Speaker 3: So he could write a song about that.
Speaker 4: I did happen to have my guitar with me, so
Speaker 4: I accord and started singing a melody to those words.
Speaker 4: And he was FLABBERGASTU his then wife, He's not with
Speaker 4: her anymore any I think it was.
Speaker 3: Annie, Annie, come here? Can we listen to this? Listen, listen,
Speaker 3: look at this.
Speaker 4: I just came.
Speaker 3: Listen.
Speaker 5: Listen.
Speaker 4: He's got the song Brandoater bad less night.
Speaker 2: He's painting.
Speaker 6: Later that evening, Piso and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends
Speaker 6: for dinner. Pikasu was in high spirit.
Speaker 7: He bad us well, said night to us.
Speaker 6: Drinking, drinking my health, he urged, drinking, drink, you know
Speaker 6: I can't drink anymore, drink more. At eleven thirty, he
Speaker 6: rose from the table and announced, and now I'm let's
Speaker 6: go back to work.
Speaker 3: You know what dream any.
Speaker 1: In an interview, Hoffman recounted what it was like to
Speaker 1: see McCartney write the song before his eyes.
Speaker 8: I swear by all that's holy that he began singing
Speaker 8: this song of the story that I had just told
Speaker 8: him about Picasso. It just came out of him. Drink
Speaker 8: to me, drink too, my health. You know I can't
Speaker 8: drink anymore three o'clock in the morning. It's right under
Speaker 8: childbirth in terms of great events of my life. I mean,
Speaker 8: I was at the birth of something. The fact is
Speaker 8: that he didn't come back the next day. He didn't
Speaker 8: even start fiddling around. It was literally immediate I finished
Speaker 8: the story and he strummed his guitar.
Speaker 4: It was a sort of you know, can you write this?
Speaker 4: It was almost he set me a little task.
Speaker 3: And I like the words.
Speaker 4: So then I thought, well, I've got to kind of
Speaker 4: set it up. The grand old painter tired last night.
Speaker 4: His paintings on the wall four wenty bad us well
Speaker 4: and say good night to us all.
Speaker 3: So then that's his this quote.
Speaker 2: May I just say something about that we're talking about
Speaker 2: drama earlier on. You know, the fact that the speaker
Speaker 2: of the song yeah is in the scene is very important.
Speaker 2: R Yeah, because he bad us, well, it's not he
Speaker 2: bad them well, he bad us well. And when it's
Speaker 2: us well. The beauty of that is I suppose that
Speaker 2: not only is the speaker involved, but they bring in
Speaker 2: the listener, so we're all there immediately.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I hadn't thought of it like that, but that's true. Yeah.
Speaker 6: In recent weeks he had been working especially hard preparing
Speaker 6: for a big show of his latest paintings at the
Speaker 6: Book's Palace in May. On this night, before he went
Speaker 6: to bed, he painted until three am.
Speaker 5: Three coup in mine.
Speaker 4: I'm getting very bad.
Speaker 2: I suppose that one could set one could musicalize quote
Speaker 2: unquote any sentence any English language. Maybe not any, but many.
Speaker 2: I mean, the language has its own intrinsic musicality. I
Speaker 2: suppose how often quote yes, how often does the rhythm
Speaker 2: of the words themselves influence how the let's call it
Speaker 2: the melody might turn out all the time, all.
Speaker 4: The time, all the time. You want to get something
Speaker 4: that rolls along naturally and that's interesting at the same time,
Speaker 4: but that fits with the music you're hearing with it.
Speaker 4: So sometimes you have to alter a word because it
Speaker 4: just doesn't quite work with them either. So you look
Speaker 4: for something that says the same thing, but just it's
Speaker 4: an alternate word. Maybe it's now it's a two syllable
Speaker 4: word instead of the one syllable word. That didn't work
Speaker 4: all the other way around. But I'll be waiting for you, waiting,
Speaker 4: I'll be waiting for you there. So, yeah, it's very
Speaker 4: important that the rhythm sounds natural.
Speaker 3: When it isn't, it can sticks out of the sort
Speaker 3: of thumb. I know how.
Speaker 1: Paul McCartney took inspiration from everywhere. Talking to him that day,
Speaker 1: I remembered a poem by the seventeenth century poet Ben Johnson.
Speaker 1: It had been covered by Johnny Cash, Drink to.
Speaker 4: Me only with thine eyes and I will play with my.
Speaker 2: Would you have been conscious of Ben Johnson's or some
Speaker 2: version of Ben Johnson's song Drink to me only with
Speaker 2: thine eyes or whatever it is? Yes, ancient, yes, ancient,
Speaker 2: drink to me.
Speaker 3: I will drink too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I've heard it.
Speaker 4: I mean, yeah, I didn't think of that, because the
Speaker 4: whole thought here was just the challenge of doing it
Speaker 4: for Dustan, you know. So I was just concentrated on
Speaker 4: the words he stuck in front of me, And I
Speaker 4: think what was nice was that he obviously seeing it,
Speaker 4: stroke heard it as melodic.
Speaker 2: So he recognized that probably had possibility.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he recognized the I think, don't you if you
Speaker 4: think about it. You know he's an actor anyway.
Speaker 2: Well, that's right, he's a singer, really. I mean, he's
Speaker 2: a vocalist, vocal rhythm of words.
Speaker 4: And I think when he read the quote, most people
Speaker 4: would probably think, wow, so that's what he said. But
Speaker 4: I think Dustin, I'm guessing here, but I would guess
Speaker 4: that he would think, oh no, this flows beautifully.
Speaker 3: Drink to me, drink to my health. You know, I
Speaker 3: can't drink any more. Pump pa pump pump pumpo.
Speaker 4: You know there's like a nice little mathematical equation. Well so, yeah,
Speaker 4: so it was a pleasure. It was a great pleasure
Speaker 4: to do it, just to shut.
Speaker 7: Off dem any more.
Speaker 1: Dustin Hoffman remembered reading the article about because those last
Speaker 1: words and talking with Paul McCartney about the famous pinter.
Speaker 8: And I was so struck by that sentence that I thought, well,
Speaker 8: he must mean that he can't drink anymore because he
Speaker 8: doesn't want to get too high, because he has to
Speaker 8: go back and work. And in some strange way, you know,
Speaker 8: I can't drink anymore, also means it's the last time
Speaker 8: I'm going to be doing this with my friends, because
Speaker 8: I'm going to dine in a few hours many more.
Speaker 4: I like that that it was probably just something ordinary
Speaker 4: that was said earnestly, you know, farewell to his friends. Well,
Speaker 4: it becomes his last words. Then it becomes a quote
Speaker 4: in an article. Then Dustin reads it and makes it
Speaker 4: more than a quote, and it suggests it's a poem,
Speaker 4: it's a lyric, and he shows it to me, and
Speaker 4: I agree with his suggestion, and I for music to it.
Speaker 4: So it's a nice little way for things to happen.
Speaker 1: Because the song starts with the story of Picasso's last words,
Speaker 1: but after a minute or two it splinters into a montage.
Speaker 1: Among other things, there's a clip from an advertisement for
Speaker 1: a French tourism service offering French language programs and farm
Speaker 1: houses available for visitors to rent. Picasso lived much of
Speaker 1: his life in France, but it's not immediately obvious what
Speaker 1: the connection is in the song. Why does the song
Speaker 1: move into such abstraction. One might wager that it was
Speaker 1: a pinterly choice by McCartney. He himself is a photographer
Speaker 1: and pinter, and he's learned a thing or two about
Speaker 1: abstract art from other practitioners, especially the Dutch American expressionist Vielanning.
Speaker 4: When I started painting for years before, I'd had this
Speaker 4: idea that it must be meaningful, the painting. It just
Speaker 4: had to have some significance, some significant meaning, and it
Speaker 4: stopped me completely.
Speaker 3: I could never paint.
Speaker 2: I'm going, what significant idea am I coming up with?
Speaker 4: I'm looking at the garden that's lovely, but it's not
Speaker 4: really significant.
Speaker 3: So it stopped me, stopped me stopping.
Speaker 4: Then I met to Cooning and I asked him about
Speaker 4: what one of his paintings was and he said, I
Speaker 4: don't know. It looks like a cut hut. And I
Speaker 4: just thought Jesus, and it blew my mind open. In
Speaker 4: this context and in the song context, this idea of
Speaker 4: it not having to mean something is quite liberating.
Speaker 5: HM.
Speaker 1: We can hear this liberation in the second half of
Speaker 1: Picasso's Last Words. The song departs from its initial subject,
Speaker 1: veering into samples from other songs on the album Band
Speaker 1: on the Run. The first is from wings hit single.
Speaker 5: Jet When did you know or did you ever know?
Speaker 3: That Jet?
Speaker 4: Was going to be an it when it came to
Speaker 4: Jet or Ban on the Road, I had those of
Speaker 4: tricks that I could use that.
Speaker 2: One of the tricks with Jet is shouting.
Speaker 3: That works.
Speaker 4: It's always a good opener for any song. Choose a word,
Speaker 4: you know, run, I'm going, You've got to you better
Speaker 4: get out of here.
Speaker 3: Run. It works. It's the shouting.
Speaker 2: It's funny you should say that now, because I was
Speaker 2: reading a review yesterday, I think of a new translation
Speaker 2: of BeO Wolf and the first word of BeO Wolf
Speaker 2: is something like what what? And they think, you know,
Speaker 2: there are various ideas that's what that means.
Speaker 3: But yet it's yet.
Speaker 2: No, seriously that it was meant to represent. I think
Speaker 2: at some level the first strum on the lyre from
Speaker 2: the poet kicking off, but it's not a similar idea.
Speaker 4: Jet was actually the name of a pony we had, yes,
Speaker 4: a little little Shetland pony we had for the kids, Jim.
Speaker 7: Jim.
Speaker 1: The other sample is in the outro, which borrows from
Speaker 1: Missus Vanderbilt, that upbeat track from Band on the Run
Speaker 1: about McCartney's rejection of an aristocratic lifestyle.
Speaker 4: We used to get asked when we're first in the Beatles.
Speaker 4: Are you worried that you've joined the established? But we
Speaker 4: didn't know. We thought it was a club, which it
Speaker 4: was in London. I mean we didn't really know what
Speaker 4: they meant. And we knew what they meant were you've
Speaker 4: gone a bit society.
Speaker 2: Yeah you weren't a desperate at or yeah you know
Speaker 2: that's right.
Speaker 9: And it was like, na, we're not, we're not. We
Speaker 9: know a few posh people yet. But to me that
Speaker 9: missus Vanderbilt embodied richness and she was a famous like Rockefeller.
Speaker 9: If you needed to refer, you know, quiz programs and
Speaker 9: give me five rich people's names, it would have been Nabelt, Rockefeller, Getty.
Speaker 9: You know, there's certain ones you just know because they're
Speaker 9: in the newspapers. So that was what she was.
Speaker 4: And my idea is it's again, it's the same throwing over.
Speaker 3: Of the rules. I don't want that.
Speaker 4: I know it's money, it's rich andary, but what comes
Speaker 4: with it is bothersome.
Speaker 1: H The connection between Picasso's Dying Words, a French tourism manual,
Speaker 1: a character based on a Shetland pony, and an American
Speaker 1: aristocrat is not particularly clear beyond the context of the music,
Speaker 1: the meaning is slippery, so.
Speaker 2: They're bits from other songs. Has the notion of all
Speaker 2: songs being one song all songs? Yeah, Well, I'm prompted
Speaker 2: partly because in the literary sphere is strictly literary sphere.
Speaker 2: One of Stevens thinks of his poems as being one poem,
Speaker 2: the whole of harmonium. He calls it. It's all one thing.
Speaker 2: It's he spent his whole life writing one big phone.
Speaker 2: I mean, obviously they're discreet there by severate things, But
Speaker 2: I mean, does it mean anything to you at all
Speaker 2: that Stevens might have thought in those terms that you're
Speaker 2: doing one song? Your life is about writing one song?
Speaker 2: Or is that just too crazy and fanciful?
Speaker 4: But you know, as a bit of a stretch for me,
Speaker 4: because my stuff quite varied, and I think that kind
Speaker 4: of suggests it isn't one song.
Speaker 3: Right, It's a lot, right, a lot of them.
Speaker 4: They don't neatly fit together, you know. If you've got
Speaker 4: something like High Eye High next to Alan, it's quite
Speaker 4: a difference.
Speaker 1: Like many songs in McCartney's catalog, Picasso's Last Words doesn't
Speaker 1: strive for cohesion. It brings together fragments to juxtapose them.
Speaker 1: The edges between the samples are sharp. It's a form
Speaker 1: of musical cubism, the very style that Picasso pioneered.
Speaker 7: Hell Hell, Hell.
Speaker 1: Picasso's last words drink to Me from Wings album Band
Speaker 1: on the Run, released in nineteen seventy three. In the
Speaker 1: next episode, Love.
Speaker 4: I was being accused of just writing silly love songs
Speaker 4: and was in danger of starting to buy into this
Speaker 4: idea that you should just be a bit tougher and
Speaker 4: a bit more worldly. But then ask me realized that's
Speaker 4: exactly what love is.
Speaker 1: It's worldly, a polemical love song to the skeptics. That's
Speaker 1: next time on McCartney A Life in Lyrics. McCartney A
Speaker 1: Life in Lyrics is a co production between iHeartMedia NPL
Speaker 1: and Pushkin Industries.