Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Hi, everyone, it's Paul Molldoin. Before we get to this episode,
Speaker 2: I wanted to let you know that you can binge
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Speaker 3: It was like an operatic undertaking.
Speaker 4: We had this little bit and that little bit of
Speaker 4: the song King Politine Pam.
Speaker 3: All these little bathroom window, all these little things.
Speaker 4: John I always would tend to finish the frightening into
Speaker 4: a full song, but at this point we kind of
Speaker 4: had enough songs for the album. We had these fragments,
Speaker 4: so we hit upon this idea to put the fragments
Speaker 4: together into a madly and then it would have its
Speaker 4: own foldness.
Speaker 5: How was that?
Speaker 4: And then I wanted an end, and I just happened
Speaker 4: to think of this little couplet, which in school I
Speaker 4: had learned that was often how Shakespeare ended with a
Speaker 4: rhyming couple. And I always thought that was pretty cool
Speaker 4: that it told his audience at the time, that's it.
Speaker 1: Folks, I'm Paul muld don.
Speaker 2: For a while now, I've been fortunate to spend time
Speaker 2: with one of the greatest songwriters of the era, and.
Speaker 5: Will you look at me, I'm going on to it.
Speaker 6: I'm actually a performer.
Speaker 2: That is, Sir Paul McCartney. We worked together on a
Speaker 2: book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours
Speaker 2: 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 2: This is McCartney, a life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir,
Speaker 2: and an improvised journey with one of the most conic
Speaker 2: figures in popular music. In this episode, the entire Abbey
Speaker 2: Road Medley Golden Slumbers, carry that with and the end.
Speaker 2: As a poet, I tend to approach song lyrics as
Speaker 2: if they were indeed poetry. Sometimes these readings are a stretch,
Speaker 2: but Paul McCartney takes pride in his literary background. In fact,
Speaker 2: he says that had his music career not taken off,
Speaker 2: he may well have been an English teacher.
Speaker 6: And the.
Speaker 2: BASTI McCartney's choice to conclude Abbey Road with a rhyming couplet.
Speaker 2: Hearkens back to a long tradition of endings.
Speaker 7: For never was a story of more woe than this
Speaker 7: of Juliet and her Robeo.
Speaker 2: Shakespeare often marked the end of a scene with a
Speaker 2: rhyming couplet, which signals to the audience some degree of finality.
Speaker 2: The couplet indicates the completion of a thought.
Speaker 7: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
Speaker 7: so long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Speaker 2: If the two lines and Paul McCartney's the end function
Speaker 2: as a concluding couplet, I have come to understand the
Speaker 2: entire Abbey Road medley golden slumbers. Carry that with and
Speaker 2: then the end as a sort of figurative sonnet. It's
Speaker 2: not that Paul McCartney ended Abbey Road with fourteen perfect
Speaker 2: lines in iambic pentameter. There aren't three quatrains following a
Speaker 2: rigid rhyme scheme leading into the couplet at the end.
Speaker 2: This is rock and roll, after all. But when we
Speaker 2: zoom out, a sonnet is often a poem that wrestles
Speaker 2: with a particular claim, approaches it from several angles, indivisible
Speaker 2: sections before coming to a sort of synthesizing conclusion. It's
Speaker 2: a rhetorical argument. The poet plays out on the page,
Speaker 2: and the couplet at the end serves as a resolution.
Speaker 2: As McCartney put it, the ending says that's it, folks.
Speaker 2: In other words, these two lines, the only lyrics in
Speaker 2: the song, are deceptively simple to understand them. Let's return
Speaker 2: to the first song of the medley, the first stanza,
Speaker 2: if you will golden slumbers.
Speaker 8: Once there was away to get back on.
Speaker 2: Paul McCartney was raised towards the end of the golden
Speaker 2: edge of piano music. Yes, in the mid twentieth century,
Speaker 2: records were ubiquitous, but it was still not uncommon for
Speaker 2: families or party guests to gather around the piano in
Speaker 2: the living room.
Speaker 4: You read about Gershwin and it says, you know, in
Speaker 4: New York at that time, every apartment, every building had
Speaker 4: a piano. That was the one thing they all had.
Speaker 4: So I do think a lot of Golden era music
Speaker 4: came out of that fact. That was the thing that
Speaker 4: many houses had a piano. So yeah, there were lots
Speaker 4: of pianists. My dad was our warm his friend at
Speaker 4: the cotton exchange. Freddie Rimmer was another one for his family,
Speaker 4: so there was always someone who could sort of.
Speaker 5: Play the piano.
Speaker 4: And then I think when records came in, then that's
Speaker 4: how people started to play their music.
Speaker 5: Except you know, whenever there was.
Speaker 4: A gathering the New Year's Eve do in our case,
Speaker 4: the boo and the piano were wheeled out, you.
Speaker 8: Know, once there was a way to get back.
Speaker 4: Home, and the piano would be belting out these old
Speaker 4: songs that everyone knew like everyone knew them, particularly the Aunties.
Speaker 4: The Aunties had them down and knew all the verses.
Speaker 4: But the camaraderie of people all standing around in a
Speaker 4: room getting drunk singing these songs were something very special.
Speaker 8: Once there was a way to get back home.
Speaker 4: And I always thought my family was just an ordinary family,
Speaker 4: But I realize now how lucky I was to have
Speaker 4: that kind of a family where people were decent, good,
Speaker 4: friendly people, not rich, nobody had any money, but that
Speaker 4: was almost an advantage because they had to do things themselves.
Speaker 8: Once those away.
Speaker 9: To get back on, once those away.
Speaker 10: To get back home, sleep really darn do not cry,
Speaker 10: and I will sing another bye.
Speaker 2: In the final days of the Beatles, McCartney took a
Speaker 2: trip back home to Liverpool. He was visiting his father,
Speaker 2: who had remarried and was living with his wife, Angela
Speaker 2: and her daughter Ruth. Even though Paul McCartney didn't know
Speaker 2: how to read sheet music, he went riffling through his
Speaker 2: stepsister's piano bench to see what he could find.
Speaker 4: I always look in a piano seat because people always
Speaker 4: have sheet they always used to. Definitely now sometimes it
Speaker 4: can be empty, but I always look to see. And
Speaker 4: this time I think either in the pianosy door it
Speaker 4: might have been up on the music stap. Was this song,
Speaker 4: Golden Slumbers.
Speaker 2: The sheet music here, performed by the Cambridge Singers, was
Speaker 2: a Victorian piano melody accompanying a seventeenth century poem called
Speaker 2: Cradle Song. The poem came from a play Patient Griselle,
Speaker 2: which was written by the Elizabethan dramatists Thomas Dekker, Henry
Speaker 2: Chettle and William Houghton.
Speaker 4: Golden Slumbers, fill your I smiled awake when you're a
Speaker 4: sleeping I do not cry, And I was in a lullaby.
Speaker 4: That chorus that I've used the course literally is the
Speaker 4: lyrics to an old Victorian.
Speaker 5: Song is isn't we called sampling? Well, it's called stealing.
Speaker 4: But because I don't read music, I didn't know what
Speaker 4: the melody that went with this was.
Speaker 5: So I put my own melody to.
Speaker 4: It and just took these words. It's turned out to
Speaker 4: be quite soulful. I think that's what attracted me to
Speaker 4: those lyrics in the first place. It's like, you know,
Speaker 4: that sort of consoling the baby or reading kids bedtimes story.
Speaker 4: I find that something very deep in that, I mean,
Speaker 4: very human and international.
Speaker 5: It strikes a chord with me.
Speaker 11: Sleep very dark, do not Cry, and I will sing
Speaker 11: another of DIY.
Speaker 4: When I saw those lyrics golden slumbers fill your eyes,
Speaker 4: it just seemed like a beautiful way to say, go
Speaker 4: to sleep, my dear smiles, awake you when you rise.
Speaker 4: I like that too, that's nice and very optimistic.
Speaker 10: You wear last, Sleep very dark, do not cry.
Speaker 5: And then I did the other bit.
Speaker 4: Once there was a way to get back home, because
Speaker 4: I think at that point.
Speaker 5: I hadn't been home for a.
Speaker 4: Long time to get back and here I was at
Speaker 4: my dad's house. Now this wasn't quite home because it
Speaker 4: was a house I'd bought him.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: When I got some money. So it wasn't quite home,
Speaker 4: but it was Liverpool and it was homewood.
Speaker 6: It was his home once those.
Speaker 9: Away to get back home.
Speaker 10: Sleep really darn, do not cry, and.
Speaker 8: I will sing.
Speaker 4: So you know, here I was seeing this lovely lullaby
Speaker 4: lyric and thinking of all things warm and wonderful. And
Speaker 4: you know what's really nice about is talking about this
Speaker 4: touching a nerve in the human psyche. One of the
Speaker 4: things I love about writing songs is you'll be watching
Speaker 4: a film or listen to the radio or something and
Speaker 4: it'll reappear. It'll appear with someone else singing it, and
Speaker 4: I just love that it's touched their nerve so much
Speaker 4: so that they think this would be a good song
Speaker 4: for this film.
Speaker 2: One of the times golden Slumbers reappeared was in the
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen children's film Sing, where the song was covered
Speaker 2: by Jennifer Hudson portraying a glamorous and vocally talented animated sheep.
Speaker 4: They use golden slumbers to open the thing and it's
Speaker 4: very powerful, and then right at the end we've had
Speaker 4: the whole story and everything's worked out, they use it again.
Speaker 4: So you know, people have said to me, do you
Speaker 4: remind people doing versions of your song do you think
Speaker 4: they're distortions of your original meaning? And I say no, no, no,
Speaker 4: far from it. I'd love to hear another interpretation of
Speaker 4: one of my songs is a compliment that they thought
Speaker 4: enough of it to cover it. So what's great about
Speaker 4: it is the next generation who are watching a kid's
Speaker 4: animation thing now know Golden Slumbers for the same reason exactly.
Speaker 4: They now know Blackbird. So I'm not surprised when people
Speaker 4: come up to me or Little Tommy's favorite song is Blackbird.
Speaker 6: What was Blackbird used in recently?
Speaker 4: I was used in boss Baby, which is another animation.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I haven't seen that either.
Speaker 4: Another gap in your cultural picture. It is.
Speaker 2: Okay now, I would be too much to say that
Speaker 2: this is a kind of lumbaby for the Beatles.
Speaker 4: I think that's too much to say, right, but you
Speaker 4: know it. We've been written around that time, and who knows,
Speaker 4: you know that I could have been feeling.
Speaker 5: Down.
Speaker 4: I actually can't tell you whether this is true or not,
Speaker 4: but it's very possible that I was feeling down in
Speaker 4: London went back up to see my dad. I'm feeling
Speaker 4: better now I'm in Liverpool and thinking of the troubles
Speaker 4: down south and thinking, you know, wouldn't it be nice
Speaker 4: to get home, wouldn't it be nice to have that
Speaker 4: comfortable feeling again once.
Speaker 8: There was away to get.
Speaker 9: Back, once there was away.
Speaker 5: To get back.
Speaker 2: There were, indeed, as bon McCartney said, troubles south of
Speaker 2: Liverpool about which to feel bad. Down in London, the
Speaker 2: Beatles were hashing out their business matters and the very
Speaker 2: future of the band. This was the end of the
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties. The Beatles were the most famous music in
Speaker 2: the world, but the tensions brewing in the group were
Speaker 2: impossible to ignore.
Speaker 8: You never give me.
Speaker 2: John, George and Ringo wanted to sign a deal with
Speaker 2: the businessman Alan Klein, but Paul was convinced they would
Speaker 2: come to regret that decision. The dispute was tearing the
Speaker 2: band apart. It was becoming a heavy burden to bear.
Speaker 4: So that was a heavy that was heavy the business
Speaker 4: meeting should go in. They were just soul destroying. The
Speaker 4: would sit around and it was a place you didn't
Speaker 4: want to be with people you didn't want to be with.
Speaker 4: And I could just see that this guy was calling
Speaker 4: to steal everything we put in the bank or invested
Speaker 4: in Scottish farms or whatever it was was going and
Speaker 4: this guy was going to have it like he had
Speaker 4: Sam Cook and he had the Stones.
Speaker 3: And I remember asking Mick Jacket for a new one,
Speaker 3: said what is this kind like?
Speaker 4: Because I could see the others were very enamored up
Speaker 4: for various reasons.
Speaker 3: He was was doing a great flannel job on them.
Speaker 8: You know, I gave you man, I only seen you man.
Speaker 11: And in the middle of the sabres.
Speaker 12: I break down.
Speaker 2: The band's breakup was so agonizing that McCartney even started
Speaker 2: to see it as divine punishment. With the paradise of
Speaker 2: the Beatles success crumbling before him, he wondered if Man's
Speaker 2: Original Sin could be the blame.
Speaker 4: That whole period a year, a couple of years, was
Speaker 4: very sort of heavy, and it seemed to me, you know,
Speaker 4: this all tied in very unfortunately with stuff that was
Speaker 4: out there already, like original Sin, even though my mom, crystalmcathley,
Speaker 4: we weren't brought up as I thought, it was very
Speaker 4: depressive to think that you were born a loser.
Speaker 3: Fuck, what chance have you got? You know, freak out
Speaker 3: is you're a sinner?
Speaker 13: No lot, I'm a very nice person, I'm a bias
Speaker 13: idea that because you said, or because some priests or
Speaker 13: some vicar sets loving.
Speaker 2: That, and if contemplating the fall of man wasn't enough,
Speaker 2: the psychedelic trips at the end of the sixties didn't
Speaker 2: make these existential questions any easier.
Speaker 4: You know, we'd started off smoking part right, and it
Speaker 4: was just giggles.
Speaker 3: It was such fun.
Speaker 4: We loved it and it was great and the worst
Speaker 4: we've happened is you'd fall asleep, and that was fine.
Speaker 4: But once it got into sort of more serious stuff,
Speaker 4: you know, lest staying up all night wishing it had
Speaker 4: were off.
Speaker 3: And it wouldn't. It was a bit we were heavy.
Speaker 4: Then you were just sort of doing it and there
Speaker 4: wasn't a slight relief.
Speaker 3: It was heavy.
Speaker 4: So you know, this idea, boy, you're going to carry
Speaker 4: that weight was sort of.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, life's not all joyous. There's a weight
Speaker 3: to it and you're going to have to carry it.
Speaker 2: When taken as two Stanzas in conversation, Golden slumbers and
Speaker 2: carry that wet seem to be a reckoning with the
Speaker 2: tenderness and gravity of adulthood. There's a gentle lullaby and
Speaker 2: then the burden of conflict, longing for the way things
Speaker 2: used to be, and knowing you can never truly return home.
Speaker 2: The beginning of the end is a cycle of two
Speaker 2: bar guitar solos traded off between John George and Paul.
Speaker 2: Jeff Emeric, the Beatles studio engineer, observed that during the
Speaker 2: recording session for the End, Paul and George looked like
Speaker 2: they had gone back in time, like they were kids again,
Speaker 2: determined to outdo one another. Yet there was no animosity,
Speaker 2: no tension at all. You could tell they were simply
Speaker 2: having fun. After the wistfulness of golden slumbers and the
Speaker 2: heaviness of carry that wet, we come to what in
Speaker 2: a sonnet would be called a volta, a turn. In
Speaker 2: this case, the turn of the song leaves behind the
Speaker 2: longing and the burden and brings us back to love.
Speaker 1: And love.
Speaker 4: That was the end, And in the end, the love
Speaker 4: you tip is equal to the love you make, which
Speaker 4: is a nice way to end my show.
Speaker 3: Now that's how I end my concerts, and it feels
Speaker 3: very complease.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I'm kind of proud that it is a
Speaker 4: rhyming couplet, just as I was taught all those years
Speaker 4: ago on my little literature teacher.
Speaker 5: But you know the thing is, you know, I never
Speaker 5: went on.
Speaker 4: To study because I was in the band and the
Speaker 4: band took over. But that was the path I thought
Speaker 4: I was headed for with my eye level in literature.
Speaker 2: Was this medley a lullaby for the Beatles? Was it
Speaker 2: meant to capture the sweet, nostalgia, heavy, wet and grand
Speaker 2: finale of the group. The End is believed to be
Speaker 2: the last song John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and
Speaker 2: Paul McCartney ever recorded. All together. They had grown from
Speaker 2: boys writing songs in their Liverpool parlor rooms, too, arguably
Speaker 2: the most eventual musicians of the twentieth century, and while
Speaker 2: this may have been the end of the group, all
Speaker 2: for members continued to share their music with the world.
Speaker 4: When you think about it, it is just a little
Speaker 4: combination of vibrations and it shouldn't affect our heart strings,
Speaker 4: but boy it does. And music can make you cry,
Speaker 4: it can make you laugh, and it shouldn't. It's nothing
Speaker 4: more than just vibrations with some words attached. And how
Speaker 4: that happens, I'm not sure, but I know it happens.
Speaker 5: I know it happens.
Speaker 4: To me. I know it happens to other people, and
Speaker 4: I'm just proud that my music can do that.
Speaker 6: I'm not quite sure how, but it can. I don't
Speaker 6: mind it being a mystery.
Speaker 2: The end from the Beatles nineteen sixty nine album Abbey
Speaker 2: wrote McCartney. A Life in Lyrics is a co production
Speaker 2: between iHeartMedia NPL and Pushkin Industries