Why didn't Paul write and record with George after 1970?

Apparently Paul told George exactly that when they were rehearsing "Hey Jude": "No, George, you come in on the second chorus, maybe." Dismissive. He might as well have told George, "You know what, George, I don't think this song needs another guitar- why don't you play bass instead?" like it was a sort of demotion or something. No tact at all, like I said. Paul might have thought he was being diplomatic (he probably thought he was being diplomatic by taking the guitar right out of Henry McCullough's hands and playing the lick Henry said couldn't be played during Band On The Run rehearsals when McCullough ended up quitting too), but his "You come in on the second chorus" suggestion still seems a little bit "f--k you" to me. Or at least, that was probably George's reply...

 

How about David Gilmour and/or Pete Townshend?

Paul probably wasn't as close to them as George was to the Wilburys members, but he's hung out with them (especially Gilmour) for around 40 years now.

 

They weren't work colleagues on their first day on the job together. By the time of the Hey Jude sessions they had been playing music together for well over a decade. I'm not sure tact was required at that point. I don't think you can create great records with tact if by being tactful you permit poor decisions to be made about the music. Paul wrote the song. George was wanting to play something that wasn't needed. Paul told him not to. Thankfully. The quality of the song was more important than George's feelings.

Rather ironic that this example - of George over-playing or playing something not called for - is quoted over and over again as either the tipping point or the flames that were stoked during the Get Back sessions. George was a master of tasteful economy in his playing.

 

There was also a nice section of Keith's Life when he talks about hanging with Paul in the Caribbean.

 

Indeed he was, and his idea for echoing the melody in "Hey Jude" does seem ill-advised, and McCartney was right to shoot it down. It's the way Paul shot it down that likely irked Harrison- a total dismissal: "You come in on the second chorus, maybe." Like I said, he might as well have told George to not even bother playing at all or to play bass. No, tact might not have been required after a decade of working together, but it still makes McCartney come off like a bit of an a-shole. Mind ya, they both come off badly, what with Harrison stomping off and sulking in the control room for the rest of the session.

Not to mention the picture Keith included of them hanging out at Keith's and smoking a spliff. That's no Marlboro Keith's got in his hand in that pic!

 

I've heard this story several times, but this is the first time I've read Bernie's full story. Reading George's quotes over and over again, there's no way someone could be that stupid, playing something obviously stolen in front of the very person that it was stolen from, and giving a measly defense when confronted.

I'm not defending George, but obviously Krause was over for some reason, and George probably intended for the whole thing to go over like "hey Bernie, remember that time you played that synth at the Lomax session? Well I liked it so much that I'm putting it on one side of my next album, but I'm going to pay you of course, what do you think?" and it backfired. For all we know, he might have made a half-***sed attempt to patch things up by asking him how to set up a bagpipe sound.

We'll never know the true story, but obviously someone who got along with so many people in the music industry wouldn't be dumb enough to do that.

 

I assume this has already been mentioned, but:

In all the years after The Beatles break-up, every little collaboration was viewed as a possible step to a Beatles reunion, or at least sparked interest in one.
Up until 1980, I'm sure John, Paul, George and Ringo were wary of that.
(After John's tragedy, there were off the wall suggestions that Julian could take his father's place.)

I think that George and Paul were very sensitive about not stirring up any reunion discussions.

The Anthology series helped to reduce the continual speculations.

 

Well, he was dumb enough to copy 'He's So Fine'. But if you click on the link above you'll see the build-up to that story from Krause.

 

Did it??? I recall the opposite, at least in terms of further 'threetle' collaborations.

 

The way I recall it, the singles "Free As A Bird" and "Real Love" from the Anthologies helped quell any further speculations.
It helped answer the endless "What would they sound like now?", "Why don't they try to get together and record something now?" etc questions...
At least for some.

 

It is open to interpretation, of course, but I don't see Paul as coming off badly. He told George not to play something that wasn't going to work. The best bands arrive at greatness by being talented individuals and a good team capable of great ideas and working to a system that allow the best ideas to prevail. In some cases, it's one individual who comes up with the best ideas consistently. Other times it's everyone. Other times it's a mix.

I think this example just got legs as a major catalyst in the tension between them because of a film crew being present. Same as with the argument in Let It Be which is so often referred to as evidence that Paul was a jerk and that George hated Paul. Nevermind that a million other arguments between various combinations of the group members were not recorded.

As to the original question (which my post otherwise completely ignores!) I think the answer has been given - they never did write together and it made even less sense for them to try to do it later when they both probably realised that there wasn't much fuel left in the tank for working together. I reckon they wisely made the choice to stick to non-musical and non-business interactions as much as possible.

 

yeah those were just terrible.

 

It is obvious that George was having fun in that interview, and that he is also being careful not to be rude when talking about 'Broadstreet' and Paul's decision to not attend the 'Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Fame' induction ceremony, but I do think that his last comment about it 'being true' that Paul had run out of good new songs was not intended as a joke; it seems to me that George was simply stating his opinion on the back of what had originally been a joke in response to what the interviewer said about Paul potentially re-recording Lennon's songs.

That doesn't mean that he was attacking Paul, merely that he felt comfortable enough to criticise Paul's songwriting, and that shouldn't come off as a surprise considering that George dismissed most of the 'McCartney' album apart from a couple of songs when it was released, and seeing as he also dismissed 'BTTE' (whilst praising 'I'm Carrying' from 'London Town' and admitting that he didn't like punk music). George never had a problem with criticising Paul's music, and neither did Ringo or John. Paul often didn't respond, but he also wasn't always positive when discussing George and John's music (I recall him not saying many positive words about 'Cloud Nine', apart from a bit of praise for one or two songs).

As for Paul's relationships with other musicians, it is true to say that he has had many long term friendships with people like Stevie Wonder, David Gilmour, Elvis Costello, Steve Miller, etc, but it is also true to say that he seems to keep a greater distance from them than George did with his musician friends, as far as I can tell.
Michael Jackson seems to be one exception to the rule; after all, he actually lived with Paul for some time when they first became friends, which is partly why I imagine Paul was so upset when Michael did purchase the ATV catalogue.

Regarding the friendship between George and Paul, I am sure that there is still a lot that we don't know; why did George visit Paul during the recording of 'BTTE', why did George agree to play on 'Wanderlust' in the first place, is it true that George met up with Ringo, Paul and George Martin during the 'Tug Of War' sessions in Montserrat, how often did Paul and Linda dine out with George and Olivia, how often did Paul play ukulele with George, how far did Paul go in trying to instigate a songwriting partnership with George in the late 80's, etc, etc.

It is also worth pointing out that the Beatles were in the strange position that they often sued each other for years whilst being on fairly friendly terms with each other (John's letter's to Paul in the early 70's shine a light on this), and sueing someone was potentially not as insulting to George as it would seem to other people (as I said elsewhere in the thread, George even sued or considered sueing Ringo over his recording of 'I'll Still Love You').

The photo of George smiling with George Martin and Paul is certainly a lovely surprise!

 

It's also in the telling and who the person is that's telling it. We each have our perspective.

 

While there were certainly occasions when one of the ex-Beatles criticized the work of another ex-Beatle, I think if you look for it there is plenty of evidence of their life long friendships enduring. Some of the strongest evidence for this is the relationships forged between their children. In recent years we've seen pictures of Stella and Dhani in LA, of Julian and Dhani in LA, of Lee and Sean in London, of Stella and Sean in New York - even of Stella at Friar Park! And there have been recording projects too like Dhani's contribution to James' album last year. If their parents hadn't been good friends I don't think these 2nd generation friendships would have been made and remained as strong as they appear to be.

 

Eric Idle said this about Paul and George's relationship diring the dedication of George's Hollywood star:

"I’m very, very pleased that Sir Paul McCartney is here because - a fact that isn’t necessarily very well known - he just behaved impeccably during George’s demise. And for the long time George was dying, Paul was there; he was wonderful, supportive, in a way that you could just not imagine, just when you would want a friend, an old colleague, to be there for you. And it’s not terribly well known, but George actually died in Paul’s house, which is rather an amazing fact, and is one of the reasons I will never stay with John Cleese."

 

FWIW, George's little smile at the end there does lend some support to your theory. Some.

The thing is, it would be a LOT easier to consider it a joke if George hadn't before, and after this, slammed Paul in the press.
Something else that makes me think it's a diss is the fact that this was a period when Paul's music was indeed at its all time low.

 

Aside from getting the year wrong (the label Electronic Sound was released on didn't even exist anymore in 1970!), it's a complicated story. Obviously putting the story into the correct timeline reveals more than some rich guy demanding a Moog synthesizer. If this was January 1969, George would have either recently left the Beatles or recently finished a disastrous month, as well as being in the midst of pretending to be a manager for a failing company. I'm not defending George, as there's probably some truth to Krause's story, but there's two side to every story.

Also, there's more to the Bright Tunes lawsuit than there looks like, the company initially let it pass, then decided to sue once the company filed for bankruptcy. George wasn't the only one who stole, some got caught ("Come Together"), some didn't (the Beatles' continued lifting of "Solider of Love" on "It Won't Be Long" and "All I've Got to Do").

 

What specifically did George say about the McCartney album? I'm curious to see that.

I don't think it's accurate to say he "dimissed" BTTE, if you're basing that on the 1979 Rolling Stone interview where he praised "I'm Carrying." What he said regarding Paul's music was:
"I think it's inoffensive. I've always preferred Paul's good melodies to his screaming rock & roll tunes. The tune I thought was sensational on the London Town album was "I'm Carrying," but all the noisy, beaty things I'm not into at all. But then that's not only with Paul's music, that goes right across the board. I'm not a fan of that sort of punky, heavy, tinny stuff. I like a nice melody."
In those comments it stands to reason he's probably talking about something from the BTTE album, since he was with Paul in the studio that day (in February 1979) and presumably heard something he was working on. But it could be an opinion about 1 or 2 songs rather than the entire album, and it's notable that he says it's the genre rather than Paul's music specifically that he's not into. I suspect he would have liked "Baby's Request" a lot.

If I had to guess I'd speculate it was a social call. He was in town to do a bunch of promo stuff for the album and perhaps just took the opportunity to visit. But who knows. It seems unlikely there was any musical purpose behind it.

The question I'm interested in, is why did the solo on "Wanderlust" never happen? It was put off that one day to do "All Those Years Ago" but why was there not any follow up after that?

I don't think there's much of any evidence George was in Montserrat, is there? Earlier in this thread there was discussion that the rumor is based on an offhand comment in a John Edward book that likely in error. There isn't any other evidence, is there?

 

This is all a bit contrary. If misremembering dates and years is a sign of factual dubiety, all of The Beatles should get the same sceptical reaction. Yes, there are two sides to every story, but unless one is a relativist one goes beyond that to assess which one is more plausible than the other.

And the second defence about pinching stuff, strikes me as nothing more than, 'They were all at it', which is hardly a vindication.

George was no less contradictory and capricious than the others. Perhaps more so, in appearance at least, because of his tendency to project an air of spiritual coherence and authority that sometimes obscured his all too human failures and fallibilities. What emerges from many biographies of him is his ability to 'act the Beatle' when it suited him, and then resume his more equable and endearing personality without a moment's reflection or embarrassment. That was probably true of all four of them, but it merely irks a little that George is sometimes depicted as being more 'normal' than the rest.

 

On this whole business of Paul perhaps not spending as much time socializing with other musicians, I went back to Bob Spitz's book The Beatles last night, and went to the section I think starting on page 436 where Spitz spends a few pages talking about Paul's relationship with Jane Asher. I think a lot of how Paul handled himself over the years goes back to Jane and what they did during this period. In short Jane introduced him, and got him involved with, a much wider scene that "just" musicians. It started with a literal move away from the shared digs with the others that John first began moving with Cynthia (since they were obviously married) to an apartment, but Paul was not far behind when Jane's parents let him move into their house. This as a practical matter immediately took Paul out of the shared life and lifestyle with the others he had had going back to the Hamburg days, and put him in an environment that was removed from that in several ways.

But it also, due to Jane Asher's own life and interests, her being a star of sorts from childhood in theater and television, brought Paul into a world of actors, literary people, artists and such all in the "swinging London" of the day. From Spitz's account and that of others I have come across, this suggests that Jane Asher's influence took him a bit away during periods of his social life from "only" musicians that he was making music with into a more varied world that Paul quite obviously took to. But it was also most likely a world of more casual acquaintances and one where his celebrity status helped him move into that world, one that he had no real previous experience of.

What I am suggesting is that Paul's relationship with Jane Asher set him on a course where he spent much more of his social life with people who were not primarily musicians, and this was an approach to his social life that he apparently continued for most of his life. I think it all goes back to the way it was with her when they started out.

 

Following up on my previous post I think it hard to overestimate Jane Asher's influence on Paul in general. She sounds by all accounts to have been quite the force and persona in her own right with her own career and obviously intelligent and beautiful. I would argue as much as Patty Boyd was a muse to both George and Eric so was Jane to Paul, with obvious songs like And I Love Her, We Can Work it Out, Here, There and Everywhere, Things We Said Today, I'm Looking Through You, and I think For No One (about their breakup) about her. Plus John is on record of how much of their songwriting took place in Jane's house including as far back as I Want to Hold Your Hand, and there's apparently good evidence Paul wrote Yesterday there, too.

Given that general influence, and the extent of it, it seems reasonable to identify how their relationship probably affected this whole business of how much time Paul spent with other musicians as compared to others.

 

To be fair to George, he also had many other sets of friends. I say sets consciously, because lots of people have said how surprised they were by how he kept one group of friends separate from another. There were his religious contacts, his comedy and film contacts, his Indian music friends, his racing car friends, etc etc. Much distortion comes from how McCartney and Harrison are depicted by biographers, who tend to struggle to infiltrate the many spheres in which the two men moved. The fact that McCartney did and does live in London means that he's always been able to move from place to place and friend to friend very easily and inconspicuously, so he flits from the theatre to the art world to literary circles to musical figures. There was one evening when he spent time with Allan Ginsberg, Edna O'Brien and Stevie Winwood, all separately and self-contained. Similarly, George often had different groups of friends, like Jackie Stewart, Michael Palin, Ravi Shankar and Joe Brown, over to Henley on separate occasions. I think the only intriguing difference is that many people seem to talk about socialising with George, while few do so about doing so with Paul. The effect is to present one as more sociable than the other, which simply never was the case.

 

You've made some very interesting observations about Jane's influence on Paul. And I think you're spot on about this last bit -- that Paul's friends are outside of music even today. That tendency might have started with Jane but it would have been exacerbated after the Beatles' break up when Paul seemed to assume everyone in the music world thought he was the bad guy -- unavoidable when you are the one who files the suit to break up the band but especially unavoidable given all the trash talking that John did. That seemed to make Paul forever insecure about his friendships with big names in the music business. Pete Townshend was once quoted about this: "Linda was very, very pro-active in their social life," recalls Pete Townshend, who was a close friend. "When they were driving through this town, she was the one who used to get him to come and visit, even made a couple of surprise visits. She was the one who would call me and then put him on the phone, and we would talk. Then he would be open and entirely accessible, but it was Linda who was always reminding him that he really had friends, that he was likable as a person, that he could reach and be reached. . . she was constantly there with the idea that there is love between people when the tape stops running and the curtain is down." Kinda sad when you think about it. He just didn't have the confidence that other big name musicians wanted to be friends, let alone that they were willing to collaborate. (And Pete spoke at Linda's memorial service.)

A couple of things that came to mind about Jane Asher's influence on Paul.

1. John Lennon was a source of tension in Paul and Jane's relationship. She wasn't all that fond of John. He was downright crude to her on more than one occasion, and I recall one of her few quotes was about how she didn't like who Paul became when he was around John. I wonder how much the fact that Jane disliked John affected Paul and John's partnership, and distanced Paul from John. It doesn't seem like John was very good for Jane and Paul's relationship, either.

2. Jane wasn't close to any of the other Beatle wives/girlfriends. Might have been a class thing or a career thing, but the end result would have been that Paul distanced himself from the other 3 fabs whose wives did get along and hung out together. Jane and Paul were out and about a lot in London -- without any of the other Beatles. I recall Jane&Paul took a trip or two with Ringo&Mo but I can't recall (like I'd know! Ha! i mean from the famous photos we've seen) a single vacation Jane&Paul took with George&Patti or with John&Cynthia. But Paul did take a trip to Paris with John in 1967, but with Maggie McGivern, whom John liked.

3. Barry Miles talks about the central role of Jane in Paul's life in a post on Miles' web site (Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now. | Miles ) about his terrific and underrated book, Many Years From Now. On Miles' web site he makes this comment:

4. Not everyone thought Paul and Jane were well-matched. For example, Marianne Faithful said she never thought they were a good match. She said Paul was warm, and Jane was cold.


An aside and another interesting comment Miles made about Many Years From Now: "Andrew Wylie, my agent, suggested Paul McCartney as the subject of my next book, ‘but it has to be authorised,’ he said. I wasn’t sure I could even reach Paul. I hadn’t seen him for at least ten years; when Linda came on the scene she made sure that all his old pals that knew and liked Jane were excluded, so I didn’t know how he would react to the idea of a biography." It's interesting how all of Paul's friends say it was Linda who isolated Paul in those early years. And all of Linda's friends say it was Paul who isolated Linda.

Not sure any of this has much to do with Paul & George -- except that Jane and Patti weren't ever close, either. So that would have affected how much time Paul spent with George during the Beatles.

 

Fabulous comment; thanks for posting it! It is very informative and I have learned quite a few things that I didn't know.

The Townsend quote is very revealing; I definitely get the feeling that Linda very much encouraged Paul when it came to his friendships with other musicians, and her comments after John's death about how she wished that John and Paul had helped each other seem to back this up.