How many paul mccartneys are there

The rumor spread like wildfire, as fans searched their Beatle albums for clues. It became a permanent part of Beatles lore—a totally fan-generated phenomenon that the band could only watch with amusement or exasperation.

But after the Detroit radio broadcast, people pounced on the story. And bringing up the rear, George in blue denim as the grave-digger—man, even in the conspiracy theories, George gets shafted with the dirty work. Fans began whispering about all the clues on the just-released Abbey Road. The real Paul was a lefty. He was No theory was too ridiculous to get taken seriously. Nope, sorry. Related: Greatest Beatles Songs.

When the rumor blew up, Paul was neither dead nor a walrus. How many bands was paul McCartney in? What was the Beatles first group name? What group was Jesse McCartney in? Who was Wings drummer? Why did paul McCartney and wings break up? Did Wings sell more records than the Beatles? Is paul McCartney the most successful musician of all time? An audience of luminaries turned into dozens of anonymous silhouettes.

He explained that he had relied on cutting-edge techniques to enhance the soundtrack and the imagery. Gone was the funereal tone. To retrieve the memories and sensations of the past, Proust relied mainly on the taste of crumbly cakes moistened with lime-blossom tea. The rest of humanity relies on songs. Songs are emotionally charged and brief, so we remember them whole: the melody, the hook, the lyrics, where we were, what we felt.

The older boys wore Beatle haircuts or acrylic Beatle wigs. Neither option looked particularly dashing with a yarmulke. My father, an exceedingly quiet man, found his deepest connection with me through music. And, because he did me the honor of listening to the Beatles, I listened when he played records that he said figured into what seemed so new: Gilbert and Sullivan, English music-hall tunes, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart, the jazz of the thirties and forties, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Little Richard.

In the same spirit of exchange, we watched Beatlemania take shape on television—news footage from Shea Stadium and airport press conferences. My father did not fail to mention that all the hysteria reminded him of a skinny Italian American singer from Hoboken. But this, he admitted, was much bigger. Some years later, I began to see how music, and the stories of musicians, could play an uncanny role in our lives.

One afternoon, I came home from my high school to report that a friend of mine was the son of a piano player. Wilson, my father explained, was the most elegant pianist in jazz. In the mid-thirties, he joined Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, and Gene Krupa, forming a swing-era quartet that was as remarkable for its integration as it was for its syncopated wildness.

In , my classmate invited my father and me and some friends to the opening of the Newport Jazz Festival at Carnegie Hall, where the old Goodman quartet was reuniting. We were allowed backstage beforehand, shyly watching as Teddy Wilson massaged his hands and fingers and slowly rotated his wrists. One afternoon this summer, I went to meet McCartney at his midtown office, a town house near the Ziegfeld Theatre.

It was a hot Saturday, and the Delta variant had broomed away most of the tourists and weekend wanderers. Although I was early, he was there at the reception desk to greet me. In the elevator to the second floor, we went through the ritual exchange of vaccine assurances and peeled off our masks. McCartney has slight pillows of jowl, but he remains trim. No one in the public eye lacks vanity, but McCartney is knowing about it.

We reached a large sitting room, and, as he plopped down on the couch, a hearing aid sprang out of his right ear. He rolled his eyes and, with a complicit smile, used his index finger to push the wormy apparatus back in place. In our conversations, McCartney struck me as charming and shrewd, an entertainer eager to please but intent on setting the story straight. He has navigated a life with little precedent, one in which a few home-town friends played a pivotal role in the rise of rock and roll, the invention of the teen-ager, youth culture, and the sixties.

The rewards for this have been unimaginable, and yet, even at this late date, McCartney wants the history of the Beatles and his place in it to come out right. Robert Weil, the editor-in-chief of Liveright, pursued McCartney for years to do the book and, in the end, helped put him together with the poet Paul Muldoon, who conducted dozens of interviews.

His mother, a midwife named Mary, had succumbed to breast cancer earlier that year. But one thing I remember vividly was on the bedclothes there was some blood. His father, Jim, was a cotton salesman and an amateur jazz musician. Although Paul grew up in Liverpool on a working-class housing estate, he went to a good secondary school where he caught the bug for literature from his teacher Alan Durband, who had studied with F. Leavis at Cambridge. His own room was filling with music.

In those days, though, a kid playing his first chords on a guitar and furtively writing his first lyrics was unusual. To turn this lonely preoccupation into something bigger, he had to go out looking for a friend and a band. On July 6, , McCartney, now fifteen, rode his bike to a nearby fair to hear a local skiffle group called the Quarry Men.

They had more in common than their talent and ambition. His father left the family when John was a child. Lennon, more than a year older than McCartney, masked his wound with cocksure wit.

And now he made a cunning, history-altering calculation. Not long afterward, McCartney brought in a school friend, George Harrison, a younger guitar player. All were working-class Liverpudlians though John was posher, Ringo poorer.

Together, they figured out guitar chords as if they were ancient runes. When Paul and George heard that someone across town knew the fingering for the B7 chord—the essential chord to go with E and A for every blues-based song in the rock repertoire—they got on a bus to meet the guy and learn it.

First in Liverpool, and then for seven, eight hours a night in Hamburg, the Beatles cut their teeth, learning scores of covers and building a reputation. At first, the songs were nothing special. What was clear from the start was that writing would be a matter of Lennon and McCartney.

As the Beatles gained a following, the sophistication of their songwriting deepened. Paul McCartney's wife is Nancy Shevell and they have been married since Nancy is Paul's third wife; The Beatle was married to Linda McCartney from until her untimely death from breast cancer in , and his second marriage to Heather Mills in ended in an acrimonious divorce in His eldest four children have all become well known in their own fields of interest.

The Beatle has sold million singles as a solo artist and has 18 Grammys and a knighthood. Paul owns an extensive music publishing catalogue that includes the rights to popular musicals such as Grease and Annie.