Macca Masticates in Believing

Each One Believing: On Stage, Off Stage, and Backstage

By Paul McCartney. Chronicle Books, 224 pp., $48, hardcover.

In the latter half of the 1970s, I was surprised to find that Paul McCartney was still publishing a newsletter for his fans. That was the kind of thing late Beatles manager Brian Epstein had been so good at arranging, but it seemed wildly anachronistic at the time, considering everything that had happened to the music world--and to the concept of "fandom"--since Epstein's death in 1967.

I could now probably sell for considerable cash the copies of Club Sandwich (yes, that was the name of the McCartney fan club and its publication) that we cut up at the Ubyssey, the student newspaper at the University of B.C. The editors there enrolled the paper in the fan club for a joke, and we enjoyed slicing out the pictures, like that of the future knight and former Monkee Micky Dolenz hamming it up at some society do, so that we could glue the glossies to the wall of the office with captions like, "Two people who used to play rock 'n' roll compare wrinkles."

That was 25 years ago. Almost-wrinkleless McCartney is now riding the crest of having mightily pleased the people of the U.S. with "Freedom", a deft counterpoint to the terrorist-sympathizing (and thematically identical) ditty "Give Ireland Back to the Irish". Buoyed up on a wave of such sentiment as only he can appreciate and exploit, Big Macca wowed the world with a tour in 2002, showing he is still toppermost of the poppermost. Each One Believing: On Stage, Off Stage, and Backstage is nearly a kilogram of adulatory Club Sandwich about the tour, with plenty of glossies you might want to stick on a wall with appropriately disparaging captions.

John Lennon dismissed fame on one hand but openly exploited it on the other; George Harrison became frankly frightened of it; Ringo Starr seems endlessly amused by it. To Sir Paul McCartney it has become as natural as playing bass, being enormously talented, and having wives with long, blond hair. Celebrity is the ocean he loves to swim in, and part of his public-relations strategy is to remind us whenever possible that he is still just a regular guy who, as Douglas Adams put it, can whistle a tune on his way to the store to buy cigarettes and then the next day buy Yorkshire with the proceeds.

Mind you, the popularity in the U.S. of "Freedom" notwithstanding, the 2002 tour might not have been such a wild success if McCartney had played only post-Beatles and post-Wings compositions. He was far too astute for that, with Beatles 1 on its way to sales of 25 million and all of the world ignoring his recent solo work. Instead, the masses came out to hear him play music mostly from his best-remembered period, 1965 ­75.

The book takes several spins away from that potential diminishment of ego. For instance, we are reminded several times that McCartney's band was hailed by critics as "better than the Beatles", which one might expect from professionals 20 years older and long familiar with the material, compared to youths whose transitions from composition to studio recording, and therefore to set-in-stone arrangements for live performances, were sometimes a matter of days.

We get a lot of McCartney explaining the creative process and his rapport with the band, the kind of stuff people very much wanted to hear about when he was collaborating with Lennon and Harrison--unless he had been this bad at explaining it then. What we get in Each One Believing is less than inspiring, unless you were at one of the shows or just cannot get enough of Sir Paul. A plus is that he does give Paul Wickens, Rusty Anderson, Abe Laboriel Jr., and Brian Ray, the fellows better than the Beatles, plenty of textual and pictorial space.

The minus is that Each One Believing is less a document than an advertisement full of uplifting praise aimed at his adoring fans, with plenty of fab pix featuring the man himself. As he puts it: "So the way I look at it is to try to enjoy my day and then enjoy another day, and if you add up enough enjoyable days together, then that's a life, and if you're lucky, it's been enjoyable. I don't have any deeper philosophy than that."

On the other hand, he has been a vegetarian for 25 years, can rock like anyone half his age, and (as he often reminds us) has carried on the late Princess Diana's crusade against land mines. Still, with Chronicle Books having over the past few Christmases issued books on Harrison, Lennon, and McCartney, one can only hope they are not currently badgering Richard Starkey for his philosophy of life.