Hello, Goodbye, Hello

England might have been less shocked to find Buckingham Palace transformed into the Royal Arms Motel. A great British institution--and perhaps the Empire's most far-flung export since the Thin Red Line--seemed in peril. From Liverpool to Piccadilly, the cries of anguish rent the air: "The Beatles are dead!"

The cause of all the gloom was Paul McCartney, the group's supremely gifted songwriter, singer and guitarist, who was just bringing out a solo LP all his own. Entitled McCartney, logically enough, the record package was decorated with color pictures--of Paul McCartney. It also contained a provocative interview with McCartney, parts of which somehow got to the press last week before the record went on sale.

Asked if he liked working solo, McCartney replied: "Very much. I only had me to ask for a decision, and I agreed with me." Asked if he missed working with the other Beatles, especially when recording, he said, pointedly, "No." Why had he broken with the Beatles at all? Said McCartney: "Personal differences, business differences, musical differences, but most of all because I have a better time with my family."

Specific Trouble. How dead was dead? As a business entity, the Beatles are contractually bound together for seven more years. They already have in the can one joint LP (Let It Be) that will be released soon, as well as one film. But since the death of the group's brilliant manager Brian Epstein in 1967, the Beatles have had, for them, rather a lean and hungry time. Record sales roll on and on, but Apple Corps Ltd., their business organization, has been plagued by dissension and failed projects. There has been specific trouble over Allen Klein, Apple's business manager, whom McCartney dislikes. McCartney's action could therefore put in jeopardy the future of the Beatles as a performing group--or rather as a recording and film-making group, since that is all the four have collaborated on for years.

As much as anything, though, the Beatles' current problem is linked to a whole new direction in pop music. It has to do with a de-escalation of what might be called rock music's group consciousness and a rising enthusiasm for solo artistry. Though the other Beatles are said to disapprove of McCartney's project, in recent months John Lennon has cut four albums by himself, Harrison two and Ringo one. Obviously, as talented a composer and performer as McCartney could not sit idly by while all that was going on.

McCartney, to be released in the U.S. this week, is what used to be called a tour de force; today the phrase is "ego trip." Paul wrote all 14 songs, sings all the lead parts, plays all the instruments. In mood and style, the disk marks the same kind of return to simple pleasures, and a simple, countrified way of saying them, that characterizes Bob Dylan's recent work. One song especially, the Nashville Sounding Every Night ("Every night I just wanna stay out and be with you"), seems to be a genuine salute to Dylan's Tonight I'll Be Staying Here with You. The album could well be called McCartney's Nashville Skyline.

Overall, the new album is good McCartney--clever, varied, full of humor --but it is nothing to match his past pop classics, particularly Yesterday, Michele and Hey, Jude. His lyrics are best when least pretentious, as in Junk, a kind of sentimental word jamboree: "Bye, bye, says the sign in the shop window/ Why, Why, says the junk in the yard." Maybe I'm Amazed, however, is a pale echo of the choral sumptuousness of McCartney's The End, which served as the coda to Abbey Road, the hit 1969 Beatle album.

Anyone who reflects sadly that one Beatle is bound to be less good than four may draw some encouragement from recent history. Last year reports of Paul McCartney's death--and replacement by a double--helped stir enormous sales for Abbey Road. Reports of the Beatles' death will certainly not do McCartney --or that upcoming LP Let It Be--any harm in the world's record shops.

If there are appropriate words to describe the situation in all its delicate imbalance, perhaps they can be found in the Beatles' own lyrics for Hello, Goodbye:

You say yes, I say no.

You say stop, I say go, go, go.

Oh, no.

You say goodbye and I say hello, hello, hello

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