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Fool on the Hill: The Myth of Perfectionist Paul
In which Faith gets it wrong and makes it right
This article first appeared on HeyDullblog 10/23/23
I got it wrong.
Back in April, I wrote a piece for HeyDullblog about Paulâs choice to put Linda in his band (âIâm Gonna Go WIth Linda on Keyboardsâ). It included this paragraph:
Paul seems to have been the one who protested loudest about Stuâs and Peteâs musical shortcomings. That guy matures into Studio Obsessive Paul. Which then turns into Micromanaging Paul, the Paul of âletâs do sixty-two fun-filled takes of âMaxwellâs Silver Hammer!ââ royally pissing off everyone in service of a song he apparently didnât even like. We admire Paul for this attention to detail, and we should. For one thing, we donât get Sgt. Pepper without it. But mistakes were, you know, made. Damage was, you know, done.
Later in the same piece, I twice use the term that weâre all familiar with, âPerfectionist Paul.âÂ
I shorthanded Paul this way because I made a mistake I try very hard not to make -- I did the lazy thing and believed a trope of the Standard Narrative, without double checking it first.
I was wrong to blindly trust the Standard Narrative â itâs probably wise never to blindly trust anything, really. Putting aside for the moment that there werenât 62 full-band takes of Maxwellâs Silver Hammer, there were 21 (weâll come back to that), I believe now that âPerfectionist Paulâ is most likely a myth, and a derogatory and damaging one that does a disservice to our ability to understand Paul, the band, and how they made their music.Â
This article, then, is an attempt to repair my dented Beatles karma, and to do my part to mythbust the persistent fallacy of âPerfectionist Paul.â
Please bear with me because in order to do this, Iâll need to break a social taboo. A stupid social taboo, but a taboo nonetheless.Â
We live in a culture where only rap stars and baby-fascist presidents are allowed to take full credit (and then some) for their own merits. Other than that, itâs not allowed, to say youâre brilliant or talented, any more than itâs allowed to say youâre beautiful or sexy. Itâs woven into the fabric of our culture, especially for women, this muzzling of our ability to love ourselves more publicly, more daringly, more honestly.
But in the service of pursuing the truth of this story and rectifying a wrong, Iâm going to take the hit and violate this social taboo by sharing a bit of my own story.
What you need to know for all of this to make sense is that Iâm â for lack of a better term â a prodigy of words and language, first identified as such when, in second grade, I scored off the scale on a series of college-level reading/writing tests. Words are and have always been my superpower. No surprise, then, that Iâve worked as a professional wordsmith in various capacities for most of my adult life â as a songwriter, a screenwriter/script doctor, and a political speechwriter, to name a few. (Iâm not, youâll notice, a prodigy when it comes to focus...). Of course, Iâve never recorded iconic albums at Abbey Road or played at Shea or on the Rooftop, but I do have extensive and diverse experience in a variety of different, often high-stakes creative situations. And I have far too much experience being accused of perfectionism by professional colleagues.Â
If you have a superpower of your own â and I suspect many of you do, since serious Beatles study seems to attract such people â you might know a bit about this problem. If so, my sincerest empathy and condolences. If not, I invite you to walk in my world... and Paulâs... for a few minutes. To experience the creative process the way a prodigy does.
As is the case with so much of the Beatlesâ story, at the heart of all of this lies a paradox.Â
Being a prodigy doesnât mean everything you do is brilliant (I wish!) and it certainly doesnât mean everything (or really anything) you do is perfect. What it does mean is that prodigies often have the ability to perceive extreme detail in their area of exceptional talent â extreme detail that people who donât have that particular exceptional talent arenât able to perceive. As such, itâs not that our creative standards as prodigies are necessarily higher, although sometimes they are â itâs that because of our ultra-heightened perception of detail, it often takes â paradoxically â more time and effort for us to reach the same standard of quality than it does for someone who isnât a prodigy.
If youâre confused by that last paragraph, itâs okay. Like all paradoxes, this one can be a little hard to wrap oneâs mind around in the abstract, so letâs look at a hypothetical example.
Letâs imagine that a band is recording a new song. And that the âperfectionâ of that song is measured on a scale from one to five, with one being complete shite and five being perfect â whatever âperfectâ means, which is largely irrelevant since thereâs no such thing as a perfectly recorded song anyway.
Letâs now also say that, because thereâs no such thing as a perfectly recorded song, four is the highest possible rating. Weâll call a four ânear perfectâ and thatâs as good as it gets, really.
Now letâs say, just hypothetically, that the band in question is the most famous and influential band in history, and as such, has very high standards. Nothing goes out the door, ideally, without being rated a four, with all of the individual latitude that standard contains.
Next, letâs suppose that two members of this hypothetical band are recording this new song. Letâs call them Juan and Pablo, yâknow, just to conceal their identities. (For the sake of simplicity, letâs say that the other two band members, Jorge and Ricardo, are off in the bog getting high.)
Juan is a phenomenally talented singer/songwriter who may also be a word prodigy, but he isnât a musical prodigy and therefore doesnât have a finely tuned ear for sonic detail. He listens to the latest take of the song and, from what he hears and by his elevated-but-not-musical prodigy standards, he gives it a four. Near perfect. Good on, then, the song has met his standards, and Juan doesnât need another take. Time to move on.
Pablo has the same high standards as Juan -- heâs also looking for a ânear perfectâ four. But unlike Juan, Pablo is a musical prodigy. When he listens to the same take, he hears details... musical flaws... that Juan, for all his wordsmithing brilliance, isnât able to hear. So for Pablo â using the exact same ânear perfectâ standard as Juan â the song isnât a four yet. Itâs maybe a high three. More work will be required to make the song sound as good to Pablo as it does to Juan. Not better than. Not perfect. As good as.
Maybe at this point, Juan gets frustrated. Maybe heâs tired and wants to go home and drop some acid and listen to the latest Dylan album, and he thinks Pablo is just being, well, a perfectionist. After all, Juan listened to the song and itâs clearly a ânear perfectâ four. What the hellâs wrong with Pablo, making them do another take?
But what Juan isnât getting is that this isnât Pablo being a perfectionist. Remember, Pablo is judging the song using the same standard as Juan. Neither of them is looking for a perfect five. Theyâre both after a ânear perfectâ four. But because Pablo hears more detail than Juan does, he also hears more imperfections. So itâs going to take more work on the song before Pabloâs ears can hear the song as the ânear perfectâ four that Juan is currently hearing.
Same standards. Different ears.
Now is a good time to remind you, dear reader, that virtually every problem in this dumpster fire we call human civilization stems from an inability to understand what itâs like to walk in the other personâs shoes.Â
Geoff Emerick demonstrates this inability to understand or validate another personâs experience when he talks about Paul working on the vocal for Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da: âRichard and I began the long, tedious process of rolling and rerolling the tape as [Paul] experimented endlessly, making minute changes to the lead vocal, in search of some kind of elusive perfection that only he could hear in his head.â (Here, There and Everywhere, p. 254) Thatâs Emerick imposing his non-prodigy experience onto Paul. It doesnât seem to occur to Emerick that Paulâs not trying for perfect, but for ânear perfectâ â just like Emerick presumably is â or that Paul can hear actual flaws âin his own headâ that Emerick simply doesnât have the ears to hear. And notice Emerickâs not very gracious about it, either, with words like âtediousâ and âendlesslyâ and, yes, âperfection[ist].âÂ
But calling someone a name doesnât make it so. I can call you a monkey, that doesnât mean you swing from the trees and eat a lot of bananas. I can call someone a perfectionist, that doesnât mean theyâre actually aiming for perfection. It just means I lack the imagination or empathy to put myself in their shoes and understand that the other person has skills that I donât have and is thus able to perceive things I canât perceive.Â
Anyone can call anyone anything â and they often do, when tensions are already high for other reasons, like, say, mysterious things that happened in India and someone in a tiara eating your digestive biscuit and feeling unappreciated as a songwriter and also other Bigger Problems that we wonât get into here.
People get pissed at each other, and things that they used to feel fine about start to annoy them, and they start to put nasty names to those things. That's human nature, when a relationship is strained â to wound by weaponizing whateverâs to hand, especially when the people involved donât seem especially good at talking about their real feelings. All normal if unfortunate behavior, but none of it makes the nasty names true. In other words, someone calling someone a name doesnât constitute any kind of credible evidence that the name is accurate. Understanding that starts to clear away a lot of the confusion here.
I hope this at least offers cause for reflection when it comes to the âperfectionist Paulâ trope, but...
What if the reasoning above is 100% wrong? What if it turns out that Pablo... Paul... actually was looking for perfection whereas the others werenât? Mind you, nothing Iâve found in anything Paul has shared re: his creative process suggests this is the case, and heâs released lots of material that could have, by his own admission, benefited from another pass, starting with McCartney.
So, seriously, is this just me creating a convoluted excuse to apologize for Paulâs creative process? Well, the thing is, I don't need a convoluted excuse â Iâll unapologetically apologize for Paul McCartneyâs creative process anytime. Because even if Paul is or was at some point a perfectionist (and again I don't think the record supports this), weâd still be wise to think twice before calling him â or anyone, really â a perfectionist.
We throw a lot of words around in Beatledom, not all of them kind. It seems to me that, at the very least, if we can't be kind, weâd perhaps do well to throw those words around a bit more mindfully â and Iâm including myself in that âwe.â Because âperfectionistâ is almost always used as a pejorative term. A slur. You can tell this right off, because itâs usually paired with the word âaccuse.â
If I may go back to my personal story one last time here, I know firsthand how much it hurts, to have that accusation hurled at me by someone who has no interest in learning what the world looks like through my eyes... or in our case here, through Paul McCartneyâs ears. How much easier just to hurl the accusation and move on, leaving someone else to deal with the damage.Â
In truth, labeling Paul a perfectionist because he has the ability to hear musical flaws we canât hear says more about us than it does about Paul. Itâs us projecting our discomfort with our lack of musical prodigy-ness onto him, demanding that he bend to our limited viewpoint and slapping a disparaging label on him when he (thankfully) refuses to sacrifice his gift to our lack of one. It's our arrogant and narrow-minded insistence on dragging him down to our level of ordinariness. Itâs Geoff Emerick resenting having to do the work of rerolling the tape (which BTW, itâs literally his job to do, in service of Paulâs creative process.)
Inherent in accusing someone of perfectionism, whether itâs true or not, is a sort of reverse classism. Itâs not far off from the âdonât get above your raisingâ attitude that permeates the rural culture I grew up in â the belief that someone who has more education or talent is somehow behaving inappropriately when they use that education or talent in a way that puts them ahead of everyone else. By calling Paul a perfectionist, weâre essentially saying, âdonât get above your raising.â Donât use your superior ears, and if you do, weâll call you names, even as weâre busy venerating the results.
Calling Paul a perfectionist is essentially demanding that he diminish his talent in exchange for being liked. Itâs bullying, really, though we perhaps donât intend it to be. And weâd all be better served in Beatledom to stop enabling that kind of nonsense. Weâre better than that. Or we ought to be. All of us, self included.
One more thing. Hereâs a spreadsheet of the number of full-band takes for every song from Rubber Soul on, because yes, this is what I spend my spare time doing:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AY0JhyOmm__9gmGPovWfAT86oGc4B2rCAFL-7lJwCSs/edit?usp=sharing (source: The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, EMI 1988, Mark Lewisohn)
Notice that Paulâs not in any way unusual relative to the others in terms of number of full-band takes for any of his songs. Notice that Maxwell, which John once claimed they did âa million takesâ of, doesnât even make the Top 20, nor does Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da. Top chart position? George, with a song that didnât even appear on any Beatles albums. Most appearances in the Top 20? That would be John.Â
Now, of course, the number of full-band takes isnât the only way to determine how much work a song took, but thatâs the thing usually cited by the Standard Narrative and by John and George when they were in post-breakup ânasty namesâ mode. Paulâs prodigy-ears did mean he often overdubbed more than the others, particularly his own parts, but thatâs not perfectionism. Thatâs because his ability to hear more detail meant that it also took him more takes to reach the same ânear perfectâ standard that the others were using.
So hereâs the thing then â if the Standard Narrative got something this easy to check wrong... well, weâre back to the thing we started with. Just because the Standard Narrative tells us itâs so doesnât make it true. Maybe itâs time to start questioning the gospel on other, bigger things as well.
This article, by the way, is not perfect and was never intended to be.Â
Q.E.D.Â
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With my deepest gratitude,
Faith