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Paul mccartney documentary5/22/2023 ![]() ![]() “We didn’t want to do a touring Beatlemania doc. “We didn’t need to do another Beatles doc,” Pollack says. In the course of the three-hour series (which was whittled down from 15 hours of footage), McCartney and Rubin revisit roughly three dozen songs from the first quarter century of the McCartney catalog, ranging from his earliest experiments to Beatles classics to a couple of cuts from McCartney II. Each episode consists of excerpts from an extended conversation between McCartney and Rubin, who filmed for two days at a hastily assembled soundstage near McCartney’s Hamptons home last August. It is, as Pollack puts it, “a very intimate discussion between two music greats.” The only talking heads here are McCartney and super-producer Rick Rubin, who leads McCartney on a mystery tour of his musical accomplishments, prompting Paul to chime in about how he or his Beatle bandmates wrote this or played that. Unlike previous Pollack-produced looks at Laurel Canyon, Johnny Cash, and Frank Sinatra, McCartney 3, 2, 1 isn’t a standard documentary. By centering the songs, McCartney 3, 2, 1 captures its subject’s wonder at the way in which he and his friends made music-which, unlike memory, doesn’t degrade or sound stale, even after 50-plus years. But what the series lacks in previously unheard information about the Beatles’ lives, it more than makes up for in celebrating and documenting the minor miracles that occurred when they came together inside the studio. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” two days after its release (an anecdote that often graces McCartney’s concerts and talk-show appearances) how he helped Lennon make “Come Together” sound swampy how a depressed Paul retreated to Scotland and went back to basics after the Beatles broke up how he and first wife, Linda, were robbed in Lagos and lost their demos for Band on the Run. McCartney connoisseurs will recognize plenty of repeated tales in Hulu’s long and winding ode to McCartney’s musical genius, which was released on Friday: how he and John Lennon met and made the perfect partners how he heard “Yesterday” in his dreams how Jimi Hendrix covered “Sgt. ![]() ![]() When I talk to EP Jeff Pollack, a longtime movie music supervisor, he cuts in to question me about McCartney 3, 2, 1 first: “What was new for you? Were there any new stories?” ![]() Eliciting something fresh seems to have been one of the producers’ primary concerns. Therein lay the challenge for the makers of McCartney 3, 2, 1: how to induce one of the most-interviewed men in the world (and, perhaps, in history) to say something he hasn’t said (or even thought) in more than half a century of talking about a band that last recorded before he turned 28. Now I look back and I was working with John Lennon.” That telltale “I say” at the start of the statement suggests that even this is a remark he’s made before. Does he remember being in the Beatles, or is he remembering remembering being in the Beatles? And how can he separate how it happened then from what he knows now? As McCartney says in Hulu’s new six-part docuseries about Beatle Paul, McCartney 3, 2, 1, “I say I look back, and at the time, I was just working with this bloke called John. And the older we get, the less likely we are to relive events via vivid, specific details (“verbatim memories”) as opposed to fuzzy, general representations of past events (“gist memories”).Īll of which makes me wonder what happens in the hippocampus of Paul McCartney when the 79-year-old former Beatle is asked about his 20-something self. Each time we exhume a memory for our own inspection, or tweak a retelling to get a laugh or coax a cry, we run the risk of unwittingly altering the original recollection. The more we retrieve and recount them, the more they may change. ![]()
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