“Momma gets by while papa gets high,” sings Paul McCartney in the closing song The Boys of Dungeon Lane. After all, it is a story he has been telling for a lifetime, the ballad of a strong, elderly woman, alone but resistant to whom no one seems to notice. He always wrote songs about women like that, from Eleanor Rigby And Lady Madonna until Another Day And Jenny Wren. He's the kind of person he loves to sing about the most, or maybe he's just the kind of person he loves the most.
It has always been one of the aspects that distinguished McCartney from other male authors of his generation. Eleanor Rigby it came out 60 years ago when Paul was 24, a Beatle and had the world at his feet. And he continues to tell that woman, after all these years, now that he is older than Eleanor Rigby herself. Momma Gets By it therefore seems like a closing of the circle: the culmination of a story told throughout a lifetime.
The protagonist of the song works to pay the rent and keeps the family together. Her deadbeat husband ignores her, yet she doesn't complain: she just carries on. Why? “She loves him,” Paul sings, “with all her heart and soul.” The voice climbs fragilely on the highest notes so that we can hear how it really is today, marked by time. He wants to make sure no one misses out on all the long and winding roads that resonate within you.
Paul has always been fascinated by the elderly, even at the time when he was a global symbol of youth. In the Summer of Love he published a musical fantasy about a couple at the unimaginable age of 64. In a few weeks he'll be 84. And yes, damn, we still need him.
Dungeon Lane it's another center. At 83, Sir Paul can still pick up a guitar and release songs like that. Let's talk about someone who wrote Love Me Do 69 years ago. It was the 1950s, in case math wasn't your thing. Yet here he is, in the 1920s, still at the top. Dungeon Lane it will contain two, maybe three subpar songs out of 14: if Drake managed to make an album with such a ratio, he would really have more hits than the Beatles.
Macca's last twenty years have represented a kind of golden age, which began with Chaos and Creation in the Backyard of 2005. First Star of the Night is a love ballad that makes octogenarian romance seem like heaven on earth. Looks great next to The Kiss of Venus of 2020, but also to Venus and Mars from 1974: when Macca looks at the stars he never makes mistakes. Mountain Top And Lost Horizon they're seductive psychedelic journeys that he turns into love songs because, well, because he's Paul.
On the album he also sings about the Beatles, as all four loved to do every time they entered the studio. Adding together the solo careers of John, Paul, George and Ringo, there are more songs on the theme of “do you remember when we were the Beatles?” what real Beatles songs. In Home to Us returns to Liverpool with Ringo, Days We Left Behind and the magnificent Down South they celebrate the early years spent with friends. There are no other bands that do something like this. Mick Jagger would rather let Keith shave his testicles blindfolded than sing about how much fun they had with Brian Jones.
Momma Gets By it feels like an alternate timeline where Eleanor Rigby she finally had the wedding she wanted. Okay, it's not her dream wedding, but she's holding on. McCartney refuses to add even a hint of irony, because there isn't any. He doesn't look down on her, he doesn't pity her, he doesn't allow us to do so. He refuses to turn this story into a sad song (if he wanted to, he very well could have done so). For him, his daily struggle is a noble form of resistance against the world, a way to keep his heart and soul alive.
Eleanor Rigby everyone knows her, yet she continues to become more and more mysterious. I'll say it again: Paul was 24 when he wrote it. It's absurd. He was a Beatle, the most handsome boy in the world, the most glamorous of pop stars. Swinging London was his playground with parties, exhibitions, clubs. Yet he couldn't stop thinking about the tired and lonely Eleanor, hiding at the back of a church harvesting rice. What an image, for a 24 year old boy. Not even the priest notices her. Paul instead gave that outcast one of his most beautiful melodies, inspiring George Martin's innovative string arrangement.
In the book Lyrics there is a photograph he took in 1966 looking out of the window of the room he lived in, in the attic of his girlfriend Jane Asher's parents' house. Looking at that view you imagine Paul overlooking a city that offers excitement and opportunities. And instead looking out that window he sees so much loneliness. It's the room where he wrote Eleanor Rigby.
The story of this heroine has always fascinated him. He followed her for decades, from Treat Her Gently/Lonely Old People to Junk until Little Willow. His first solo single was in 1971 Another Daya day in the life of a normal employee, with work to do, but also the need to keep dreams and hopes alive. No one else would have noticed her, let alone dedicated a song to her. “I guess, deep down, it's because I'm a voyeur,” Paul told me in 2021. “I observe a woman instead of just being with her.”
Momma Gets By celebrates the values that McCartney revered in the older generation, but didn't just pay lip service to those values. In the 1970s, while other English rock stars, including the other Beatles, lost themselves in the pleasures of Hollywood chasing sex, drugs and Brandy Alexander, Paul lived with Linda on a farm in the Scottish countryside, raising their children. He dug drains, fed the chickens, made sure there were no leaks in the roof. It literally repaired the holes where the rain came in. He had no time to wander in his mind.
He was the Beatle least interested in the generational war of his time, so much so that he even put his father's hero, Fred Astaire, on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. In When I'm 64 Paul and John play an elderly couple and enjoy intertwining voices boasting: “We'll save every penny!”. They already planned to become a grumpy old married couple when they were kids on the roof of the world. They deserved much more time to grow old together.
Who talks about nostalgia in Dungeon Lane hears something that honestly escapes me: Paul sings about bombs falling during the Second World War, food rationing, hard work, disease, poverty, the bad old days. He came from an immigrant family: his maternal grandfather was Irish and the Beatles came directly from Liverpool's Irish immigrant culture. Salesman Saint is a vivid and affectionate account of parents and their generation struggling to survive in difficult times. He never allowed the world to forget his mother Mary, a nurse and midwife in the toughest part of Liverpool. She died of cancer when he was a child, but she made sure the whole world knew her. And thanks to Let It Bethe world knows it.
Maybe that's why he's fascinated by older women: they represent the kind of person Mary McCartney never had the chance to become. It's also why he's always been obsessed with old romantic ballads, the ones his father Jim loved to play on the piano, the slow ones his parents never had the chance to dance together in old age (you know Baby's Requestfrom Back to the EggWings' latest album? Do yourself a favor and listen to it again.)
The heroine of Momma Gets By it has always been at the center of Paul McCartney's music, throughout his life. She could be the muse of Another Day or of Blackbirdor Jenny Wrenprotagonist of the greatest song he has written this century. Despite his heartbreak, he ultimately promises, “The day will come when Jenny Wren will sing!” Momma Gets By it ends the same way: no one notices his daily heroism, but nothing can extinguish his spirit.
You probably won't agree, but McCartney's last twenty years were the best creative period of his post-Beatles life. I'm serious: he's doing his best stuff since Abbey Road. Chaos and Creation that's for Macca Time Out of Mind it was for Bob Dylan, the record in which he found his “voice” as an older man. Since then he hasn't released an unworthy album (and I assure you, no one could have predicted this in the 80s: Dylan and McCartney capable of making a series of extraordinary records every few years? We would have given anything for just one good album).
The world has not yet fully recovered the treasures that Sir Paul disseminated in the 1970s – think of the recent Wings memoir or Morgan Neville's delightful documentary Man on the Run. Why wait? The fact that Paul McCartney continues to give us powerful songs like Momma Gets Byalmost 70 years after I first picked up a guitar, is a reason to celebrate in itself.
From Rolling Stone US.
