Paul McCartney Miles, Barry

Paul, with Mal Evans, had a relaxing safari in Kenya, visiting the Ambosali Park at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, and staying at the exclusive Treetops Hotel, where the rooms are built up among the branches of ancient trees. Their final night in Africa was spent at a YMCA in Nairobi before returning to London on 19 November 1966. It was on the flight back that Paul came up with the idea for Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. (from the first line)

It was a long plane journey but rather than sleep Paul stayed awake writing and playing with ideas. The freedom he had experienced while driving through France in disguise at the beginning of the holiday had given him the idea of creating a new identity for the Beatles: by not being the Fab Four they could try something new, experiments and show the fans that they had grown up.| PAUL: We were fed up with being the Beatles. We really hated that fucking four little mop-top boys approach. We were not boys, we were men. It was all gone, all that boy shit, all that screaming, we didn't want any more, plus, we'd now got turned on to pot and thought of ourselves as artists rather than just performers. There was now more to it; not only had John and I been writing, George had been writing, we'd been in films, John had written books, so it was natural that we should become artists.

A definitive, authorized portrait of Paul McCartney draws on hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews and access to personal archives to chronicle the private life and successful career of one of the worlds most famous musicians, the world of the Beatles, his partnership with John Lennon, and more. Reprint. 50,000 first printing. *Author: Miles, Barry *Subtitle: Many Years from Now *Publication Date: 1998/10/01 *Number of Pages: 696 *Binding Type: Paperback *Language: English *Depth: 1.75 *Width: 6.25 *Height: 9.50

From the Publisher:
Based on hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with author Barry Miles, and complete access to McCartney's own archives, this is Paul McCartney in his own words. It is a history from the inside of one of the greatest songwriting partnerships of the century. It's the private life of a man made public property--a Beatle--by the age of 21. It's the trajectory of the most popular pop group in history, from beginnings to break-up. It's a chronicle of the 60s by the man at the center of the storm. It's music, drugs, women, money, madness, the Maharishi, art, love, peace, and bitterness. Beginning to end, it's the story as never told before. There have been countless words written--and not a few sung--about Paul McCartney. In "Many Years from Now", he sets the record straight.Barry Miles has succeeded in letting Paul McCartney tell the story of his life as a Beatle in his own words. It includes Paul's recollection of the genesis of every song that he wrote with John Lennon and the fascinating details about their remarkable collaboration. of photos.

Annotation:
More than a biography of Paul McCartney, this profile of the former Beatle presents McCartney's own perspective on the band through extensive interview excerpts and archival material. A unique perspective on one of the most exciting and innovative periods in modern music history.Being a pop star and having a dozen girls waiting outside your front door is a frequent musician's fantasy. However, if they're actually waiting for your more-famous housemate, who happens to be Paul McCartney, it can wreak havoc on the ego. Such was Peter Asher's experience when McCartney dated Asher's sister Jane, one of the many minor yet significant episodes explored in PAUL MCCARTNEY: MANY YEARS FROM NOW, Barry Miles's intimately detailed biography of the ex-Beatle. Miles packs in an abundance of early-years background information, from McCartney's Liverpool childhood to the Beatles' apprenticeship in Hamburg's red-light district, but really hits paydirt with his account of London's '60s art scene, in which the author was a major participant, and of McCartney's involvement with avant-garde icons such as William Burroughs and British electronic music experimenter Cornelius Cardew. McCartney's relaxed recollections--he's a beguiling storyteller--compiled over a five-year period of conversations with the author, are illuminating, particularly on the subjects of songwriting ("Eleanor Rigby" was written with a view to a post-Beatle career, once McCartney had hit 30), and his artistic rivalry, later to develop into full-blown animosity, with John Lennon.

Author Bio

Barry Miles

Born in Gloucestershire, England, in 1943, Barry Miles is a journalist, biographer, and onetime owner of the legendary 1960s Indica Bookshop and Gallery in London. His first-hand knowledge of the Sixties has led to his becoming a noted chronicler of the decade's significant figures, including Paul McCartney and Frank Zappa, as well as a cultural commentator in his coffee-table volume HIPPIE, published in 2004. Emerging from his early-'60s studies at Cheltenham College of Art, his initial artistic interests lay in the American avant-garde; books mail-ordered from San Francisco's Beat-oriented City Lights bookstore exposed him for the first time to the works of poets like Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg. He founded the Indica Bookshop in 1965, in partnership with art dealer John Dunbar, then-husband of Marianne Faithfull. McCartney and Peter Asher, whose sister, Jane, was then McCartney's girlfriend, were also investors. These and other connections with significant figures on London's '60s art and music scene led to Indica's becoming something of a cultural and artistic clearing house. John Lennon first met Yoko Ono at an exhibition of her work in its basement gallery, while Miles also started International Times, Britain's first underground newspaper, on its premises. Miles was also instrumental in organizing the 1965 poetry reading at London's Albert Hall involving Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the seminal events in the birth of the British underground movement. In the 1970s he assisted in the cataloguing of Ginsberg's tape archives in New York, as well as reporting on the growing punk movement there for the New Musical Express. He published his own memoir, IN THE SIXTIES, in 2002.

Praise

Salon
'Many Years From Now' has to be considered one of the essential books on the Beatles. Cleverly titled, handsomely packaged, it is by no means the whole truth and nothing but the truth...but it is invaluable as an insider's account of life at the eye of the hurricane that was the Beatles. This is how Paul McCartney remembers the events and personalities that revolutionized music and popular culture in the 1960s -- or is it more how he wants the world to remember them?....So call this book the Good News According to Paul. His main point, argued repeatedly and persuasively, is that he and John were creative equals who thrived on their differences, and that a less balanced relationship could not have survived the immense pressures exerted by the world and their own personalities....This is McCartney's version of history, not the definitive biography of the man, and despite its faults it's a fun, occasionally illuminating read. Paul tells Miles at one point that he and John had to be two of the luckiest people in this century to have met each other. But try to imagine a world where songs like 'Yesterday,' 'Strawberry Fields Forever,' 'Fool on the Hill' and 'A Day in the Life' had never been written, and it's pretty clear it's we who are the lucky ones." - Mark Hertsgaard 11/12/1997

Product Attributes

Book Format:		Paperback
Number of Pages:		0654
Publisher:		Henry Holt & Company

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