With such a powerful legacy of multi-instrumental command and songwriting prowess, with and without The Beatles, it can be easy to forget that Paul McCartney is a bassist first and foremost. When McCartney first joined John Lennon’s high school band, The Quarrymen, in October 1957, he took a position on the six-string but soon fell into the bassist role by necessity.
“Nobody wants to play bass, or nobody did in those days,” McCartney noted in Many Years From Now. “Bass was the thing that the fat boys got lumbered with and were asked to stand at the back and play… So I definitely didn’t want to do it, but Stuart [Sutcliffe] left, and I got lumbered with it. Later, I was quite happy”.
“When we were in Hamburg, Stuart fell in love with a local girl called Astrid and decided he was leaving the group. So we were now without a bass player. We couldn’t have three guitars and no bass. Nobody wanted to be the bass player in those days because it was always the fat guy playing bass. There seemed to be some sort of stigma attached to it,” McCartney reiterated in The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present.
Despite his reservations, McCartney became somewhat attached to his iconic Hofner violin bass but always favoured the piano or guitar as his main songwriting conduit. “I’ve never composed on the bass. Never. Not to this day.” McCartney began to take the role of the bass guitar more seriously in 1964 when The Beatles recorded ‘She’s a Woman’, the first of many colourful and considered basslines.
“I have to smile at the fact that I turned out to be a bass player because my dad always used to point out the bass in songs we heard,” McCartney reflected in The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present. “He was a musician with Jim Mac’s Jazz Band, playing piano and trumpet, and he educated me and my brother on music appreciation. We’d listen to something on the radio, and he’d say, ‘Hear that? That’s the bass!’”
In light of McCartney’s sprawling achievements, it’s easy to see why he’s been overlooked as a bassist, but it takes one to know one. In a 2022 interview with Far Out, Jah Wobble, the former bassist of Public Image Ltd., discussed Mccartney’s talent on the instrument.
“The British somehow produce these really great melodic bassists that are really imaginative,” he noted, adding, “McCartney is very imaginative in playing inversions of the chord rather than just pedalling the root note, and he’s also, obviously, a great writer.”
While McCartney’s bass skills couldn’t be compared with the virtuosity of The Who’s John Entwistle, anyone would be lucky to have him as their mentor. Fortunately, the Beatle once filmed a brief bass guitar lesson for his fans.
Watch Macca give some tips in the video below.
