For a singer like Alice Cooper, some of the best performances come from attitude. It’s impossible to put together a show that consists of boa constrictors, guillotines, and simulated infanticide onstage and say that it’s all about the music, but Cooper still knew that if there wasn’t a good song at the centre of everything, it would all fall apart. While he still keeps his voice in great shape in his twilight years, Cooper thought it all circled back to how Paul McCartney sang in The Beatles.
Then again, every member of the Fab Four had their own unique approach to vocals when they stepped up to the microphone. John Lennon always got his way through with brute force half the time, and George Harrison had a real conviction in his voice that showed through his best songs like ‘Something’ and ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. And for as much as people clown on Ringo Starr, his greatest strength is the pure charm spilling out of every vocal he laid down.
It’s not like Cooper didn’t have an affinity for all of The Beatles in one way or another, even becoming a drinking pal with Lennon and Starr as a member of the Hollywood Vampires in the 1970s. Though Lennon also placed in Cooper’s selection of greatest singers submitted to Rolling Stone, there was no competition in terms of what McCartney could do with his voice.
First, let’s get one thing crystal clear: McCartney may be one of the most eclectic members of the group. For all the jokes that have come his way about him only making granny music throughout his career, not many people can morph their voices into different shapes and still manage to sing all of them really well.
It’s easy to judge it by the ballads he’s most known for, like ‘Let It Be’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’, but that storyteller approach also has a flipside when he breaks out the screaming chops. Remember, this is a musician who listed Little Richard as one of his greatest inspirations throughout his early career, and hearing him sing his version of ‘Long Tall Sally’ or working his way through ‘Helter Skelter’ would be difficult even by the standard of most metal singers.
Even after the group broke up, McCartney still found ways to flex his vocal chops to keep everything interesting. There would still be ballads galore like ‘My Love’, but there would be strange fever dreams like ‘Temporary Secretary’, blistering hard rock like ‘Letting Go’ and ‘Junior’s Farm’ and, yes, even the old-timey music as well on tracks like ‘You Gave Me the Answer’.
While it’s easy to see Cooper gravitating to McCartney’s uptempo rockers, his influence actually crops up on many of his own ballads. When the shock rocker first started to tap into his sensitive side, songs like ‘Only Women Bleed’ have ‘The Cute Beatle’s fingerprints all over it, down to the melody slowly moving alongside the chords almost reminiscent of ‘Eleanor Rigby’.
It would seem that Macca was paying attention too, eventually teaming up with Cooper’s supergroup version of The Hollywood Vampires for a cover of Badfinger’s ‘Come and Get It’. Lennon and Harrison could do a lot of things with their signature vocal sound, but McCartney was the one member of the group who could go down every avenue that he liked with his voice and get something out of it.
