Paul McCartney says that budding musicians in Liverpool would travel across the city just to learn a new chord.
The Beatles and Wings member shared how new notes were shared between aspiring guitarists who would travel by bus or foot to the houses of those with new knowledge. McCartney recalled a time when he wished to learn a B7 chord and would have no trouble travelling to find the “missing chord” to add it to his ever-growing arsenal of notes. It was a unique way of getting notes from across the city, pooling resources together with pals after long adventures through Liverpool. McCartney would share this anecdote during the first episode of the Anthology documentary, where the legendary frontman explained this need to seek out notes.
McCartney said: “Sometimes we’d travel the whole of Liverpool just to go to someone who knew a chord we didn’t know. I remember once hearing about a bloke who knew B7, now we knew E, and we knew A, quite easy, but we didn’t know B7, the missing part, the link, the lost chord.
“Once we got on the bus, we trooped across Liverpool, changed buses, and we found this fella. And he showed us B7. We learned it, got back on the bus, went home to our mates, and went ‘got it.'”
It was a dedication which would serve McCartney well through his career, a musical legacy inspired, he says, by Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. McCartney once said Elvis Presley was “what we had been waiting for” in contemporary music at the time. The songwriter would also dub The King a “guru” of music, whose influence was clear.
He would go on to share Presley was a “good looking” musician, though it was not the music he first noticed. McCartney said: “I remember being in school when I was a kid and somebody had a picture in one of the musical papers of Elvis Presley. I think it was an advert for Heartbreak Hotel. I just looked at it and thought ‘he’s so good looking, he looks perfect.’”
Heartbreak Hotel would release on January 27, 1956, and was a Billboard Top 100 chart topper. The two-minute track would leave a lasting impression on John Lennon, too, with the Imagine hitmaker considering Heartbreak Hotel a “great” alternative to American music of the times.
He told the NME: “We’d never heard American voices singing like that. They always sang like Sinatra or enunciate very well. Suddenly, there’s this hillbilly hiccuping on tape echo and all this bluesy stuff going on. And we didn’t know what Elvis was singing about … It took us a long time to work what was going on. To us, it just sounded as a noise that was great.”
It was not just Presley that McCartney was fond of, with the work of Buddy Holly also catching his and Lennon’s eye. McCartney explained briefly that the difference between Holly and the rest of the music scene at the time went beyond his sound and style. He said: “Suddenly here was a rock and roll hero who had glasses.”
