Paul called into Los Angeles’s KROQ (a Radio.com station) during the Kevin and Bean
show this morning to plug his current “Out There” tour, which hits
Dodger Stadium on Aug. 10. During their conversation, they discussed
everything from the Beatles to Dave Grohl to his daughter’s musical taste.
Macca seemed to be in a jovial mood, and when asked if he has to be addressed as “Sir Paul,” he replied, “King
Paul will do.” Comparably, when reminded that he last played Dodger
Stadium 48 years ago with the Fab Four, he said, “It couldn’t have been
me!”
But as for the long-told rumor about how close he and John Lennon
came to actually showing up on “Saturday Night Live” in 1976 when Lorne
Michaels offered the Beatles a whopping $3000 to reunite? “It nearly
happened man, it very, very nearly happened.”
The legend
has always been that Paul was visiting John in New York City, and that
they were watching “SNL” at Lennon’s apartment. McCartney told the KROQ
hosts, “We’re just sitting around and having a laugh and ‘Saturday Night
Live’ came on, and he said, ‘Have you been watching this?’ ‘No, I’m
living in England, why, what’s going on?’ He said, ‘They’ve got this
amazing thing going on, where Lorne Michaels came on last week and he
said I’m entitled to offer you, the Beatles, so much money [to
reunite].’ It wasn’t an awful lot – it was the standard rate.
“So John said, ‘It’s a hoot, you know what would be great, we can go
down there now. It’s only around the corner, we should show up.’ For
about five minutes, we were going ‘We’ve got to do it.’ Then it was
like, ‘Are you kidding, let’s stay in and watch the show, stay
comfortable, if we go down there it’s gonna be crazy. It would be a
great story,’ but we decided against it.”
When asked if the decision to never reunite was one of the smartest
decisions they ever made, McCartney agreed. “We talked about it, we
certainly got offered a lot of money to do it, but it was one of those
things, it was like, ‘You know what, guys? We’ve done it. We’ve come
full circle. We’ve been through all the joys and the horrors of being in
a band, we’ve done everything we wanted to do.’”
He added this somewhat stunning admission: they feared that the
reunion would not be well-received. “‘If we get back together again, it
could fall flat, we might not enjoy it, so why do it?’” he explained.
“As we say in England, leave ‘em laughing.”
Although he points out, “Once or twice, it was quite tempting, we got
some tempting offers. [But] Why spoil the whole thing and come out of
retirement and have it not work, so we decided against it. I agree with
you, it was the smartest move.”
They also asked about his more recent musical partnership with Dave Grohl.
“The thing about Dave is, he’s such an enthusiast, he’s a live wire,”
McCartney said. “Anything you do with him is ‘up.’ As you know, you’ve
interviewed him. He’s a very ‘up’ guy and it’s very infectious. I’m a
great enthusiast too. So when he asked me to come along and do some
music for the Sound City thing, I said, ‘Well, OK, we’ll see
what happens.’ I got there and he said, ‘What are we going to do, should
we do an old rock ‘n’ roll song?’ And he made a couple of suggestions.
And I said ‘I’ve done that.’ A couple of the ones he mentioned I’d done
with the Beatles. I said, ‘I don’t want to try to top those.’
“I’d just been given a new guitar by Johnny Depp, that little cigar
box thing, I was so in love with it, I said, ‘Let me wail away on this
and see what happens.’ I started kicking around on that, and Dave jumped
in on drums, so there was no way there wasn’t going to be any
chemistry. And then Krist [Novoselic] and Pat [Smear] started playing
alongside us, and we suddenly had a big thing going. We listened to it,
the first take was about 20 minutes and we said ‘What are we gonna do,
should we structure it a little bit?’ So we agreed on what we were gonna
do, got back in there, made the song, and it was all over in about
three hours. All of us had a complete blast.
“In the middle of all of that, I didn’t know that I was in a Nirvana
reunion,” he admitted. “I thought I was jamming with a bunch of guys.
It was only when I heard them talking, ‘Hey, we haven’t done this in 20
years or something!’ I’m going, ‘What are you talking about, guys?’
‘Well, you know, we’re Nirvana.’ I must admit, I didn’t even know, I
said, ‘Oh, OK, that’s pretty cool.’”
Given that that song, “Cut Me Some Slack,” won a GRAMMY, and that
Grohl lives in L.A., is there a chance he might join McCartney’s band
when they play Dodger Stadium? “There’s always a possibility, it depends
who is in town and who fancies showing up. Nowadays I have millions of
people I know out there, not least of all, Ringo [Starr]. Who knows, we might find a couple of them creeping up on stage unbeknownst to me.”
Finally, asked if he minds talking about the Beatles after all these
years, he acknowledged that people are sometimes self-conscious about
asking him about it.
“I do enjoy it, it’s like talking about your college days, when
you’re not in college anymore and there’s quite a few years gone by,” he
said. “I’m looking back on it, it’s like looking at a scrapbook. People
think sometimes, ‘I don’t want to bore you, I don’t want to ask you a
Beatles question,’ I say, ‘No, it’s OK.’ I could be at a dinner party,
and everyone is telling their stories, and I’m thinking, ‘It’d be good
if they asked me a Beatles question, I’ve got a few stories there.’”
Visit HERE for full audio of the interview.
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