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At the start of Morgan Neville’s amiable and highly watchable new Amazon Prime documentary Man On The Run, the film’s subject, an 83-year-old singer-songwriter of some repute named Paul McCartney, makes an incredible statement. “If I hear someone damning Paul McCartney,” he says, “I tend to agree with them.”
These words strain credulity for at least two reasons. One, it is likely that for every single day of his life since around February 1963 — when The Beatles scored their first No. 1 hit, “Please Please Me,” in the U.K. — Paul McCartney has been the subject of extreme adoration in every single room he has been in, no matter where he happens to be on the planet. Madison Square Garden, the corner market, Buckingham Palace, a random street corner in Peoria, the White House, a remote sheep farm in Scotland — put Macca anywhere, and even the rams will pay reverent homage. Yes, there have been naysayers, especially in the music press. (More on that in a minute.) But at his current vintage, he is probably our most beloved living rock star, and definitely the most famous.
Damning words sent in his direction have been pretty scarce of late, is what I’m saying. So, setting up a film like this — while appropriate for, say, Lou Reed, or maybe literally any other musician — doesn’t exactly suit the most prodigious crowd pleaser presently known to man.
Two, it is equally clear that Paul McCartney steadfastly disagrees with the handful of negative adjectives that have snuck over his transom. Which he proceeds to demonstrate for the remainder of the documentary, as he clears his good name against various charges, irrelevant as they are to the rest of us.
Neville’s film operates on two levels, one obvious and superficially cheery (the less interesting level) and the other implicit and cloaked in veiled resentment (the way more fascinating one). At first glance, Man On The Run is standard-issue legacy maintenance — handsomely made, cleverly edited, engagingly remastered and hi-def’ed, and loaded with content that won’t be at all surprising to anyone who has seen any of the other 127 documentaries about The Beatles and the members’ solo careers. But even for those that have, there’s something cozy and reassuring about hearing the same stories retold for the 127th time. Paul’s brief dalliance with alcoholism post-Beatles breakup, his perseverance in making 1973’s Band On The Run after half his band suddenly split, the time he and John almost took up Lorne Michaels on his joke offer to reunite The Beatles on SNL, the 1980 pot bust in Japan, Linda’s undying support through it all — Man On The Run dutifully checks all the usual “McCartney anecdote” boxes.
Beneath that, however, is the real story, which is this: Paul McCartney, like the proverbial elephant, does not forget. All the mean things that were written about him in the early 1970s, when he was by far the ex-Beatle under the most media scrutiny (at least for artistic, non-FBI-related reasons), remain stuck in his craw.
For instance: At the start of the movie, right after Paul claims he agrees with the Paul haters, he immediately disputes the allegation that he broke up The Beatles, pointing out that John secretly quit in late 1969, months before Paul went public with the news upon the spring 1970 release of his solo debut, McCartney. Which, by most accounts these days, appears to be true. But also: Who in the world, at this point in time, still gives a damn? I would guess the same number of people still litigating “who broke up The Beatles?” equals the number of individuals who remain preoccupied with whether Allen Klein was a good hire to manage the band’s financials, or the unfairness of Jon Landau’s pan of Ram in Rolling Stone in 1971, or whether Paul expressed suitable public grief immediately upon learning that John Lennon was murdered. And that number would be exactly “1.”
Paul’s continued distress (and outright irritation), in spite of everything else in his extraordinary life, over these matters — and his enduring need to underline any instance of public praise from his friend and rival Lennon, which he does throughout Man On The Run — is never actively interrogated by Neville. But it is easily the most compelling and illuminating aspect of his film, even if this appears to be unintentional.
It also points to a subject I could honestly write about to an exhaustive (and exhausting) degree. And that is the nature of musical legacies, and how they go up and down in public esteem over time, like stocks measured in vibes rather than dividends. I’ve been following music in an active way since about 1990 — this was around when I transitioned from passively listening to the radio to buying music (first cassettes, then compact discs) and reading music magazines and books. In that 36-year span, I think I have a pretty good read on the top classic-rock stocks and how their respective statures have fluctuated. For the sake of humility I won’t call myself the Dow Jones of this particular area of assets, but I’m in the same ballpark.
So, trust me when I declare that Paul McCartney’s stock has had the biggest upswing during this period. Paul’s present status as a universally respected figure, as Man On The Room reiterates over and over, wasn’t always so.
