The Guinness Book of World Records lists McCartney as history's most commercially successful musician, with more than 100 million albums and 100 million singles sold since 1961.
McCartney was born June 18, 1942 in Liverpool, England. He grew up in public housing projects, the son of a school nurse and a cotton salesman. From his father he learned to play the piano by ear, but as a teenager he gravitated to the guitar, influenced by the American music of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Although McCartney is righthanded, he restrung his guitar and played it lefthanded, a quirk that has lasted throughout his career. By 1956 he was sufficiently versed in guitar and vocals to seek work with a local band.
McCartney joined the Quarrymen, a "skiffle" (jug) band founded by John Lennon. Before long Lennon and McCartney were bosom buddies who spent long hours in McCartney's home writing songs and improvising on their guitars. McCartney made his debut with the Quarrymen in 1957 at the Broadway Conservative Club in Liverpool. Under the name Johnny and the Moondogs the group toured Scotland and the smaller working-class towns outside of London, then signed for several lengthy engagements in Hamburg, Germany. The Hamburg audiences were notoriously demanding, and it was there that the group -- renamed the Beatles -- developed a confident stage presence and a generally outrageous act. Upon their return to Liverpool, the Beatles attracted a gifted manager, Brian Epstein.
Epstein "cleaned up" the Beatles somewhat, dressing them in matching suits and suggesting new hairstyles. Within a year the group had a recording contract with EMI Records and its American counterpart, Capitol. By January of 1963 two Beatles songs, "Love Me Do" and "Please Please Me" had made the British Top 20; both were written by Lennon and McCartney. The group -- which had added Ringo Starr on drums and George Harrison on guitar -- made its triumphant debut in America in the early months of 1964.
The Beatles phenomenon has never been equalled in the history of popular music. In one year -- 1964 -- the group had five hits in the Top 10 simultaneously, another seven in the Top 100, and four albums in the Top 10 as well. Most of these songs were McCartney-Lennon collaborations. The pair had decided early on to attach both names even to songs that just one of them had written, so it is difficult to sort out exactly who wrote what. "John and Paul went together like peanut butter and jelly," writes John Milward in the Philadelphia Inquirer. "They brought out the best in each other. Even in the later years of the Beatles, when the majority of Lennon-McCartney songs were written solely by one or the other, each man acted as the other's most trenchant critic."
Certainly Lennon and McCartney were pop music's most successful songwriters as a team, but McCartney also authored timeless songs of his own, including the engaging ballads "Yesterday," "Eleanor Rigby" and "Hey Jude". As the Beatles matured -- discovering social consciousness, hallucinogenic drugs, and Eastern religion -- McCartney managed to maintain a comic perspective with songs such as "When I'm Sixty-Four". This tongue-in-cheek wit, in sharp contrast to Lennon's pessimism, would follow McCartney into his solo career.
The Beatles disbanded in 1970 and for some years thereafter quarrelled bitterly in legal and personal disputes. The period was traumatic for McCartney, especially since the critics panned his first solo efforts, McCartney and Ram. Lennon also stung his former partner with a song "How Do You Sleep," that spoke of McCartney's "pretty face" and his "Muzak" in pejorative terms. Undaunted, McCartney formed a group called Wings and continued to record, using his wife Linda as a backup singer and keyboardist. Within three years of the Beatles' demise he was back on the charts with a platinum album, Band on the Run, and two hit singles, "My Love" and "Band on the Run." The theme song he wrote for the motion picture Live And Let Die was nominated for an Academy Award.
With Wings or on his own, McCartney has achieved a success that rivals his Beatles days. For one thing, he owns the royalty rights to the Wings songs (Michael Jackson owns the entire Beatles library, to McCartney's chagrin). His business concerns are managed by personnel he considers trustworthy. Most important, however, is the fact that Linda McCartney accompanied him in the studio and on tour--the two had been inseparable since they married in 1969. A Time reporter writes: "Smarmy as all this may sound to any fan used to high-voltage tales about the profligate life of rock stars, McCartney draws ... sustenance from his rigorously imposed family structure. ... Unlike most rock superstars, the McCartneys try to stay in touch with reality."
McCartney's solo work has been described as "middle of the road" pop, a somewhat disparaging classification for his catchy tunes and singable lyrics. It is fair to say that McCartney's music fits in the pop format, but it falls into the same "pop as art" category as do the works of Phil Collins, Elton John, and Billy Joel. "As a Beatle, McCartney ebulliently proved that he could mix with the best of them," writes the Time critic, "but at the moment he is having fun being flippant about rock's old insistence on relevance. His tunes are elaborately homespun, lined with shifting, driving rhythms and coy harmonics, their lyrics full of flights of gentle, sometimes treacly fantasy. ... Even during his Beatle days, McCartney was something of a sentimentalist, and not embarrassed about it. At this point in his development, he seems pleased to be a first-rate performer and a composer of clever songs."
McCartney's fans of the 1990s include those of his own generation as well as youngsters who were not even born when the Beatles disbanded. "McCartney still draws many of the Beatles faithful, to be sure," writes the Time critic. "He has also found a whole new audience, his audience. They have come to hear him, not history." In a candid interview for the CBS-Television series "48 Hours," McCartney said that he has no intentions of retiring from songwriting or performing. "I'm just in the middle of my career," he said. "I'm only 47, I don't feel like I'm finished." He concluded: "I'm still planning to write better songs."
On April 17th, 1998, Paul lost his wife, Linda to breast cancer.
He had often been criticized for including her on his albums and touring bands over the years, but in reality was always being true to himself and very consistent about his beliefs about family. When asked on the Oprah Winfrey show what his best gift to his wife had been, his reply was "The kids.".
Paul and Linda always felt that their proudest achievement were their four child ren:
