Early evening in late summer, the golden hour in the village of East Hampton. The surf is rough and pounds its regular measure on the shore. At the last driveway on a road ending at the beach, a cortège of cars—S.U.V.s, jeeps, candy-colored roadsters—pull up to the gate, sand crunching pleasantly under the tires. And out they come, face after famous face, burnished, expensively moisturized: Jerry Seinfeld, Jimmy Buffett, Anjelica Huston, Julianne Moore, Stevie Van Zandt, Alec Baldwin, Jon Bon Jovi. They all wear expectant, delighted-to-be-invited expressions. Through the gate, they mount a flight of stairs to the front door and walk across a vaulted living room to a fragrant back yard, where a crowd is circulating under a tent in the familiar high-life way, regarding the territory, pausing now and then to accept refreshments from a tray.
Their hosts are Nancy Shevell, the scion of a New Jersey trucking family, and her husband, Paul McCartney, a bass player and singer-songwriter from Liverpool. A slender, regal woman in her early sixties, Shevell is talking in a confiding manner with Michael Bloomberg, who was the mayor of New York City when she served on the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Bloomberg nods gravely at whatever Shevell is saying, but he has his eyes fixed on a plate of exquisite little pizzas. Would he like one? He narrows his gaze, trying to decide; then, with executive dispatch, he declines.
I smiled at the understated way Remnick introduces McCartney, one of the most famous persons in the world, as Nancy Shevell’s husband, “a bass player and singer-songwriter from Liverpool.” And that detail about Bloomberg eyeing the pizzas, narrowing his gaze, trying to decide, “then with executive dispatch, he declines,” is very fine.
I read those two passages and I was hooked, in spite of myself. I’m normally allergic to celebrity profiles.
In the second section, in which Remnick reflects on the way songs are “emotionally adhesive,” he tells a story about his father and him attending the opening of the 1973 Newport Jazz Festival at Carnegie Hall, where, backstage, they meet one of his father’s heroes – jazz pianist Teddy Wilson.
The third section, my favourite, is written in the first person. It describes Remnick’s meeting with McCartney at McCartney’s Manhattan office. It contains this inspired detail:
We reached a large sitting room, and, as he plopped down on the couch, a hearing aid sprang out of his right ear. He rolled his eyes and, with a complicit smile, used his index finger to push the wormy apparatus back in place.
The fourth section reviews the evolution of the Beatles. Sample: “The development from album to album—from three-chord teen-age love songs to intricate ballads to the tape loops and synthesizers of their psychedelic moment—both caught the Zeitgeist and created it.”
The fifth covers the band’s breakup (“All these stress fractures could be felt in 1969 when the Beatles gathered at Twickenham after the New Year’s holiday”).
The sixth describes the aftermath of the breakup (“The crackup was raw and public. Lennon, who was undergoing Arthur Janov’s primal-scream therapy, was not prepared to muffle his pent-up grievances”).
The seventh reports Lennon’s murder and its impact on McCartney (“McCartney was hamstrung; how could he respond? Lennon was now a martyr. People gathered outside the Dakota to sing ‘Imagine’ and leave behind flowers or a burning candle”).
The eighth is a commentary on McCartney’s post-Beatles work. It includes this curmudgeonly assessment: “In truth, McCartney often seems inclined to issue everything that he has had occasion to record, and much of it is undercooked and sentimental.” Ouch! I wonder what McCartney thought of that.
The ninth is a curio: Remnick returns to that Newport Jazz concert that he and his father attended in 1973, but this time his focus is on drummer Gene Krupa. Remnick writes,
When I watch McCartney perform, I can’t help thinking about that Newport Jazz concert my father and I attended in 1973. When we were backstage, Gene Krupa, the drummer for Benny Goodman’s band, sat slumped in a chair, silent, staring at a space in the carpet between his shoes. He seemed racked with dread and very old. Then, onstage, he shook off whatever weighed on him and came alive to the sound of his old friends: Goodman’s sinuous clarinet, Hampton’s glowing vibes, Wilson’s liquid runs on the piano. Just before “Avalon,” the customary closer, Krupa had his moment, beating his mother-of-pearl tomtom to open “Sing, Sing, Sing,” a standard that Goodman and Krupa had made into an extended improvisational set piece. Krupa was a runaway train. The hall throbbed to his foot at the bass drum. There was something ominous, even frightening, about the spectacle of this sickly man, now come dangerously alive, at the edge of abandon. When Krupa was done, and the applause rained over him, you could see that his shirt was drenched.
After the show, we waited by the stage door on Fifty-sixth Street, hoping to see Teddy Wilson and thank him. The door banged open and an immense security guard burst onto the sidewalk. He was carrying an old man, seemingly unconscious, in his arms. It was Krupa, wrapped in towels. A cab pulled up, and the guard funnelled him into the back seat. Less than four months later, we read in the paper that Krupa had died, after struggling for years with leukemia. He was sixty-four.
Sorry, the analogy between McCartney and Krupa escapes me (perhaps it’s that McCartney, like Krupa, seems determined to keep performing right to his life’s end), but those passages on Krupa are among the liveliest and most memorable of the piece.
The tenth section artfully circles back to the scene of the party that began the piece. Now, it’s the day after and Remnick is at McCartney’s house. It begins with one of those great simple narrative sentences that always grab me: “The morning after the party, I returned to McCartney’s house on the beach.” In this final part, McCartney contemplates the future (“McCartney sat down to talk on a screened porch. Projects lay ahead, some of which he’d be completing as he hit eighty”).
“Let the Record Show” is a brilliant review of an incredible life. It’s all the more impressive when you consider that it’s written as a sideline to Remnick’s main job - editor-in-chief of The New Yorker. He’s a genius editor and a wonderful writer. Long may he continue in both roles.
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