The Beatles were together for just ten years, having started in 1960. However, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and John Lennon found it sufficient to create some of the greatest albums ever recorded. With an estimated 600 million albums sold globally, they continue to be the best-selling group in history.
It’s quite difficult to lose a job, and the great Paul McCartney experienced this immediately following the band’s dissolution. Even though he still possessed a sizable fortune that would have allowed him to stop working, he felt empty not being able to pursue his skill. In a 1984 interview with Playboy magazine, he recollected the emotion as well as how he handled it.
How Paul McCartney felt right after The Beatles were over
“I was impossible. I don’t know how anyone could have lived with me. For the first time in my life, I was on the scrap heap, in my own eyes. An unemployed worker might have said, ‘Hey, you still have the money. That’s not as bad as we have it.’ But to me, it didn’t have anything to do with money.”
“It was just the feeling, the terrible disappointment of not being of any use to anyone anymore. It was a barreling, empty feeling that just rolled across my soul, and it was… I’d never experienced it before. Drugs had shown me little bits here and there. They had rolled across the carpet once or twice. But I had been able to get them out of my mind. In this case, the end of the Beatles, I really was done for the first time in my life.”
He continued, “Until then, I really was a kind of cocky sod. It was the first time I’d had a major blow to my confidence. When my mother died, I don’t think my confidence suffered. It had been a terrible blow, but I didn’t feel it was my fault. It was bad on Linda. She had to deal with this guy who didn’t particularly want to get out of bed. If he did, wanted to go back to bed pretty soon after.”
“He wanted to drink earlier and earlier each day and didn’t really see the point in shaving, because where was he going? And I was generally pretty morbid. There was no danger of suicide or anything. It wasn’t that bad. Let’s say I wouldn’t have liked to live with me. So I don’t know how Linda (His wife) stuck it out.”
After John Lennon declared his desire to quit the band, it was a trying time for their relationship and the band broke up. While they were making their last album, “Let It Be,” there was stress, but everything turned out in the end. For a few years following the split, McCartney and Lennon had a strained relationship since they weren’t speaking well of one another in interviews. Nevertheless, a few years before Lennon was brutally assassinated at the age of forty, they ended up rekindling their friendship.
The successful McCartney solo career
In 1970, the Beatles released “McCartney,” his debut album. The only other person on the album was his wife Linda, who recorded the harmony vocals. He recorded everything by himself. The musician recorded the piano, organ, mellotron, bass, guitar, drums, and more in addition to singing.
It was the start of a lucrative solo career that saw the sale of an estimated 45 million albums globally. Being elected into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice once as a member of a band and once as a solo artist makes McCartney one of the rare artists.