Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair chronicle in technicolor McCartney's pivotal years from 1969 to 1973, as he recreated himself in the immediate aftermath of the Beatles breakup.
A devoted document dump, assembled from diaries, court papers and reporting fresh and reconstituted ... The man himself was not interviewed for this project...but gave the thumbs-up to other sources. The result is aptly patchwork ... But it’s deft patchwork, the seams between old and new tucked away in the neat drawer of its index ... Trivia, the coin of the realm in pop culture writing, is spilled here in abundance. Lots of it feels relevant or at least redolent ... There will be thousands more pages written about Paul McCartney, and yet, he seems to be taunting, we will never catch him.
So just what does this first volume of The McCartney Legacy give us that we don’t already have? Well, if you just so happen to be looking for an exhaustive survey of the singer’s post-Beatles career (both solo and with his band Wings), you’ve come to the right place ... A compulsively readable (for Beatlemaniacs, at any rate) blow-by-blow account of McCartney’s final days in the world’s most astonishingly creative rock ’n’ roll band and his willful determination to make a go of it out on his own ... It’s a welcome portrait of a complicated man who is too often depicted as a smiling jukebox. For a superstar who has thrived in the public eye with a no-drama mantra, there’s plenty of drama in these pages ... The photos are revelatory ... Kozinn is an astute musical analyst ... But the book’s prose, like its subject, is sometimes prone to banality ... Still, these post-Beatles years provide plenty of fodder — even, yes, a few things we didn’t already have.
And while the subject himself declined to speak with the pair...he gave implied permission for others to speak with the authors. That resulted in scores of fresh interviews for the book, and the authors drew on their own archive of tens of thousands of McCartney’s print, audio, and video interviews. They also had access to or uncovered thousands of never-before-seen documents ... In the biographical pieces, there are plenty of new nuggets for even the most hardcore fans ... One thing that really sets this book apart is Kozinn and Sinclair’s unprecedented amount of detail on every single Paul McCartney solo recording sessio ... So, does the world need another book about Paul McCartney? If it’s The McCartney Legacy, I say, say, say…yes!
