Music producer Rick Rubin arrives at the ninth annual Grammy Week Event honoring him at The Village Recording Studios on February 11, 2016, in Los Angeles. His formidable size, wild hair, and rabbinical beard create the picture of the ultimate “Bear Jew,” but as you watch him listen to the isolated harmonies on “This Boy” or the guitar solo on “And Your Bird Can Sing,” he becomes like all of us: a fan of this remarkable music. You can tell Rubin is a genius by the way he presents himself: an absolute schlump, as my mother would say, shoeless, in shorts and an ill-fitting t-shirt. The 58-year-old, who famously started Def Jam Records out of his New York University dorm room (Weinstein Hall, the one with the best dining options), and who has created work with artists across the spectrum of music from rap (Run D.M.C.) to heavy metal (Slayer) to country (Johnny Cash) and everything in between (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Beastie Boys, the Mars Volta, Neil Freaking Diamond, etc.), is absolutely the guy you want needling McCartney with specific “How exactly did you accomplish this?” questions. Our interlocutor is the esteemed Jewish-American record producer Rick Rubin. Online, we can easily pull up footage from the Ed Sullivan Theater, the last gig atop Apple Records on Savile Row, or even rent the film “Give My Regards To Broad Street.” (That last one isn’t exactly recommended.) So what you get in “McCartney 3,2,1” is exactly what all music nerds fantasize about doing: sitting down with Paul and the tapes, with a piano and guitar in reach, and asking questions almost just about the songs. Wisely, all involved in its creation know that there is no shortage of films that tell the story of the Beatles or Paul McCartney. For those of us who have poured over everything from the Beatles’ shortest song (“Her Majesty” at 0:25) to their longest (“Revolution 9” at 8:20) as if they were passages of scripture, this documentary is a true gift.
Even people who don’t care much about music know “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Yesterday” and “Yellow Submarine” as much as they do nursery rhymes. McCartney is one of only two people still living who can claim witness to these recordings that, for many of us, feel as if they’ve always been there. Luckily, the burdensome shadow of myth hasn’t clouded his memory. Now I look back, and I was working with John Lennon.”
As Paul McCartney himself says in the spectacular new series “McCartney 3,2,1” (streaming on Hulu in North America and on Disney+ in Europe), “At the time I was just working with this bloke called John. NEW YORK - One thinks about the eternal songs of the Beatles, foundational to nearly 60 years of popular culture, not so much as being created by mortals, but handed down from Sinai.