With a little help from his friends, Paul McCartney gets a big post-Beatles biography

On the Shelf 'The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969-73' By Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair Dey Street: 720 pages, $35 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. He has just spent eight years working with Adrian Sinclair on “The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969-73,” the first of four planned tomes, exhaustively detailed, examining the songwriter’s post-Beatles life and career. He’s gained a newfound admiration for the once-maligned “Ram” album and elaborately produced songs like “The Back Seat of My Car” and “Little Lamb Dragonfly.” “It’s not that I’ve switched sides, it’s that now I say, ‘Why are there sides?’” Sinclair first tapped Kozinn with the idea of commissioning biographical sketches around a “sessionography” of all McCartney’s recordings, in the style of Mark Lewisohn’s seminal “The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions.” But as the book kept growing, Lewisohn, himself now working on a multibook Beatles biography, suggested a full-fledged bio. There was the time McCartney retreated to Scotland to escape a Beatles feud and just missed an invitation to play on a Jimi Hendrix album; or when he wrote “Another Day” on commission for a film but didn’t like the movie or the cast, so he kept it for himself; or the fact that “Live and Let Die” was his second shot at writing a song for a Bond film, after a near miss on “Diamonds Are Forever.” Kozinn also reports that McCartney offered background chatter for Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” — but it was cut for sounding too guarded and polished. “You don’t need a doctorate in Paul McCartney to enjoy ‘Hi, Hi, Hi,’ but Adrian says Paul’s life and music are so intertwined that you can’t fully understand the music without knowing about his life.” Awards Peter Jackson takes us inside the process of making ‘The Beatles: Get Back’ Working with a free hand, the director included previously unseen George Harrison quitting the band and was able to isolate moments of conversation away from the sounds of guitars and amps.