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From his first solo album McCartney has stepped out from
behind the bass and displayed his considerable talent playing six-string
guitar, but few fans realized during the Beatles' recording years that
McCartney was providing some of the tastiest guitar playing to be heard
on those records, rivaling Lennon in spirit and Harrison in technique.
His solos can be heard on, among other songs, "Taxman," "Drive My Car,"
"The End," "Good Morning, Good Morning" and "Helter Skelter." Now
this musician, who brought a new spirit and prestige to bass guitar, is
being appreciated belatedly for his six-string work.
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Although
primarily known for his bass playing, Sir Paul McCartney started his rock
and roll career on a six-string guitar. When he met John Lennon at
the St. Peter's Parish Fete on 6 July 1957, he impressed the leader of
The Quarry Men by knocking out a dead-on version of "Twenty Flight Rock."
McCartney was soon offered a job with the band and after a few practices
debuted at the New Clubmoor Hall, Norris Green, Liverpool on 18 October
1957. "I kind of went in first of all as lead guitarist really,"
McCartney says in the Tony Bacon 
when
he was called upon to replace bassist Stuart Sutcliffe. From that
point he would provide innovative, highly musical bass accompaniment for
The Beatles throughout their career.
1956:
Zenith
Model 17 acoustic, vintage unknown: In June 1956, McCartney's father gave
him a trumpet for his fourteenth birthday. "I used to play it a little
bit," he recalls in Many Years From Now, the Barry Miles
biography, "because that was the hero instrument then,
The Man with
the Golden Arm and everything, but it became clear to me fairly
quickly that you couldn't sing with a trumpet stuck in your mouth."At the
same time, skiffle-band fever was sweeping England, and after getting his
dad's permission, young McCartney brought the trumpet back to Rushworth
and Dreaper's Music, where he traded it in for this model made in Germany
by Framus. 
When
he got home with the £15 guitar, he "couldn't figure out at all how
to play it. I didn't realize it was because I was left-handed, and it wasn't
until I saw a picture of Slim Whitman, who was also left-handed, and I
saw that I had the guitar the wrong-way round." Once he re-strung the guitar
"upside-down," McCartney discovered that the first string rattled around
in the wider notches designed for the sixth string, so he carefully shaved
down a safety match and made a little block to keep the string from moving
about. Later he mounted a little pickup near the bridge, and eventually
removed the pickguard, and used this guitar until the Beatles' first trip
to Hamburg. The Zenith, on which McCartney composed his earliest
songs, including "When I'm 64," still hangs in his studio; he pulled it
down for the "Anthology" video to play a bit of "Twenty Flight Rock."
