This is a new phase BEATLES Album...

The Last Photo Shoot

On April 10, 1970 Paul McCartney gave a revealing "self-interview" in a press release meant to promote his first solo album, McCartney. "I had talked to Peter Brown from Apple and asked him what we were going to do about press on the album. He said, 'I'll give you some questions and you just write out your answers. We'll put it out as a press release.' Well of course, the way it came out looked like it was specially engineered by me."

Q: Is this album a rest away from the Beatles or the start of a solo career?

PAUL: Time will tell. Being a solo album means it's "the start of a solo career…and not being done with the Beatles means it's just a rest. So it's both."

Q: Is your break with the Beatles temporary or permanent, due to personal differences or musical ones?

PAUL: Personal differences, business differences, musical differences, but most of all because I have a better time with my family. Temporary or permanent? I don’t really know.

Q: Do you foresee a time when Lennon-McCartney becomes an active songwriting partnership again?

PAUL: No.

This was a week prior to the release of McCartney and nearly a month before Let It Be (May 8, 1970). Lennon had privately left the Beatles months earlier, yet it was from this interview that the story of a Beatles split spread across the world like fire. London's The Daily Mirror ran a front-page story with the headline, "PAUL IS QUITTING THE BEATLES," while CBS News declared, "The Beatles are breaking up." (The news superseded the proposed launch of Apollo 13 the next day.) Though Paul had said nothing definitive, the release of Let It Be contained an odd disclaimer: "This is a new phase BEATLES album…," a seeming denial by the record companies making promises that would never be kept. The dream was over. All of us took it personally, few of us recovered, and the 60s ended just like that – there was no "new phase BEATLES album."

It was that decisive ending that earmarked the 70s as Rock's greatest era (the 90s were the least impressive decade in that the most noteworthy music came from artists who were fully established in the 80s - from Radiohead in 1985 to Nirvana in '88). No artist of the 90s (even Weezer) compares to the best of the 60s and 70s, and no one would have imagined that the 70s could possibly compare to what had transpired in the hippie era.

The 70s (and these are indeed gross and arguable generalizations) were a new beginning and a disjuncture in American and British music. The British bent carried on in the art-rock model of The Moody Blues and King Crimson; out of it came Roxy Music, Electric Light Orchestra, Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer - music that couldn't happen in America (although it gained great popularity). The American faction took the Laurel Canyon/singer-songwriter approach with the emergence of Crosby Stills and Nash, James Taylor, Jackson Brown and Bruce Springsteen, or the New York school embraced by the Peppermint Lounge and later, CBGB and the Mudd Club - those descendants of the VU: Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith and the Ramones. The 70s were upon us. They had not the charm of the 60s, but they indeed had the music. 

Officially (that math thing again), the 70s do not begin until 1971, but let's cheat. 1970 brought us: All Things Must Pass, After the Gold Rush, Deja Vu, Black Sabbath's Paranoid, Deep Purple in Rock, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, American Beauty, Tea for the Tillerman, The Carpenters' Close to You, The Moody Blues A Question of Balance, Bitches Brew, David Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World, Sweet Baby James, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Elton John, Gentle Giant, Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Genesis' Trespass