Stream It Or Skip It: ‘McCartney 3, 2, 1’ on Hulu, Where Macca And Rick Rubin Join The Chat

Directed by Beyonce collaborator and Best Documentary Feature Academy Award nominee Zachary Heinzerling (Cutie and the Boxer), McCartney 3, 2, 1 (Hulu) places Paul McCartney and producer Rick Rubin in the bosom of conversation, their only accompaniment a studio mixing board chock full of representative material and the occasional guitar or piano. The truth nuggets fly and musician-y digressions evolve as Hulu keeps its Summer of Soul music doc hot streak alive.

MCCARTNEY 3, 2, 1: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Paul McCartney is vocalizing and fingers are snapping — there’s already a sense of intimacy flowing from 3, 2, 1, and it’s only been three seconds. That sense heightens as two figures emerge in the warm black and white film. Rick Rubin and McCartney stand before a mixing board. “You up for listening to a bit of music?” the veteran producer casually asks the iconic Liverpudlian musician.

The Gist: Hulu’s latest music documentary coup is McCartney 3, 2, 1, a six-episode series that finds the legendary Beatle, Wings bandleader, and ever-curious solo artist in conversation with Rick Rubin, the guru-like Def Jam Recordings cofounder and signature sound producer of records from Beastie Boys and LL Cool J to Johnny Cash and Red Hot Chili Peppers. With their half-hourish run time, each ep takes the enviable position of being a regular person who stumbled into an impromptu get together between two music titans and had the sense to shut up and listen as the two shoot the shit about influences, style, recording techniques, and writing some of the most durable and memorable pop music in human history. In the first outing, entitled “These Things Bring You Together,” Rubin turns to the mixing board. “Here’s a little number,” he says, and cues up the McCartney-penned 1963 hit “All My Loving.” And while you’d swear that, by now, everybody would know everything there is to know about the Beatles, but right away, 3, 2, 1 has you hearing the nearly six decades-old track from an entirely fresh perspective. “This is John’s rhythm thing,” McCartney says, jerking his left hand in imitation of Lennon’s staccato jangle. “You try doing that for three minutes.” And as Rubin isolates the track containing McCartney’s lead solo, he savors it, and simply says “Country.” It’s an incredible moment of deconstruction, simultaneously revealing the material on a historical, technical, and aesthetic level, and 3, 2, 1 is only getting started.

There’s autobiography here, too. McCartney tells Rubin about his father’s frequent turns at the family piano, and the loving home life that informed his personal disposition, an outlook that was at odds with the enormous chip on John Lennon’s shoulder as a child with a rough upbringing. McCartney emphasizes how much that dichotomy balanced the two men as songwriters, with John adding his inherent cynicism to Paul’s baked in lyrical optimism. “It’s getting better all the time! (It couldn’t get much worse)…” And before long, Rubin and McCartney are back at the mixing board, tackling the late 1960’s high concept animal that became Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album Macca says was made in part because of the Beatles’ “intercontinental rivalry” with Brian Wilson, an answer album to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Throughout 3, 2, 1, McCartney’s mind calls up memories like it all went down just yesterday, and Rubin is the grateful listener, a fellow professional and musical craftsman who is nevertheless in thrall with his chance to bounce questions off a living legend.

What Show Will It Remind You Of? There’s a similar sense of conversational intimacy and unbounded freedom of expression to David Letterman’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction (Netflix), which Rubin actually appeared on as a guest. Meanwhile, the PBS series Soundbreaking explored the watershed moments when the studio and a producer became as instrumental as the recording artist, highlighted by an episode discussing Beatles producer George Martin as well as the recording of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.

Our Take: After all of the remasters, reissues, documentary rehashes and history dug through, it turns out there’s still more to glean out of what the Beatles mean to music and our larger popular culture. And while its wealth of revelations about songwriting inspiration and the artistic immediacy of recording some of the most iconic Beatles material provide terrific ballast, the true balance of McCartney 3, 2, 1 is in its intimate front porch vibe. Rubin’s the right foil for this, of course — removing layers of varnish to reveal the stark beauty underneath has been his calling card as a producer time and time again, and he does the same here, letting McCartney spin yarns and anecdotes and falling easily back to the mixing board, where each of them assume the universal position of music fans, furiously nodding their heads and rocking along to the opening salvos of “Sgt. Pepper,” the guitar rocking heavier than you remember it, and Paul dropping in factoidal cookies about the recording session, shouting them over the studio monitors. It’s crazy, it’s cozy — this isn’t Behind the Music, it’s happening right out in front of you.

This profound sense of hearing again for the first time might be illustrated best in the first episode’s last section, as Rubin and McCartney break down the George Harrison White Album composition “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” They expose the song’s bones on singular tracks, how Paul’s frenzied, raw bass line exists at once in tandem and against the spiritual grain of George’s elegiac lead parts. It’s like a raw nerve poking right through the speakers, and Macca sings over his bass line some fantasy rock ‘n’ roll song that never was, a proto-Bad Company thing that was always happening under the mournful beauty of Harrison’s bit. You want to say, “Awesome! Now do ‘Paperback Writer!'” Insert your favorite Beatles or McCartney title here — the point is, 3, 2, 1 will have you enthralled.

Sex and Skin: Well, Rick Rubin is his usual barefoot self throughout.

Parting Shot: “You guys were essentially blending styles,” Rubin says of the iconic tracks he and McCartney are deconstructing, “not by mixing two genres, but really by mixing two fields. Like, when the Beatles played a reggae-influenced number, it doesn’t sound like reggae, it sounds like the Beatles. It becomes something new.”

McCartney picks up the thread. “Yeah, you know, that’s a nice fact of music, is even though you’re inspired by something, it’s going to sound like you.” And as 3, 2, 1 hits you with the credits, the reggae-influenced “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” pops off.

Sleeper Star: Jimi! Rubin and McCartney are riffing on the euphoria that permeated the air during the hot, steamy weekend in May 1967, when the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band record was first released. People were getting high to it, getting drunk to it; the songs emanated from every window in Laurel Canyon. Suddenly, McCartney recalls how Jimi Hendrix opened his concert at weekend’s end with a rangy cover of the title track — he’d learned it over the previous two days. “He did a great version of it, really wacky, loud, and beautiful,” McCartney says over vintage footage of Hendrix tearing through the lead to “Sgt. Pepper.” “He’s using his vibrator arm, his Bigsby arm, and he’s going…” and Paul imitates the wailing vibrato effect of Hendrix’s incendiary guitar with his voice, face, and hands.

Most Pilot-y Line: McCartney is relating the anecdotal history of his younger days with George and John, hitchhiking together and uncovering kernels of inspiration from unlikely sources as burgeoning young songwriters. “So you know, those things, I say, all of that brought you together,” he tells Rubin of those experiences. “So by the time we came together to be a recording group, I think this is why we could, so quickly, just put together a lick, you know? And that made it more joyful.” The primordial ooze of the Beatles’ unified creative genius, revealed.

Our Call: STREAM IT. McCartney 3, 2, 1 is imbued with a loose, parlor conversation vibe that belies the gravity of the memories and recording studio insights that McCartney peppers into the conversation. 3, 2, 1 is fascinating.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges