Paul McCartney Ram (1971)

This is the original trash review of Ram by Jon Landau in Rolling Stone 1971

From Jon Landau Rolling Stone July 8th 1971

Ram represents the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far. For some, including myself, Self-Portrait had been secure in that position, but at least Self-Portrait was an album that you could hate, a record you could feel something over, even if it were nothing but regret. Ram is so incredibly inconsequential and so monumentally irrelevant you can’t even do that with it: it is difficult to concentrate on, let alone dislike or even hate.

McCartney’s work in the Beatles was always schizoid. On the one hand there were the rockers: “She’s A Woman,” “I’m Down,” “If You Won’t See Me,” “Get Back,” and “Lady Madonna”; on the other, the ballads and the schmaltz, including (in descending order), “Hey Jude,” “She’s Leaving Home,” “Yesterday,” “And I Love Her,” “Taste of Honey” and “Till There Was You.” Ram fulfills all the promise of “Till There Was You” and loses touch with the entire remainder of McCartney’s own past. And it is so lacking in the taste that was one of the hallmarks of the Beatles that it strongly suggests Paul is not happy in his role as a solo artist, no matter how much he protests to the contrary.

The odd thing about it is that within the context of the Beatles, Paul’s talents were beyond question. He was perhaps the most influential white bass player of the late Sixties, the only one of the Beatles with a keenly developed personal instrumental style. He was also the group’s best melodist, and he surely had the best voice.

But, if it was Paul who used to polish up Lennon’s bluntness and forced him to adapt a little style, it is by now apparent that Lennon held the reins in on McCartney’s cutsie-pie, florid attempts at pure rock muzak. He was there to keep McCartney from going off the deep end that leads to an album as emotionally vacuous as Ram. Now left to their own devices, each has done what always came most naturally. Lennon has created a music of almost monomaniacal intensity and blunt style, while McCartney creates music with a fully developed veneer, little intensity, and no energy.

Thus the dissolution of the Beatles reveals that their compromises had always been psychological first, and musical second, and that without each other they both drift naturally to their own emotional-musical extreme. Lennon has the better of it for the moment, but he may falter yet: “Power to the People” was as awful in its own way as anything on Ram, and only a fool would write off a man of McCartney’s past accomplishments on the basis of two albums (I’m not much of a fan of the last one either).

All of which makes it no less easy to deal with this very bad album from this very talented artist. For myself, I hear two good things on this record: “Eat At Home,” a pleasant, if minor, evocation of the music of Buddy Holly (with some very nice updating), and “Sitting in the Back Seat of My Car,” the album’s production number.

The album’s genre music—blues and old rock—is unbearably inept. On “Three Legs” they do strange and pointless things to the sound of the voice to liven it up; it doesn’t work. “Smile Away” is sung with that exaggerated voice he used for the rock & roll medley in Let It Be: it is unpleasant. The “When I’m Sixty-Four” school of light English baubles is represented by “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” a piece with so many changes it never seems to come down anywhere, and in the places that it does, sounds like the worst piece of light music Paul has ever done. And “Monkberry Moon Delight” is the bore to end all bores: Paul repeats a riff for five and a half minutes to no apparent purpose.

The lowest point on the album, and the one that most clearly indicates its failures, is “Heart of the Country.” It is an evenly paced, finger-picking styled tune, with very light jazz overtones, obviously intended as Paul’s idea of “mellow.” Somehow, his lyrics about the joys of the country ring false. Rather than a sense of self-acceptance or pride, I get a feeling of self-pity and self-justification from this cut, feelings that are almost masked by music so competent, in fact routine, that it all seems to slip away. Compare it to an earlier piece of music somewhat in the same vein, “Blackbird.” That song has all the charm and grace “Heart of the Country” tries for, but also the depth, purpose, and conviction, which are the missing ingredients from Ram as a whole.

These days groups are little more than collections of solo artists. The idea of a group as a unit with an identity of its own has become increasingly passe as groups become less and less stable: they seldom stay together long enough to achieve such an identity. But the Beatles were obviously a true group and history is now proving that it was greater than the sum of their parts. Collectively, the Beatles had a way of maximizing each of their individual strengths and minimizing each of their individual flaws. Individually, none of them can create on the same level, no matter how good some individual recordings may be.

For none of the Beatles is a truly self-sufficient artist and therefore none of them seems to function at his best as a soloist. In this light, Paul has simply proven to be the most vulnerable: the group hid most of his weaknesses longer and better than they did the others so that they were the most unexpected now that they have finally become visible. But now they have become visible and the results can scarcely be more satisfying to McCartney himself than they will be to the many people who will find this record wanting. McCartney and Ram both prove that Paul benefited immensely from collaboration and that he seems to be dying on the vine as a result of his own self-imposed musical isolation. What he finally decides to do about it is anybody’s guess, but it is the only thing that makes Paul McCartney’s musical future worth thinking about and hoping for.

Paul McCartney: Wings Band on the Run (1973)

From Chris Welch, Melody Maker, 1 December 1973

“IT’S NOT A concept,” says Paul McCartney, but there is a thread to Wings’ newie Band On The Run. The feeling expressed throughout is one of happy, almost exhultant freedom, in which the music is open, un-pressured and eminently satisfying. It epitomises what Wings are all about. They soar sunward and revel in light and warmth.

One of the more remarkable aspects of the album is the breadth of sound they achieve, when one considers that most of the instrumentation is in the hands of the three surviving members. With Denny Seiwell and Henry McCullough out, Paul had to take over the drum duties as well as playing bass guitar, and the rest of the instruments are played by Linda McCartney and Denny Laine. There are some fine songs, as one would expect, including the delightful ‘Blue Bird’, with its hint of Bossa Nova rhythm, and the title track which sets the pace for richly melodic and memorable material. A lazy guitar and synthesiser statement opens proceeedings with Paul and Linda singing of being “stuck inside four walls,” which alludes to captivity and subsequent escape. A touch of orchestra leads into doubled tempo, which is increased yet again for the high flying ‘Jet’, which shouts of freedom. After ‘Blue Bird’, ‘Mrs Vanderbilt’, begins with the classic Charlie Chester line “down in the jungle, living in a tent.” Paul says you “don’t need money, you don’t pay rent.”

Message

I think Charlie used to conclude, “better than a prefab – no rent.” The message here is not to worry, not to hurry, a creed to keep successful rockers sane. ‘Let Me Roll It’, has an almost Plastic Ono quality about the hard and sharp guitar riff and strong use of echo. The bass line here is beautiful, and simplicity of production stunningly effective. This could become a rock standard, or at least a single. Side two opens with the sea, where life began, and Paul’s warning on ‘Mamunia’, not to complain about the rain. There is a slight amount of conga drum but certainly not a great deal of African influence, as was expected from the location of the sessions, in Lagos. Again, the production is beautifully simple, with the bass most to the fore, and gentle acoustic guitar additions behind the sparkling harmonies. ‘No Words’ is a romantic ballad with dramatic orchestral interjections, courtesy of Tony Visconti. The beat is more pronounced and the twists and turns of the arrangement always resolve in an interesting, rewarding fashion. The guitar solo is faded, which is a shame, but it has to make way for the measured strides of ‘Drink To Me’. It reminds me a bit of ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, and has a couple of devices oft favoured in Beatle days, the lugubrious tones of a clarinet and some interspersed radio commentary.

There is a reprise of ‘Jet’, which comes in with cunning logic, before ‘Drink’ spills over into party mood.

‘Nineteen Eighty Five’, streaks ahead with a driving piano pattern over descending chords, that terminate abruptly for a Hollywood choir, only to return with renewed energy.

Hypnotic

The drums stomp and the lead guitar howls in ever-increasing excitement, and as the orchestra joins in with great bellowing shafts of sound the effect is hypnotic. Then tension is released by a return to a few bars of ‘Band On The Run’. Wings’ understanding of a proper balance between the use of melody and arrangement, complexity and simplicity, should serve as a lesson to all those groups who force themselves into impossible postures and teeter off-balance. And with this album. Wings prove they are not just a flutter, or plaything, but a highly valued addition to the ranks of music makers. “IT’S NOT A concept,” says Paul McCartney, but there is a thread to Wings’ newie Band On The Run. The feeling expressed throughout is one of happy, almost exhultant freedom, in which the music is open, un-pressured and eminently satisfying. It epitomises what Wings are all about. They soar sunward and revel in light and warmth. One of the more remarkable aspects of the album is the breadth of sound they achieve, when one considers that most of the instrumentation is in the hands of the three surviving members. With Denny Seiwell and Henry McCullough out, Paul had to take over the drum duties as well as playing bass guitar, and the rest of the instruments are played by Linda McCartney and Denny Laine.

There are some fine songs, as one would expect, including the delightful ‘Blue Bird’, with its hint of Bossa Nova rhythm, and the title track which sets the pace for richly melodic and memorable material. A lazy guitar and synthesiser statement opens proceeedings with Paul and Linda singing of being “stuck inside four walls,” which alludes to captivity and subsequent escape. A touch of orchestra leads into doubled tempo, which is increased yet again for the high flying ‘Jet’, which shouts of freedom. After ‘Blue Bird’, ‘Mrs Vanderbilt’, begins with the classic Charlie Chester line “down in the jungle, living in a tent.” Paul says you “don’t need money, you don’t pay rent.”

Message

I think Charlie used to conclude, “better than a prefab – no rent.” The message here is not to worry, not to hurry, a creed to keep successful rockers sane. ‘Let Me Roll It’, has an almost Plastic Ono quality about the hard and sharp guitar riff and strong use of echo. The bass line here is beautiful, and simplicity of production stunningly effective. This could become a rock standard, or at least a single.

Side two opens with the sea, where life began, and Paul’s warning on ‘Mamunia’, not to complain about the rain. There is a slight amount of conga drum but certainly not a great deal of African influence, as was expected from the location of the sessions, in Lagos. Again, the production is beautifully simple, with the bass most to the fore, and gentle acoustic guitar additions behind the sparkling harmonies. ‘No Words’ is a romantic ballad with dramatic orchestral interjections, courtesy of Tony Visconti.The beat is more pronounced and the twists and turns of the arrangement always resolve in an interesting, rewarding fashion. The guitar solo is faded, which is a shame, but it has to make way for the measured strides of ‘Drink To Me’. It reminds me a bit of ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, and has a couple of devices oft favoured in Beatle days, the lugubrious tones of a clarinet and some interspersed radio commentary. There is a reprise of ‘Jet’, which comes in with cunning logic, before ‘Drink’ spills over into party mood. ‘Nineteen Eighty Five’, streaks ahead with a driving piano pattern over descending chords, that terminate abruptly for a Hollywood choir, only to return with renewed energy.

Hypnotic

The drums stomp and the lead guitar howls in ever-increasing excitement, and as the orchestra joins in with great bellowing shafts of sound the effect is hypnotic. Then tension is released by a return to a few bars of ‘Band On The Run’. Wings’ understanding of a proper balance between the use of melody and arrangement, complexity and simplicity, should serve as a lesson to all those groups who force themselves into impossible postures and teeter off-balance.

And with this album. Wings prove they are not just a flutter, or plaything, but a highly valued addition to the ranks of music makers.

Paul McCartney Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005)

From theguardian.com

Paul McCartney has grown bitter – and it’s done him a world of good, says Alexis Petridis
4 stars, (Parlophone)

For a moment, let us banish the nagging suspicion that the world may house people more deserving of our sympathy than a happily married knight of the realm, globally acknowledged as a peerless genius and with a rumoured personal fortune of £762m, and spare a thought for Paul McCartney. Despite his reputation for irrepressible chirpiness – the man who, for a generation of 1980s Smash Hits readers, will always be Fab Macca Wacky Thumbs Aloft – it can’t be easy being him at 63. Your best work was completed four decades ago. The hits have dried up (his last top 10 single was in 1987). Every new effort is greeted with little more than a yawn, a shrug and at least one twerpish critic bringing up the subject of The Frog Chorus: even a wildly successful world tour couldn’t hoist 2001’s Driving Rain higher than number 46.

Obviously the unimaginable wealth, rapturous reception at Glastonbury and Live8 and official title as the Most Successful Songwriter in the History of Popular Music must make life a smidge easier, but none of it answers the question: now what? Over the past 20 years, he has tried virtually everything, embarking on projects that presumably whiled away the time between world tours pleasantly enough, but that only the bona fide nutjobs would listen to twice: ambient techno, classical music, old rock’n’roll covers, fitful attempts to reignite the spark with new collaborators, even a compilation of his late wife Linda’s musical efforts.

On first glance, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard looks like more dabbling. It teams McCartney up with Nigel Godrich, the modish producer of Radiohead, Beck and, perhaps less laudably, Band Aid 20’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? In interviews, McCartney has made the sessions sound hard work: “painful”, “a plunge into the darkness” and “like being pulled through a hedge backwards”. Godrich first dismissed McCartney’s idea to make an Indian-themed album, then dismissed his backing band, then started dismissing his songs.

The largely one-man-band results resemble the more ramshackle albums from the first decade of McCartney’s post-Beatles career: McCartney, Ram, 1980’s McCartney II. But those albums were sunlit, quirky and marked by a daffy, occasionally grating sense of humour. Chaos and Creation in the Backyard is muted and crepuscular. Godrich’s measured, dry production means that even the love songs seem strangely downbeat: the chirpy Promise to You Girl sounds as out of place here as a burst of Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da at a funeral.

Some of the sessions’ tension has seeped into the songs, with surprising results. At the Mercy sounds bewildered and despairing. Riding to Vanity Fair is notable not only for a glorious chorus that rises from the song’s murky strings and minor chords in a way that is so inimitably, ridiculously McCartney-esque, you can virtually feel your thumbs involuntarily twitching aloft, but also because it offers a previously unheard noise: Paul McCartney sounding bitter. It’s an emotion he has previously avoided, presumably because he spent his golden years collaborating with a songwriter who could do vicious, sneering, bug-eyed bitterness better than anyone. Even when Lennon turned his sights on him – on How Do You Sleep?, an early draft of which tactfully labelled McCartney a “cunt” – he never responded in kind, preferring the bemused, disappointed shrug of Dear Friend and Let Me Roll It. But someone has clearly riled him in a way that Lennon could not. Peppered with withering “apparently”s and “I wouldn’t dare to presume”s, Riding to Vanity Fare takes McCartney, emotionally at least, into new territory. It’s all rather bracing.

Not all the album’s pleasures are so unexpected. It does a brisk and highly enjoyable trade in Beatles references. English Tea offers a string arrangement that is one part Eleanor Rigby to two parts Martha My Dear and a witty lyrical nod to the author’s saccharine public image (“very twee,” he notes, “very me”). Friends to Go has a distinct Two of Us swing. A charming bit of Latin-inflected fluff called A Certain Softness recalls Step Inside Love, the charming bit of Latin-inflected fluff he wrote for Cilla Black in the mid-1960s. The delightful Jenny Wren could no more obviously signpost its links to The White Album’s Blackbird if it were called Listen to This, It Sounds a Bit Like Blackbird off The White Album.

For all the nods to the past, not a note of Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard comes close to Beatle standards: it’s an intriguing diversion rather than a major addition to the canon. What it has is a sense of purpose, lovely tunes in abundance, and charm. It mints an unassuming and idiosyncratic style with which McCartney could see out his career. At last, it seems he’s found an answer to the previously imponderable question: now what?

McCartney (1970): How Paul’s self-titled debut solo album broke up The Beatles

From udiscovermusic.com April 2021

With his debut solo album, Paul McCartney embraced a lo-fi way of recording, making no attempt to compete with The Beatles

When Paul McCartney’s debut solo album, simply titled McCartney, was released on April 17, 1970, it was far from what many expected. Following Abbey Road’s polished perfection, McCartney chose to issue an album of songs, experiments, and sound doodles predominantly made on his own at home. It would launch a solo career spanning five decades – and counting. But first, he had to leave The Beatles.

“Paul quits The Beatles”

On April 9, 1970, McCartney phoned John Lennon to tell him that he was quitting the band. Lennon had told the group of his own intention to leave the group back in September 1969, though, by mutual agreement, no announcement was made. Now McCartney, too, had decided to up sticks.

What McCartney failed to mention to Lennon was that he had just sent a “self-interview” to the nation’s press, all but informing them that The Beatles were over. In this press release, which was sent with promotional copies of his self-titled debut solo album, Paul answered questions he assumed he would have been asked had he done a press conference. As well as talking about the new album, he spoke about The Beatles’ future – or lack of it.

Q: Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles?
A: No.

Q: Is this album a rest away from The Beatles or the start of a solo career?
A: 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?
A: 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?
A: No.

The next day’s Daily Mirror ran the front-page headline “Paul Quits The Beatles.” If Paul wanted to ensure that his debut solo album didn’t go unnoticed, he could hardly have done more.

“There was no attempt to compete”

In the half-century since its release, McCartney has been praised for its homemade nature, which gives it the charm that Paul saw in it all along. “I had all these rough things and I liked them all and thought, Well, they’re rough, but they’ve got that certain kind of thing about them.”

At the time of McCartney’s release, however, the reception was mixed, with many critics finding the songs half-finished and under-produced. With hindsight, however, by not attempting to compete with his former group with a well-produced record that he’d labored over, Paul stepped out from their shadows. As Neil Young put it when inducting Paul into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, “There was no attempt made to compete with the things he had already done.”

Alongside the Q&A, Paul included a track-by-track breakdown of the songs on his debut album, which he recorded largely on a Studer four-track tape machine in his Georgian townhouse in London’s leafy St John’s Wood, a short walk from Lord’s Cricket Ground, London Zoo and, more importantly, EMI’s studios at Abbey Road. The album was finished at Morgan Studios in the northwest London suburb of Willesden, and Abbey Road. Today, McCartney’s modus operandi has become an entire field of music-making, known as lo-fi. At the time, however, it was unheard of for a major artist to use such basic methods. Working without even a mixing desk, Paul plugged straight into the tape machine.

“A trailer to the full song”

McCartney opens with a doodle of a song called “The Lovely Linda.” Coming in at well under a minute in length, McCartney admitted that this was the first thing he’d recorded when the Studer was installed, “to test the machine.” In his notes, Paul promises that “the song is a trailer to the full song, which will be recorded in the future.” Fifty years on, we’re still waiting to hear it.

Next up is “That Would Be Something,” which, like “The Lovely Linda,” was written by McCartney on his Scottish farm in 1969. George Harrison declared it to be “great.” It’s an effortless breeze of a song, its country roots emphasized by Paul’s southern drawl. Of particular note are the drum fills, which Paul sings rather than plays.

If these two songs set an earthy atmosphere, “Valentine Day” establishes the record’s casual feel. Like “Momma Miss America,” this improvised instrumental was recorded “with more concern for testing the machine than anything else.”

But for all the casual nature of “Valentine Day,” it’s immediately followed by the first genuine McCartney classic of the collection. It would appear that “Every Night” tells of the two lives Paul was living at the time. On the one hand, The Beatles were falling apart; business differences found him on one side of a divide, with John, George, and Ringo on the other. By his own admission, McCartney descended into a depression and turned to the bottle for solace.

On the other hand, he was newly married, with a new baby girl, as well as Linda’s six-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. This dichotomy is reflected in “Every Night,” which opens, “Every night, I just want to go out/Get out of my head/Every day, I don’t want to get up/Get out of my bed,” before concluding: “But tonight I just want to stay in and be with you.”

In his notes, McCartney said that he’d had the opening lines for a few years. It’s also the first song on the album not recorded at home, having been laid down at Abbey Road.

“I sent Sinatra a song called ‘Suicide’ – he did not get it”

If he’d had those lines for a little while, “Hot As Sun” dates from much further back – to at least the late 50s. A 12-bar instrumental, Paul clearly enjoyed the number: not only had he revived it from over a decade earlier, during The Beatles’ “Get Back” sessions in January 1969, but he added it to the setlist for Wings’ final tour, in 1979.

The track is topped off with Paul’s recordings of wine glasses, before a brief fragment of a song called “Suicide” can be heard. Paul had written that song with the intention of giving it to Frank Sinatra. “I spoke to him on the phone and told him about it: ‘Great, Paul, send it along.’ Thank you, Frank! So I got that out of it. I did a demo, sent it to him and he thought I was taking the piss. He really did. ‘Is this guy kidding?’ You know, sending Sinatra a song called ‘Suicide’? He did not get it.”

Next up is “Junk,” a song Paul had written during The Beatles’ stay with the Maharishi in India, in 1968. Appropriately, for an album that could be described as musical bric-a-brac, “Junk” features a lyric describing the ephemera in a junkyard. “Handlebars, sentimental jubilee, jam jars: I like images like that,” Paul explained in his fan club newspaper Club Sandwich. “There are certain words you like. I always used to say that ‘candlestick’ was my favorite word. Certain words either make colors in your head or bring up a feeling. So the song was a potpourri of nice words that I had to make some sense out of, so it was, ‘Buy buy, sell sell, ‘Junk’ says the sign in the yard.’ To lump it all together I got the idea of ‘Junk.’ It was a nice way to write a song.”

Side One of the original vinyl pressing closes with “Man We Was Lonely,” a song written towards the end of the recording sessions for McCartney’s solo debut album. As Paul noted, this was also his first duet with Linda. “The chorus (‘Man we was lonely’) was written in bed at home, shortly before we finished recording the album,” he recalled. “The middle (‘I used to ride…’) was done one lunchtime in a great hurry, as we were due to record the song that afternoon.”

The second half of the album opens with “Oo You,” an instrumental recorded at home, to which McCartney later added vocals at Morgan. After the bluesy instrumental “Momma Miss America,” came a song Paul had tried unsuccessfully to complete during the “Get Back” sessions. The Beatles’ aborted attempt at “Teddy Boy” would later surface on their Anthology 3 compilation, complete with John Lennon’s lampooning backing vocals, instructing the listener “take your partner, do-si-do,” while Paul collapses in giggles. It is a whimsical story-song typical of McCartney around those times, following the tradition of “Rocky Raccoon” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” An instrumental version of “Junk,” appropriately named “Singalong Junk,” follows, before the album’s undisputed tour de force, “Maybe I’m Amazed.”

Even more passionate today

Written about his wife Linda in 1969, “Maybe I’m Amazed” was recorded at Abbey Road, with Paul again playing all the instruments – including one of his best guitar solos. Included in Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time, “Maybe I’m Amazed” remains a centrepiece of McCartney’s live shows. As he sings, photos of him, Linda and their family appear on a giant screen behind him; if anything, Paul’s delivery is even more passionate today, many years after Linda’s death, than it is on the album recording.

Bringing Paul McCartney’s solo debut album to a close is an experimental instrumental track named “Kreen-Akrore.” As McCartney explained in his notes: “There was a film on TV about the Kreen-Akrore Indians living in the Brazilian jungle, their lives, and how the white man is trying to change their way of life to his, so the next day, after lunch, I did some drumming. The idea behind it was to get the feeling of their hunt. So later piano, guitar, and organ were added to the first section.

“The end of the first section has Linda and I doing animal noises (speeded up) and an arrow sound (done live with bow and arrow – the bow broke), then animals stampeding across a guitar case.”

And with that, Paul McCartney began a solo career.

Paul McCartney’s Once-Maligned, Now-Adored ‘Ram’ at 50

From theringer.com

In the wake of the dissolution of the Beatles, Paul and his wife Linda crafted a collection of songs that channeled their domestic bliss and Paul’s desire to create something unlike any of his work with the Fab Four. A half-century later, it remains a classic.

In October 1970, drummer Denny Seiwell was a sought-after New York City session musician who split his time between studios and jazz clubs. Like a lot of local session men, he used an answering service to set up his gigs. One day, the service called to give him good news and bad news: A session he was supposed to attend had been canceled, but Barry Kornfeld, a friend and folky guitarist, wanted him to do a demo. Normally, Seiwell was too busy to do demos, but because of the cancelation, he had an open slot, and he hadn’t seen Kornfeld in a while. He agreed to go.

“They gave me the address, and I said, ‘Jeez, is there a studio there?’” Seiwell says. “It didn’t sound right. I went to the address, and it was a brownstone, way over on the West side, on 43rd Street or something. And it didn’t look like it had electricity. Like they were going to renovate the building or something. I walk up the steps to the lobby there, and there’s a guy. I said, ‘Is there a studio here?’ And he pointed to the basement. And here it is, this dingy, dirt-floor basement, a ratty set of drums sitting in the middle of it, and Paul and Linda sitting on a folding chair over in the corner. That was it. It was very bizarre.”

“Paul and Linda” were, of course, the McCartneys, among the most recognizable couples in the Western world. The demo Seiwell was expecting had turned out to be an audition for an ex-Beatle and his bride. “Musically, we hit it off,” Seiwell says. “We had fun together. I was relaxed, and he was relaxed, and we just had a groove. And I walked out of there saying, ‘Damn, I just met a Beatle. That’s amazing.’ And I thought, ‘I’ll never get to do it.’”

But he did. Seiwell passed the audition, and a few days later, McCartney called him and told him he wanted to book him for a series of recording sessions that would be starting soon. The exultant drummer pretended to check his schedule, silently celebrated, and said yes. Seiwell would go on to be a founding member of Wings, McCartney’s post-Beatles band, and would play on the first two Wings albums, Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway, as well as on Bond-theme-song single “Live and Let Die.” But the highlight of his collaborations with McCartney—and one of the highlights of McCartney’s career—was the record they laid down together in late 1970, along with Linda and guitarists David Spinozza and Hugh McCracken: Ram.

Ram, which was shared with the world on May 17, 1971, will turn 50 on Monday. This week, Seiwell saluted it with the release of Ram On, a track-by-track tribute album that the original drummer—joined by Spinozza and a host of Ram admirers from the music world—played on and coproduced. The impulse to piece together a Ram remake during a pandemic is a manifestation of the special place in the McCartney catalog carved out by his second post-Beatles LP, the only album ever credited to “Paul and Linda McCartney.” A year after recording Abbey Road, McCartney drew on his undiminished melodicism, musicianship, and versatile voice to set the barbed hooks that result in unskippable songs. But Ram holds a soft spot in many Macca fans’ hearts because it’s more than a dozen disconnected compositions by a master tunesmith. Listening to Ram is like retracing Seiwell’s footsteps on the day he met McCartney. It’s a trip to an unassuming, unpretentious place that doesn’t sound or look like what anyone expected, where we can share a room with Paul and Linda during a day in the life of two country dreamers who had set their troubles aside. And like its drummer’s audition, it’s a little bit bizarre.

When Seiwell met McCartney, Let It Be had been out for five months, and McCartney was six months removed from releasing his self-titled first solo album and sending a promotional press release that was widely interpreted as an announcement of the Beatles’ breakup. McCartney was estranged from his former bandmates, and although Lennon had quietly left the band first, McCartney bore the brunt of the blame in the press for precipitating the split. “I was in the middle of this horrendous Beatles breakup, and it was like being in quicksand,” McCartney recalled in Ramming, a mini-documentary that accompanied the 2012 release of a Ram deluxe edition. “And the lightbulb went off one day when we realized that we could just run away.”

He and Linda decamped to Campbeltown on Scotland’s Kintyre peninsula, where McCartney had purchased High Park Farm in 1966. As the Beatles’ bonds broke down, McCartney had dealt with depression exacerbated by drinking, but he’d pulled himself out of his funk by working on his solo songs in Scotland. Although the Beatles wouldn’t legally dissolve for a few more years, the four splintered parts were recording separately and figuring out what it meant to no longer belong to the world’s biggest band. The first two attempts to answer that question were inconclusive: Ringo Starr’s Sentimental Journey was a covers collection of standards, and McCartney—the first installment in what would eventually turn into a trilogy of eponymous DIY releases—was a slapdash, if endearing, mixture of lightweight leftovers, unfinished-sounding instrumentals, and a couple of classics, “Every Night” and “Maybe I’m Amazed.” “I thought Paul’s was rubbish,” Lennon pronounced. “I think he’ll make a better one, when he’s frightened into it.”

The McCartneys spent the summer of 1970 in Scotland, where they worked on songs for a more polished—but not too polished—second album, when they weren’t busy riding horses, shearing sheep, and playing with their young children. “I have some really great memories of just sitting around in the summer, in the garden, and the kids would be playing around, the sun would be shining, I’d have my guitar,” McCartney said in Ramming. “So it was kind of a great time for me, full of golden memories now, looking back at it.” In a different 2012 interview, McCartney remembered that “with some songs, I would go out into the fields if it was a nice day with my guitar.”

As Paul also said, “I think the songs—some of them, anyway—reflected our lifestyle at the time.” It’s a record that evokes a time, place, and mood, like Exile on Main Street with a Scottish farm subbing in for a French villa and hugs instead of hard drugs. That connection comes through not just in the pastoral stylings of “Heart of the Country” and “3 Legs” or the loved-up domestic bliss of “Ram On,” “Eat at Home,” and “Long Haired Lady,” but also in the sound. Paul asked Linda to contribute to the album and be in the band he was planning to form, despite her lack of training. She received songwriting credits on six of Ram’s 12 songs, and her homespun harmonies made the album a family affair that sounded different from the Beatles. A more practiced vocalist might have sung certain “Long Haired Lady” lines more smoothly and sweetly than Linda did, but a more typical intonation also might have made it less fun to sing along.

Recording with his wife was one way to ensure that his new bandmates wouldn’t all turn on him the way the old ones did. It was also in keeping with McCartney’s lo-fi approach to his first album (as well as Wild Life, his first one with Wings). McCartney could have assembled a supergroup to record Ram, like Lennon’s “Dirty Mac” lineup at the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, but as he said in 2001, “I was looking for a new band rather than the Blind Faith thing.” After a decade of Beatlemania and internal tension, secret auditions and no-name sidemen seemed like low-pressure, lasting solutions to the problems that had plagued the Fab Four.

When Seiwell and Wings founding guitarist Denny Laine (who completed the Wild Life lineup) visited the McCartneys in Scotland in 1971, after Ram was released, Seiwell says, “We wrecked a few rental cars on the way up there. It wasn’t an actual road, it was a lane with hidden boulders here and there.” After they arrived, he recalls, “We would just hang out and laugh and talk about his farm and the animals and the horses.” When it was time to jam, the quartet would enter “Rude Studio,” a modest recording space set up inside a barn. “It was all very casual, very loose,” Seiwell says. So was the Wings University Tour in 1972, a back-to-basics road trip in which the group showed up unannounced at various venues and offered to play impromptu, low-priced performances for small student crowds.

Lennon and Harrison had complained about McCartney’s controlling behavior in the studio in the Beatles’ later years. As the lone legend in the room during the recording of Ram, it would have been easy for Paul to pull rank, but Seiwell didn’t witness any ego trips. “There was none of that,” he says. “We were all on the same level. … He hired us for what we do. And I think he had enough trust and faith in us that he would get the best performances out of us if he just let us use our musical abilities.” Only once did McCartney request that Seiwell do something differently, asking whether he could use a less standard, rhythmic beat to complement the vocal at the beginning of “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey.” Even in that case, Seiwell says, “He didn’t … show me what to play. He allowed me to come up with a part that worked for the song.”

Although Seiwell and the other new recruits weren’t headliners, they had some serious chops, which they needed to master some of the album’s demanding musical moments. “Ram was not that easy of a record to really pull off,” Seiwell says, adding, “A lot of the material on Ram was really complicated. To do a song like ‘Uncle Albert’ in one day, in one pass—we did not do ‘Uncle Albert,’ and then stop the machine, and start it for ‘Admiral Halsey.’ That was one song, and that’s the way it was recorded.” Other passages presented similar challenges, particularly the layered vocals of “Dear Boy” and the creative arrangements of multi-part teen ballad “The Back Seat of My Car,” a song McCartney had demoed during the sessions for Let It Be. (“Oh my God, talk about complicated songs,” Seiwell says about “Back Seat.”) “And there wasn’t a lot of editing, if any,” he continues, adding, “That record was not done to a click track. It was pure. It was really an organic recording.” Most tracks required only three to five attempts to get an album-quality take.

Throughout the recording process, the studio was a sanctuary from post-Beatles turmoil. “It was never brought into the studio, and it wasn’t even brought into Wings, when it got really serious in the beginnings of the Wings,” Seiwell says. “We knew about it without knowing about it, but he never brought it up. And I was glad we were all sheltered from that, and that wasn’t our purpose. We were there to grow into a band, and Paul wanted to give the world a brand-new look, an honest look at a new band, and start from scratch one more time.”

The significance of recording with McCartney during a pivotal period wasn’t lost on Seiwell in 1970 and early ’71. “When you think of it, I was the first guy that he actually made music with after leaving the Beatles,” Seiwell says. “That was such a trip, man, that I was right there. After Ringo was gone, I stepped into some big shoes.” Seiwell and anyone with him in the studio were likely the first people not named McCartney to hear the music that would one day be beloved by millions. “Every time he would play us the song we were going to do that day, I’d say, ‘Oh my God. This is not your ordinary New York session. People are going to be listening to this stuff 50 years from now.’” And now they are.

For the first half of the ’70s, the prolific former Beatles—even Ringo—pumped out records that, if culled and combined, would have measured up to their best Beatles material. Shortly after the 1970 sessions for Ram wrapped up and the McCartneys returned to Scotland for the holidays, George Harrison released All Things Must Pass, which was followed weeks later by John Lennon’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. All Things Must Pass was a triple album, an outpouring of pent-up creativity by the Beatle whose songs had been blocked by the prolific Lennon-McCartney combo. Plastic Ono Band was raw and reflective, a document of despair and primal screams. Unlike his former bandmates’ early solo statements, McCartney’s sophomore release wasn’t produced by Phil Spector, and it wasn’t intended to be a grand artistic statement. The goal, McCartney said in Ramming, was “to just see what forms out of the bare elements instead of thinking, ‘Oh, after the Beatles, it’s gotta be important, it’s gotta be super musicians.’ This is more like, ‘No, let’s just find ourselves.’”

What McCartney found was an effortless-sounding synthesis of his influences and strengths. Ram boasted the Beach Boys–style symphonies and harmonies of “Dear Boy” and “Back Seat”; the Buddy Holly bop of “Eat at Home”; the Lennon-esque absurdity and doggerel of “Monkberry Moon Delight.” Yet it’s less an homage to anyone else than a sampler of McCartney’s musical selves, from the anti-political preaching against preaching in album opener “Too Many People”—a potshot aimed at the outspoken Lennon, who would soon return fire—to the whimsical song suite of “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” the winking raunchiness of “Eat at Home,” the rustic scatting of “Heart of the Country,” and the “Eleanor Rigby”–esque, depressed protagonist of non-album single “Another Day,” a hit from the same sessions.

Ram is mostly a mellow record that doesn’t take itself too seriously, consistent with the placid setting that inspired it. But it has its harder-rocking moments, among them the blistering solo on “Too Many People” and the rollicking “Smile Away.” “Oh Woman, Oh Why,” the B-side to “Another Day” and another track often appended to Ram rereleases, is a vocal-cord-shredder that features the sound of McCartney firing a starter pistol. That’s one example of the Ram sessions’ instrumental inventiveness, along with the ukulele on “Ram On,” the orchestra on “Back Seat,” and the telephone impression and flugelhorn solo on “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” (the latter of which was performed by Marvin Stamm, who reprises his performance on Seiwell’s Ram On).

Seiwell—admittedly, far from an unbiased source—was floored the first time he heard Ram (to borrow a phrase from Song Exploder) in its entirety. “I put it on the turntable, and I went, ‘Oh my God,’” he says. Until a stack of fresh-pressed vinyl was delivered to his door, he hadn’t heard McCartney’s bass parts, which were dubbed in after the drummer was done. But critics and McCartney’s former buddies in the Beatles were scathing in their dismissals. The most memorable putdowns came from Starr and Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau. See how they snide: McCartney’s old drummer said, “I don’t think there’s one tune on the last one, Ram” and added “I just feel he’s wasted his time” and “He seems to be going strange.” Landau led with the sentence, “Ram represents the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far”; called the album “very bad,” “incredibly inconsequential,” “monumentally irrelevant,” and “emotionally vacuous”; and observed that Lennon had “held the reins in on McCartney’s cutsie-pie, florid attempts at pure rock muzak.” Other than that, Mr. Landau, how did you like the play?

“They weren’t listening with their hearts or their ears,” Seiwell says. “There was a vengeance going on there, and it was sad.” Whether the ex-comrades and critics were settling scores about McCartney supposedly breaking up the Beatles or just faulting the album for not having the heft and depth of the Harrison or Lennon LPs that preceded it, the template for pooh-poohing silly love songs was set. “Whatever they said didn’t seem to mean anything to the record-buying public, because they loved the record,” Seiwell says. Ram topped the U.K. album charts and peaked at second in the U.S. “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” went to no. 1 in the U.S., becoming the first of many non-Beatles gold records for McCartney, and “Another Day” was a top-five hit on both sides of the Atlantic. “As time went on, people started hearing, ‘Oh my God, this is a masterpiece,’” Seiwell continues. “And there was no denying it after a while. … It’s amazing that so many people you bump into will say, ‘Oh man, you played on Ram. That was my favorite record.’ Not just ‘my favorite McCartney solo product.’ They say, ‘That was my favorite record.’”

Five decades after its initial savaging, Ram is a critical favorite, too, an album often identified as an indie-pop pacesetter. Ram owns McCartney’s only five-star critic rating at AllMusic, and its average user score at the same site trails only Band on the Run’s. “I believe that it connected with so many people because he had such angst in him when he was writing this material,” Seiwell says, adding, “I think that angst came through in the record, and a lot of people felt it. … He had to get it out. And the way Paul gets it out is in his music.” That angst didn’t manifest itself the same way Lennon’s did; whatever strain McCartney suffers, his music remains mostly major key. But he harnessed the pain of personal and professional setbacks to kickstart his career and create one of his catchiest, most cohesive, and most authentic albums.

Although he had an idyllic interlude instead of a Lennon-like lost weekend, McCartney seems to have internalized some of the scorn that greeted Ram in 1971. “I assumed that a lot of stuff I did then was no good,” he says in Ramming. “But now, when I go back to it, I think, ‘I remember why I did that. There was a reason for it. It wasn’t just some flippant, off-my-head gesture. I actually was trying to do that.’ So looking at it now, like a lot of things in retrospect, it looks better than it looked to me then.”

That personal reappraisal hasn’t translated to increased exposure at McCartney concerts. According to setlist info from fan site The McCartney Project, McCartney has performed only four of the 12 tracks on Ram live (not counting the snippet of “Back Seat” he sang in Mexico City in 2017). He hasn’t played “Eat at Home” or “Smile Away” since 1972, which leaves “Too Many People” and “Ram On” as the only songs on the album to have cracked his concert rotation in the 21st century. Maybe McCartney doesn’t trot out tracks from Ram on the road because they’re tough to play live (though other acts have covered every cut on stage). Maybe the memories of life with Linda are bittersweet in her absence, which could also explain why he’s stayed away from his farm in recent years. Or maybe Ram’s subdued songs simply aren’t as well suited to the huge venues he plays as the bangers on Band on the Run.

But it could be better this way. McCartney’s concerts are greatest-hits marathons, and Ram, more so than most McCartney albums, is best enjoyed as a complete piece. There’s more than one way to enjoy it. A pseudonymous McCartney himself oversaw an instrumental/orchestral recording of Ram called Thrillington, which was recorded in ’71 and released in ’77. Other artists have since stepped up to keep the covers coming. Two tribute albums came out in 2009. Seiwell, who’s still friendly with his former Wingsman, says McCartney gave his blessing to the latest collection and likes what he’s heard. And this week, McCartney marked the golden anniversary of his golden memories by releasing a half-speed-mastered vinyl version.

Those Ram reimaginings arrive on the heels of McCartney’s latest bid to bridge the generations: a remix of last year’s McCartney III called McCartney III Imagined, for which he drafted far less ancient artists such as St. Vincent, Anderson .Paak, Phoebe Bridgers, and Dominic Fike to put their spins on his songs. Projects of this sort might seem desperate if collaboration hadn’t been a hallmark of most of McCartney’s career, if his outreach efforts didn’t seem motivated by musical curiosity as much as a desire to stay relevant, and if he hadn’t finally allowed his hair to go gray. Although these May-December team-ups can be cringey at times, McCartney is, by most accounts, a lot of fun to work with, and many of today’s artists are no less excited to get a call from Paul than Seiwell was in 1970. That he’s avoided dinosaur status more adeptly than his peers—even the few who still walk the stage and the studio—owes something to his unflagging energy, relentless likeability, and continued capacity for songcraft, as well as the singular fame of his first band. But it’s also attributable to the timelessness and creative credibility of records like Ram and McCartney II, which seem more like progenitors of subsequent trends than the end of evolutionary lines.

In other words, you don’t have to have been there to appreciate Ram. But Seiwell was, and when he tries to sum up the experience of recording Ram, he remembers “Rode All Night,” a spontaneous, nearly nine-minute guitar-and-drums jam from the 1970 sessions that wasn’t officially released until the 2012 deluxe edition.

“He started singing, and he said, ‘I rode all night, I rode all night until I finally hit the daybreak,’” Seiwell says. “Now for me, that meant that he’s finally free from having to make music with one group only, with the Beatles. That he found other people to make music with. And I really took that as about the highest compliment. And I told him about that. He said, ‘No, that’s not what it meant at all.’ I went, ‘I don’t care. I’m sticking with it.’ Because it felt great to me.”

Musically speaking, McCartney has stuck with what’s felt great to him for the past 60 years, sometimes to his detriment but mostly to his credit and his audiences’ delight. And rarely, since the Beatles broke up, have the results sounded as great to others as they do on the songs he was singing in Scotland half a century ago. 

Paul McCartney Flaming Pie (1997)

From clashmusic.com

Honestly, it’s tough sometimes, being a hardcore Paul McCartney stan in 2020. Obviously we know Macca is the foremost artistic genius of his generation, but it’s not as if the great man makes it easy for us, out here in the trenches, defending his honour against those tiresome pub bores who reckon they’re sophisticated for pretending John or, heaven help us, fucking George was the best Beatle.

Fucking shut up about the Frog’s Chorus – it’s a children song, get over it.

Anyway, there we’ll be, arguing the toss about the relative merits of ‘Live And Let Die’ compared with, fucking, ‘You’re Sixteen You’re Beautiful And You’re Mine’, when bang, here he is again, cringeing up the place on telly, undermining all our good work, like a croaky old dear off an Age Concern fundraising ad.

So yeah, loving sir Paul McCartney is frustrating as hell, except when a tidy little archive gem resurfaces on the radar of public consciousness to remind everybody who the motherfucking king is.

Is ‘Flaming Pie’ (1997) Paul McCartney’s greatest masterpiece? No, of course it isn’t. His greatest masterpieces are towering cultural touchstones to rival the pyramids.

What you have here instead, in this handsome reissue, see, is a snapshot of 55-year-old Macca – the elder statesman, the wizened old artisan, humbly proffering a suite of songs that would easily sit at the apex of literally any other cunt’s career.

Opening number ’The Song We Were Singing’ says it all, really – a timeless fingerpicked McCartney waltz, all languid choppy rhythms and poetic imagery. It’s about John Lennon, I think, and weed – what’s not to like – over a bracingly unusual outing of what I will argue to my grave is a hip-hop-inspired flow.

Some context, for what it’s worth – in 1997 Sir Paul had just finished filming The Beatles Anthology, marinating in reminiscences of his Fab Four heyday. This set a lofty artistic bar, while in the background a dispiriting cancer diagnosis for his soon-to-be-deceased partner Linda lends an irresistible tragi-romantic poignancy to the slow numbers.

And the slow numbers are really where it’s at on this record – ‘Calico Skies’ and ‘Great Day’ especially wouldn’t sound at all out of place mid-White Album.

History’s foremost balladeer also smashes it out the park on light-touch lament ‘Little Willow’ – penned in tribute to Ringo’s ex-wife Maureen, who herself not long ago succumbed to leukaemia – and the achingly sad ‘Souvenir’.

“I go back so far / I’m in front of me” on ‘The World Tonight’ is probably the LP’s standout lyric. Here is a man bitterly conscious of his advancing years and declining relevance – two solid decades before James Corden took him for a spin and broke the internet. All the while, bashing out top-drawer melodies with a master-craftsman’s panache.

Sure, boomers are gonna boomer, and Paul boomers the fuck out the gaff here, especially on dumb cod-blues jam ‘Used To Be Bad’ and the execrable ‘Really Love You’, on which Ringo plays drums, apparently, woo.

But man alive, if you do nothing else today give the title track a spin and marvel at Sir Paul McCartney’s deftness of touch, his impish sense of glee, his preternatural knack for a toe-tapping pop hook.

Take heart, and hang in there, fellow McCartney truthers – soon enough he’ll kick the bucket and everyone will realise we’ve been right the whole time. Until then, enjoy this stellar mid-career effort; perfect for slipping on next time you’re engaged in a vain struggle to convince some knobhead that Harrison actually sucked.

Paul McCartney talks to Sounds (1971)

From Sounds Nov 20, 1971

From geirmykl.wordpress.com

Paul McCartney, sitting on the control desk in EMI`s number 2 studio at Abbey Road – “I went to New York looking for the best studio in the world, but I prefer it here,” – was talking, not unnaturally, about his new band, Wings.
“The night before John said he was leaving the group and all that, we were at home and it suddenly dawned on me. `If everyone else doesn`t want to do it, I`ll get my own band, even if it`s just a little country and western thing or something like Johnny Cash, just so I can get in there and have a sing.` Because that`s all I wanted, just to play.

HIDING

Everyone did really, everyone was trying to play, but no-one wanted to do it with the Beatles.”
It`s been a long time since then, and Paul`s the only one who hasn`t yet got out on the road. John`s done it – Cambridge, Toronto, Fillmore East – George has done it – with Delaney and Bonnie, and with Ringo and all the others at Madison Square Garden. But Paul`s been hiding away. There`ve been two albums which haven`t had very good reviews, and which personally I`ve found rather lifeless, plus the odd single.

HANDHOLDS

But now there`s Wings – a band. There are no firm plans for going on the road, though at the moment they`d like to do it, but there`s an album. We listened to it at the studio – McCartney jiggling about in his seat to it, obviously delighted – and certainly to me it sounded as if after years of reaching out for handholds, McCartney had found out how to do it again.
One side rocks hard and loud, the other side moves more slowly – just like the old records, one side for jiving, the other for smooching. That`s the way he planned it. “Mumbo” is the first track, and maybe THE track. “Bip Bop” sounds a bit like the Stones` “Stray Cat Blues”.
“Love Is Strange” is the old rocker`s words set to a reggae beat, and it works, “Wild Life” is the title track, with a strong vocal, a nice guitar solo, and a sound that isn`t far away from the first Moody Blues album. Good old Denny Laine.
Side two has an overall sound that`s pretty close to the Beatles when they were close – ooh-aah backing vocals, rhythm guitars, short solos. It ends with “Dear Friend” – very slow, piano, strings. “That`s the only one that`s at all about the Beatles situation,” he says. “Throw the wine – shut up, stop messing about.” But on “Wild Life” there`s a line that refers to “a lot of political nonsense in the air.”
Later, he was talking about political nonsense, all the trouble between him and the others, between the McCartney`s and Linda`s father, John Eastman, and Allan Klein. Politics, Paul called it, and he didn`t like it. All he wanted was to be out of the whole thing, to own the copyright to his own songs, forget the Beatles, sign a piece of paper saying we`ve split up, everything`s going to be shared by four.

CRAZY

“And John said, “Yeah, but that`s like asking us to stop the bombing in Vietnam.” We eventually decided that we were all Vietnamese, so that`s all right…
“But I keep wanting to send him postcards saying `The war`s over if you want it” – tell him what he`s saying. It`s just crazy, I`m sure the truth`s a whole lot more simple than it`s made out.”
Talking about John: “John`s John. John wants to wipe everything away and start again, but in doing so he never wipes anything away. He wants it to be him and Yoko against the world, or whatever, but he`s still in with all the others, in with all the contracts and going in to the meetings and everything.
“He`s getting pissed off with it though – I sense it. I`ve had a couple of good conversations recently with just John, and I`ve felt a lot of common ground with him. And I watched him on the Parkinson show, and really a lot of the things he`s into, we`re into as well.”

STRAIGHTS

Did he like John`s albums?
“I liked `Imagine`, I didn`t like the others much. But really, there`s so much political shit on at the moment that I tend to play them through once to see if there`s anything I can pinch.” And how does he sleep?
“I think it`s silly. If he was going to do me he could have done me, but he didn`t. That didn`t phase me one bit. `You live with straights`. Yeah, so what? Half the f-king world`s straight; I don`t wanna be surrounded by hobnailed boots. I quite like some straight people, I`ve got straight babies. `The only thing you did was Yesterday`. That doesn`t bother me. Even if that was the only thing I did, that`s not bad, that`ll do me. But it isn`t, and he bloody knows it isn`t because he`s sat in this very room and watched me do tapes, and he`s dug it.”
But back to Wings. There`s Paul, and there`s Linda, and Denny Laine, and drummer Denny Seiwell who Paul found in New York before he did “Ram”. He was auditioning drummers in a dark basement, and he asked for rock and roll beat. Denny went straight to his tom toms – all the others went to the high hat. Denny got the gig. “I play all the lead guitar on the album,” said Paul, “except for a few places where Denny (Laine) and I play in harmony. I fancy myself as a guitarist, see. He did have a solo but I took it off him.” Denny smiled.

INNOCENCE

Linda sings, writes with Paul, and plays a lot of keyboards. “I like what she does. Her style isn`t like that old, hard pro thing that`s got all the technique, but it`s like children`s drawings. That`s not a very good simile, but it`s got what children`s drawings have got… innocence.”
The album was recorded with very little rehearsal, and a lot of the basic tracks were done live in the studio – a far cry from the painstaking technical methods of something like “Ram”. Why hadn`t he done something like this before?
“Well in a way I did, but it was me playing all the instruments, and you can`t get into it in the same way. `McCartney` was more or less me testing out the studio in the house – the kids in the back, Linda cooking dinner, and me sitting down and having a play. That was just that album, and then “Ram” was just the next album. But whereas with `Ram` I tried so hard that I really wanted people to like it, with this one I don`t care so much because I like it.”
How important was it to him that people like reviewers liked his work generally? “It was a little too important to me, but obviously I hope people will like what I do, so it gets to me. With this one it might get to me a bit if it gets shitty reviews but I don`t think it`ll get to me so much. I had to rationalise things after `Ram`.”
Wings have made an album, but the idea has been to form a group – a group that won`t just make records but that`ll play together a lot, and go on the road.
“We don`t know exactly how we`re going to do that yet, except that we know we`re going to do it quietly until the band`s got the confidence to know we can play anywhere. But I don`t want to start with a big `Wings at the Albert Hall!` thing, with all the Press and business people there. The basic idea is for us to turn up at a place that we just fancy visiting at the time, and try to arrange a little gig. Do it under another name or something. If we do it the other way, then we`ve got to be THEM, and do the whole bit, and when it comes to the night we just might not fancy playing anyway.
“My best playing days were at the Cavern, lunchtime sessions, when you`d just go on stage with a cheese roll and a coke and a ciggie, and people would give you a few requests, and you`d sing them in between eating your cheese roll. That was great to me, I think we got something great going in those days – we really got a rapport there, which we never got again with an audience. And if an amp blew up or something, it didn`t matter, because we`d just pick up an acoustic and sing the Sunblest commercial or something – and they`d all join in.

NERVES

We used to do skits and things too – I used to do one on Jet Harris, stagger around looking moody and a bit drunk, playing “Diamonds”. He`d been to the Cavern once and fallen off the stage.
“That was the stage with the Beatles I thought was best, and that`s the way I`d like to be able to play again – if a few people happen to turn up to a gig then it`s usually great, but if you`re all sitting there like penguins waiting to judge me, then I`m going to be nervous, and I`m not going to enjoy it. I`m not like John, who swallows his nerves in Toronto and be sick just before he goes on – that I`m not going to go through thank you. It`s not necessary, and if it`s not necessary, I`m not going to do it.
“With this band we play good together live because nobody`s too hung up about what he`s playing. We`ll go round to Denny`s house and just sit there playing songs that we half-know. It`s good.
“We don`t want to be a media group – we don`t want to go everywhere and plug everything and have knickers with our name on them and all that. That won`t work for me now – it`s all done. It was great while it lasted but its over now.”

LOOSE

Did he really enjoy all that while it was happening?
“Yeah, it was great, obviously, and I did enjoy it, loved it, but it got to be a bit tight at the end. It was when we got to be Beatles with a big B that things began to be difficult because even if we wanted to go out and play, how the hell could we do it? We`d have had to have done a big million seater thing, and that`s why I was suggesting them that we all just go away somewhere and play, like I want to do with Wings. Ricky and the Redstreaks at Slough Town Hall or something – and everyone turns up for the Saturday night dance and finds it`s us.
“We`re all musicians, and the fun of being a musician is being able to play live to people. For us, it might be a year, it might be two years, or it might be next week. We don`t know, we might not even fancy going live in the end, and if that happens it`s all right too.
“I`m just trying to keep things loose, because life itself is loose. I don`t want to have to say `I`ll be in Slough tomorrow` on the way I feel today, because tomorrow I might not feel like it, and it`s great to be able to give yourself the evening off. Everybody talks about freedom and all that, but all you`ve got to do to have it is just to take it. You don`t have to do a Santana and tour the world or something – I`d rather have a few people annoyed that we didn`t turn up, or rather that Ricky and the Redstreaks didn`t turn up, than go through all that again. And as long as we keep that basic freedom, I don`t think we`ll go far wrong.”

Paul McCartney Flowers in the Dirt [Deluxe Edition] (1989)

From pitchfork.com

The reissue of his 1989 collaboration with Elvis Costello reveals the art underneath its schlocky gloss. It is also the rarest of things: a McCartney record where you can sense his need to be loved.

Paul McCartney wasn’t exactly in the commercial doldrums in 1989, but he certainly understood ignominy was within his grasp. Press to Play, his 1986 album, generated no real hits to speak of. George Harrison—the young kid he brought into the Beatles back in 1958—bested Paul in 1987 with Cloud Nine, an album that contained the number one smash “Got My Mind Set on You” and a lesser hit called “When We Was Fab,” an affectionate nod to his time as a Moptop that played right into the lingering nostalgia from the 20th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band* *in ’87.

Savvy as ever, McCartney decided it was time to strengthen his ties to his Beatles past on Flowers in the Dirt, the 1989 record that effectively opens the third act in his monumental career. McCartney designed Flowers in the Dirt to be taken out on the road in his first international tour in over a decade and while that in itself would’ve been a noteworthy event, he realized he should have a record to peddle as well. He’d been working on new songs but the project came into focus when his management suggested it might be a good idea to team with Elvis Costello, the former punk who had been a card-carrying member of the Beatles fan club since he was a kid.

Most of the contemporary press regarding Flowers in the Dirt highlighted the collaboration between Paul McCartney and Elvis Costello, positioning Costello as the salt to McCartney’s sugar. Comparisons to John Lennon were encouraged, as the publicity team pushed the idea that the songwriters composed “eyeball to eyeball,” just like the two Beatles did at the start of their career. Costello encouraged McCartney to dig out his iconic Höfner bass—he hadn’t used it since the Beatles—and the two wrote enough material to constitute a full record. But after initial sessions with Costello as a producer didn’t go as expected, Paul sought out other options, bringing in a bevy of producers (Micthell Froom, David Foster, Steve Lipson, and Trevor Horn) to help cast as wide of a net as possible with these songs. With McCartney also behind the boards, there was no shortage of cooks in the kitchen.

So it’s no wonder that things rarely cohere. “My Brave Face,” one of the four McCartney/Costello compositions (“Où Est le Soleil?,” originally a bonus track on the cassette and CD versions, is now officially canon), opens the album with a melodic punch. Any momentum it provides is crushed by the stiff synth-funk of “Rough Ride,” a Lipson/Horn production that should’ve been relegated to a B-side but instead exists as the worst second track ever released on an album. From there, Flowers in the Dirt proceeds in fits and starts, sometimes achieving a small measure of grace. McCartney always excelled in familial love, so “We Got Married” and the valentine to his son “Put It There” pull on the heartstrings. But the deliberate proto-digital gloss flattens the album, softening the edges of the Costello collaborations and disguising the loveliness of such sweet miniatures as “Distractions.”

It is the rarest of things: a Paul McCartney record where you can sense his need to be loved. Maybe if McCartney’s confidence hadn’t been shaken by Press to Play’s commercial underperformance—and if his competitiveness hadn’t been stoked by Harrison’s success—he would’ve settled on a single collaborator. But the parade of producers on Flowers in the Dirt suggests he’s trying every style in hopes of a hit. Maybe the hit could arrive on adult contemporary radio, so he has David Foster—the architect of Chicago’s ’80s comeback—polish “We Got Married.” Maybe he could squeak out an MTV hit with the help of Trevor Horn, or perhaps Costello could give him an assist on college radio, or maybe stoke some memories of the Beatles. McCartney decided to cover his bets, and he wound up with a record that feels constrained and insecure.

All of this calculation makes the Archive Collection—both in the slim double-disc and the absurdly overstuffed box—so revelatory. Both variations are built upon the demos McCartney recorded with Costello, both containing the spare guitar-and-voice renditions that recall the Everly Brothers more than Lennon/McCartney. These nine songs were recorded in the autumn of 1987 and they crackle with energy. They’re ragged and right, feeling more alive and cohesive than the album that came later. Some of the songs would show up on later records by both—“So Like Candy” is a centerpiece on Mighty Like a Rose and “The Lovers That Never Were” performed a similar role on Off the Ground—but the songs are best heard as a piece. Costello was too verbose and florid to be Lennon, but his melodic gifts and sarcasm challenged McCartney, who never relied on easy turns of phrase here. That’s why it’s better to have the songs heard as a collective: They’re stronger when played together.

The recently released Super Deluxe Edition contains full-band demos from 1988, which may have been the full-band renditions that McCartney decided were unsatisfactory. They’re livelier than Flowers in the Dirt, with “The Lovers That Never Were” suggesting the intricate melodicism of Costello’s Burt Bacharach collaboration Painted From Memory and “Playboy To a Man” riding an organ groove straight out of the Attractions. While some of the B-sides and mixes are entertaining—“Back on My Feet,” the flip of the UK-only hit “Once Upon A Long Ago” is an amiably anonymous ’80s adult contemporary cut and the highlight of the bunch—they wind up bolstering the slightly desperate nature of McCartney in 1989. The demos, however, offer a different story. Here, McCartney isn’t concerned with commerce, he’s just thrilled to be working with a musician who could be his equal as a writer and a performer. That’s the divide between the initial release of Flowers in the Dirt and the reissue: the 1989 LP is made for a mass audience, while the reissue reveals the art lurking underneath the gloss.

Paul McCartney – McCartney (1970) & McCartney II (1980)

From popmatters.com

There are few chapters in the life of Paul McCartney that have ever been underreported, and that certainly applies to his acrimonious departure from the Beatles in 1970. But while the stature of his bandmates — especially John Lennon and George Harrison — escalated in the decades which followed, McCartney has often been given comparably short shrift by chin-stroking music nerds. In fairness, McCartney himself must shoulder some of the blame for his spotty reputation: His recorded output has sometimes wavered somewhere on the shaky precipice between mawkish and schmaltzy; he had no concept of irony; there wasn’t a picture taken for 15 years straight where he wasn’t winking and hoisting his thumbs aloft.

McCartney has been making a concerted effort for a while to try and turn the artistic tides in his favor, perhaps beginning with his 1989 collaborations with Elvis Costello, working with the likes of Welsh indie-heroes Super Furry Animals, hanging out with Dave Grohl and playing festivals like Coachella. McCartney has also attempted to cast a different light on his previously released material, and as such has finally gotten around to his first two solo albums proper, collections on which he played every instrument.

McCartney and McCartney II are separated by a decade, the former recorded as a low-key, pressure-free tonic after the Beatles split, and the latter a polished collection of private recordings worked up before the final Wings tour and released a year later when the band was no more. The end of the Beatles allowed the Fab Four to each break off and find their own way: George Harrison had a lot to say, John Lennon a lot to get off his chest and Ringo Starr a desire to step out from behind the drumkit and become a frontman in his own right. McCartney, though, just wanted to chill the fuck out.

McCartney bears all the telltale signs of the circumstances that led to its creation; the album is at once intimate and inspired, finding a relaxed Macca on top form. Songs like “The Lovely Linda” and “Junk” are the work of an artist from whom a broader view of Love (with a capital “L”) was most effectively told through a deeply personal lens, while “Hot as Sun/Glasses” and “Momma Miss America” are so perfect in their rough state, it’s as though the artist stepped away from the canvas to add more paint to his palette, caught a glimpse of the pieces in mid-design and instinctively said, “Fuck it, they’re done.” If the album proper has one defining track, it’s probably “Maybe I’m Amazed”, an absolutely scorching love song that might have been a massive single in 1970 had it actually been released in that format (a live version recorded with Wings hit #10 on the charts in the US in 1976), but is instead one of the finest songs ever written and recorded by McCartney, including his work with the Beatles.

The bonus audio material on McCartney is also more than just filler, including three songs performed with Wings at a 1979 concert in Glasgow; a live in-studio run through “Maybe I’m Amazed” from the 1974 documentary One Hand Clapping; and three unreleased tracks, including “Don’t Cry Baby” (a jam on what eventually became “Oo You”), a piano-and-vocals demo of an amusing work in progress number called “Women Kind” in which McCartney sings about bra burning, and a compelling demo of a song called “Suicide”.

McCartney II, released in 1980, is perhaps even more overlooked in McCartney’s canon, in spite of it including the chart smash “Coming Up” (the live version recorded with Wings during a Glasgow concert in 1979 that was a #1 hit in the US and Canada is included on a second disc of bonus material). For many, the album was an odd curio upon release, and in many ways it sounds even weirder now. While much of his most popular solo/Wings material up to that point was recorded on traditional rock & roll instruments, McCartney II doesn’t just feature synthesizers and other electronic instruments, it showcases them.

Just two songs in, “Temporary Secretary” is a manic, futuristic laser blast with an actual melody simmering underneath. It would be pointless to compare it to anything McCartney had ever done before, and would be equally so to compare it to anyone else as it couldn’t possibly be anyone else. More than any other song on either eponymous album, “Temporary Secretary” illustrates the complex nature of Paul McCartney’s musical output, and why painting him into a corner as an artless and cynical hack has always been utter bullshit. “On the Way”, a sparse, mid-tempo tune that sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of a deep chasm, is another gem, as are “Waterfalls” and “One of These Days”, two songs which are rescued from succumbing to sugar shock by virtue of their genuine beauty.

McCartney II also features a handful of terrific bonus tracks, including a few futuristic b-sides (the Gorillaz-forecasting “Check My Machine” and the full-length version of “Secret Friend”), an even stranger relative of an already strange album track (“Bogey Wobble” is the b-side, “Bogey Music” the album cut), a cheesy yuletide single (“Wonderful Christmastime”) and a couple of unreleased songs: “Mr. H Atom/You Know I’ll Get You Baby” (a Devo-esque shimmy which opens with the line, “The Shangri-La’s vs. the Village People”); “All You Horse Riders/Blue Sway” and “Blue Sway”, the latter featuring the addition of orchestration by Richard Niles. (A second disc of bonus material, most of which features extended versions of album tracks, was not available for review.)

The bonus DVD material is also fascinating, especially on McCartney where the album’s songs are revisited many years later by Macca himself. Following a splendidly animated film accompanying McCartney’s present-day recollections of recording the album and a few archival clips, “Every Night” and “Hot as Sun” are given a live airing by Wings at one of the benefit Concerts for Kampuchea on December 29, 1979. McCartney’s MTV Unplugged performance recorded on January 25, 1991 also featured a pair of numbers from his solo debut; “Junk” and “That Would Be Something” are included on the DVD.

McCartney II includes a much longer DVD, in part because of a 25-minute English television chat show called Meet Paul McCartney. The program is definitely of its age, a somewhat dry, overly intellectual conversation between Macca and presenter Tim Rice. McCartney II also includes videos that predate the launch of MTV by one year, including a fairly literal promo for “Waterfalls”, a clip of “Wonderful Christmastime” that looks as though it’s spent the past 30 years in direct sunlight and the legendary tongue-in-cheek video for “Coming Up”, which takes the DIY means by which the music was recorded and features a band entirely comprised of McCartney in various costumes, with a pair of backup singers played by Linda. “Coming Up” gets the most video coverage by a long stretch, with clips of a 1979 rehearsal, a Concert for Kampuchea performance with Wings from that same year, and a “Making of” version of the promo video with commentary provided by McCartney. Both reissues are available in a few different formats, including digital, vinyl and both two-disc and super-deluxe CD versions.

McCartney and McCartney II are both essential releases for different reasons, though they both find the former Beatle in his comfort zone. He recorded these tracks as though no one was ever going to listen, and in doing so released himself from the pretense of pressure. This is Paul McCartney in 1970 and 1980; stripped down and terrific.

Paul McCartney – McCartney III (2020)

From pitchfork.com

The third instalment in McCartney’s home-recorded series is less adventurous and revelatory than its eponymous predecessors, but still contains moments of genuine wonder and weirdness.

There are many Paul McCartney albums, but only a precious few get to call themselves McCartney albums. McCartney III is the surprise third entry in a series that began with his 1970 solo debut McCartney and seemed to end with 1980’s McCartney II, two dramatically different records born of dramatically different circumstances that were nonetheless united by a DIY methodology. Unlike the other records in Macca’s solo discography, these were true one-man-band efforts, clearinghouses for the rough song sketches and home-recording experiments he’d never bring to his proper releases. And both were flawed-yet-fascinating portraits of a perfectionist embracing the purity of imperfection. So the appearance of that roman numeral in the title of McCartney III is loaded with significance, a promising indication that what we’re getting here is the man, not the myth. This is especially exciting news for that generation of fans who hold “Temporary Secretary” in a greater esteem than Sgt. Pepper’s.

The novelty of McCartney and McCartney II had a lot to do with the context in which they appeared: the former was a purposefully ramshackle response to the studio-sculpted grandeur of the Beatles, the latter a synth-shocked antidote to the arena-rock bombast of Wings. But while they were solitary efforts, those records were still plugged into the sounds and conversations of their times. McCartney was rooted in the agrarian, anti-psych aesthetic of contemporary groups like the Band, while McCartney II showed Macca having a go at the new wave and early electronic music seeping into the mainstream. On these albums, McCartney wasn’t so much the all-knowing auteur as a sponge soaking up the prevailing styles of the day and squeezing them out, without a care if he made a mess.

McCartney III, however, has no such guiding principle—other than the fact it arrives in a year when McCartney, like many of us, was stuck at home with a whole lot of extra time on his overly sanitized hands. Following a decade where he actively pursued modern-pop relevance through collaborations with Mark Ronson, Ryan Tedder, and Kanye West and Rihanna, McCartney III finds its maker shacked up at his Sussex farmhouse, tuning out the radio to indulge his every scatterbrained whim. With no desire to engage with the contemporary musical landscape or absorb new influences, McCartney III is less adventurous and revelatory than its eponymous predecessors. Mostly, it reiterates his well-established fondness for acoustic ditties, ruminative piano ballads, and hot-rod rockers. And yet it still offers intriguing evidence that, even when sticking to his usual lane, a septuagenarian multi-millionaire pop star comfortably ensconced in his rural estate can still get up to some pretty weird shit when no one’s looking.

The opening “Long Tailed Winter Bird” is the perfect microcosm of everything that’s both inspired and indulgent about this project. Armed with a needling, Celtic-tinged, folk-blues acoustic refrain, McCartney coolly ratchets up the tension, locking into a distorted guitar break while mischievously cooing “do you, do do do you miss me?” It’s a rare treat to hear him lean into something so gritty and tense, but the song is ultimately all warm-up with little payoff—“Long Tailed Winter Bird” flies in circles for over five minutes, always teasing that it’s about to grow into something more peculiar and powerful, yet never quite getting there.

Still, “Long Tailed Winter Bird” is practically “Yesterday” compared to the album’s eight-minute centerpiece “Deep Deep Feeling,” which tries to recreate the mesmerizing sprawl of McCartney II-era oddities like “Secret Friend,” but with more belabored results. Starting out as a torch song about the disorienting effects of love, the track is slowly deconstructed through a random barrage of ominous orchestration, disembodied harmonies, sputtering cod-reggae rhythms, and guitar squeals that sound like they drifted in from a Dire Straits record. But this would-be descent into madness is outfitted with a safety net, too self-consciously “crazy” to feel strange. A similar fate befalls the similarly titled “Deep Down,” another addition to the growing canon of exceedingly horny late-career Paul McCartney songs that essentially gives “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” an ‘80s synth-funk makeover but rides it out for three times as long.

As was the case with the first two McCartneys, III’s eccentricities are best put to use when they’re supporting Macca’s endearing melodies rather than corrupting them. Fortunately, McCartney III has enough radiant moments to outweigh its stumbles. “Find My Way” betrays a very 2020 sense of unease—“You never used to be afraid of days like these/But now you’re overwhelmed by your anxieties”—but offers a pick-me-up in the form of “Savoy Truffle”-style buzzing brass, playful noodling, and a breezy, drum loop that could’ve been pulled from Beck’s bag of tricks. With its glammy, Super Furry Animals-scaled sweep, “Seize the Day” is even more explicit in its optimist’s mission. In an age of cruelty-is-the-point politics, an innocent platitude like “It’s still alright to be nice” practically sounds like fighting words.

As much as the legend of the McCartney series is rooted in its off-kilter sensibility, its most resonant moments remain the simplest and most heartfelt. McCartney III honors that tradition with “The Kiss of Venus,” a romantic lullaby playfully delivered in his higher register and sprinkled with harpsichord pixie dust, but underpinned by a warning not to get too lost in love: “If the world begins to shake/Will something have to break/We have to stay awake.” And on the album’s closer, “Winter Bird/When Winter Comes,” we get a startling reminder that McCartney’s genius doesn’t merely lie in his talent for orchestrating side-long suites, but in his seemingly effortless ability to dash off a casual acoustic sing-along about farm animals and make it feel both instantly familiar and mythical. “When winter comes, and food is scarce/We’ll warn our toes to stay indoors,” he sings of his critters’ annual hibernation ritual, while also calmly bracing us for what’s shaping up to be some dark months. Now more than ever, the McCartney series isn’t simply a sketchbook dump for its maker—it’s a sneaky vent for some of his most unifying impulses.