The Beatles' Solo Careers

having slogged through McCartney, Ram, Band on the Run, Redrose Speedway, Venus and Mars and Speed of Sound yesterday Macca's tossed off semi-nonsensical approach to lyrics *really* begins to grate in large quantities. There are things I love on all those albums but his dedication to vapidity is some kind of force of nature.

― Οὖτις, Thursday, October 23, 2014 3:16 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is interesting, I have no idea what I'd think about Paul if I'd gotten to know his records like this tbh! Very much benefits from having only one CD bought every couple weeks, welp, gotta toss it on again while I play some more Civilization and get to know the ins and outs of "Mamunia." I do wish the lyrics weren't so tossed-off on the best compositions ("My Love" is just such a fucking wasted opportunity, every time). But the goofiness is part of the appeal of the deep cuts.

I think Paul could have improved "Imagine" quite a lot, not on bass but on piano. Heard it at the store for the first time in a while the other night and was shocked to notice just how roly-poly and "demo loop" the main riff sounded like. Get another idea! Also, just having it be more of a "group" song might really help undercut the JOHN LENNON IS HEAR TO SPEAK SIMPLE TRUTHS aspect of it - some backup vocals, some strumming, a solo from George, some energy in the drumming, and you've got something between Hey Jude and Revolution 1, something a little huskier ... rather than this preachy precious shithead inviting you to Imagine!.

tbf I had heard/purchased all those albums individually, was just on a binge yesterday and that struck me. I think my intro to Macca's solo catalog was initial childhood awareness of the Wings hits ("Band on the Run", "Listen to What the Man Said", "Live and Let Die" etc.) and then I never bothered with any albums proper until I borrowed Ram from someone and fell in love with it. Acquired the others in short order.

Ah, dig! That makes sense. I remember having a VERY carefully curated "recommended listening order" for friends interested in McCartney when I was a teen. You really had to work your way up to Red Rose Speedway and Back to the Egg, and I think I basically didn't mention Speed of Sound which I played all the time for "Wino Junko" and "She's My Baby" mainly.

Back To The Egg is the most underrated Wings album of them all, and I can never quite understand why it doesn't get more love.

the songs suck

"Arrow Through Me" excepted.

waited years for crate digging hip hop star to sample it until Erykah Badu came along

is Red Rose Speedway not well regarded? it was probably my favourite Wings album

BTTE doesn't have good hits anchoring the usual round of pantomime genre exercises, so even if it rocks a little harder than London Town and there are a few beautiful melodies ("Love Awake," "Arrow Through Me," "Baby's Request") the rockers feel like unearned attempts at climaxes, or just desperate stabs at whipping up energy. I say all this as a fan, and someone who does enjoy the record. It's just kinda thin, especially if you don't count "The Broadcast," "We're Open Tonight," and "Reception" as even really being songs. Anyway, it'd never be my first pick for "branching out beyond Ram? Well, have I got an album for you!"

Not sure what the c.w. on Red Rose Speedway is at this point.

xxxpost:

and 'Getting Closer', 'Again and Again and Again', 'Old Siam, Sir' and the whole of side two.

Oh, I'd totally recommend it after Ram, Band on The Run and Venus and Mars. Such a fun record.

I have never heard that one - kinda skeptical

Bottom-tier Wings: Wild Life, Wings At The Speed Of Sound
Middle-tier Wings: Red Rose Speedway, London Town
Top-tier Wings: Band On The Run, Venus and Mars, Back To The Egg

And as if by magic, 'Old Siam, Sir' comes on shuffle play. Time to rawk!

Always been curious whether the lesser Wings singles like "Arrow Through Me," "Letting Go," "Sally G," etc got genuine radio play

consistently baffled by people's affection for Back To The Egg.

"Sally G" is great, haven't thought about that one in a while. "I never thought to ask her what the letter G stood for / but I know for sure it wasn't Good."

At least one thing Back to the Egg has going for it is being better-recorded than the last couple of records before it - shaking off some cobwebs there.

London Town has its highlights: 'Cafe On The Left Bank' (which would have fit snugly onto Back To The Egg, come to think of it), 'Girlfriend', 'With A Little Luck'. Fond of 'Backwards Traveller/Cuff Link' too. However, London Town's highlights show up the rest of the album to be not particularly that great. Remove 'With A Little Luck' from side two and what do you have left?

Back To The Egg on the other hand is consistently good to very good throughout, and is very much a start-to-finish, complete album experience (rather than a "individual tracks in isolation" deal).

I really love that very rare field recording of a horny panda skullfucking George Harrison's corpse spliced with a demented McCartney screaming in agony about his tax bill as he sheared off his own bollocks with a sthil-saw, it never quite garnered the rave reviews it deserved but it is a very important part of the post-Beatles albums canon.

otherwise known as "My Love"

that's the one!

I gotta rep for Back To The Egg as well. It just sounds much more crisp and lively than London Town or Speed of Sound plus has much better songs- Getting Closer, Arrow Through Me, Old Siam, So Glad To See You, To You. And Daytime Nighttime Suffering as a bonus track which is a top ten solo Paul song.

Of course it has it's share of filler but so does every Paul record...

McCartney II is his best solo album by far! Totally brilliant.

Remove 'With A Little Luck' from side two and what do you have left?

uh MORSE MOOSE AND THE GREY GOOSE you philistine duh

also "name and address" is fun

Oh fucking hell, I forgot how batshit 'Morse Moose and The Grey Goose' is! Great intro, then disco groove, then he shoehorns a sea shanty in the middle. Yeah, I'll agree, this is another highlight.

I really dig on The Alternate London Town and don't find much else in the solo-Beatles catalog to admire.

Save Nilsson.

LOL @ xelab

I haven't heard any McCartney besides I, II and Ram. Got "All the Best" when I was a kid just off my discovering the Beatles kick and it was a massive letdown and I've been weary since then.

weird there's not been a proper Paul 'Best Of..' in 30 years. unless one counts Wingspan i suppose.

McCartney has said the mid/late 70s were one of the happiest times of his life. He could get the train up to London, walk from Charing Cross to his record company's offices in Soho, entirely unmolested. The John was shot, and his life was turned on its head again.

the john always had a sweeter end of the deal

All the Best is splendid car fare.

Ha, All the Best was my McCartney gateway drug! But I was young and well before my Beatles discovery period.

listened to Lennon's "Rock and Roll" last night - what a weird album. It's not bad exactly, but it's funny he would do the exact thing he seemed to resent Paul for even suggesting just a few years earlier. In a funny way it does bear some similarity to the 50s-obsessed wing of glam (Gary Glitter etc.) altho without the camp or the muscle. Oddly nothing really rocks all that hard. I can't help but think Spector would've given it more power had he gotten the final say over it, but John seemed to increasingly favor limp, sort of washed out sonics as the decade wore on, like he didn't really appreciate the low end of a solid rhythm section.

tbf it's entirely likely Lennon wouldn't have made this album at all if it wasn't for the lawsuit

one weird thing i remember reading about that album is that spector is the one who suggested he cover "just because" -- which john, a lifelong elvis fan, had never heard. i definitely feel like most of the energy goes out of his solo work post-71, but part of that might be down to poor production -- i used to have the lennon anthology and i remember there was some good stuff on that.

The sessions tapes are a treat though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmI-MdAxs0k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSO8Z-qrPtQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pVnXgiG0bk

lol "remember the solo, that's the bit where I don't talk"

spector is the one who suggested he cover "just because" -- which john, a lifelong elvis fan, had never heard

Wait, I'm confused, what is this story? The "Just Because" on Rock and Roll is the Lloyd Price song, not the Elvis/Stanley Brothers/Frankie Yankovic etc.one, and there's no way Lennon had never heard Lloyd Price. Or did Elvis ever cover the Lloyd Price song?

"What're they gonna do, play jazz with Jethro Tull?"

"I'm gonna be a 90 year old guru"

:(

i definitely feel like most of the energy goes out of his solo work post-71, but part of that might be down to poor production -- i used to have the lennon anthology and i remember there was some good stuff on that.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Friday, October 24, 2014 5:09 PM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lennon was kinda the opposite to McCartney in the sense that McCartney, whenever he brought a song into the studio, would have very specific ideas about all the parts and what kind of treatment to give the song in the studio (which legendarily used to wind the rest of The Beatles and members of Wings up), whereas Lennon was a little more collaborative in this respect... in his solo work he'd have the chord sequence and melody and get the musicians he was working with to play around with it until they honed it into something that Lennon was happy with. In The Beatles, I actually think McCartney used to take a very active role in arranging Lennon's songs, which help give those Beatles album a type of consistency.

McCartney has this thing for working out every single aspect of his songs: chord structure, melody, production, arrangement, all the parts... whereas with Lennon's solo stuff the arrangements and playing are only as interesting as what the musicians he's working with come up with.

Wait, I'm confused, what is this story? The "Just Because" on Rock and Roll is the Lloyd Price song, not the Elvis/Stanley Brothers/Frankie Yankovic etc.one, and there's no way Lennon had never heard Lloyd Price. Or did Elvis ever cover the Lloyd Price song?

ah, you're right -- it's been so long since i heard the lennon album that i actually didn't remember it wasn't the elvis song he was covering. i can't find the story i'm thinking of but from this lennon quote it sounds more like he probably had heard the song but didn't "know" it well, which isn't too surprising since he often couldn't remember the words to his own songs:

"At the end of making that record, I was finishing up a track that Phil Spector had made me sing called 'Just Because,' which I really didn't know -- all the rest I'd done as a teenager, so I knew them backward -- and I couldn't get the hang of it. At the end of that record -- I was mixing it just next door to this very studio -- I started spieling and saying, 'And so we say farewell from the Record Plant,' and a little thing in the back of my mind said, 'Are you really saying farewell?' I hadn't thought of it then. I was still separated from Yoko and still hadn't had the baby, but somewhere in the back was a voice that was saying, 'Are you saying farewell to the whole game?'

thought this was a fun interview w/ mccartney when i read it, he talks a lot about his time on the farm in scotland after the beatles broke up, making "ram," and beards: http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/8854-paul-mccartney/

Pitchfork: When you went to the nearby town in Scotland, were people unfazed by the fact that Paul McCartney was in their grocery store?

PM: Yeah, a little bit. People get used to it when you live locally, because you go to into the pub with them, or you go to dinner with your local solicitor, or you hang with a couple of guys working on the farm. You gradually get to know other people, and they become very protective of you. The only people who would bother us would be the tourists, but it was never a real problem.

Also, you gotta remember, I had a big black beard, and not everyone recognized me as a Beatle. When we went to New York, I'd go to Harlem or wherever and I had this beard and an old thrift-shop jacket on, like a Vietnam vet-- I used to joke with people, like, "I look the guy who might mug you." People didn't want to look me in the eye. It was quite a good cover at the time.

One of the things about beards is that, when men reach a certain age, they'd like to see if they can grow one. It's a phenomenon I understand very well. So I thought, "I'm gonna be in Scotland, there's nobody to see me if I fail." After you get over the itchy face, you go, "Oh, I don't have to shave, that's cool." And then you move into the philosophical thing-- people say, "Oh, you look weird, you have a beard." And you say, "No, actually, it's weird to shave." Having a beard is natural. When you think about it, shaving it off is quite weird. (laughs)

oh sod off, Paul. yer boring ass pot sketches never came close to something like POB. wings is execrable, everything. McCartney II is ace but it doesn't have, you know, "Mother." or "God." Or "I Found Out." and on and on...

"Lovely Linda" is gorgeous and coulda been a White Album toss-off. "Momma Miss America" is a really nice thick groove.

"Mother" and "God" are important but I hardly ever want to listen to the mmore than once in a good while.

xpost My reaction to "All the Best" was colored by immediately following my discovery of the Beatles canon, which I was directly comparing it to. I looked at the track listing and it's actually really good and I like most of the songs, but some of that soft rock stuff ("My Love", "With a Little Luck") was just too weak and wussy for a teenaged me who thought "Happiness is a Warm Gun" was the best rock song ever (which I still maybe kinda do).

and for many years it was the only place to find "NO More Lonely Nights."

Hah. That was probably the moment I wrote him off.

Ringo begged off playing on the Beatles re-recordings on the Broad Street soundtrack: "Paul, we already did these songs, remember?"