Wings At the Speed of Sound

With Paul McCartney's new album, Memory Almost Full, due out the first Tuesday of June, this month seems as good a time as any to review Macca's solo career. I am a fan, not a fanatic; I'm in awe of the guy's talent, though, and find a lot of creative inspiration in his work. I don't own all of his solo albums but I own a lot of them. I'll be writing about them, in the order they were released, over the next few weeks.



All right, I want to use a lifeline here. The online equivalent of phone-a-friend, if you will.

See, I don't own Wings At the Speed of Sound, and, based on passing exposure to it over the years, I'm fairly certain I wouldn't enjoy listening to it often enough to write a decent review. Also, I don't want to blow $10 on an album I'm quite sure I won't like.

So this text, I hope, is just a placeholder. I'm hoping that one (or more!) of you, my dear friends, will provide a review that I can post here in lieu of this plea. It doesn't have to be anything lengthy or elaborate or profound. Heck, "Shit sandwich" will suffice. Just so that it comes from someone who actually knows the album and has a well-formed opinion about it.

Please email reviews to me at tmeltzer@nc.rr.com. A hearty 'thank you' will be your sole remuneration. That, and the people's ovation and fame forever, of course.

Venus and Mars

With Paul McCartney's new album, Memory Almost Full, due out the first Tuesday of June, this month seems as good a time as any to review Macca's solo career. I am a fan, not a fanatic; I'm in awe of the guy's talent, though, and find a lot of creative inspiration in his work. I don't own all of his solo albums but I own a lot of them. I'll be writing about them, in the order they were released, over the next few weeks.



Venus and Mars opens with one of McCartney's great production numbers, "Venus and Mars/Rock Show," an acoustic homage to Mr. and Mrs. Macca that morphs into an anthem celebrating arena rock. Musically, it's a tour de force: great melody, great arrangement, great performances from get to go. Check out the chromatic electric guitar part that introduces the lyric to "Rock Show," the breakdown during the "drug scoring" section of the song, the bow to glam rock during the "green metal suit" section, the impassioned vocals, the ragtime piano outro… it's all beautifully conceived and executed, and all a great deal of fun. The lyric, on the other hand, is a bit perplexing. It's either entirely tongue-in-cheek or disturbingly self-celebratory. It posits the listener as an audience member in a sports arena, assures us that its subjects (so important they're represented by goddamn planets!) "are all right tonight," then reminds us of how thrilled we are to be seeing them in concert, noting that our "temperatures rise as [we] see the whites of their [Wings'] eyes." Regardless of its intent, it's hard to imagine that audiences hearing this number at the opening of a Wings show reacted by sitting back in their seats, nodding knowingly and saying to themselves, "Ah, yes, nice bit of ironic distance there." To a fist-pumping, screaming audience, it had to play as a paean to the thrill of seeing Wings, and that's a little weird.

Much of Venus and Mars pursues similarly confused/contradictory purposes. With lead vocals doled out to band members Denny Laine ("Spirits of Ancient Egypt") and Jimmy McCulloch ("Medicine Jar," a McCulloch cowrite and the only song on the album not written by Paul), Venus and Mars seems intent on presenting itself as a Wings album rather than a McCartney album; even so, there's no doubt whose hand controlled arrangements, performances, and production here. Furthermore, unlike McCartney or Wild Life, Venus and Mars is clearly intended to be a polished product, not a notebook of ideas and offhand jams; however, a lot of the songwriting is simply too frivolous or glib to sustain any gravitas, lyrical or musical. The album includes way too many genre exercises and throwaways like the 20's-style "You Gave Me The Answer" (whose chorus, "You gave me the answer to love eternally/I love you and you, you seem to like me" injects yet more of that ironic distance that makes "Rock Show" a little creepy), the pleasant-but-forgettable New Orleans blues "Call Me Back Again," the atmospheric rocker "Spirits of Ancient Egypt" (an excuse to play around with modal harmonies and Middle Eastern sounds, maybe?), and the execrable "Magneto and Titanium Man," as compelling an argument as ever there was that smoking marijuana can make you very, very, very stupid.

Still, Macca proves that he can still blow you away when he gives it his all. He keeps it simple on the minor blues stomp "Feel Like Letting Go" to deliver a great Wings arena rocker in the vein of "Let Me Roll It"; wisely lets the music do the talking on the lovely rock ballad "Love in Song"; and knocks it out of the park on the hit single "Listen to What the Man Said," a silly love song that is not nearly as annoying as, say, "Silly Love Songs." McCulloch's straightforward anti-drug PSA "Medicine Jar" stands among the highlights; its earnestness offers a nice contrast to McCartney's sometimes off-putting ironic distance.

Venus and Mars ends on yet another note of confusion, intertwining two songs--"Treat Her Gently" and "Lonely Old People"--that have no apparent connection other than key and feel. Each is a nice if humble vignette on its own, and together they are pleasant enough so long as you don't stop to ask yourself "Why the hell did he combine these two songs?" Maybe it'd make more sense if I listened to it after rolling a bone, but alas those days are long past for me. In the future, I'll try to remember to enjoy this album for its surface pleasures alone, which are considerable. Think too much about Venus and Mars, though, and might well wind up with a big headache.

Band on the Run

With Paul McCartney's new album, Memory Almost Full, due out the first Tuesday of June, this month seems as good a time as any to review Macca's solo career. I am a fan, not a fanatic; I'm in awe of the guy's talent, though, and find a lot of creative inspiration in his work. I don't own all of his solo albums but I own a lot of them. I'll be writing about them, in the order they were released, over the next few weeks.



Band on the Run is a lot like Red Rose Speedway, only more fully conceived and more expertly executed. The ideas here are better, the hooks are hookier, the arrangements more complete, but in essence this is just another exercise in pop mastery. It's a fun album that is extremely enjoyable when taken on its own terms, but it's very hard to shake the feeling that it's all a little bloodless. That would be disappointing enough on its own, but more bothersome are the deeper questions it begs. For me and, I suspect, many others, the biggest problem with this album (and other similar McCartney solo efforts) is that all the craft and effort invested in lightweight production numbers like the title track and "Picasso's Last Words" not only call into question the value of McCartney's solo work but also leave you questioning some of the Beatles' more ambitious productions (Sgt. Pepper, side two of Abbey Road, etc.). It'd be as if the author of the Bible followed it up by writing Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

Even so, I'm extremely fond of this album. That's partly due to longevity. I received my first copy of Band on the Run as a bar mitzvah gift, and I wore the grooves out on that copy. It's a perfect album for a thirteen year old with a musical sweet tooth who can accept the often nonsensical lyrics for what they are likely meant to be: pleasant sounds whose primary purpose is to not interfere with the music. If they impart some platitudes about love, peace, and the environment in the process, so much the better, but Macca's approach to lyric writing here seems positively Hippocratic: First, do no harm.

Also, this is an album chock full of irresistible hooks and extremely clever musical ideas. OK, it's not Pet Sounds, but it's not Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods either. Judged against what was playing on the radio at the time, this is a damn good record. "Jet" and "Helen Wheels" are superb rockers, perfect summer radio fare. "No Words" is yet another gorgeous pop song that McCartney seems to dash off with maddening (to songwriters like myself, at least) ease. "Bluebird" is a lovely acoustic number good enough to survive a sax solo, the bane of 70s MOR music. "Let Me Roll It" is a perfect parody of Lennon's Plastic Ono Band on which, if I'm not mistaken, Macca basically calls Lennon a wanker ("You gave me loving in the palm of my hand"). It's all done with the trademark boyish charm, of course, which works a lot better than do Lennon's venomous attacks on his former partner. And, like so much of McCartney's work, this album would make a great semester-long course for any rock bassist looking to escape root-based parts without losing the bottom in the process.

On one front, though, Band on the Run represents a disappointing departure for McCartney, one that bodes ill for subsequent solo albums. On his first three albums, McCartney attempts to address personal themes of love, domesticity, "keeping it real," and the joys of making music. While his work may not have produced the most profound insights, at least there was a sense that he was writing from the heart, and a genuineness shines through that helps mitigate the lyrics' faults. McCartney's efforts to broaden his lyrical scope here don't often detract from the proceedings, but that's mostly because the music is so good that the lyrics are an afterthought. They don't add anything either, and they add distance that doesn't serve McCartney's art well. Commerce is another matter: unlike quirky little numbers like "Big Barn Bed," "Every Night," and "Some People Never Know," many of these songs are ready made to be performed in arenas and stadiums. With Band on the Run, one suspects that McCartney made the conscious choice to bring his organic/pastoral period to an end so that the era of "Wings: Corporate Entity" could begin.

Red Rose Speedway

With Paul McCartney's new album, Memory Almost Full, due out the first Tuesday of June, this month seems as good a time as any to review Macca's solo career. I am a fan, not a fanatic; I'm in awe of the guy's talent, though, and find a lot of creative inspiration in his work. I don't own all of his solo albums but I own a lot of them. I'll be writing about them, in the order they were released, over the next few weeks.


It's no understatement to say that Paul McCartney's early post-Beatles work was not well received in the press. Jon Landau described Ram as "the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far" and said it was "so incredibly inconsequential and so monumentally irrelevant you can't even [hate] it: it is difficult to concentrate on, let alone dislike or even hate." In his review of Wild Life, John Mendelsohn dismissed McCartney's first three solo albums as "largely high on sentiment but rather flaccid musically and impotent lyrically, trivial and unaffecting." These two selections are pretty representative of other contemporaneous reviews I've seen. More than a few get vicious; McCartney should probably be glad there was no Pitchfork back in the early 70s.

It's easy to imagine that critics back then were acting like kids in a divorce, feeling compelled to choose sides during a devastating breakup. Most chose John Lennon (although a thoughtful few decided that both John and Paul suffered greatly and equally from the absence of the other).

In retrospect, I think, McCartney wins the post-Beatles battle by a landslide. Even Lennon's best solo work (Plastic Ono Band, Imagine) is self-important and all too often mean-spirited (check out "How Do You Sleep?"). His worst solo work (Sometime In New York, the experimental albums with Yoko) is completely unlistenable. At his worst, McCartney is lightweight, but at least his work evinces enough craft to keep you engaged.

That said, Red Rose Speedway is one of those albums that helps explain why critics were so enraged at McCartney. Approach this album with high enough expectations--as critics of the day probably did--and this record is even more infuriating than Wild Life, which doesn't even present the pretense of craft or, for that matter, effort. Red Rose Speedway has hooks galore; it's just that on most of it it's hard to shake the sense that McCartney isn't really giving it his all. The lyrics are just a little too dopey, the arrangements a bit too underdeveloped, too simplistic--where the McCartney of Ram might have developed a contrapuntal line or an elaborate background vocal, the McCartney of Red Rose Speedway seems perfectly content with a facile guitar line or a simple stacked triad in the harmonies.

McCartney seems to be coasting on pure talent here, but because that talent is so prodigious, there's much here to enjoy for those who don't arrive expecting a masterpiece. The opening track, "Big Barn Bed," is an infectious trifle that probably celebrates domesticity, but with lines like "Weeping on a willow/Sleeping on a pillow/Leaping armadillo," it just as likely celebrates a particularly potent bong hit. "My Love" is a crafty bit of schmaltz, "Get On the Right Thing" is a great example of the sort of arena rock bombast at which McCartney excels, "One More Kiss" is a country throwaway most songwriters would gladly take credit for… and thus the album proceeds. It's a little like watching a great boxer who's perfectly happy to outbox an inferior opponent without even trying to deliver a knockout blow. It's all very impressive while at the same time a little disappointing.

There's no need for me to go on; the great Lenny Kaye (aka "Doc Rock") wrote a brilliant review of this album in Rolling Stone that pretty much says it all.

The current reissue of Red Rose Speedway includes several stellar bonus tracks, including the rocking "Hi Hi Hi." My favorite--one of my favorite McCartney songs, in fact--is "C Moon," a reggaefied homage to the McCartneys' love for one another. The term "C Moon," for those wondering, is the opposite of "L 7." Put an L and a 7 together and you get a square; hence, "L 7" for "square." Put a C and a crescent moon together and you get a circle; hence, "C Moon" for "cool." The song is quite a workout, complete with a great vocal and an equally great horn chart.

Wild Life

With Paul McCartney's new album, Memory Almost Full, due out the first Tuesday of June, this month seems as good a time as any to review Macca's solo career. I am a fan, not a fanatic; I'm in awe of the guy's talent, though, and find a lot of creative inspiration in his work. I don't own all of his solo albums but I own a lot of them. I'll be writing about them, in the order they were released, over the next few weeks.


It's difficult to imagine an album like Wild Life being released by a major label today; even in its day it had a lot of folks scratching their heads. Recorded in three days by a band that had barely played together before sessions began, Wild Life is a defiantly unpolished record, to say the least. That holds as true for the songwriting as for the performances. If the goal was to create an album that made McCartney sound like a finished, polished record, well, mission accomplished.

Give McCartney credit for not trying to dress this album up. No effort is made to masquerade this album as anything other than what it is, and that holds true right from the opening track, "Mumbo," the lyric to which consists entirely of improvised nonsense. It's not bad, exactly; the groove, the guitar riffs, and the churning rhythm guitars are all quite satisfying. But it's more the germ of a good song than the finished product. Like most of this record, it left me wondering why someone of McCartney's stature and talent would release something like this. This is the sort of thing that belongs on a collector's edition CD box set, not at the front of your brand new album.

You have to figure he just didn't care, a suspicion reinforced by the second track, "Bip Bop," whose lyric makes only slightly more sense than does its predecessor's. Again, it's a nice groove but there's nothing special about the track. By the third track, a hyper-synocpated cover of Mickey and Sylvia's 1957 hit "Love is Strange," it's pretty clear that either McCartney is saving his best for the end or this album just flat out sucks. The title track, a seemingly endless three-chord vamp over which McCartney sings impassionedly about zoo animals, does nothing to change this impression. At least this one has a really nice background vocal arrangement.

Track 5, "Some People Never Know," finally demonstrates some craft. It's a sweet love song with a simple, lovely lyric and a very pretty melody. Linda's vocal is pitchy but, as on much of this album, has a Mo Tucker-like quality that doesn't annoy, which is probably the best one can hope for. (I feel for the lady; she's not a musician at all and yet here she is in a band with one of the world's greatest and most famous pop stars. I try to appreciate her efforts for what they are and admire the McCartneys' approach to handling the challenges of celebrity marriage. And mostly I'm grateful she's not Yoko.)

Track 6, "I Am Your Singer," continues the momentum started by track 5, except with Linda taking a more prominent vocal part. It's a very pretty number, although nothing that stands out especially in the McCartney canon. The remainder of the album consists of reprises of "Mumbo" and "Bip Bop," each under a minute in length, a nifty piano pop song called "Tomorrow" (that, sadly, doesn't contain any apparent references to "Yesterday" but, happily, includes one of McCartney's gorgeous patented Beach Boys-influenced background vocal arrangements) and "Dear Friend," a piano dirge that many praise as a classic musical missive to John Lennon but which, frankly, leaves me cold.

And that's it. The whole thing clocks in at about 38 minutes, but it seems to pass more quickly because so much of it drifts by without your noticing it. When I read Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay a few years back, I felt at the end as though I'd swallowed a basketball. I was extremely full, yet knew that one carefully placed pin prick would reveal just how little I'd just ingested. After listening to Wild Life repeatedly, I feel as though I've swallowed an inflatable golf ball.

The current reissue of Wild Life includes some great bonus tracks, including the rowdy stomp "Give Ireland Back to the Irish" and a remarkably enjoyable version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" (I shit you not). I won't bore you with the story of how McCartney came to record a version of this nursery school classic--read about it here if you don't already know about it--but I will note that its inclusion points up what's wrong with Wild Life. If McCartney can work such magic with this little bit of nothing, why is he foisting off stuff like "Mumbo" and "Bip Bop"? Ditto for the remaining bonus tracks "Little Woman Love" and "Mama's Little Girl," throwaways that are nonetheless strong enough that they would fit comfortably in the track list for Ram. Either could have replaced almost any track on Wild Life and, in so doing, improved the album.

Ram

With Paul McCartney's new album, Memory Almost Full, due out the first Tuesday of June, this month seems as good a time as any to review Macca's solo career. I am a fan, not a fanatic; I'm in awe of the guy's talent, though, and find a lot of creative inspiration in his work. I don't own all of his solo albums but I own a lot of them. I'll be writing about them, in the order they were released, over the next few weeks.


Ram commences with an adamantly down-strummed acoustic guitar and an indecipherable guttural shout (it could be "Piss off, yeah" or "Piece of cake" or "It's OK" or even "Feel so good" or just about anything else). As is so often the case on this album, exactly what McCartney is singing is almost beside the point. He's a bit miffed about something, apparently, but it's the sound, not the lyric, that really conveys the meaning. On this opening track ("Too Many People") and throughout Ram, McCartney demonstrates that his poetry is mostly in his music, not in his lyrics. Glorious melodies, gorgeous harmonies, exquisite arrangements and a wonderful palette of bass, drum, guitar, and keyboard sounds are what make Ram a masterpiece. The lyrics--though some are quite good (and some are just as awful)--are a nice addition but are rarely essential.

On some songs, the lyrics appear to be little more than placeholders, something for McCartney to sing so that the album's lyrical content doesn't consist entirely of "tra la la." Take "Monkberry Moon Delight," which begins

So I sat in the attic, a piano up my nose,
And the wind played a dreadful cantata.
Sore was I from a crack of an enemy's hose
And the horrible sound of tomato.

Ketchup,
Soup and puree,
Don't get left behind

It's nonsense, as is the rest of this 5-minute-plus long song. It doesn't matter; the song is a pure joy, a nifty and rocking piano stomp with more great musical ideas than you'll find on most entire albums. Check out the nifty little bouzouki part or the great arpeggiated guitar lines or the bass line and scat that McCartney sings during the long outro. Or simply check out how McCartney totally throws himself into the vocal performance on this exceedingly silly song. It's hardly the only slight composition on this album that McCartney elevates through brilliant invention and full-tilt performance. The change in feel at the end of "3 Legs," the bridge section of "Eat at Home," the elaborate background vocals on the ukelele-driven (!) title track, the Little Richard-esque vocal on "Smile Away"--all take what could easily be ordinary, dull songs and transform them into something delightful and wonderful.

Some might cite this these as examples of McCartney's lack of substance, of a proclivity for polishing turds. I disagree. Some people express their profound thoughts in lyrics; others express those thoughts musically. And most of us poor saps are incapable of either. I'll take my genius in whatever form it takes, and if I have to choose one or the other, I'll take music over lyrics. A great song with an innocuous lyric is still a great song, while a great lyric with a terrible melody is a song you will forget.

And Ram is, in fact, more substantial lyrically than many of McCartney's post-Beatles efforts. The album focuses on several themes--the redemptive power of love, the joys of domestic life, the resuscitative powers of solitude and pastoral living--that collectively communicate McCartney's desire to redefine himself, to find meaning and fulfillment in something other than ex-Beatledom and pop stardom. This thematic focus results in the only dud on the record ("Long Haired Lady," which sounds like something from a very bad rock musical), but overall it provides the album with a coherence missing from many subsequent efforts. (Likewise, the relatively spare and organic sounds and arrangements chosen here work well not only on their own but also as a reinforcement of the album's "small is better" motif.)

But Ram's greatest pleasures come from the music, which reaches its pinnacle in the sublime pop songs "Dear Boy," the overplayed but endearingly loopy "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey," and the closing track "The Back Seat of My Car," which ends the proceedings in much the same way they began: with a guttural scream of indeterminate meaning but communicating an indisputable joy in the creation of great music.

McCartney

With Paul McCartney's new album, Memory Almost Full, due out the first Tuesday of June, this month seems as good a time as any to review Macca's solo career. I am a fan, not a fanatic; I'm in awe of the guy's talent, though, and find a lot of creative inspiration in his work. I don't own all of his solo albums but I own a lot of them. I'll be writing about them, in the order they were released, over the next few weeks. Paul McCartney's first solo album, entitled McCartney, was recorded on a home four-track, with McCartney playing all the instruments (and providing all the vocals except for some harmonies from wife Linda). It is as raw, intimate, and simple as Abbey Road--completed during the same period--is baroque. The opening track--the brief and beautiful "The Lovely Linda,"--ends with the sound of spontaneous laughter, suggesting that the album is as much a musical diary as it is a commercial enterprise. It's a conscious choice, obviously, and a wise one that sets the tone for the album that follows.

McCartney's offhandedness can be both engaging and infuriating, depending on your willingness to indulge McCartney, who seems to have put absolutely everything he recorded on the four-track onto this album. Thus, the inclusion of "Valentine Day," an instrumental that consists of little more than a two-chord vamp accompanying a simple blues/rock solo on electric guitar; "Hot As Sun/Glasses," the former a "Flying"-style instrumental that might make a great television theme song, the latter the sound of McCartney rubbing the rims of drinking glasses to produce notes; "Oo You," a slight minor key blues/rocker; "Momma Miss America," a vaguely Eastern European sounding instrumental that would not have sounded out of place on Camper Van Beethoven's debut, Telephone Free Landslide Victory; and "Kreen-Akrore," an instrumental named after a Brazilian Indian tribe that is mostly an excuse for McCartney to show off his ethnic drumming.

All this might seem ridiculously self-indulgent, and maybe it is, and yet this is a charming and, at times, overpowering album all the same. Several things save it. First, every one of the throwaways described above has something to recommend it: a nifty bass line, a great groove, a brilliantly conceived chord voicing, or a surprisingly innovative musical turn that reveals a great mind at work. It's almost as if, at this point in his career, McCartney was incapable of creating completely worthless crap (that wouldn't always be the case, alas). The second track, "That Would Be Something," has no right to be any good at all: it's little more than a standard blues guitar lick with McCartney singing "That would be something/That really would be something/That would be something/To meet you in the falling rain, mama/To meet you in the falling rain" over and over. But it's quite good, catching an infectious groove and riding it for nearly three minutes and not even beginning to overstay its welcome. A campfire drum-and-guitar circle could easily drag this one out for several hours.

Second is the fact that McCartney is peppered with some knock-you-down brilliant songs. Track four, "Every Night," arrives just in time--it's the first song on the album that actually sounds like a "finished" song. It's a gorgeous love song to Linda, counterbalancing the depressing humdrum of daily life ("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") with the redemptive power of love. The song uses the minor II in the verse and the major II in the chorus to reinforce the dichotomy--that probably sounds stultifyingly technical, but when you hear it you know what it is and why it gives you that happy 'whoosh' up your spine. It's pretty much a perfect small song.

Likewise "Junk," a song about an antique store full of merchandise of questionable value. McCartney may have been thinking about this album of bits and scraps--the album includes a number of songs intended for various Beatles albums--when he came up with the song's conceit, encapsulated in the chorus "Buy, buy says the sign in the shop window/Why, why says the junk in the yard." If so, he thought enough of the album to give its theme song an achingly beautiful melody, and recognized the quality of his work well enough to reprise it as an equally lovely instrumental on track 11. This song has the same sad, quiet, meditative quality that distinguishes the many great songs on Paul Simon's solo debut album. I don't know if there's any connection there in one direction or the other, but this song for some reason reminds me a lot of "Everything Put Together Falls Apart" and "Run That Body Down." "Junk" is immediately followed by "Man We Was Lonely," another hooky little song that pits a simple sing-songy chorus against a much more sophisticated verse. It's a great example of what makes McCartney's writing so extraordinary; he's equally at home with simple and complex musical ideas and so adept at both that he can shift easily from one to another, seemingly without effort.

The crowning achievement of McCartney, of course, is "Maybe I'm Amazed," one of the great pop love songs of the rock and roll era. There's not a lot to say about this song except that it stands up with the best songs in the Beatles' catalogue. Unlike many of the tracks on this album, which are purposefully rough, this is a fully realized recording, spare but brilliantly arranged, layering instruments as the piece progresses to build to an anthemic ending. It's nearly 4 minutes long and yet it's over all too soon, requiring an immediate second spin.

Subsequent entries to this thread will not all be this glowing, I assure you. But McCartney is a gem--not the apotheosis of Macca's solo career (that'd be Ram) but still damn good. It begins a period of Macca's career during which he sought to distance himself from his superstar Beatle persona and explore smaller, more personal themes, to eschew pop stardom and celebrate domesticity. In this way it's a lot more rewarding than some of the more polished Wings albums to come, albums that embrace and celebrate stardom and pop culture and lose a lot of this album's charming personal touch in the process. Seek it out if you don't have it already.