FEATURE:
After The Beatles…
Paul McCartney’s McCartney at Fifty
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WHILST I am going to write one more…
feature about The Beatles’ Let It Be turning fifty before the day itself on 8th May, there is something to celebrate before then. It did not take long for all the solo Beatles to release albums away from the band. The Beatles announced their split in April 1970, though Ringo Starr had released Sentimental Journey the year before. When it comes to the best of the four solo albums released in 1970, perhaps Starr’s Sentimental Journey and Paul McCartney’s McCartney were overshadowed by their bandmates’ efforts. McCartney would go on to produce stronger albums after 1970, but I think McCartney is a great album. Whilst John Lennon’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (Dec 1970) and George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass (27th November, 1970) are superior solo albums – and among the very best of the 1970s -, McCartney is a big deal. McCartney was, essentially, the one who signalled the end of The Beatles, and he recorded a lot of the album in secrecy, using home-recording equipment. I can only imagine how strange it was for the four Beatles to go their separate ways and regroup after the band split. Whereas The Beatles final-recorded album, Abbey Road, was polished, McCartney is a lot looser and more lo-fi. His wife, Linda, did contribute here and there but, largely, McCartney is the album of one man recording in a very different setting to Abbey Road Studios.
A world away from the sound of The Beatles at the very end, some critics were cold towards the album because of that. Although McCartney’s announcement to the press in April 1970 sort of shut the door on The Beatles, John Lennon made it clear he wanted to walk away from the band in 1969. The rest of the group were angry when they learned about McCartney’s solo album, and the fact that he was not going to delay its release. Let It Be arrived on 8th May, 1970 – several weeks after McCartney came out. I think McCartney has gained a lot more warmth in the years after its release, compared to the reaction in 1970. Many critics blamed McCartney for breaking up The Beatles, and the under-produced sound of the album turned many others away. I am going to mark John Lennon, and George Harrison’s debut solo albums later in the year, but it would be unfair to ignore McCartney as it turns fifty. I think Every Night, Maybe I’m Amazed, and Junk are among McCartney’s best solo cuts, and his 1970 is far from a failure. Although McCartney is a one-man effort that differs vastly from the George-Martin produced Beatles best, I like the fact the album is quite sparse and doesn’t have that gloss and layers. With Phil Spector producing Let It Be – and McCartney unhappy with a lot of what he was doing -, maybe McCartney was an attempt to produce an anti-Let It Be. In any case, the press reaction was quite hostile, and it is a shame the album was released when it was; were it held back for a few more years, maybe the reception would have been more positive.
Take McCartney away from the legacy and tangle of The Beatles and their break-up, and many more-modern reviews have seen positives in the album. This is what AllMusic had to say:
“Paul McCartney retreated from the spotlight of the Beatles by recording his first solo album at his home studio, performing nearly all of the instruments himself. Appropriately, McCartney has an endearingly ragged, homemade quality that makes even its filler -- and there is quite a bit of filler -- rather ingratiating. Only a handful of songs rank as full-fledged McCartney classics, but those songs -- the light folk-pop of "That Would Be Something," the sweet, gentle "Every Night," the ramshackle Beatles leftover "Teddy Boy," and the staggering "Maybe I'm Amazed" (not coincidentally the only rocker on the album) -- are full of all the easy melodic charm that is McCartney's trademark. The rest of the album is charmingly slight, especially if it is read as a way to bring Paul back to earth after the heights of the Beatles. At the time the throwaway nature of much of the material was a shock, but it has become charming in retrospect. Unfortunately, in retrospect it also appears as a harbinger of the nagging mediocrity that would plague McCartney's entire solo career”.
Every Paul McCartney album deserves respect, but I feel McCartney gets a bit overlooked because of the association with The Beatles’ demise. There are some weaker tracks on the album, for sure, but McCartney is a really interesting work from a man who was in a bad situation.
Maybe that sounds like a defence, but one cannot judge McCartney or blame him for wanting to release a solo album. Pitchfork had this to say when they reviewed McCartney in 2011:
“Paul played everything on the record himself, apart from some backing vocals by Linda, recording much of it at home on a four-track. No singles were released, there are several instrumentals, and it's all a bit ramshackle, the type of album that in the hands of most musicians would lend itself to introspection. And yet McCartney doesn't really tell us much about McCartney. As a songwriter, he wasn't (and still isn't, really) the confessional type. To a degree, McCartney is an actor whose medium is his songs. His love for Linda, expressed so ebulliently on "Maybe I'm Amazed", was certainly genuine, but he wrote this eventual FM-radio staple as a classic, universal love song. When presented with the opportunity to let his guard down and show us his unvarnished self, Paul McCartney never did-- even in this intimate setting, his songs remain extroverted and devoted to achieving some measure of pop accessibility.
The highlights of McCartney's later solo albums were often uptempo rock songs, or big, show-stopping tunes, but here, apart from "Maybe I'm Amazed", the peaks include two versions of the same quiet song, "Junk". The sparse vocal version features McCartney accompanying himself with acoustic guitar and a bit of bass and percussion, ticking through a nostalgic inventory of disused objects. McCartney later reprises "Junk" in a "singalong" instrumental version, with mellotron and piano joining in for a pretty waltz. I'd be surprised if Elliott Smith didn't learn something from it.
Much of the rest of the album was written and recorded off the cuff, and it shows-- McCartney plays with Latin rhythms ("The Lovely Linda"), a bit of blues ("That Would Be Something"), and some bounding, half-time country pop ("Man We Was Lonely"). "Teddy Boy" is sentimental storytelling, and closer "Kreen-Akrore" is McCartney experimenting in his weird, humorous way with oddball drum patterns and sound effects“.
Today (17th April), it is fifty years since the release of McCartney: a body of work that deserves new appreciation and dissection. It is true that Macca’s solo career has its average and less-than-brilliant moments, but I have a soft spot for McCartney. It is now, as it was in 1970: an underrated…
AND brilliant album.