I have to admit to making a factual error in one of my posts, specifically 'Double Your Pleasure Part Seven'. The mistake was saying that Paul McCartney's 'Give Ireland Back to the Irish' was a reaction to John Lennon's 'Some Time in New York City'. After posting it - like two weeks later - I had a suspicion that I may have rushed to judgement. I did, most definitely. With a little digging, I found out that my chronology was a little messed up.
This needs a little bit of explanation. In that post, I said that 'Give Ireland Back to the Irish' was a reaction to Lennon's double album. Problem is, it was released four months before it. One could almost say that Lennon's highly political 'Some Time in New York City' was a reaction to McCartney's single. But that wouldn't be accurate, either.
What muddied the water was, first, my only checking the year that both were released, not month. Unfortunately, Discog, the web site I refer to often when writing about music, doesn't giver release dates, just year. Also, Lennon had done a couple of political singles earlier, 'Power to the People' and 'Happy Xmas (War is Over)', both minor masterpieces. But it wouldn't be until June of 1972 that he would hook up with the New York group Elephant's Memory to record his scurrilous double album.
Lennon and McCartney had been the power team of the 1960s, the brain trust behind the largest global phenomenon in popular culture ever. It was natural that when, in 1970, they split, each newly married and ready to start solo careers, it would attract massive amounts of press. John wanted all the attention he could get, using it as a tool for spreading his message of peace and love. Paul seemed to try and ease into his position more quietly.
By 1971, they were sending message songs to each other, since the lawyers were doing their best to kept them from actually talking. John was typically vitriolic on 'How Do You Sleep At Night' from the otherwise fairly bucolic 'Imagine' album, a huge seller. Paul replied with, in retrospect, the much better and more tempered 'Dear Friend' from his new band Wings' first album, 'Wild Life'. It was a ballad with excellent strings sneaking up on the listener, the exact opposite of Lennon's knock-him-over-the-head approach. Naturally, Lennon got all the notice.
Lennon was riding at the height of his solo career, with two excellent albums under his belt. The two political singles also helped, making him seem a man of the people. McCartney, by contrast, was accused of pumping out suburban muzak on 'Ram', now recognized as a masterpiece. Paul couldn't win; the critics had the race rigged against him.
The whole thing was stupid. John and Paul had more in common at that moment then perhaps they realized, both married to foreigners who each brought daughters to the union. Of course, Yoko was a little more foreign, but John lusted after her differentness as well as her artist credibility. Paul simply wanted to retreat to the Scottish countryside and raise a family. John and Yoko became the media whores of the century while Paul became a homebody.
The lack of Beatle money changed everybody's plan. Both needed to create product for a cash flow, and even that money was put in escrow by both Apple and the publishing company due to litigation. To get around this, both started putting their wives' names in the songwriting credits. In fact, there was collaboration in both cases, but once again, Linda was pilloried while Yoko, while not exactly praised, was at least tolerated.
The way Lennon and Ono treated the children was a good indication of the difference between him and Paul. Lennon had already been married and divorced, having a son. Once with Yoko, time with Julian became sparse. After much legal hassle tracking down Yoko's daughter, setting up house at Ascot all decorated in white, they got custody of her daughter. All too soon, the pair were off to New York City, kids not to be seen. Typically, Lennon did a 180 in his personal life. McCartney never did that once in his entire sixty year career.
Let's not forget that even George Harrison was getting political in his own way during this time. Between Lennon's two 1971 singles, George released an emergency single of the song 'Bangla-Desh' to raise funding and awareness of the environmental catastrophe in that newly born nation. His friend and mentor Ravi Shankar had asked for the favor, and to Harrison's credit, he dove in head first. Soon after, there was even the first all-star charity concert to raise even more money, with a hit movie and double live album. Doesn't the single cover above seem slightly similar to 'Some Time in New York City'?
It's worth noting that Lennon had relocated to NYC by the time of the concert and was invited to make an appearance. He agreed to do it, but only if Yoko also did her thing. Harrison decline, and the concert proceeded gloriously in the manner recorded. George, despite playing guitar on 'How Do You Sleep', still had big issues with Lennon as well.
Another common thing between Lennon and McCartney is that they sought to be part of groups at almost the same time. How they did it speaks volumes about the differences in their personalities. Lennon and Yoko simply took over an existing NYC band, Elephant's Memory, not all that different from Blue Oyster Cult except that they had a sax player. John and Yoko even produced an album for them, all original songs by the band, as well as doing a handful of charity gigs in the New York area.
McCartney did the exact opposite, building his group from scratch, piece by piece. Denny Seiwell was a NYC based session player who had auditioned for the 'Ram' album. He and Paul got along well, and he was an excellent drummer. Soon he got an invite to join Paul and Linda in Scotland. As would become the norm for this group, he was told to bring his wife.
One of the big problems with the Beatles had been who was going to play bass, especially once Paul demonstrated his abilities on both guitar and piano. In the studio it could be worked around, but on the 'Let It Be' album, when everything was being done live, neither John nor George wanted anything to do with the instrument. Paul needed a utility player and found one in Denny Laine, who'd been around the block a few times. Originally the guitarist and singer with the Moody Blues, he left and played in various bands such as Balls, as well as playing both guitar and bass in Ginger Baker's Air Force.
Laine stuck around longer than anyone else in the band. It helped that he was an excellent harmony vocalist as well. Since Paul would be playing a lot of piano, Denny could slide over to bass without complaining. He developed a particularly close friendship with Linda, a common thread with everybody who ever was in Wings. Being from the north of England helped.
And Paul asked Linda to be in the group. Wanting the kids around, who mostly weren't in school yet, it was simpler to have their mother around as well. Linda had no illusions about her talent and really didn't want to do it. She would be an object of ridicule for years. After her death from breast cancer, those comments seemed particularly ill formed.
The original four piece got together and after a few rehearsals recorded the 'Wild Life' in three days, using another to mix it. Paul even advertised how quickly it had been done, another mistake. Named 'Wings', the band's album managed to sneak out in December 1971 to fairly universal distain. Having recently purchased the 2018 release with bonus tracks, I can appreciate it more now, although I always liked it. There is an organic relaxed vibe that McCartney never managed again in a group setting. It sounds like a group finding it's feet.
For one thing, unlike Lennon and Ono, this sounds like a real band. The playing on 'Bip Bop' and especially 'Love is Strange' is excellent, especially the drumming. Paul's singing is absolutely magnificent, even if he does some primal screaming in 'Wild Life' that sounds like he is copying Lennon. Then again, he was doing the same thing years earlier on 'Why Don't We Do It in the Road' and 'Oh! Darling'.
The surprise came when a single was supposed to be released three months later in February 1972. 'Love is Strange' was pulled because McCartney had written a new tune in reaction to Bloody Sunday, a massacre of 14 Northern Irish citizens by British soldiers that had happened on January 30th. Perhaps inspired by new guitarist Henry McCullough, born in Northern Ireland, it was a rare reactionary move by Macca. Compared to either Lennon or even Harrison, it is more musical. Can you imagine if the Beatles had stuck together and done a political album? Thank God they broke up first.
The song was banned by the BBC immediately, and Wings managed to also get the slightly salacious 'Hi Hi Hi' also banned, two songs in one year, a feat that I imagine Lennon envied. The five piece band had great success with 'My Love' and the theme song from the James Bond movie 'Live & Let Die'. Later, after his Wild 18 month long Lost Weekend in Los Angeles, Lennon would sit at home with his new-born son and watch his old writing partner conquer the pop charts for the next decade.
One reason that I know anything about any of this is the often-bootleg 'Cold Cuts', a collection of McCartney and Wings outtakes that Paul worked on obsessively for decades. One version that I have is three jam-packed CDs, with up to five different versions of such songs as 'Best Friend', 'Night Out' and 'Hey Diddle'. McCartney first started tinkering with the concept of putting an album of left-over material, much of it from the aborted double album version of 'Red Rose Speedway', in 1978, when his band went on hiatus after the grueling 'Wings Over America' stadium tour.
If the bootleggers are to be believed (keep in mind that English seems to be a second language), sixteen cuts were being 'sweetened' by Macca, but the project was set aside when he put the last version of Wings together and released 'Back to the Egg'. Cross referencing the new official double album track listening and all known bootlegs from the time period, it becomes apparent that 'Red Rose Speedway' would have been a much better album as a double, and that there was enough material for a triple. Songs such as 'Wild Prairie' (which had a 12 minute version), 'Henry's Blues', 'B Side to Sea Side', (God forbid) 'Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance' from the 'James Paul McCartney' television special, as well as various singles and alternate studio takes of some of the live stuff like 'The Mess' are still missing from the project, even the big expensive box set.
McCartney kept coming back to this material but never did finish it. Perhaps it is because it is rumored to be what he was working on the day of December 10, 1980, when he heard about the murder of his best friend. George Martin called him and gave him the bad news. While they met at the studio that day, it was supposed to be for George to listen to those tracks, not to work on 'Tug of War', which hadn't started production yet. Instead, the two consoled each other.
The material trickled out very slowly over the years. Most of the McCartney Archive box sets are frankly not really worth the money, even though I own the majority of them. Not many outtakes, including known tracks from the 'Cold Cuts' stash, which were continually revisited during the 1980s. Some were on McCartney's tribute to his recently deceased wife, 'Wild Prairie' from 1998, a collection of mostly unreleased material featuring Linda. That must have been just as painful as the 1980 episode.
It's interesting that now Paul seems to be willing to clean out the cupboard. Perhaps he remembers it as a pleasant time in his life, surrounded by his wife and kids, a good band, and a growing success. 'Band on the Run', one of the iconic albums of the 1970s, was just on the horizon, even if two members of the band quit rather than travel to Nigeria. I'll leave you with a poster from that period, not to titillate or shock, but because I remember it on the wall of a record store, huge and in color, back in 1974. Good times indeed!
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