(This post was updated on August 2, 2019, to include details about Wings Over America)
Five years after The Beatles broke up—and nine after their final
gig— Paul McCartney finally came to terms with his legacy and began performing
songs from his Fab days again. The move thrilled audiences who finally got a
chance to hear how never-performed favorites such as “Lady Madonna” and “The
Long and Winding Road” might sound live. The Wings Over the World tour and its
accompanying album (Wings Over America) and film (Rock Show) also made it
clear that McCartney had the material, the chops, and the innate showmanship to
be one of Rock’s greatest live acts. Sure all of his proto-hair metal “Oh
yeahs!!!” were cheesier than the Velveeta factory, but all is forgiven when he
starts pounding hell out of “Soily” or “Jet”.
Universal Music is now reminding us of what a great ticket
McCartney has been throughout the years with vinyl versions of four of his live
discs. Naturally, Wings Over America
leads this campaign, and it’s easily the best record here, collecting three LPs worth of great musicianship and showmanship with an emphasis on tracks from Wings’ two best albums: Band on the Run and Venus and Mars. McCartney’s willingness to share the spotlight with Jimmy McCulloch and Denny Laine, whose rendition of his old Moody Blues hit “Go Now” is as good as anything by the show’s main star, is charming and supports the argument that Wings really was an all-around good band and not just Paulie’s puppets.
As a show of support for the age of glasnost
(“openness and transparency”) Gorbachev ushered in, Paul McCartney ensured that
his latest album would be released in the Soviet Union. It was a live-in-the-studio
recording of rock and roll classics he had already planned to put out in the UK
with an album cover inspired by those that adorned rock albums bootlegged for
the underground Russian market. He and a pickup band that included Mick Green
of original British rockers Johnny Kidd and the Pirates fire through classics
made famous by Elvis Presley, Bo Diddley, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, Wilbert
Harrison, Sam Cooke, and Paul’s idol Little Richard intended as a sort of rock
and roll primer, as was Mick Carr’s liner notes explaining the origins of each
song. McCartney titled it Choba B CCCP,
Russian for Back in the USSR.
As a historical document, the album is pretty
interesting. The introduction of what could be the greatest artistic product of
capitalist society to the communists is a charming project, and at age 46, Paul
proved he could still rip it up pretty well…though one hopes the folks who
bought this disc were inspired to root out the original versions of its songs. Choba B CCCP is best when not
inviting unfavorable comparisons with original versions, as when Paul
transforms Duke Ellington’s jazz-pop standard “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore”
into a chunky New Orleans-style rocker.
Jumping ahead five years, we move to Paul Is Live, a double disc that feels like a sequel to Wings Over America because of its
sprawling assortment of songs that includes an acoustic set and quite a few
Beatles tunes. In fact, our host is downright Beatles-drunk on this 1993 disc
from its Abbey Road-meets-“Martha My
Dear” cover to its title reference to the weirdest conspiracy theory of the Beatles
era to its eleven Beatles classics. If anything, the song selection shines a
more positive light on Paul’s solo material, which heavily favors his most
recent album, Off the Ground. The
rawness of live performance pumps new life into so-so material such as “Peace
in the Neighborhood”, “Come on, People”, and “Biker Like an Icon”, while new
renditions of Beatles icons can’t hope to compare to the Fabs’ originals,
especially when a cheap synth replaces the brass in “Magical Mystery Tour” and
“Penny Lane” (come on, Paul…you’re telling me you couldn’t afford to take a
brass section on the road?).
Wings Over America
and Paul Is Live spotlight McCartney
the arena rocker, and Choba B CCCP
presents him as an impromptu studio jammer. A 2007 set at Hollywood’s Amoeba
Records presents yet another side of Paul McCartney as a live artist because of
its unusual intimacy. Despite—or possibly because of— the gig’s smallness, the
crowd is electrified, and that makes Amoeba
Gig an exciting album. The material plays less of a role in its thrills as
the gig supported Memory Almost Full,
a pretty mediocre album, and The Beatles selections run toward the obvious with
most of them having counterparts on other live McCartney albums. Still, it is
heartening to hear the star still in such strong voice and so in command of a feverish
crowd well into his sixties.
The 180-gram quality of all four pressings is pretty high
with clear, strong sound, and extremely deep bass. They are available as both
colored and black vinyl.
