Review: 'Wings'

The band Wings was an entity distinct from Paul McCartney the solo artist, but a lot of retrospective stuff released under the guise of Wings wasn't too dogmatic about that. 1978's Wings Greatest included a couple of singles released before Paul and Linda started playing with Denny Laine, the only other consistent member of the group. 2001's Wingspan included songs from before and after the actual Wings era. Even the recent Wings oral history plays loose with that distinction. 

Review: 'Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run'

As I recently noted, 2000's The Beatles Anthology did a very good job of imparting the story of John, Paul, George, and Ringo from the personal, not necessarily historically reliable, perspectives of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Of course, the guys' stories did not end there, and for those who want to know what came next for Paul, at least, might justifiably expect the new oral history Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run to be a sort of unofficial sequel to The Beatles Anthology. After all, it is credited to Paul McCartney, just as the 2000 book was credited to Paul and the rest of his ex-bandmates, even though that book included the occasional comment from other players in The Beatles' story. 

Review: Wings' 'Band on the Run' 50th Anniversary Set

If there's a word that sums up Paul McCartney's work-approach with The Beatles, that word could be "perfectionism." That was one of the things that drove his band-mates up a tree when he insisted on take after take of things like "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" and "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", although the cutesiness of those songs surely rubbed John, George, and Ringo the wrong way too. So it was a shock when McCartney began his solo career by bucking that perfectionism, if not the cutesiness. McCartney was a homemade, one-man-band record full of non-songs and only intermittent flashes of his perfect song craft, "Maybe I'm Amazed" being the most obvious example. If RAM suggested that the perfect old Paul was back, then Macca continued to confound with an album of jams with a new band called Wings, which he then followed with a Whitman's sampler of nutrient-free confectionary experiments he titled Red Rose Speedway.

Review: Wings' 'Wild Life', Half-Speed Mastered Vinyl Reissue

Paul McCartney couldn't catch a break after The Beatles broke up. While he attempted to reset his perfectionist aesthetic with McCartney, a rough collection of finished and inchoate songs on which he played all the instruments, critics ran him down for being sloppy, lazy, cute, and glib. Okay, they had a point, but when they continued to pile on when he allowed his inner perfectionist to reemerge, and he made the delightful RAM, so full of lively performances and well-crafted pop nuggets, it became clear that they had it in for Paul McCartney. So either as a means to fade into a combo to prove he wasn't the control freak his former bandmates painted him as or because he genuinely missed the camaraderie and collaboration of band-work, McCartney decided to put his name off to the side and form a new group. 

Review: 'RAM' [special edition] by Paul and Linda McCartney

Lambasted in 1971, RAM has stood up better than any other Paul (and Linda) McCartney album. This well-crafted grab bag no longer bears the baggage of The Beatles’ messy break up, so we can enjoy its refreshing pop, country, blues, pocket symphonies, psych, and metal guilt free. Now there’s even more to enjoy on Hear Music’s double-disc special edition of RAM. The remaster is warm and most complimentary to Paul’s incomparable bass work. Aside from the hit single “Another Day”—another terrific pop confection that outpaces its initial bad rep—the bonus tracks are mostly the kind of fun fluff critics once accused RAM of being. Imagine what a shellacking the album would have received had it included the B-side “Little Woman Love” or “Hey Diddle”! “Oh Woman, Oh Why” is at least heavy-duty fluff. The drum-driven jam “Rode All Night” is pretty weighty too, though its nine minutes is a bit much.

The McCartneys' 'Ram' to Get Deluxe Treatment This Spring

Paul McCartney's solo career gets a bad rap, but those of us who realize it wasn't all "My Love" and "Ebony and Ivory" will be excited to learn that his and Linda's excellent 1971 disc Ram will be the next to get the deluxe treatment as part of the Paul McCartney Archive Collection. The series has already winged out deluxe editions of McCartney, McCartney II, and Band on the Run. Ram is scheduled for spring 2012, though a specific release date and tracklisting have yet to emerge.

However, Hear Music has firm details on a preview single of its reissue of the Ram-era single "Another Day"/"Oh Woman, Oh Why", which is on the way for Record Store Day on Saturday, April 21.

In the meantime, here's what I had to say about Ram in Psychobabble’s Eleven Greatest Albums of 1971:

Someone had to take the fall for The Beatles’ breakup. The most sniveling journalists pitched their poison pens at Yoko and Linda. The rest blamed Paul. He was the first to quit and the first to release a solo record. When that record proved to be a sketchy miscalculation (didn’t he realize how the first ex-Beatle album would be scrutinized?), critics shredded it. Giddy from finally having a reason to knock a Beatle down, they greeted his second record with equal viciousness. McCartney was hurt, and justifiably so. Hearing Ram decades removed from the national-tragedy level hysteria surrounding The Beatles’ dissolution, it’s hard to see what the critics hated and impossible to miss the craftsmanship. So what if a good deal of the lyrics make no attempt at profundity? Since when was that Paulie’s objective? The tunes are his most effervescent since “The White Album”. The recording is a perfect union of Abbey Road-style invention and Let It Be-style grit. Both of those albums would have benefitted from such balance. And how could anyone dip into such a diverse dish without finding something that suits his or her fancy? McCartney is the consummate chameleon throughout, paying homage to Brian Wilson (“Back Seat of My Car”) and Buddy Holly (“Eat at Home”), playing the down-home farm boy (“Heart of the Country”) and the moonshine-mad bootlegger (“Monkberry Moon Delight”), and giving us the best Beatles song since the band’s breakup (“Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey”). Those who criticized Ram as a cheerful exercise in style over substance chose to ignore the lacerating spite in “Dear Boy”, “3 Legs”, and the flame-throwing “Too Many People”. John Lennon didn’t. He regarded those tracks as sucker punches from his former partner (he had a point regarding “Too Many People”), and responded with the really mean “How Do You Sleep?” on Imagine. No one seemed to mind that Lennon’s record was guilty of a lot of the criticisms lumped on Ram: saccharine production and puerile lyricism (though Lennon got a pass because of his stabs at political observation and self-examination). 40 years on, one of those albums still sounds 100% fresh, and it isn’t the one on which a rich man tells us to “imagine no possessions.”

Thanks to The Second Disc for this scoop.