McCartney Album

McCartney Album
I’ve spent weeks attempting to figure out why Paul’s first solo album was not merely criticized but seriously slammed by so many. Of course, each person must have had his or her own particular set of motivations as well as their personal reaction to any music but when so universal an opinion is expressed it seems likely that much of the motivation will be alike.

To begin with, listening to it for the very first time, prepared to find it a less then perfect first effort, I was quite simply blown away! Not that every cut is a perfect example of song writing or arrangement or whatever. I’m sure that I could find reasonably legitimate criticism of most, if not all, the songs. I can find criticism of Mozart, after all! But separately and as a whole, it’s certainly not anything like disastrously bad. In fact, without prejudice, it‘s simply great to listen to. Variety, subtlety, beat, it’s all there.

What thoughts or emotions lead people to seek out reasons to criticize another’s work; anger, hatred, jealousy, bribery, perhaps desire to please others? All these things definitely played a real part (well, I don’t actually know about bribery but anytime Allen Klein not to mention Yoko Ono are involved I don’t think you can count it out) in the reviews of Paul’s first solo album. However, I don’t think that they were the only things nor really the most important. I think the real problem, and it continues at least up to the release of Chaos and Confusion in the Back Yard, is that Paul didn’t produce the album they expect because McCartney simply wasn’t a “Beatles album.”

John had released 4 albums, George 2 and Ringo one before Paul’s was released. McCartney looked to people like the last chance to have a real Beatles album, post Beatles. Instead they got the news that, as everyone had certainly known, the Beatles really were over and McCartney wasn’t at all a Beatles album.
The Swinging Sixties were gone and the Beatles were too. People were disappointed and a lot of people react to disappointment with anger. John had made it clear that Paul was on his shit list as had George and even Ringo said a couple of unkind things; Paul had been the one who publicly implied that there would never be another real Beatles album and there was this album review to write. You’re a reporter, the Beatles will be news more then ever for the next little while and John was always good for something quotable, so who do you want to be happy with your review? Three Beatles or one; it’s a pretty easy equation to solve.
Besides, McCartney is soft! It’s about love and marriage, not the proper subject of rock; girls, heart-break, drugs, acid trips and angst, that’s what rock is about these days. There are all these instrumental bits, you can understand all the lyrics and then there’s that weird rhythm in Momma Miss America and what kind of a song title is that? So it was easy to ignore it as it played through only once and slam it real good. Obviously, none of the other Beatles could really be Beatles alone but surely Paul was the least Beatle of them all. So it really didn’t matter how lovely some of the melodies Paul was doing sounded, didn’t matter how he played, how exciting the rhythms were, what great songs he wrote about finding love and happiness; it wasn’t the Beatles and it must be his fault.

After that, people got in a habit, sure the reviewers may like John, George or Ringo’s releases or not, but they were invariably grudging at best when it came to Paul’s. I’m not going to go dig up sales figures, I do know that the public in general did like Paul’s after Beatles (hereinafter “AB”) work because they bought records. By the end of the 70s a lot of Paul fans didn’t even know he’d been in some other band before Wings! Then John was shot dead and nothing can ever change the things he said, not even the things he said later.