This Is Not A Chair

Paul has done it to us again and slipped it right by us all and nobody’s said a damn word! I mean, when we saw the album with that chair on the front we should have known we were missing something. But no, we just toddled along bitching to ourselves about “that stupid damn chair” and somebody wondered if maybe it was Linda’s favorite chair but nobody even took them up to argue about it.

I got my album two or three days ago (I’d heard the songs, I just didn’t have my own copy) and of course I read every word in the “liner notes” –and even then it took my brain several hours to suddenly sit up and say, “WOW.” I got up and grabbed the box and yes, sure enough the front of the chair on the front of the box and the back of the chair on the back of the box aren’t photos of a chair but paintings of chairs.

But the chair Paul is slouching on and standing behind and doing gymnastics around isn’t the same chair that someone Photoshopped a photo of Paul onto. The chair in the photos that include Paul is covered with brocade that resembles the childlike drawings on the painted chairs.

I have long since noticed in Give My Regards To Broad Street that the man adores very VERY subtitle jokes – some of which I haven’t yet managed to decipher – and this joke damn well is subtitle – I think Magritte would be pleased.

This is not a chair but this is not a painting.

Paul is one wicked funny man !

Memory Almost Full – Review

So, am I ready to write a review of Memory Almost Full? I’ve got several thousand words done already from commenting on the album, the individual songs, the reviews, the critics themselves and what the album means to me. Thousands of words and I suspect even I am not really interested in reading them all. Worse yet, they don’t even begin to communicate how I feel about this album. In the year and a half I’ve been seriously learning about the Beatles, learning their history–that of the Band as well as that of each member and close associate–I’ve come to have a lot of respect for McCarthey’s talent and ability. Perhaps one of the most attractive thing about this album is that it showcases those talents in their full maturity without loosing his playfulness and humon.Play McCartney (I) right after listening to Memory; yes, it’s very much the same man with almost 40 more years practicing his art.

First of all, the album absolutely blew me away. I now truly understand that most difficult of Beatle words; “gobsmacked.” I’m confident that it means the way I felt the moment when the album really hit me. That wasn’t the first time I listened to it or even the second; it was either the third or fourth. I was sitting right here in front of my computer with the speakers neatly aimed at my ears while it played and built and quite suddenly it crashed into me.

It’s more then just difficult to write a review of this album; if you’ve really listened to it, your mind and emotions are, at the very least, a bit unsettled. Not necessarily by what is said but by the way he leads you into and out of the songs, tweeks your own memory bank and finesses you into a look back at your own life. Truly listening to this album puts you on a mad, dark roller coaster ride; helter skelter you’re up and then you’re down—serious, happy, puzzled, abandoned. Who else would write a song for mandolin and work-boot? Who else could?

Paul’s voice, as always, is confident and pure (when that’s what he wants.) The album is full of music difficult to sing well. Considered simply as an additional music instrument, the human voice has more variety and flexibility then any other. The possessor of a remarkably elastic and true voice, Paul exploits it fully from a clear, warm, open low to an equally warm and pure high and an assortment of rocker-raucous inbetweens. Knowledge and practice beat youth and beauty most days.

I’ll take Paul at his word; that he generally isn’t thinking about what’s going on in his own life when he writes a song; he just makes up a song. He knows that some of his fans can’t resist trying to link the love songs up with his wives or children or somebody and his sad songs with whatever. I don’t think it seriously irritates him but if he ever did write any songs about HM, I suspect they’ll never be recorded and the demo tapes are ashes. On the other hand, I wasn’t able to resist making some tentative and not really serious connections in House of Wax—the Beatles were the House, Beatlemania the walls and who each of them really is/was are the secrets hidden in the yard. Anyway, if you need to know, House of Wax is my favorite (at the moment) in the album. I was on the verge of getting angry about the women “scream and runn around,” let’s not get into the female hysteria bit, but he pulled a major save with “Like wild demented horses.” Now that’s some imagry I can really dig!

I’m not going to go through this album song by song. It opens with a bounce, a gentle rocker (albeit with words to think about) and a 100% solid gold McCartney silly love song of unusual beauty. (Though I’d like to know where he found those butterflys that buzz) Having made his polished bow to expectations and the past, Paul proceeds to bounce our heads off the floor, walls and ceiling! This album could just as well been titled “It’s About Time” in more ways then one. While I’ve found that a lot of people who really liked Chaos and Creation in the Backyard don’t like this one as well, and visa versa, I’ll admit to being very, very fond of both.

As a whole, the album is definitely disturbing. It is crafted to arouse mixed emotions and it surely must have been deliberate. It comes close to setting up a dissonance in your brain the way the Beatles used subtle dissonance to help the girls scream. Did Paul deliberately select songs that would have this effect? Is the somehow a concept album? Not an album for people who hate thinking.

Also not an album safe for the knee-jerk (you can leave the “knee” out, I don’t mind) McCartney haters. Number 3 on the Billboard chart in the US, number 1 on the internet album sales, number 2 in downloads and number 5 in Britain, either means that Paul has managed to accumulate a vast number of devoted fans OR it’s a damn fine album. Doesn’t make the whiners look too good as the waffle around citing one of Paul’s early solo albums as his best work – we remember how much those same albums were hated at their release.

Many people on the various Beatle and McCartney lists I’m on and many of the reviewers and commentators on Memory Almost Full mention their surprise (or admiration or whatever) that Paul could produce an album like this when he’s almost 65/retirement age/drawing his pension. Obviously to these people, 65 is the end of everything useful, interesting or creative in live. Actually after 60 or so there are a number of factors that affect what an individual can or can’t do and none of these factors are their age.

First and most important is what the individual thinks they can do. Keep in mind that most women become grandmothers between 35 and 45 (not 70 as the illustrations and advertisements would have it) and it’s pretty easy to be a great grandmother-father before 65. Even the person who is 65 can limit their activities by believing, as I suppose the majority of younger people do, that they can’t do anything worthwhile after 65. Obviously, if you KNOW you are too old to do it you aren’t going to try.

Those who haven’t fallen victim to that supposition are limited by mobility, health, energy levels and opportunity. These factors basically govern what they are likely to do or will attempt to do in their 60s or their 90s. It isn’t as if every one hadn’t seen a multitude of examples of this running from the late George Burns to somebody’s great grandfather down the block. Being over 60 changes you and changes what you are interested in doing and usually changes the methods you choose to use in order to do it, but it certainly doesn’t end your productive life. There is no cosmic switch that turns you off when the magic number comes up!

McCartney and the Record Reviewers

Today Paul’s new album, Memory Almost Full, was released. We are know for sure the title is an anagram that really means “my soulmate LLM;” of course we do. News outlets of all sorts have been interviewing Paul, featuring imaginative profiles, and of course, reviewing the new album. To boil it down it is simply the best/worst McCartney has ever done; his voice is amazingly good with richer low notes/he’s too old to sing and he should have realized it; the songs are sophisticated and mature/purile and vacuous. You get the picture I’m sure. Hey, we just went through this a couple months (at least it seems like only a couple months) with Ecce Cor Meum that was either intensely great or overwhelmingly boring. Over and over I found myself muttering, “What the hell is he (virtually all music reviewers seem to be male) listening to? It certainly is NOT Paul McCartney’s Memory Almost Full!”

We should be used to this sort of thing. The only time Paul doesn’t get mixed reviews; he gets unanimously bad ones. What is harder to deal with is not understanding why. (I’m going to limit this posting to reviews of his music. I’ll get into the grimy question about why he is the person a lot of people love to hate some other time.) I did mention one problem a day or two ago when I did a post on righteous listening. If I’d written a review of MAF after the first time I heard it, I’d probably have compared it to Flowers in the Dirt, as one professional reviewer did. “A good album but nothing particularly special.” It wasn’t till the third time that I started REALLY hearing all that was going on. It was probably the 5th time through that I realized that I was going to love House of Wax best of all. Paul seems to do simple music but it’s not as simple as it seems. I notice that most of the reports on one of my McCartney lists have mentioned something about the second time or the third time. Of course, people who are paid to do reviews have deadlines to meet and, as someone who has gotten herself into reviewing books a time or two, I know it’s difficult to make yourself read at least half a book before you try to write about it. Reviewing is a responsibility that too few take as seriously as they should.

There’s another, much better, reason that Paul’s reviews are contradictory and sometimes a little strange. That’s because in a sense there isn’t any “pop” music any more – thanks to a famous band of the 1960s that we all know quite well. There are rock music writers and there are classical music writers. Rock music has become something that resembles only one Beatles song, (and doesn’t resemble it very closely) Revolution. I personally decided many years ago that I wasn’t going to pay somebody for yelling at me accompanied by painful noises. To my ears, if there is anything pleasant about the sound, some reviewer will say, “it’s not rock.” By that rule, Paul McCartney doesn’t play or write much, if any, any rock. So the reviewer for Rolling Stone, Mojo and so on may very well not see much to like. The rest of the critics really like Beethoven and Schubert and so on and although they are stuck reviewing all sorts of music they don’t really “get” it. They can usually find a ballad they can like but anything faintly gets a knee-jerk reaction of distaste. When Paul writes something classical it’s actually worse. The rock reviewers REALLY don’t get it and the classical buffs each have their favorite styles and a “brotherhood” that doesn’t look kindly on interlopers from the common herd of pop/rock composers.

Obviously there are reviewers whose minds are made up long before the album comes out. Some were/are John fans or George fans. Some really think that if Paul hadn’t “broken up the Beatles” they’d still be touring to the screams of … um …. 55 year-old girls. Some love the Rolling Stones and have never been convinced that the “war” was all in the heads of the newspapers. Or they are so fond of one particular type of current music that they can’t see any other.

A third factor affects McCartney fans as well as reviewers. Almost everyone comes to a new release with expectations or merely wishes of what they want to hear. Like me wanting McCartney II to be a direct continuation of McCartney I and Ram, everyone has favorties among the 20 (or 21) prior album releases. And for the most part, Paul disappoints us by doing something that we not only didn’t anticipate but is so different that we couldn’t have anticipated. Memory Almost Full is definitely such an album. It is not a continuation of Chaos and Creation in the Backyard and, outside of the single reference to Flowers in the Dirt, of any other album. Completely in line with Paul’s tradition, it’s new and different and you can tell it caught a lot of reviewers off guard. Some were disappointed and others were shocked. More then one seems resentful that an “old man” could produce anything new and different. As a contempory of the “old man” I have to say that ageism is alive and well in the Western World.

Back in the Dark Ages when the Beatles were starting out, there wasn’t a division between rock and pop music. John and Paul wrote pop music. Their pop music included both rocking songs and ballads and whatever. Paul’s still do. John’s still did. A lot of current soloists and groups still do. Some people who live in trailers are great folks and some pop singers rock better then almost anybody. People don’t have to come in isolated little boxes if they don’t want to. But if you don’t play the box game, you can expect the box types to misunderstand.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

The noisiest fights in my childhood home were about my father’s high fidelity sound system (stereo wasn’t pioneered until I was in my teens). The Hi-fi was a collection of speakers, from woofer to tweeter, Pa placed in one of the kitchen cupboards built into the interior wall between the kitchen and the living room. The cupboard drawer hid them from the kitchen side and the square grand piano was in front and above so whatever he did there was invisible. The amplifiers and pre-amplifiers were in the bookshelves behind the door between the kitchen and study and the turntable and radio receiver were located in the study. The majority of these components Pa had built himself using Heathkits.

The arguments were not about what was being played or even that it was being played; they were about what Pa called “room volume.” He said, and it was true, that the quality of the reproduction of the original instruments was better at a higher volume. (I suspect that the loss of cupboard space in the kitchen had been included in the arguments in the early days.)

As little as 15 years ago most stereos didn’t do as good a job on the sound at low volumes, I know because I don’t like to listen to music at a high volume and it was almost impossible to find one I could afford that performed adequately for me. (Because of Pa’s great interest in the best possible sound, I’m pretty unforgiving about poor sound with truncated highs and buzzing lows.

This morning someone on one of the Beatles mail-lists I subscribe to posted the URL to an article about tricks to increase the loudness of popular music by messing with it during the process of recording an mixing and the fact that listening to them isn’t good for people.  http://tinyurl.com/26kvz5 I have always disliked loud sounds, as well as heavy odors even if they are pretty ones and it was nice to find out that perhaps I’m not really a complete nervous-Nellie.

Paul McCartney’s new CD has not, I’m sure, been subjected to this process, and the sound quality over my computer with my speakers that are a lot better then the ones usually shipped with a computer, is as expected very good. Even the extreme low notes at the opening of House of Wax (it really sounds like a didgeridoo but may of course be electronically generated) may be distinctly heard and the high harmonics of the electric guitar in the same song are pure and undistorted. It is quite an accomplishment to  have a wild and emphatic guitar solo without either feedback or distortion and I am deeply grateful to whoever is responsible for it.

Reviewing

I have really tried over the years to keep in mind that when someone has decided that they don’t like someone or something, he or she is unlikely to admit it even if they happen to find something about it or him to like or if he or she accidentally does something that they do actually like. It’s entirely to be expected that when Paul McCartney puts out a new album there will be as many opinions as there are people paid (or not paid) to write about music. Somehow the ones who have decided not to like it seem to be just as eager to spread their opinion around as everyone else. The best technique is not to talk about things you dislike and maybe the world will forget about them. That’s the best way; I didn’t say I followed it.

I’m also learning that it’s completely foolish to try to guess who Paul wrote this or that song about. I’ve read a dozen or so reviews of Memory Almost Full today and there’s one guy who thinks the whole album is about how much Paul loves Linda. I think one person or another has named every single song on the album except Dance Tonight as being about Heather Mills. Come to think of it, why on earth did they leave that one out considering that she was on that silly dance show? The truth is for the most part I don’t care who or what Paul thought he was writing about, the question is does the song do it for me?

The second best cheap amusement for the day is reading all the articles (and comments on them) marking the 40th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band. Here the range of opinion isn’t nearly so great: there are those that feel it was both important and great and there are those who thing it was only one of those things or neither. I only have two things to dsay about that: if it’s so unimportant and not great why are we still arguing about it 40 years after the sales receipt went into the trash? The other thought is that my mother taught me to keep an extra around in a brown paper bag, there are some people you just don’t serve the good stuff to.

My opinion of Memory Almost Full? Great, marvelous, exciting, scary, nostalgic, prescient, fun, sad, terrifying and visionary. In other words, I like it a lot. It is quite definitely an album to listen to several times before you start forming an opinion. The arrangements are intricate, layered and full of color and texture. My favorite? House of Wax and then Mr. Bellamy. I’ve always had a weakness for dramatic music. After that I like Feet in the Clouds a lot. I like the way he winds over and under, around and through without quite touching the melody. I’ve liked an awful lot of Paul McCartney songs in my life but I can’t say there are very many I like more then these. He also proves it truly can be done, a wild and free electic guitar solo without feedback or distotion!