I wonder who won the holiday and whether they also made an album
What were you doing in 1977? Well at least for a short part of that year Paul, Linda and Denny were hanging out at Paul and Linda's Scottish farm and Paul having recently purchased the rights to Buddy Holly's songs they decided to bash out an album of Buddy Holly covers for Denny to sing. When I say they, I guess I mean Paul decided: 'On the four-track recorder Paul laid down the basic tracks, overdubbing each instrument himself. Denny and Linda added a few licks and all three joined in on the vocals... Denny singing lead and Paul and Linda harmonising.'
The gentle contortions that led to the creation and attribution of the resulting album Holly Days are therefore pretty interesting in McCartney 70s lore, and the 70s let's be fair is his (as opposed to 'Beatle Paul's) most interesting period. As I said, Paul owned the rights to Holly's songs (I don't really understand how this works/worked, to be honest, since Holly was generally only a cowriter of most of his songs, but I guess he and his collaborators were all signed to the same music publisher and the songs were bundled up as 'Buddy Holly songs' for convenience - ?) so that was one new toy to play with. He had his little home studio 'a wood-lined, tin-roofed shack known as Rude Studio', another toy. I'm not going to call Denny Laine a toy, he seems to be largely a decent chap and journeyman and let's not diminish the importance and value of someone who, for instance, co-wrote one of the biggest hit songs of the second half of the 20th century, by which of course I mean 'Mull of Kintyre'. I am going to suggest that putting Denny's name on this record, and prioritising him on the sleeve (there are 17 pictures of Denny Laine on the record, although the front cover is a picture of a really beautiful horse)* and there is also one picture of Paul McCartney, alone, and some of him in the same frame as Denny) is a way to make a record and let it come out under the radar, so to speak. It publicises Buddy Holly songs, which Paul owns, and it gives them a bit of a 70s twist that BH might not have imagined i.e. it puts forward some serving suggestions (one of the songs here is 'I'm Gonna Love You Too' which Blondie released as the first single of Parallel Lines a few years later. It wasn't a hit, except in the Netherlands, but the fact that it seemed like a good idea at the time suggests that Paul's idea to update/repackage was also a good one). I also would like to propose that Paul was kind of scared of John Lennon's scorn, or at least aware of it. He wouldn't have wanted to do a whole album of Buddy Holly songs himself in case Lennon then went into some kind of public paroxysm about how McCartney'd never be Buddy fuckin' Holly, or Holly spinning in his grave or whatever. So he did do one himself, and Denny Laine did all the lead vocals.
The Holly Days album comes between Wings at the Speed of Sound and London Town, (actually it comes between Wings Across America and London Town but of course WAA is a live album, so I'd tend to look at that as a kind of stocktake/stocking filler/statement of chops than anything else) but it has much more of a feel of Wings Wild Life leading into McCartney II than anything else. I have a particular fondness for the experimental stuff, not just because obviously Paul McCartney's throwaway albums are more consequential and valid than most artists' career-defining ones. On something like Holly Days, Wings (for that's who it is) don't have to be anything other than creative people producing something fun and friendly. A 'Denny Laine solo album', the very title of which indicates 'no major life-redefining cataclysms to see here', allows them to be as funny and strange as they want, and if they get to mess around with some great pop songs, so much the better. Wings were already controversial and the records they made scrutinised (and criticised) to within an inch of their lives, and it must have been nigh on impossible to make good records under those conditions, even notwithstanding they often sold in their millions. There's so much nothing like 'Silly Love Songs' here, in any sense, except I suppose in the sense that there might on some level be a similar value placed on the disco beat of 'Silly Love Songs' and the casio (?) drum machine used on a few of these songs. Oh, and that it's silly. It's a silly bunch of love songs, I guess.
I'll get the silliest silliness out of the way: the speeded up voices on 'Take Your Time', which was sensibly placed as the second last track, just before the instrumental 'I'm Lookin' for Someone to Love'. So often with PMcC you wonder what he's driving at with his various peculiarities and while it's tempting to say he just doesn't care/ can't self-edit, I suspect it's closer to the way one is when one knows that one has been an inventive innovator in the past, and putting weird speeded-up voices (not that this was such a huge innovation - Alvin and the Chipmunks etc) on a track might be the way of the future. Or perhaps it just made the kids laugh. Or it made stoned PMcC, LMcC and DL laugh. It's not exactly bad (it adds texture) but nor is it exactly explicable.
That said, there was obviously some serious muscle put behind this album, notably the promotional and production work put into 'Moondreams' which was released as the second single ('It's so Easy/Listen to Me (Medley)' was released before the album, the effort of reading let alone announcing its title surely enough to put off any DJ). 'Moondreams' is a crafted gothic ballad not a million miles away from, let's say, PMcC's 'Waterfalls' from a few years later. As a pop record it undeniably works very well. Other stuff - like 'Fool's Paradise', would have fitted nicely into any Wings album, probably somewhere in the middle of side two.
Each side ends with an instrumental, which I'm going to take as a kind of 'Singalong Junk' approach - 'we didn't necessarily quite finish these, but we like them as they are.'
So I do sort of wish that Denny had been inspired to, that he had been encouraged to, write at least one song of his own for the album, something that fitted, in the way that PMcC had three songs of his own on Run Devil Run in amongst the 50s covers. But that's OK not having something like that to focus on means we can better the regard the album as a whole, a pristine concept.
Oh just one more thing: remember how people used to pore over Beatles albums for clues to shit, well, here's an intriguing detail I think we need to know more about. What did Paul, Linda and Denny get from Western Australia that they're so keen for us to know about?!
*I had to say that, because if I said 'a horse' it would come across as if I was saying 'wtf', but of course all horses are all beautiful.
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