I was a big Beatles fan in the mid-1970s (following on from picking up a copy of 'She Loves You' at the Auburn South Primary School fair in, I'm going to guess, 1975). Funny to think that, while at that stage it
was a retro concern, there was at least the possibility that the Beatles would reform with their classic line-up. Also, while at the time it seemed like the five years since the Beatles broke up was a really long time, I didn't fully appreciate that one day it would be 50 years since they broke up, and that would be an even longer time.
So I more or less know the Beatles canon, perhaps absent a few of the earlier songs - you know, the With the Beatles or Hard Day's Night songs, because I didn't own those albums when I was a kid but I probably have heard them all, probably on numerous occasions actually. I suppose that Beatles enthusiasm turned me towards a few things in life that have occupied me ever after, too, arguably via the Roy Carr and Tony Tyler The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, a big 12" sized book that, now I come to think of it, was designed to sit in your record collection with I suppose your Beatles records.
Carr and Tyler were all the usual things, pro-Lennon, anti-saccharine McCartney, etc. They actually, I now realise, were toeing a pretty lazy line with a lot of the things they wrote about Yoko,* and so on, and they weren't eager to get vested in any unpopular opinions. I didn't realise that in 1975/6 because I was hearing all this for the first time. I couldn't help but be really keen to hear all of the stuff, particularly the solo early 70s material, a lot of which was actually hard to come by, even then. So in (say) 1976 I had a copy of the Imagine album, and a copy of Ram, and a copy of Wings over America (that came to me new) and a copy of Ringo and the fairly tawdry Harrison greatest hits that, surely to his extraordinary irritation, was one side of his Beatles tracks and one side of solo tracks (I think that was a kind of punishment, when he left EMI).
Anyway I think there have been enough words written on the Beatles for my opinions to be even less important than usual, but I just wanted to say that over time, I have come to be firmly of the opinion that Paul McCartney is by far the most talented member of the Beatles, and that he considerably outperforms the others in terms of his curiosity and interest in making new sounds and working in his chosen medium - when they're all together, they're riffing off him or motivated to try and work against him or within his sphere, and even when they're apart, they're still all working against or sparking off each other in different ways, but McCartney is at the heart of it. Lennon's Beatles work is about half as good as McCartney's most of the time; what screws Lennon up is he has no particular desire to push the envelope musically, only a wish to use the Beatles as a vehicle, so for instance the song 'Revolution' is, yeah, fine but it's - and Lennon himself used this description a few years later - an example of his general output after the mid-60s, and perhaps even during and before, 'just rock and roll at different speeds'. 'Revolution' is an OK song but it's no 'Helter Skelter' or 'Hey Jude'. Those are songs which seriously advanced matters. On some level, Lennon and Harrison must have appreciated that McCartney was doing amazing things, and they were lucky to have him providing a scaffold for them to fuck around the edges of. 'I Want You/She's So Heavy' is passable, you know, but no-one would buy a Beatles record with just John Lennon songs on it. He and Harrison leaven the great work that McCartney does.
So when McCartney strikes out on his own - unwillingly, incidentally - or with Linda, and then with Wings, he's really an adventurer. He doesn't have Lennon and Harrison dragging him down, and he does some of his best work in the 70s. After that time, I agree with most critics, he gets a bit complacent; he is 'near enough is good enough' with some notable exceptions. He's still got it, but he pushes himself less often, perhaps in realisation that his new work is slowly becoming less relevant through the 80s. Which might have been a relief as much as an irritation.
So it's fun from my POV to bait the Beatles fans by hinting that Wings are a better band than the Beatles but in many ways I believe it, notwithstanding the obvious truth that there would be no Wings without the Beatles. But the Wings albums essentially hold up, in the way that few other Beatles solo records don't (of course, Wings is a band - McCartney was the only one of the ex-Beatles, I suppose Harrison/Travelling Wilburys aside, who actually put himself back in a band).
McCartney first picked up a guitar, I gather, about a week after his mother died. If there's a better way to understand his particular genius and drive, I can't imagine what it would be. He seems to be a somewhat damaged figure all along, and being damaged is what drives him. He's keeping it together. I don't know if his music is an articulation of his pain, or a wish to deny it (I suspect the latter) but while I have nothing more than pop culture understanding of psychology (Linus' blanket) it seems painfully obvious that music is what keeps Paul from falling into the precipice of despair and anguish he's always on the edge of.
Of course, unlike - blah, Ian fucking Curtis, to pluck someone from recent conversations because I think it was just the 40th anniversary of his death or something - McCartney's stock in trade is rarely explorations of his or anyone's pain, only sometimes allusions to an abstract notion of pain, which could easily be just dabbling in sadness for the sake of colouring a lyric. I suppose it would have been nice on one level for Paul to have made his own version of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band but on the other hand, he's doing what works for him. I still hold that Ram, Wings Wild Life, Wings at the Speed of Sound*** and Back to the Egg in particular are some of the best albums of the 1970s and better than most Beatles albums, a kind of false competition because you can't (as I said above) give Wings/McCartneys albums a status above the Beatles in terms of impact and adventurousness: McCartney is always working, and perhaps was doing so most particularly throughout the 70s, in the shadow of his 1960s. Wild Life did not, and could not, have had the impact Sergeant Fucking Pepper did, on any level, whatever it was.** But it was a hell of a lot more revolutionary than freakin' Two Virgins. Anyway, I have already admitted my opinions are unimportant, and I hold to that, but as I have so often said over the last 15 years, my blog my rules, and it makes me feel better to write these things. It's reasonably wholesome right.
* To continue being a cliche I have to add that I think Yoko Ono is far more talented than Lennon and at least as important a figure as McCartney, but it's hard to compare their respective impact because they work(ed) in such different worlds. But christ, I love Yoko getting Harrison, Starr etc to back her on for instance Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band doing things a hundred times more compelling than they really ever achieved again in their careers, just by accepting their place: we're session people, the Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke of our day.
** Of course Ram (and I suppose Band on the Run) was an attempt to return to the general richness of the late 60s Beatles epics, but people couldn't see them necessarily like that anymore. I am surprised that Band on the Run is so often cited as the best Wings album though, because it's actually a little subpar compared to, for instance, Back to the Egg or Speed of Sound, although I suppose it has a consistency of sound (and a wild back story) that those albums lack.
*** Update a year late: I'm such a fucking idiot, only today (30 May 2021) did I realise that this picture, from the inner sleeve of the album:was a joke on the idea of 'Wings are playing at a venue called the Speed of Sound... yeah... Wings at the Speed of Sound'. I wonder if this image was an original album cover proposal. It's pretty good except for the photo in the middle which is stupid and makes the whole thing look bad.
