Paul's "Memory Almost Full" Debuts at No. 3!

[JSngry]

And while I agree that the post-Beatles work of all four is of widely varying quality, I think there is a clustering of points at the "low" end of the scale, and really not too much at the high end.

Well, yeah, maybe, if you think albums, definitely. But 70s Top 40 radio was full of ex-Beatles hit singles, and not too many of them out and out sucked. Most of them were damn fine pop singles. It's just that, hey, "we" were expecting "more" from ex-Beatles, and that just wasn't gonna happen.

Really, what "we" were expecting was for The Beatles to happen without The Beatles. In retrospect, that was really stupid on our part, but oh well. Clueless idealism will pimp you out just as much as anything else will. And now we still look at it like is could have played out that way, should have played out that way. Well, no. It couldn't have, it shouldn't have, and that's why it didn't.

[J Larsen]

Well, yeah, maybe, if you think albums, definitely. But 70s Top 40 radio was full of ex-Beatles hit singles, and not too many of them out and out sucked. Most of them were damn fine pop singles.

Fair point - I was born in the 70s and don't really have that context. The albums are really frustrating.

[Johnny E]

I mean, anything more than a month or so after the fact, "How Do You Sleep" is...silly. Meow. meow meow, who gives a shit anyway?

I do. I love that song and I love the Imagine album.

They, all four of 'em, were better, much better, together than apart. And they, all four of 'em, did post-group solo work of widely varying quality.

I disagree. I think Plastic Ono Band, Imagine, All Things Must pass and Living in the Material World are all albums that stand side by side with the best Beatles albums. None of Paul's solo albums do.

[BruceH]

The thing that gets me about McCartney, as someone said before, is that when he's at his most catchy is when he's often also at his most annoying. That's certainly true solo and even occasionally during his Beatles days---"Hello Goodbye," "You're Mother Should Know," "Maxwell's Silver Hammer"...they're not just dismissable little ditties, but so pushily insistant that there's something almost, I don't know, hateful about them.

[.:.impossible]

Arrah Through Me

Pleasant tune, unfortunate hair.

Something about that tune just kills me. I know I didn't hear it as a kid because my mom held onto The Beatles and Paul's first few and stopped time there, but it brings me back to childhood in the back of my dad's Scout listening to AM radio on the way to Dew's Pond. The floor of the Scout was a frying pan by the time we got where we were going. We had a couple of john boats hidden under leaves out there. Dad had permission to fish out there.

Paul's got a way about him.

[JSngry]

70s Top 40 radio was full of ex-Beatles hit singles, and not too many of them out and out sucked. Most of them were damn fine pop singles.

And that, I think is where so may people went wrong in their expectations. The Beatles were always a pop band. And after the band broke up, the four members essentially remained pop artists, John's & George's forays into non-pop musics notwithstanding. When it came time to do something "for the public", hey, Plastic Ono Band, as raw as it is, at the end of the day, that's still a pop record. The focus is on the star, and the songs are all aimed at focusing the attention on the star. It's not "music for music's sake", it's "music for personality/attitude's sake". Which is beautiful, I mean hey, I love me some pop music, always have, always will. But to dis on the Beatles solo work for not being profound or anything is to perhaps operate from the assumption that the group's work was beyond or otherwise different from pop. It wasn't. It was just pop at an incredibly high level of inventiveness, and as afate would have it, it "spoke to the times" to a degree that pop seldom does. But it was still pop, and Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, & Starr were all pop musicians and songwriters. So it stands to reason that they would continue to be that after the band broke up, and they did. Lennon wrote pop songs about inner pain & political wrongs, McCartney wrote pop songs about domestic bliss and the joys of all things mundane, Harrison wrote pop songs about God and Life, and Ringo....Ringo made perhaps the best pop records of any of 'em.

But they were all pop, and as such, hey, it's only gonna be so much unless you're at a special place at a special time. If you never were, and you put out a good run of well-written, well-crafted singles plucked form a bunch of so-so albums like all four or 'em did, hey, you're gold. Singles are the lifeblood of pop, artists and audience alike. But if you were in a special place at a special time, and you go on to make the same records, somehow it's a "disappointment". Well maybe, just maybe, the disappointment is due to unrealistic expectations and not subpar perfomance. Pop will never change the world, nor will it save your soul. The best it can do is give you some good energy to get you going on your way to someplace. The rest is up to you. That's really true of any music, but especially of pop, whose Conveniently Utilitarian Jiffy-Lube-ness is to be neither over- nor under-rated when it comes to things in general.

[JSngry]

I think Plastic Ono Band, Imagine, All Things Must pass and Living in the Material World are all albums that stand side by side with the best Beatles albums.

Sorry, can't go there. Just can't. To me they're like parts of the best Beatles albums expanded into full albums.

[Johnny E]

I think Plastic Ono Band, Imagine, All Things Must pass and Living in the Material World are all albums that stand side by side with the best Beatles albums.

Sorry, can't go there. Just can't. To me they're like parts of the best Beatles albums expanded into full albums.

I see those albums more like Beatles records without Paul. John, George and Ringo are all over those records. No Paul though. He was to busy suing them at the time. All the songs on All Things Must Pass were written while the Beatles were still together. Some of them were even recorded by the Beatles. The final record is a masterpiece. Phil Specter did that shit up.

[zen archer]

Here is a quote from geoff Emericks book Here ,There and Everywhere......this should dispel the Mccartney is lightweight crap

"And then there was the bass player, he was also clearly the most interested in how the recording sounded.

Though he didnt raise his voice like the lead singer did, i had the distinct impression that he was the leader of the group.

When he spoke, the others listened intently and invariably nodded their heads in agreement, and before each take,he was the one

urging them on to give it their all.

Looking back on it now , it's funny how most people thought of John Lennon as the leader of the Beatles. It might have been his band in the beginning,

and he might have assumed the leadership role in their press conferences and public appearances.

But throughout all the years i would work with them it always seemed to me that Paul McCartney , the soft spoken bass player,

was the real leader of the group, and that nothing got done unless he approved it ."

[Teasing the Korean]

The Beatles were simultaneously an AM radio pop band AND an experimental pop band. We've heard these records to the point that they've lost their element of surprise. The White Album, for example, is a really WEIRD record. Even the happy ditties on that album come off sounding creepy.

Therefore, though Paul is certainly talented, I have every right to view his solo career as a colossal wasted opportunity from an artistic standpoint. His accountant would disagree, surely.

Edited June 19, 2007 by Teasing the Korean

[Chalupa]

That about sums it up right there. Don't get me wrong. I love the Beatles. I'm like one of these people that can't trust anyone who doesn't like the Beatles. But let's be frank, Paul is a lightweight. Without someone else to bounce ideas off of in order to give his tunes some edge (Lennon, Lane, Costello, etc.) he's no more than a Barry Manilow type. Great bass player, great voice, good song writer. But the minute he started believing that he was a genius and didn't need the Beatles anymore, that's when his music started to take a turn for the worst. And the way Paul sued everybody and left the Beatles was lame. Let us not forget, it wasn't Yoko that broke up the Beatles, it was Paul.

I don't think Barry Manilow ever wrote anything as heavy as "Helter Skelter".

If you wanted to campare Lennon and Macca's post Beatles careers I think you can find A LOT of crap that was put out by both. "Somewhere in NYC"?? Swill. "Double Fantasy"?? Bleech. I think Lennon comes off a little better not because he put out better stuff but because he had the good sense to take 5 years off when the well dried up.

You can't pin the blame for the Beatles break up on one person. I think the immense pressure of being a Beatle 24/7 took its toll on all of them. There's just no way they could have continued. They were young men who grew up under intense public scrutiny that grew tired of Beatlemania and wanted to move on. Look what that fame did to so many of their contemporaries. Brian Jones, Hendrix, Janis, Morrison... all dead before they turned 28. Can you blame them for wanting some semblance of a "normal" life?? Even Dylan had to take a sabbatical. It's amazing that they stayed together for as long as they did.

edit spelling.

Edited June 19, 2007 by J.H. Deeley

[Chuck Nessa]

Ah, the music of our youth revisited.

[JSngry]

Ah, the music of our youth revisited.

Guilty as charged.

Next up - Miles, Monk, Ellington, Archie Shepp, & Sonny Rollins.

[Chuck Nessa]

Ah, the music of our youth revisited.

Guilty as charged.

Next up - Miles, Monk, Ellington, Archie Shepp, & Sonny Rollins.

Yup.

[Guy Berger]

If you wanted to campare Lennon and Macca's post Beatles careers I think you can find A LOT of crap that was put out by both. "Somewhere in NYC"?? Swill. "Double Fantasy"?? Bleech. I think Lennon comes off a little better not because he put out better stuff but because he had the good sense to take 5 years off when the well dried up.

And the "good sense" to die young, before he managed to produce a large discography.

Guy

[ghost of miles]

Well, yeah, maybe, if you think albums, definitely. But 70s Top 40 radio was full of ex-Beatles hit singles, and not too many of them out and out sucked. Most of them were damn fine pop singles. It's just that, hey, "we" were expecting "more" from ex-Beatles, and that just wasn't gonna happen.

Really, what "we" were expecting was for The Beatles to happen without The Beatles.

Klaatu lives!!

I was a riproarin' Beatlemaniac as a kid...once made a little diorama of Candlestick Park so that I could reenact the final '66 concert. In pre-mix tape, pre-Lennon-death days, I used to fantasize about putting together an album of the best early 1970s post-Beatles cuts & singles, and pretend that it was a Beatles reunion album. (Actually, don't one or two of Ringo's recordings come close to the real thing?) Then I heard the Ramones, who were really loud, really catchy, and really NOW (at the time). That pretty much killed my Beatlemania, along with the Broadway show of the same name, which seemed dumb, dumb, dumb. (Kudos, though, to a movie called I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND, a charming comedy/period piece about some kids trying to get into Ed Sullivan's show to see the Fab Four's American debut... saw it on a double-bill with ROCK N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL.)

Very good piece by Lester Bangs in PSYCHOTIC REACTIONS that was written right after Lennon's death ("Thinking the Unthinkable About John Lennon"). I was going to type out a few passages, but looks like somebody posted it online a couple years back, so here's the whole piece (bold emphasis mine):

You always wonder how you will react to these things, but I can't say I was all that surprised when NBC broke into "The Tonight Show" to say that John Lennon was dead. I always thought that he would be the first of the Beatles to die, because he was always the one who lived the most on the existential edge, whether by diving knees-first into left-wing adventurism or by just shutting up for five years when he decided he really didn't have anything much to say; but I had always figured it would be by his own hand. That he was merely the latest celebrity to be gunned down by a probable psychotic only underscores the banality surrounding his death.

Look: I don't think I'm insensitive or a curmudgeon. In 1965 John Lennon was one of the most important people in the world. It's just that today I feel deeply alienated from rock 'n' roll and what it has meant or could mean, alienated from my fellow men and women and their dreams or aspirations.

I don't know what is more pathetic, the people of my generation who refuse to let their 1960s adolescence die a natural death, or the younger ones who will snatch and gobble any shred, any scrap of a dream that someone declared over ten years ago. Perhaps the younger ones are sadder, because at least my peers may have some nostalgic memory of the long-cold embers they're kneeling to blow upon, whereas the kids who have to make do with things like the Beatlemania show are being sold a bill of goods.

I can't mourn John Lennon. I didn't know the guy. But I do know that when all is said and done, that's all he was--a guy. The refusal of his fans to ever let him just be that was finally almost as lethal as his "assassin" (and please, let's have no more talk of this being a "political" killing, and don't call him a "rock 'n' roll martyr"). Did you watch the TV specials on Tuesday night? Did you see all those people standing in the street in front of the Dakota apartment where Lennon lived singing "Hey Jude"? What do you think the real--cynical, sneeringly sarcastic, witheringly witty and iconoclastic--John Lennon would have said about that?

John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you've made your mark on history those who can't will be so grateful they'll turn it into a cage for you. Those who choose to falsify their memories--to pine for a neverland 1960s that never really happened that way in the first place--insult the retroactive Eden they enshrine.

So in this time of gut-curdling sanctimonies about ultimate icons, I hope you will bear with my own pontifications long enough to let me say that the Beatles were certainly far more than a group of four talented musicians who might even have been the best of their generation. The Beatles were most of all a moment. But their generation was not the only generation in history, and to keep turning the gutten lantern of those dreams this way and that in hopes the flame will somehow flicker up again in the eighties is as futile a pursuit as trying to turn Lennon's lyrics into poetry. It is for that moment - not for John Lennon the man - that you are mourning, if you are mourning. Ultimately you are mourning for yourself.

Remember that other guy, the old friend of theirs, who once said, "Don't follow leaders"? Well, he was right. But the very people who took those words and made them into banners were violating the slogan they carried. And they're still doing it today. The Beatles did lead but they led with a wink. They may have been more popular than Jesus, but I don't think they wanted to be the world's religion. That would have cheapened and rendered tawdry what was special and wonderful about them. John Lennon didn't want that, or he wouldn't have retired for the last half of the seventies. What happened Monday night was only the most extreme extension of all the forces that led him to do so in the first place.

In some of this last interviews before he died, he said, "What I realized during the five years away was that when I said the dream is over, I had made the physical break from the Beatles, but mentally there is still this big thing on my back about what people expected of me." And: "We were the hip ones of the sixties. But the world is not like the sixties. The whole world has changed." And: "Produce your own dream. It's quite possible to do anything...the unknown is what it is. And to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions."

Good-bye, baby, and amen.

- Los Angeles Times, 11 December 1980

Edited June 19, 2007 by ghost of miles

[danasgoodstuff]

I think I miss Lester Bangs more than John Lennon...

[Eric]

I think I miss Lester Bangs more than John Lennon...

[bertrand]

So no one remembers that everything McCartney did after '68 sucks because it's not really the original McCartney, it's the guy who replaced him after the crash?

I always bought into that theory just because of the sudden drastic drop in his songwriting abilities before and after '68.

Bertrand.

[Teasing the Korean]

So no one remembers that everything McCartney did after '68 sucks because it's not really the original McCartney, it's the guy who replaced him after the crash?

I always bought into that theory just because of the sudden drastic drop in his songwriting abilities before and after '68.

Bertrand.

That's right, I forgot. Only I heard the double took his place in early '67...

Edited June 19, 2007 by Teasing the Korean

[J Larsen]

So the guy in '68 was hte double for the double?

[Guy Berger]

I think I miss Lester Bangs more than John Lennon...

Eh. Let's keep things in perspective. Bangs was just a writer.

Guy

Edited June 19, 2007 by Guy

[BruceH]

The Beatles were always a pop band.

No kidding.

[BruceH]

If you wanted to campare Lennon and Macca's post Beatles careers I think you can find A LOT of crap that was put out by both. "Somewhere in NYC"?? Swill. "Double Fantasy"?? Bleech. I think Lennon comes off a little better not because he put out better stuff but because he had the good sense to take 5 years off when the well dried up.

Very true.

[DMP]

Anyone ever heard his "classical" music?