The Cute Beatle

So, anybody out there a Beatle fan? Whether you like the Beatles or not, no matter what your age or musical tastes are, there's an excellent chance that they've had a significant effect on the music you like.

Lately, I've been on a Paul McCartney binge. I have times like that, when I go on musical binges, listening to one artist almost exclusively for a couple months at a time. It had been a while since I'd had a good Beatles binge, and this time it settled on Paul. The Cute Beatle.

I've been concentrating on his solo work, although I've been digging around his old band's stuff as well. I keep coming back to the Ram album. It's an interesting piece of work. I've been looking at some of the reviews that have been done in recent years, on AMG, Rolling Stone, etc. A lot of people take exception with the fact that most of the tunes are all-but-meaningless throwaways. The thing with McCartney is that, even these get the full treatment. Just take a listen to the song "Ram On." One little verse, and the whole thing hangs on a little mandolin riff. But then you add the hand claps, the background vocals, the fills, and it becomes something more. Give your heart to somebody, so-o-o-on, right away . . .

The whole album is like that. What I find most striking about it is how everything sounds. Every now and then you hear a recording that makes you notice how good, or bad, your speakers are. Paul McCartney's Ram ranks right up there with Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark, and Miles Davis' Kind of Blue in that respect. Especially the tone he gets out of the electric guitar. Listen to the chords in Uncle Albert. I would love to know how they got that tone. Clean, without being sterile. Full, without being loud. I love the way that album was produced. It's deep, without being thick. There's layer upon layer, but each one gossamer-thin.

It is really a high point in his career, although he's got a lot of great albums. Band On The Run always gets held up as his crowning achievement, and I do like it, but the ones that bookend it were equals in many ways. Red Rose Speedway and Venus And Mars may each have more flaws, but the highs seems to reach a little higher as well. I always liked his first solo album, McCartney. Off The Ground is terribly underrated. If you like Paul and have never heard it, you've really missed something. There's some great stuff on there, and the band is so much better than Wings it's almost painful. The new album, Chaos And Creation, is also quite good. I didn't know quite what to think of it at first, but it grows on you. Jenny Wren, Fine Line, and How Kind Of You come to mind as stand-out tunes, but the whole album's very good.

Listening to his music also makes me think about Linda McCartney, who was a centerpiece in his life in so many ways. I have come to believe that many people are jealous of their relationship. I have to confess that I probably fall into that catagory. Really, how could you not be? She was talented, beautiful, intelligent, and their partnership was a 24/7 kind of thing. Don't get me wrong; I love my wife, Lynn, dearly. There is, nor can there ever be, anybody else for me. Still, it's a musician's fantasy to have someone that can be that involved in the thing that defines your life as Linda McCartney was with Paul and his music.

She took her share of heat over the years, too. Supposedly, there's a bootleg tape that's been making the rounds for years. It's from a board tape of one of their concerts, with everything mixed way down except her off-key backing vocals. Funny, I suppose, but still mean. She was truly the Anti-Yoko. I personally believe that Yoko Ono ruined John Lennon. She fed on his weaknesses and built a fence around him. The poor bastard never stood a chance. Linda, on the other hand, supported and inspired Paul.

It would be easy to be skeptical of their relationship. It was too good to be true. Weren't they both sleeping around? Weren't they both junkies? This whole happy-couple thing must be a put on. In the end, however, I think the best clues to the truth can be found in the music that Paul wrote. The man who wrote My Love in 1973 was the same man who wrote Winedark Open Sea in 1993. He loved her, deeply.

That's why we all hurt for him when she died. We knew who those songs were for, and we knew he meant every word. I couldn't listen to Run Devil Run, the next album he did after her passing. Too much pain. To his credit, his creativity has kept him going, and I think Linda would approve of the way he's dealt with the loss. He's remarried, and instead of trying to recreate Linda and their relationship, he hooked up with a strong, independent woman for whom he feels genuine affection. But he hasn't taught her to play keyboards, and he doesn't drag her on stage with him. The new band is a boy's club, and they go up and rock the house. Paul is, for the first time in his life, a solo act.

The new album seems to be the most focused work he's done since Off The Ground. I especially enjoy it, because I've recently turned 50, and it's good to know that you don't have to be an oldies act once you turn 35. Keep rockin', Paul, and ram on.