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Paul McCartney
The McCartney Years
(Rhino)
#3 Boxed Set/Live Album/Music DVD for
2007
First Appeared in The Music Box, December 2007, Volume 14, #12
Written by Douglas Heselgrave
Fri, December 14, 2007, 07:15 AM CST
Everyone gives Paul McCartney such a hard time. On the one hand, it’s hard to
feel sorry for a knighted multi-billionaire who has co-written some of the most
enduring pop classics of all time and whose hardest work presently seems to be
choosing with which beautiful actress to become engaged in a secret liaison. On
the other hand, there has never been another artist of McCartney’s stature whose
work has been so consistently and maliciously maligned in the press. No matter
how thick one’s skin is, some of what has been written — regardless of how
justifiable the criticisms may have been — must have hurt.
Over the years, McCartney certainly hasn’t made it easy on himself either.
The public nature of his life has left everything that he ever has done open to
scrutiny. His desire to switch writing credits on some of The Beatles’ songs —
from the traditional Lennon-McCartney authorship to McCartney-Lennon — struck
many as egoistical and shallow. Furthermore, his embarrassing pleas in the press
to be loved and taken seriously as an artist have made many of his fans feel
uncomfortable. McCartney’s persona often rubs the wrong way, and the perception
of his art has suffered as a result.
The murder of John Lennon in 1980 didn’t help matters. In death, Lennon
immediately attained rock ’n‘ roll sainthood. His work and life have been
elevated to a mythical status, and in the process, both his diffidence and his
hesitancy suddenly were repainted as indications of a higher calling. Rock ’n‘
roll loves a rebel, though — especially a dead one — and from the moment of
Lennon’s untimely demise, McCartney has been doomed to play the role of second
fiddle. Forget his solo work and his noble efforts to create something new with
Wings. As tragic as it was, by dying young, Lennon was delivered from the
pressures of aging. Consequently, his legacy endures, and his iconic image has
been left safely intact. He became rock’s Che Guevera while McCartney became its
Gilbert and Sullivan, and Sir Paul has struggled under this designation ever
since. In many ways, this has been unfair. As the years have passed, Lennon’s
insurgent stance has calcified into a corporate brand while McCartney has
continued toiling away at his craft in the increasingly long shadow of his
former partner’s recalibrated image. All of this has made an honest assessment
of McCartney’s work very difficult, at least until now.
The new, three-DVD boxed set, The McCartney Years goes a long way
toward making a reevaluation of his career possible. When looking over the
contents of the collection, the first thing that impresses is the sheer volume
of his work. Clocking in with more than 400 minutes of music, The McCartney
Years is certainly a good value for the money, and it is the anthology for
which his fans have been waiting. Moving from the 1970s to present day, the
first two discs are essentially videos of many of McCartney’s solo songs as well
as material from his days fronting Wings. The final — and the most interesting —
disc in the collection compiles of an abundance of concert recordings that begin
with the Wings Over America tour and end with his wonderful Glastonbury
appearance in 2004.
Growing up as a teenager in the 1970s, it was impossible to avoid the songs
of Paul McCartney and Wings. The group was ever present on the radio, but as the
decade wore on, so many more interesting things started happening in music that
Wings disappeared off my radar. With the emergence of punk, new wave, and
reggae, it was really hard to care or, for that matter, to "listen to what the
man says." There has been so much cultural revisionism in the intervening years
that it is important to note that by the late 1970s, the work of Lennon and the
other surviving Beatles was considered as irrelevant as McCartney’s
radio-friendly ditties are today. Prior to the death of Lennon, interest in
their collective outputs was at an all-time low.
Taking this into account, I have to admit that I approached The McCartney
Years with an extreme bias. After not hearing many of these songs for quite
some time, I was prepared to hate everything about the set, and I already had
composed a disparaging review in my head before I even put the first disc into
my DVD player. Over the course of watching these videos, however, something
happened. There’s certainly a lot of second-rate pap in the collection — for
every Maybe I’m Amazed or live Beatles cut, there’s a Say, Say, Say
or Coming Up to bring the proceedings down a notch. Yet, the overall
impression of McCartney that emerges is different from the one I’d expected.
Behind the baby-faced earnestness of his singing and his palpable desire to
be adored, there resides a musical genius. Has there ever been an artist with
such an innate and seemingly effortless sense of melody? On song after song, the
tunes are maddeningly perfect and without parallel. The arrangements also are
soaring and bold, and an exquisite sense of rhythm and counterpoint is at the
service of the divine melodies that McCartney seems to have plucked from thin
air. Certainly an angel must have been whispering to him. How many artists would
give their lives to create material such as this? No human, this side of Mozart,
has ever been blessed with an ear that could give form and substance to these
seraphic sounds taken from the ether. McCartney and Mozart in the same sentence!
My brain must be going soft.
The further I got into The McCartney Years, the more my preconceptions
about McCartney’s work were upset. There was something about the appeal of this
strange cherub’s work that previously had remained elusive, but now had begun to
impress itself upon me. Over the decades, McCartney quietly has endured, and he
has kept working at his craft regardless of prevailing fashion. He has made
concessions and worked with other artists, perhaps hoping to rekindle some of
the chemistry he enjoyed with Lennon during The Beatles’ heyday. Though Michael
Jackson and Elvis Costello are both artists of great stature — regardless of
what one might think of their efforts — neither of them added much to
McCartney’s oeuvre when they made music together. McCartney’s resolute
stubbornness and his adherence to his muse serve as proof of a vision that he
has no choice but to follow.
This portrait of Paul as consummate artist gelled for me as I watched the
live material featured on The McCartney Years. Whether he’s performing
with Wings, at Live Aid, on MTV’s Unplugged, or with his own band at
Glastonbury in 2004, it is impossible not to marvel at the former Beatle’s focus
and commitment. Even though most of his albums are at least half-full of
inferior material, McCartney still has penned so many classic songs that he has
no trouble putting together a killer concert set. Indeed, when watching him in
action, there is no doubt about what he was placed on Earth to do. From rocking
out with Wings while standing a platform that is obscured by dry ice and lasers
to delivering a career-spanning and truly revelatory show in Glastonbury,
McCartney is a man who is transformed once he hits the stage. He can’t help that
goofy grin. He’s in a transcendent state that lets everyone know that there
isn’t a soul anywhere in the universe who, at that moment, is having more fun
than he. When he tells people, before launching into Hey Jude, that they
may know the words and want to sing along, it initially seems pretentious, but
then one has to admit that everyone does know the words, and it would be false
modesty to claim otherwise. After all, McCartney was a Beatle, and the songs are
ubiquitous. At times, it must be a hell of a burden to carry, yet when he is on
stage, he rises to the occasion by singing, playing, and performing like a man
on fire. The way in which he manages to make Yesterday sound — well, like
it was written yesterday — is an amazing testament to his showmanship. To hear
him engage in some truly wicked grungy guitar dueling with his band mates on
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is enough to bring a smile to the
face of the most jaded music critic.
The McCartney Years is an astonishing document. Far from being dull or
calculated, this collection has the effect of bringing a fresh perspective to a
body of work that admittedly is overexposed and underappreciated. Many of life’s
formative experiences take only a brief amount of time to unfold, but their
impact sometimes can send ripples across time. The Beatles’ music was the work
of four very young men, but it left this sort of enormous impression. Although
they were together for little more than a decade, the group’s members ever since
have existed in the shadow of their former glory, and — in one way or another —
they have spent the intervening years recovering from the experience. McCartney,
in this sense, has been trapped in a Catch-22. The music of The Beatles is so
deeply embedded in our culture’s consciousness that it has been all but
impossible to hear the band’s music and the subsequent solo work of John, Paul,
George, and Ringo clearly. Hopefully, The McCartney Years will help to
establish some clarity. If one can approach the music contained on these three
discs and hear these songs anew, by forgetting for a minute from where McCartney
emerged — if such a thing is even possible — perhaps Sir Paul will finally get
the recognition he has been after. 
The McCartney Years is available from Amazon.com.
To order, Click Here!
For Canadian orders, please
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For UK orders, please
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Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2007 The Music Box
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