I'd say it was probably INTENTIONAL. Paul is too good to not know what he (himself) is doing. So if Paul was doing any (subtle) impression of Costello, I'd say he did it on purpose.
Yeah I remember thinking that even at the time. Shame Macca held back so much from this set. The material I've heard is stellar and even half of it would have been a huge improvement over what we wound up getting
For me, it's not Lynne but Clapton. Whenever Clapton was there to push George, he was a stronger writer. He relied on Eric for All Things Must Pass and Cloud Nine, two of his biggest albums. But, yes, I agree that George seemed lost for a good chunk of his solo career. Two key points you are missing about the lyrics: first, when the album was released, someone asked him about the lyric "Oklahoma was never like this" in "Press" and Paul sheepishly admitted that it was a placeholder he never got around to fixing. That brought huge ridicule, and the critics piled it on with comparisons to the poor lyrics of Wings, better Beatles lyrics by Paul, and – of course – the higher-praised John Lennon. I remember "Mary Had A Little Lamb" being particularly pointed to as an example of a musician who was never really serious, unlike John, and therefore was no longer living up to the standard he set for himself years before. (He wasn't alone: the period was dire for other musicians like Clapton [Behind The Sun] or David Bowie [Tonight].) Second: Put It There was Paul saying you don't want to be stuck in the middle of America somewhere, plugging an album you don't really like. What he's referencing is the video shoot for "Stranglehold," done in Arizona. Poor reception over the album, the lead single, and the second single in the UK was bringing him down and it was likely that people were calling for him to play something other than this new track. So he takes the time to do it right. He puts together an album that is supposed to be critic-proof. Bad lyrics? He had a beloved songwriter co-penning them. Poor production? It's by some of the top in the biz. And that also meant lyrics. He would end up more focused on lyrics in the next album lead-up, though, as he got a poet to overlook his lyrics and make suggestions like keeping those bad works like "bastard" on the LP and "****ing" on the single.
Loving that version of tommys coming home on disc 3. Would have liked to see tommys coming home make the album.
I agree! I downloaded on my MacBook to put into iTunes and although it was not difficult or time consuming, there were a lot of steps for each track. I almost made a mini "to do" list.
What are the cassette demos like , are they worth downloading ? Might just do it anyway to have a listen.
I've been listening to this set quite a bit, it really is amazing how there basically two separate albums in the set, Flowers and the Macca/Elvis demos. I hadn't listened to FITD for about half a year, wanted to go in "fresh", I can't get over how strong the album now seems to me. Maybe this box is making me see the album through rose colored glasses, but the first ten tracks are all fantastic IMO, and "Motor Of Love", "How Many People" and "Ou Est Le Soieil" are decent filler. And the demos! Why he left "So Like Candy" or "Tommy's Coming Home" on the self I'll never know. Plug those songs in for the last three on the album and FITD would really be something... This wasn't the box set I wanted, I wanted either Red Rose or London Town, but I'm happy we got it, it is making me revisit and feel like Flowers is a "new" album from Macca, and that is the highest praise I can give the set.
You can only download them if you purchase the Super Deluxe box set. Otherwise, those cassette demos are not available. They are being held hostage. Set them free! Set them free...
I’ve been processing all the discussions here along with the information in the box set book (which IMO is excellent), the superdeluxeedition (SDE) interview, and some interviews from the time, and a picture is forming in my mind of issues at the time that likely contributed to many of the points we’ve been discussing here about retrospectively questionable decisions pertaining to both the McCartney-Costello collaboration and FITD in general. I think the key character in this whole thing is Paul’s manager at the time, Richard Ogden. Ogden was a former record executive brought in by the Eastmans in the wake of the Broad Street (film) and Press to Play flops to overhaul Paul’s career. He was responsible for scrapping the Phil Ramone Return to Pepperland sessions in favor of putting out All the Best. All the recent and contemporary articles and interviews indicate that the ensuing period of Paul’s career was part of a master plan of Ogden’s: get Paul teamed up with the hip, edgy, Lennon-like Elvis, have them write a bunch of great songs, get a strong, relatively young band together to play the songs on a Paul album with Elvis having a production role, and go out on a big “comeback” tour with the band. Chris Whitten in the deluxe edition book says Ogden’s “grand plan was to try and get Paul to think about having a real band again,” a “strategy… to try and encourage Paul to move in… maybe more of a Beatles way.” In an interview with Whitten that @Claudio Dirani posted on here last fall, he also says Ogden “sort of planned the whole thing in his mind, how it was all going to go.” The presence of such a plan is backed up by Elvis in the booklet when he says “the idea was to write songs for Paul’s record” and, while he felt the demos were good enough for release as is, “I knew they needed to be band songs.” All the contemporary articles (probably arranged by Ogden) and recollections from contributors here indicate the idea was that Elvis would be brought in to help create new material for Paul. And this wasn’t a surprising objective -- most of Paul’s other 80s collaborations took the form of knocking out a couple of songs mainly to stick on Paul’s records. That the entire endeavor was part of a clear “master plan” Ogden had designed is crucial to understanding some seemingly strange decisions. It seems most of us agree in hindsight that the Paul-Elvis material could have best been served as a separate joint project, while leaving the other wealth of material Paul had at the time (including the frustratingly productive scrapped Ramone sessions) to go on a new solo record. Paul seems to recognize that now because he addresses it in the booklet: “The demos were great but we couldn’t release them as I had a band…” At first, reading that, I thought it sounded bizarre. He sounded like he was talking about going off and doing a side project while in a certain former band of his, where indeed that might have rubbed people the wrong way, but this was a band that had only just been put together. Why would they care if Paul worked on a side project? They were mostly just happy to be there! However, what Paul says next is the real issue: “so that didn’t occur to me… that’s just the way we were going, we’d booked the studios, that’s what we were going to do, so it would have been a bit radical to just say, ‘Hey, sorry guys cancel that idea.’” In other words, the idea of a separate joint project just wasn’t part of the “master plan” that was already set in motion. The group had been brought together with the express purpose of performing the Paul-Elvis songs for Paul’s record and tour. Every entrepreneur knows that plans can be both good and bad. Having a plan helps you define objectives, prioritize, and make decisions, but if your plan is too rigid you can miss out on unforeseen opportunities, and I think that’s what happened here. I think two unexpected aspects of the Paul-Elvis collaboration came up: their songwriting and performing partnership, and friendship, wound up being much stronger than anticipated, but their different visions for final production, at that time, were an unanticipated obstacle. I think the fruitfulness of their songwriting partnership surprised everyone a bit, including them, and is the reason it’s been so popular with the fans. In hindsight, it would have been tremendous if they could have nurtured and exploited that relationship even further. However, one benefit of how things did turn out is that they wound up releasing most of the tracks according to their own idiosyncratic visions, so the discrepancies in final production goals are readily apparent. Listen to, e.g., Elvis’ Playboy to a Man and Shallow Grave. These are darker, more dissonant, and more “out there” than the ‘88 version and ‘87 demo respectively, and certainly different than anything Paul released around those times. Meanwhile, Paul added some experimental production techniques to some of his versions, and even appears to have altered the lyrics to one song (Mistress and Maid) to give it a less “dark” feel. It’s easy to see how the initial sessions, with Elvis co-producing, might have broken down due to creative differences. I was pleasantly surprised to see Paul directly address the question of why they never revived their collaboration in the booklet, but his answer is a bit dissatisfying. He notes that “I tend to want to work with someone, and when it’s done, I tend to want to move on… been there, done that.” It is indeed clear in Paul’s career that he prefers to move forward rather than look back, and most of his collaborations have been isolated to a single point in time; however, he has returned to certain artistic collaborators again and again if he likes the way it turned out (Youth, George Martin, David Gilmour). The fact that since that time Paul and Elvis have clearly remained good friends, and collaborative performers at times, makes Paul’s “out of sight, out of mind” tendency a somewhat strange excuse in this case. But I think that points even more strongly to them perhaps not wanting to revisit whatever creative differences they faced the first time around, for fear of it damaging their personal relationship. I think if these two had hooked up in the 90s instead, after the whole Ogden plan, it might have worked better. I think Off the Ground shows a Paul who was more relaxed about doing what came naturally to him, so the relationship could have proceeded more organically. In fact, the timing overall may just have been bad, as I think the production styles Elvis envisioned may have been better suited to a later time. In fact, to me, both the released My Brave Face and the ‘88 Playboy to a Man sound like a lot of mid-90s rock. Maybe they wouldn’t have wound up butting heads over production issues and could have continued their songwriting partnership less encumbered. Likewise, in the 90s, any potential concerns about comparisons to what George Harrison was doing would have lessened, as George had pulled back from the charts and he and Paul were getting along better. However, while I think it’s easy for us to look back and speculate about how a joint project between Paul and Elvis might have been viewed, positively or negatively, in light of the Wilburys, as well as George’s surprise Cloud Nine success, I actually think that what George was doing had little to do with the decisions that were made at that time. The Ogden plan got underway as soon as he joined in early ‘87, before the Cloud Nine success and before the Wilburys even existed. The desire to re-establish Paul as a competitive artist was a top priority of Paul and his management in the wake of what they perceived as embarrassing failures. I’m sure George’s sudden success didn’t help the situation, especially when Paul was constantly asked about it in interviews and the two of them had reignited their legal feud, but I think the plan was already developed and being executed independently of all that. However, I think the Wilburys provide an excellent contrast to the whole Paul situation at the time, because that project came about in the exact opposite manner -- completely organically. No one set out to bring a bunch of superstars (faded or not) together to form a “supergroup.” They came about almost absurdly randomly, through a chance set of events including George winding up at dinner with Jeff and Roy, picking up a guitar (and Petty) at Petty’s house, and ending up in Bob’s studio to cut a track for himself. Even then there was no plan to work on an album together. Once they were all in the same room, they all wound up playing on the track, and had so much fun that they decided to do 9 more. That spontaneity and natural collaboration shines through on the record and in the videos, where it’s clear that these are a bunch of friends just having fun with no grand purpose. The Paul-Elvis collaboration might not have had quite that spontaneous feel, since it started more like a blind date, but the demos convey that once together they had that same sense of natural fun and chemistry. It’s the master “design” that seems to have nipped that spirit in the bud somewhat. This is where I think the regrets about that time period stem from. Ogden was in effect designing the entire period, leaving little room for organic development and tangents. Now, looking back, some of his plan seems to have panned out well in terms of commercial success. All the Best was a successful release, and the ‘89-’90 tour was a big success that did bring some renewed interest and favorable press to Paul. However, this success was not quite enough to make Paul truly hip and “relevant” again, and also seems like it may have had some suboptimal artistic ramifications for both FITD and the Paul-Elvis collaboration. There were no catastrophic decisions, but rather alternate scenarios that in hindsight seem like they would have been superior creative choices. These regrets underscore the value of a manager who can strike the right balance between offering guidance and assistance, while letting an artist, especially a highly creative one like Paul, retain primary control of their artistic path. I think Brian Epstein struck such a balance, as did George Martin as a producer. Interestingly, it appears that Ogden’s management style was causing friction even at the time. In the SDE interview, Chris Hughes says, “I remember a conversation with his manager, and he’d gotten to a point where his influence, it was getting tricky, and I think Paul was having some trouble with him.” Ogden was eventually fired when the New World Tour in ‘93 lost money, but I don’t think he should get the full “blame,” if there is any, for aspects of his style that might have led to difficulties. I think Paul and John Eastman both wanted Paul to be “successful” again, Ogden was brought in specifically to make it happen, and his efforts turned out to be moderately productive, though overall it seems like his tenure was a mixed bag. Ultimately, we know Paul is his best when he’s being “himself,” and does best when he has people around who can offer candid guidance and support while letting him do what comes naturally. Hopefully he learned from that whole experience. Either way, at least we finally have something closer to “what could have been” to enjoy.
Wow! What a comment; thank you so much for taking the time to post this very well researched and eloquent post. I certainly feel that I now have a much greater understanding of both Ogden's role as Paul's manager (and the pros and cons of his ideas), and also the reasons why the demos didn't develop into a joint McCartney/Costello album. In the past, I have said that 'PTP' sounds like the last time Paul aimed for something truly contemporary with one of his studio albums (at least until parts of 'New'), and it seems like Ogden was the reason for that. I understand why he had Paul scrap the 'Pepperland' sessions, and it was a masterstroke to suggest that he work with Costello, but after the results were so fantastic, I wonder why he seemingly didn't suggest to Paul that they release an album together? Anyway, thanks for making so much sense of that time period and for explaining why things did work out like they did. Decisions that didn't make sense now do seem more understandable.
I grew up playing video games like that as well. It just looks so cheesy. It's the singing heads that get me. And then the band members having what looks like seizures. And then the sombrero. My God, the sombrero.
An interesting thing. I noticed the same thing that the remaster really sounds much improved. And it seems like many are saying the same thing. But if I remember correctly, many of us (myself included) wondered before if a remaster would help in any way as the album already sounded good.
I tend to agree 100% on your review - which happens not to be a simple review, but it's delving into the album making of. 1) This box set is 90% about Paul and Elvis. The LP itself ranks second place 2) Dylan Jones essay is erratic when it says that the album was a 80's landmark. It was certainly praised as a good comeback, but not like George's Cloud 9. 3) It really is irritating whenever Paul leans on his insecure side, assuming he thought at first there were no good songs on the album,. Well, really? So why did he decide to get back touring after 10 years, as it was exactly the premise. 4) The errors regarding the whole marketing are also sort of buggers. 4 discs when it could be really 4 discs including the digital-only content. We have no idea why they chose links instead of real discs, since its price is really above avarage to say at least. Disc 3 coulbe on disc 2, so we'd have a real audio disc #3 with its digital content in instead.
This is where Paul's reluctance to look back can becoming annoying to fans. If he pulled out the records occasionally, he'd realize there's good stuff on everything. In this case he even watched all these videos for the McCartney Years! It must not have even registered with him what album those were from. It would be less bothersome if he was constantly busy putting out new material -- I would say, yes, please just focus on what you're doing and make great stuff. But, well, he spends most of his time touring, and you could argue that's even more reason he should be devoting time to examining his back catalogue to find material to enhance his setlists (I know, let's not open that can of worms). Anyway, that bothered me too, and this is my slap on Paul's wrist.
Nailed, basically. You know, he plays a mediocre song such All Together Now because he knows critics won't bother touching on something done by the error-proof Fabs. However, he pretends he never went out on tour playing 6 songs from FITD and another six from Off The Ground (if you count Get Out Of My Way, it makes 7).
Hmm...who knows. I like to think that's part of what makes this collaboration so good...they were probably just caught up in the fun and joy of it. Like John and Paul often were, obviously.
While the idea of new album/new tour may have been the premise, that wasn't how the press saw it: the headlines were that Paul McCartney was going on tour with Beatles songs that had never been done live before — and it didn't help that the set list leaned heavily that way in response to the demand that would create. The tour began with just two representations of 1974-1986; by the end of it, the number had doubled, but one was a rarity ("Mull Of Kintyre") and one was a replacement for an earlier track that represented much of the pre-"Live And Let Die" years. As a result, when it comes to the next tour, Paul sees no reason to keep the songs going when he can just as easily but in the new ones in hopes of them sticking instead. his Unplugged mini-set within that tour concentrated on songs that got the biggest applause at that show. He somehow gets it in his mind that what succeeded was not all songs but rather The Beatles and a handful of older pieces. And with Wingspan happening right before the hiring of the new band, we end up with a McCartney stage show that shifts some of the Beatles spotlight to early, rocking Wings hits that Paul thinks might have a chance — though even then, he replaces the poorer-performing 2 new ones and 1 Beatles with the reverse in 2003 (2 Beatles, 1 Wings). Factor in the newer material that keeps coming and you've got no reason for Paul McCartney to go back and listen to the albums as a whole to think about what is good and what can be played effectively. Heck, Venus And Mars and Speed Of Sound's interviews with him really underline that he is proud of the songs, even if he's forgotten about them in terms of his overall catalogue. It's a large catalogue that's difficult to handle, and it really doesn't help that he's resistant to the push for retrospectives as an artist: A Collection Of Oldies and 1962-1966/1967-1970 were to fill contract obligations, as was Wings' Greatest, while All The Best! was more a marketing gimmick to announce the release of his material on CDs. Even his management today has that issue; when I look at Paul's set lists now, we're hitting the 15th anniversary of Driving Rain and there appears to be no interest in reviving "Lonely Road" or "Your Loving Flame," both of which have not been heard for over a decade. Instead, we see the resurrection of Beatles songs skipped one tour for another. Though, that said, no matter how much we may complain, we should be happy he's still making new music and going on the road — not many of his generation are still doing it and loving it.
Wow the George Harrison turnable. That's so cool! I thought I had a Beatles collection issue, I only named my dog Ringo. You may need to see Dr Robert.
I always loved the cover art on this album, especially how you can see Paul's face hidden in the flowers. Pretty cool.
