Paul McCartney Archive Collection - Tug Of War & Pipes Of Peace coming! (Part Two)

We all stand toogether is a very good piece of music- perhaps even great. The thing is that it s made with childrenbin mind- somethingvmany seems to forget.
Personally I d take that single song before the whole legacy of/for instance- Kiss. But thats me

 

To me this underscores just how impactful John Lennon's death was, in ways that often are not stated or acknowledged. Had Lennon lived, continued recording, and taken up touring (e.g. the supposedly planned John Lennon 1981 World Tour), quite possibly the peer pressure would have spurred Paul on to a higher level of achievement himself -- better recordings, more live shows and/or tours before 1989, and more experimentation. It seemed to take until almost the end of the decade for McCartney not only to shake off the Lennon assassination hangover and move forward more decisively in his absence, but also to begin making music (and doing live shows) that critics and the public generally thought were up to his potential. Coincidence? I don't think so.

 

I remember thinking in the very early 80's that the whole New Wave scene might see Paul going for a stripped down melodic sound.
I was very much looking forward to it.
Instead, he went in the complete opposite direction, scoring major hits , but losing his way.
It wasn't until he teamed up w/ New Waver Elvis Costello at the end of the decade that Paul began righting the ship.
Thank God he ditched that Ramone album and started over.

 

I think most people here seems to miss the obvious. The eighties were hard for many older acts not only Macca. The orinal fanbase grew older and had other things on their minds than music. The hit-parade has always been a young peoples game. That s-imo-all there is to it.

 

Compared to someone like Bowie, Macca knocked it out of the park in the 80s.

Tug of War - faultless classic
Pipes of Peace - patchy, still decent. lots of good outakes
Broad Street - ok, pretty poor
Press to Play - much maligned, bursting with melody
Flowers in the Dirt - strong album

Looking forward to these reissues.

 

However hilarious those pictures are I am not sure they are much worse than many others woth other artitsts from the same era.Good taste and the eighties are two things that doesn t mix very well.

 

That is a very good point. I think that Paul had a better 80's than most of his 60's and 70's contemporaries.

He did develop a sappy reputation, but that does ignore the experimental work that he did on McCartney 2 and PTP, and the great work that he did on Tug Of War and FITD.

 

I personally enjoy most of PTP, but I also feel that Paul 'overcooked' it and spent too long working on it. He also made a few poor choices when it came to decide what versions and mixes of the songs should be included. For instance, the single version of Pretty Little Head is fantastic and superior to the album version, the B-Side version of It's Not True is much better than the album version IMO, Tough On A Tightrope should have made the album, and the earlier mix of However Absurd is far better than the version that made the album.

I also don't understand why Yvonne's The One didn't make the album, and I also feel that Hanglide is fantastic and deserved to be on the album (I agree with the opinion of another Forum member who said that it points ahead to his Fireman work).

In case you are interested, here is my playlist version of the album:

Stranglehold
Good Times Coming/Feel The Sun
Yvonne's The One
Footprints
Tough On A Tightrope
Only Love Remains
Press
Pretty Little Head (Single Version)
It's Not True (B-Side Version)
However Absurd (Early Mix)

 

I could not agree more; it is telling that the last album that Paul released before John's death was the experimental McCartney 2, and that the first album that he released after John's death was the George Martin produced 'Beatlesque' Tug Of War. I think that Paul felt that his first work after John's death had to be Beatlesque, consistent, and something that would please Beatles fans, and that must be why Paul spent so long working on it.

Had John lived, I imagine that Paul would have finished the album that he was already working on with George Martin in 1981, a year earlier than in reality, and who knows what he would have done after that? It would not be surprising at all if he had continued down the line of McCartney 2.

John was showing a New Wave influence on some of the Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey material, and I imagine that their friendly but competitive rivalry would have pushed Paul into releasing more experimental work.

It is such a shame that a mixture of John's death and the poor critical reviews that McCartney 2 got swayed Paul from releasing more music along those lines.
Had the album been met with a positive reaction from the music press, I imagine that he would have tried to release a follow up. In that alternative reality, who knows when Paul would release the Fireman albums? Maybe he would have made 80's equivalents to the Fireman albums?

 

Personally I (almost) never dwell in contrafactual speculations what would have been if not......
Truth is- noone knows what would have been if-for instance-Lennon had not been killed.
What has been has been nothing can t be done about that. Seen as a whole I would say Pauls carreer is-artistically impressive . The low point are-imo -relatively few and he i still delivering close to 73 years old.
Nothing much I would have liked different actually. There must be failures to -in anyones carreer .

 

Thanks for posting this. It's a really terrific cover even in its informality. Sexsmith's voice captures a brokenness inherent in the song's lyrics that I hadn't noticed before.

 

Count me as another who would love to read this thesis!

 

I wholeheartedly agree with the omission of 'Angry'. I cannot begin to tell you how much I dislike that song, the arrangement and performance of which totally belie its subject matter. "Shouting down again mahama" when I'm angry? I don't think so. At least the single version had some bite to it with the added brass, but the album version is just laughably bad.

 

I have always loved this song, and I am very pleased that all of a sudden we now have covers of it from artists as amazing as Ron Sexsmith and Smokey Robinson.

 

It's funny I've been singing it around my kids and, given McCartney's comments on writing the song in an interview, I think I understand the song a lot better when I think about Paul writing from a father's perspective.

Interview: Whom can you use today as sounding boards?

PAUL: My kids. I'll play some new tune on the piano. If it's real good,
"I'll notice the kids will pick up on it and start humming it. I
remember, when I wrote So Bad, the lyric was "Girl, I love you / Girl, I
love you," which I sang for my little girls--and they sang it back. Then
my little boy, James, who is six, looked at us doing this, and I began
singing the lyric as "Boy, I love you / Boy, I love you"--I didn't want
to leave my boy out of a love song!

 

The film flopped. It grossed something like $1.4 million domestically, according to Box Office Mojo. Even by 1984 standards, that's a major disaster.

 

Agree with others here- I always thought So bad is a brilliant pop-song . Great to hear I was not alone.

 

Well, maybe. Or to a degree (and, yes, Spies Like Us was a moment of disgust for me personally). But there is an alternate or additional explanation: A large percentage of Paul's existing fan base grew out of the habit (fell from the virtue?) of buying new music, or bought it only more selectively and rarely. Whereupon Paul was faced with the task of winning over a new fan base, something which in aging Paulie's end of pop doesn't really happen.

I know I shouldn't use my own experience as the measure of all things, of course, but after that same Spies Like Us/Press to Play era (1987 or thereabouts), music was changing and I myself disengaged from contemporary music and didn't re-engage for another 10 years or so. It happens: I no longer had the high school leisure and spending money for music, important musical trends seemed "weird" to me and I mostly got into music with a retro vibe (Flowers in the Dirt!).

 

Yeah man, I guess it can be explained that he was going for a different sound that but song has that natural McCartney sense of melody & style.

I like Press To Play, I bought it on cassette in the early 90s when its reputation as far as I knew was very low. I really liked it and I think it rises above the criticisms of its 80s pop sound, it's a creative but just not wholly successful record. But now when I want to hear that material I usually play the demo versions with "Yvonne" in there.

 

I love that song. I love that quote. All of this criticism of Paul singing with frogs etc. needs to be put in the context of a father of 4 children making choices for more reasons than "being hip".

 

I fully agree; I think that one of Paul greatest strengths is that he doesn't care whether he is 'being hip' or not.

Any criticism of him for releasing a children's song is pathetic IMO, and the critics of the song completely ignored the fact that it was only one song, released in between serious albums like Tug Of War and experimental albums like McCartney 2 and PTP.

Paul wasn't parodied and insulted for years after writing Yellow Submarine, so why should he be insulted for writing We All Stand Together?

 

Thanks for looking that up. I tried yesterday, but I was entering "Broad Street" instead of "Broad St" on boxofficemojo and getting no hits at all...

Interesting to see that of 168 movies released that year, it ranked #150 in box office revenue:
http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?page=2&view=releasedate&view2=domestic&yr=1984&p=.htm

 

And it's not "hey, people didn't see it so they didn't know how bad it was so how could it have an impact?" either. People intentionally didn't see it because word-of-mouth made it into a joke after the first weekend. It's not like it just went under everyone's radar. It was heavily promoted and flopped with a very loud thud.

And it wasn't just bad. Plenty of people make bad movies and go on just fine. It was bad in a soft, goofy, point-your-finger-and-ridicule kind of way. See "Paul In Blue" above.

 

In support: I do remember there being plenty of MTV promotion at the time: a contest and a giveaway of the car featured in the film, iirc. Those glossy film-as-book books that they maybe still make for films (gee, I wonder if I might have one of those around my parents' house somewhere...).

Anyway, I think it's not a case where you can pin a box-office disappointment on lack of promotion.