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

Good for you that you like Driving Rain, as do many others here. It's all a matter of personal tastes, and nobody is right or wrong in the equation.

My own reasons for not particularly liking the three albums in question run the gamut. Again, the requisite disclaimer: I speak only for myself here and my opinions are just my own. But I always found Wild Life to be an unsatisfying album because it sounds lazy and unfinished. I know that the premise was to go in a la Dylan and make a "quickie" album. But no matter what the approach, the songs have to be good enough to make the grade, and to my ears they aren't. In a sense I don't like Wild Life because of RAM -- RAM showed what McCartney could do when he put his mind to it, and it raised the bar of expectations to a level that Wild Life simply did not match. Maybe such comparisons are not fair. But we do that in life, and life is not fair. So there's that.

Driving Rain to my ears suffers something of the same fate -- a few of the songs are good to my ears, but most just don't achieve their potential, and they drag. Flaming Pie -- a much stronger album -- was still fairly fresh in my mind, and again in comparison Driving Rain comes up short and small. I don't see it as a "bad" album so much as a weak album relative to potential.

As for Memory Almost Full, I've resigned myself to the fact that most people here don't agree with me on my negative assessment of it, and that's fine. I respect that. But to my ears it is the beginning of a time, still ongoing, where McCartney tries too hard in the studio to be someone (and something) that he is not, as if he discovered grunge rock 20 years too late and feels a late-life urge to catch up and be cool to/accepted by the younger crowd. It just sounds to me like he is trying too hard to reinvent himself with that one, and it feels forced to my ears, not in a good or comfortable way. In fact I find it somewhat embarrassing. But that's just me, speaking as one who liked his traditional sound and approach just fine. It certainly was successful, and over a long period of time. In the end of course McCartney, like anyone, is free to craft the image of his choice and make the music that he wants to make. And a part of me admires that he doesn't want to live just on reputation, that he tries to keep it fresh, and that he keeps at it long after when he could have retired and counted his cash instead. Maybe if McCartney were more consistent about it -- read: gearing his concert set lists toward that same approach and taking more chances with it, instead of playing it safe with mostly classics and Beatles-heavy choices -- I'd see it differently. At this point I don't. But I'm willing to listen to other informed observers here who see it differently than I do. Quite possibly they are seeing and hearing something that I am not.

 

Surely the most disturbing aspect of all this is that they are so happy to discuss it all on a public forum with thousands of members.

 

Great idea. If it had to be on the album, then it makes sense as the final song.

 

His greatest mistake with Wild Life was not including Hey Diddle and a Hey Diddle Link.

 

Dude, his names not Shirley, it's Laverne!

 

Exactly. If Graystroke praised POP occasionally, maybe Paul would go down under and play the entire album in concert, with an extended version of 'Ode To A Koala Bear' as an encore. Wouldn't that be a nice treat for our Aussie friends?

 

It's funny but after reading these posts and listening and loving my combined playlist of both albums intermixed as a double album almost daily for the past month! I'm far more excited fior the POP Archive than Tugs!

 

That is the most frustrating aspect of the POP release; Tug Of War was a hit album which was greeted positively by most critics, and had Paul not stretched himself too thinly over two different projects, he could have had another critically popular commercially successful album as a follow up.

Add the Broadstreet songs, maybe some of the songs that he gave away at the time to films or other acts (especially On The Wings Of A Nightingale), the interesting songs that he had available like 'It's Not On', and some of the strong songs that he released as B-Sides (Rainclouds for instance), and a good pop album could have turned into a very interesting, diverse and eclectic album.

 

No doubt, that's one way it could have been better. I'd start with replacing "The Other Me," "Average Person," and "Sweetest Show" -- at least with something closer to the demo versions. Maybe pieces of them would have worked as link tracks or fragments in a Frankensteined piece that he often does so well. Also, contrary to many here, I'm not a fan of "Through Our Love." Generic McCartney ballad -- sounds as if it were created by a computer program that worked off some model of how his ballads are supposed to sound. I think "Twice in a Lifetime" is much stronger -- but what is it doing on this release again? I haven't worked my way through the deluxe book yet.

The POP deluxe does give me hope though -- if the second disc of this can be so redeeming, imagine the possible joys of a barefoot, buckskinned Wild Life bonus disc.

 

What's nice is we can easily create our own, and listen to what everyone else is missing. Their loss.

 

and I would say the exact opposite... Hearing Tug of War for the first time in 1982 was a significant memory. It left an indelible impression, having been a Beatles fan for 9 years at that point. I was the kid at the local record store who bought the solo albums on release day (or pretty close to it) from about Living in the Material World on. On one listen alone, I knew it was a special record and VERY different from McCartney II and Back to the Egg. I agreed with Rolling Stone's review as well, thinking it was a masterpiece. My opinions haven't changed. Sadly my opinions haven't changed on Pipes of Peace It is the one solo McCartney album I listen to the least....

 

I find both of your comments interesting, because you both lived through the release of the Pipes Of Peace album, whereas I first heard it decades after it was released, without the context of the era.

I happen to enjoy most of the album, although I agree with two of the common complaints against it, which are that the production is too sweet and heavy in places, and that the track-listing damages the second half of the album.

Despite liking the album overall, I can fully understand how, when compared to a classic like 'Murmur', it must have been disappointing.

As I am sure that you both know, one of the aspects of Paul's solo career that I find the most frustrating is the critical bashings that he has often received, and how he responded to them. Paul released a very interesting and experimental album in 'McCartney 2', but the critics savaged it, and claimed that it wasn't 'worth the plastic that it was printed on'. Paul responded by retreating for two years into the studio to record a grand, Beatlesque album, and even got George Martin to produce it, knowing that his solo career was in danger and that he had to make a 'statement' after John's murder. The critics lapped the album up, and Rolling Stone even gave it 5 stars, so I fully understand why Paul believed that making a similar follow-up was a good idea.

The problems were that he was stretching himself too far between POP and the Broadstreet project, and that Martin and Paul both decided to leave off Paul's more experimental work, in favour of simpler pop songs, because of the bashing that 'McCartney 2' got, and the praise that 'Tug Of War' got.

In summary, I personally believe that POP, as it was released, is a fair pop album on the whole, despite a couple of lesser tracks and some clunky lyrics, and I am glad to see that it hasn't just been outright dismissed in most of the new reissue reviews (Rolling Stone are now saying that it holds up better than Tug Of War, and DIY Mag called it a 'classic', and although I disagree with both claims, it is good to see the album get some appreciation), but I do wish that Paul had been braver, ignored the critics, and released more of his experimental/contemporary work, instead of waiting until the PTP sessions, because it would have made for a more interesting album.

Songs like 'It's Not On' and 'Simple As That' act as an interesting link between Check My Machine and Pretty Little Head, and I would be extremely interested in hearing any other similar songs that Paul wrote but never released in the early-to-mid-80's, and the demos of songs like 'Sweetest Little Show' show how a simpler production would have benefitted some of his compositions from the era.

 

Yes, that is the greatest thing about these reissues IMO, alongside the improved sound.

 

If you can call that living? I kid!

 

Maybe 'survived' would have been more appropriate?

 

Before you get yourself into more trouble, then you best realize that the name in question is GRAYSTOKE. We don't need any extra stroking here...

 

Just make sure you lose the correct "r", not that there is anything wrong with that.

 

Oooo. That's quite a nice play.

 

POP came out when I was 18. I had a few months earlier broken up with my high school girlfriend and graduated. I was not in a place to enjoy a lighter McCartney album at the time. She was a huge McCartney fan including posters af him all over her room, and I was at my peak of my "Lennon rules McCartney sucks phase!" Had I stayed with her, I think I would have enjoyed the album much more, honestly. Isn't it strange how much where we are as a person impacts our enjoyment of an artist or album?

 

If you like to play that way, again as Seinfeld says, "not that there is anything wrong with that."

 

I really really dislike the remix....

1) hate the EQ choices
2) sounds too bright as a result
3) they aren't faithful to the original--those subtle changes don't work in favor of any of the tracks.

 

I was 19 when "Pipes of Peace" came out. One of my college roommates worked in a record store, and after the promotion for the album was over he brought home a huge poster (the one with Paul squatting down in his K-Swiss sneakers, his hair starting to go grey, holding the "pipes of peace" in his hand). Somewhere in the deepest, darkest reaches of the Internet, one of my roommates dug up and posted a picture of me in front of the post emulating Paul's pose. Embarrassing but true. Anyway, I knew right away this album was not as good as "Tug of War" (which I played endlessly throughout my senior year of high school), but I listened to it all the time nonetheless. In the mid-90s when Apple had threatened a lawsuit against us for our upcoming book, I was hardly in a Beatle mood. I stopped listening to all of the solo albums, and in fact sold a great many of them off. It wasn't until the later 90s that I let all the negativity go (didn't hurt that they never sued us) and I started to rediscover the solo stuff. With greater perspective, yes, "Pipes" is an inconsistent album that doesn't hold up next to it's predecessor very well. But some songs have aged very well for me - the title track and "The Other Me" in particular. I love listening to songs that are positive and unabashedly embrace humanism - I don't care that other people find them "embarrassing", "simplistic, "preachy", or my favorite "ham-fisted". "In love our problems disappear", that works for me.

 

To me the unique soundscape of Tug is one of it's greatest strengths as well as POP's to a lesser extent. The remix takes away that foundational strength.

P.S. Isn't it weird when you quote someone and it quotes part of their post that never actually posted? It's happened to me a couple of times and as in this case the added info is enlightening.

 

Thanks for posting, and well said; I can always rely on you to perfectly summarise what it is that is so appealing about Paul's unabashed support for love, especially when it is mixed with his beautiful melodies. I don't care how 'cheesy' he can be; after all, I love cheddar.

 

The irony, of course, was at the time neither album fell into that category. "Ram" got a couple of decent reviews but some were just downright hateful. The response to "Wild Life" was much the same.

The problem with the positive response to TOW both critically (some of it good will because of the murder of Lennon, Paul's sincere tribute to him and an album of stronger material) and commercially was that Paul saw that everyone seemed Ro like it so why not create more of the same rather than try something truly different. While it sold well, it didn't sell as well and critically was not as well received. I think that confused Paul and he sought refuge in a mixture of both the familiar and new as if to remind people that he, too created The Beatles as, in hindsight, Lennon was seen AS The Beatles (and most folks forgot about the bad material that Lennon himself generated).

Paul's approach there does inform his concerts as well to a smaller degree but his approach there is also related to this--he feels that many people are coming to see him for the first time or haven't seen him multiple times because of the long period he didn't tour and he wants to make sure to hit the most popular highlights of his career.

He will, however, occasionally throw in the rarity butp, largely, those surprises remain exactly that.