📚 The McCartney Legacy Volume 1: 1969-73

It took some weeks for me to finish this very large book. I was given this as a very thoughtful Christmas gift, but ended up buying and reading an ebook version of it as there was no way I was going to lug this around with me.

The authors started writing with the intention of creating a McCartney solo-specific version of Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, but found that they couldn’t avoid telling a story at the same time. The text of the book is punctuated by distinctive sections for each recording session, in a consistent format, informing us of what songs were worked on. They also include a little narrative to add some colour to the events:

An example recording session call-out.

This book was a great read. I’ve consumed so many Beatles-related books over the years, but there was still lots in here that I didn’t know. For a Beatles nut, I’m actually not that familiar with McCartney’s early solo discography. I’m a long-time fan of McCartney (1970) and Band on the Run (1973), but have only recently picked up Wild Life (1971) and am yet to explore Ram (1971) and Red Rose Speedway (1973). It’s been fun to read about a track and then listen to it on a streaming service, particularly when I wasn’t familiar with it. For the songs that I was familiar with, there were fascinating nuggets and insights. For example, I hadn’t realised that the high-pitched sound a few seconds into The Lovely Linda, the first track on Paul’s first solo album after the Beatles broke up, is the squeaking of a door that was accidentally captured and left in. This is the first example in his solo career of going with the flow when something happens:

Unlike other artists and producers inclined to erase extraneous noises or accidental instrumental strikes on individual tracks, Paul would leave them as they were recorded, allowing the potential to “explore the accident, not fix the mistake” as Seiwell put it. Though aiding the creative process, for Alan Parsons this posed a problem. “You try to keep the tracks clean and try to avoid having to pull down faders every time if there is a noise or a talking voice or something,” he explained. “Whereas McCartney was notorious for never allowing engineers to wipe anything, so it always made the mix take twice as long.”

It was amazing to hear that Henry McCullough got to appear on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon through the accident of Wings being booked in a neighbouring studio:

“They were next door making Dark Side of the Moon,” said Paul. “The engineers were quite interchangeable, so an engineer that’d work on their stuff would work on ours. And he did play us some of the Dark Side of the Moon stuff.” For an hour or so, during the weekend of January 19 and 20, Wings and Pink Floyd joined forces, on Pink Floyd’s turf, when the latter were recording voices that would be woven into the fabric of several songs.

…

And so it was that a hazy recollection of McCullough’s—“I don’t know, I was really drunk at the time!”—found its way into ‘Us and Them,’ a track on one of the most revered albums in the history of rock.

Despite its size, the book didn’t feel overly-long or too detailed. I found myself picking it up at any available moment and was disappointed when I reached the end. Fortunately there’s a sequel in the works that is due out in December this year, covering the period 1974–1980. Here’s how we leave things:

With a critically lauded, Gold-certified hit album on his hands, Paul found himself in a very different position at the end of 1973 than he’d been in at the end of 1969. Four years earlier, he was crawling from the wreckage of the Beatles, unsure of himself and his future. But he had also been nursed, coaxed, and sweet-talked by Linda into recognizing his strengths sufficiently to borrow a Studer four-track from EMI and set down some tunes, taking his first steps toward reinventing himself. But what he recorded then was a motley batch, assembled largely of belatedly finished songs from the Beatle days, revived and polished juvenilia from the late 1950s, and jams molded into instrumentals. He started with only two new songs; others had sprouted as he worked, including the enduring ‘Maybe I’m Amazed.’ But the music on Band on the Run was fresh—its oldest songs were written during the Red Rose Speedway sessions—and the album was fully conceived before the first session.

I’m excited to find out what the next book brings.