The Home Key #22: Paul McCartney, the Solo Years

AB:

In each picking an album to use as a touchstone for our conversation, it seemed as though we naturally, and free from haggling, fell into three different eras of Paul McCartney solo records - early, middle, and late. As with any timeline, there are micro eras, and I suppose that even “middle” could be debatable, as there are various middling periods before he found his ways into this generally strong late period, arguably beginning around the 2000s (a subject, I suspect, that might find its way into future parts of our conversation).

I will start by saying that I have always been drawn to the early solo era - something that in my mind runs from McCartney to Red Rose Speedway. Such an assessment is more visceral than logical or analytical, no doubt a function of being a child in a household that got excited about these albums as they came out, and the way that that excitement slowly became my own with each new release, the records and songs becoming my songs, my moments, and in a way, I suppose, the nascent connection of an inner me, one completely reliant on others for survival, to the independent consciousness and joy of someone else expressing himself. Ask me any day which was my record of that time and I’d immediately tell you Ram, an album that I can’t remember not loving, one of those albums in which every note, every beat, every nuance, playful and affecting, feels like it is part of my wiring. A close second, if not a tie, would be McCartney. There is a unifying tone over that whole album that, for what has been nearly my whole life, has been one of warmth and welcome - not to mention so many incredible songs that still hold up, from those that we later learned had been rehearsed with the Beatles as possibilities for Get Back, to “Maybe I’m Amazed,” arguably one of the best songs of all time, from melody to arrangement to lyrics to performance. And yet, as I sit down to write this, the record that asserts itself for this moment is the third in the early line-up, 1971’s Wild Life.

Now this has never been a critic’s favorite, and not really a fan favorite. It doesn’t fit into the repartee of being misunderstood in its time but later proven to be ahead of its time, revelatory or influential (say, the way Ram has become). Frankly, it’s been seen as forgettable. But for me, Wild Life has always been a deeply meaningful album, perhaps in part for it what it meant to me the first time I saw it at a friend’s house, property of his mother, laid across a living room coffee table in a tract home at the bottom of a sloped cul-de-sac. Paul, Linda and, at the time two unknown persons of whose presence we’d later learn were what made this “Wings,” perched on a fallen tree limb that spanned a creek, with Paul knee deep in the water strumming an acoustic guitar. The whole cover, corner to corner, is lush with the greens of the setting. I can still picture the feeling of wanting to be inside that world, with the four of them, so inviting and welcoming and idyllic. At that point, I don’t know that I’d even heard a song from Wild Life, as, unlike the other albums from that period, there was no hit single such as “Maybe I’m Amazed” or “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” or “My Love.” But already I’d been smitten.

But an idyllic cover is no reason to cite this as a McCartney album worthy of discussion.

My reaction of memory, and still my feeling, is that Wild Life is a record driven by a certain kind of joy, a sense of the love of making music. We hear it in the first song, “Mumbo,” which begins with the whir of the tape recorder, followed by the count-in of “Take it, Tony” just before the music blasts in. It’s a full-out rocker, akin to a jam, with lyrics that once deciphered still barely make sense. And yet it is so joyful and raw to this listener, so natural, even as its layered guitar riffs bring a subtle sophistication below in the mix, a reminder of McCartney’s perfectionist tendencies. Even “Bip Bop,” its childlike sing-songieness that was perfect for this listener at eight years of age, complete with lyrical homage to High Heeled Sneakers, has that same underpinning of looseness and thrill of making music. In fact, in the 2018 Archive edition, one of the bonus tracks is a cassette rendition of Paul and Linda singing “Bip Bop” around the house, children in the background, dishes banging, phone ringing - all reinforcing that this song, this album, was a reflection of how they were living their life, one that I always imagined took place just beyond the trees and the creek in the cover photo, one that through my imagination I could be part of. A strange and unique sense of accessibility to people so exponentially removed from my everyday world. The same feeling carries through to the cover of Ian and Sylvia’s “Love is Strange” (the closest the album had to single), again, not necessarily a song chosen for its timelessness, but one that comes across for its quintessence, a song Paul and Linda just liked to sing. “Tomorrow” was a tune that hooked me at eight, and still hooks me, placed on my long-list of contributions to an imagined Beatles album that never was.

In many respects, I suppose I find the album charming, and one that conjures a sense of family, simplicity, and pleasure. As we all noted in our writing on the Peter Jackson Get Back film, there was an interesting tension with Paul between being a musical perfectionist and a person mindful of career, while at the same time truly believing that if the band could return to the thrill of making music (the constant conjuring of memories of Hamburg and the early days, as well as the breaking into all the old covers for inspiration) then the musical success would follow. In the movie, Paul’s really flogging that idea, and you kind of believe it, but also have the nagging sense that it is aspirational, not necessarily natural at that moment in the band’s history. In contrast, at least for me, Wild Life captures what he was after, beautiful and moving, all in a way that curiously offers a vibe whose strength is stronger than its songs, but still serves as a reminder of the power that comes from listening to music, where feeling can offer relief from the noise of thinking.

Unlike many of McCartney’s later albums (and many I really like), I’ve never had the sense of Wild Life chasing any kind of audience or charts or historical relevance. From its cover to its songs to its performances, it always came across as people making music for no other reason than that they liked to play music. A romantic ideal, to be sure, but perhaps a form of realization of what was being so desperately sought in those Get Back sessions. And yet despite the bruising criticism the record suffered (and suffers), I remain touched by its intention as a piece of art, that which ultimately and honestly conveys and transfers a feeling and a sensibility and an imagined life from one person to another, so purely and succinctly, engendering an emotional reaction with each listen: for me, happiness and comfort.

RM:

Back in the days when I was playing in a band somewhat regularly, we used to, in the band, have a theme that we like to discuss, and the theme was as follows: “When will David Byrne be relevant again?” This was between 2005 and 2013, or thereabouts, and it was during a certain nadir as regards the David Byrne body of work, at least as understood in self-congratulatory taste-making circles. Like many people my age, I had deeply revered the Talking Heads for much of their time in the public discussion, and I probably thought Remain in Light and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts were among the very best albums anyone made in the early eighties. But I disliked, with some vehemence, the later output of that band, the Talking Heads, and I felt some rather strident dislike for the “Brazilian” period of David Byrne’s solo work (though, complete disclosure, now I truly love Brazilian music, and I very much understand where Byrne’s passion came from).

The point of our band discussion, which rested on a certainty that Byrne would be relevant again, was: Under what circumstances would history again require his services? This is a discussion that I have about writing and writers often too. Obviously, until Herman Melville was “rediscovered” in the late 1920s, history had little need for the author of Moby Dick. From the self-publication of his last work in 1877 (Clarel, the epic poem about travelling to Jerusalem) until Carl Van Doren and Lewis Mumford, et al., began writing about him in the twenties, he was mostly forgotten. For about fifty years.

Similarly, during the period when people resisted David Byrne, when he seemed too happy for his own good, too self-consciously awkward, it was only a matter of time. Twenty-five or thirty years, to be precise. And then we got the Byrne of American Utopia, and the really excellent band-sound of that show, likewise the very great “Hell You Talmbout,” by Janelle Monae, recorded by that band, recreating the gang harmonies from Remain in Light, drawing additional attention to Monae’s song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVQdXB9xgpw. Perfect timing! Suddenly history needed David Byrne! And his Broadway show! Suddenly he seemed again like the intense intellectual/trickster/off-kilter genius who wrote “Burning Down the House,” the recent cover of which, by Paramore, also made the case.

History needs certain artists at certain moments-that’s my thesis. Sometimes history needs the song (“Moon River,” by Andy Williams, let’s say), regardless of the singer, and sometimes they need the story of the artist regardless of the song. Maybe when they need both there is a flood of adulation. And such was the case, perhaps, with the little two-guitar combo from Liverpool, England. Sure, the craft of songwriting by the combo from Liverpool was a thing to marvel at, to delight in, but also the story was incredible. Four ruffians from a manufacturing city of little charm (so the story goes), the equivalent of Newark, let’s say, or Detroit. The two main songwriters were both “motherless,” and all four of them came from extremely modest economic circumstances. They were an impossible to predict phenomenon, a bolt from the blue, and once the story took hold it was an awesome thing to latch onto and to be a part of. You didn’t even have to be from England. And the songs were great.

The thing about Paul McCartney, though, is that his story, by the time of the solo career, is quite different. In his solo years he’s a very affluent person with enormous name recognition and a beautiful family, a person who breaks up the greatest band ever (even though maybe John broke up the band), who then starts his solo career by not trying at all, only to follow it by trying too hard, making disco-inflected ditties and clammy, excessively pretty ballads with Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. What happened, the story goes, to the guy who wrote “Helter Skelter?” What happened to the guy who wrote “Eleanor Rigby?”

As with David Byrne, it was always the case that the worm was going to turn, and half of what was dislikeable about, say, “Silly Love Songs” or “Wonderful Christmastime” was also dislikeable about “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da” or “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” Because the outsized hatred for Wings at the Speed of Sound was primarily about the Beatles, it was only a matter of time until there was an audience who was not fixated on those songs, or, shockingly, didn’t even really know about them.

As with Adam, I felt as though it would be easy, for our project here, to select Ram for discussion, which was a release I too was present for as it happened. My mom bought it for us, and I can remember listening to it in the living room in Stamford the year after my parents separated. A dark time! “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” for me, was the significantly weird, glued-together masterpiece of that album, which really taught me something about the popular song, about non-linearity, melody doing the work instead of the words, and also about strange details in the register of arrangement. (It’s the only song on Ram that is as “arranged” like a Beatles song, with George Martin having worked on it, and that may be part of why it struck such a chord.) I still love “Uncle Albert” and Ram, a great deal.

But there is an undeniable feeling for me about early McCartney solo material, and that feeling is that the lyrics are insubstantial. It’s remarkable to me, in a way, that the guy who wrote “Penny Lane” and “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” and “Here, There, and Everywhere,” had to put the “butter pie” line in “Uncle Albert,” and who similarly wrote a song about his dog only having three legs. I’m sure “3 Legs” is about the Beatles, and thus is a clever example of allegory, but it’s still noteworthy for its aggressive lack of subtlety, and that, I think, became a sort of an ongoing phenomenon, lyrics glued on, for the time being, without much further consideration. Someone’s knocking at the door! Oh instantaneity! Lyrics that were about how they sounded, not about what they might mean. “Smile Away” on Ram seems thin to me, as does “The Back Seat of My Car.” I love these songs, the way you would if you were a nine-year-old, living in a strange town, not allowed to have contact with your father for nearly a year, and the radio was sort of all you had; I loved these songs and they are immense, but they are not as ambitious as the Beatles.

The problem comes mainly from comparing the solo songs to the Beatles songs.

That’s why I wanted to choose a McCartney solo album from the much much, much, much, much, much, much later period, wherein we are among those who are beginning to forget. The solo songs do very different things! The problems with the lyrics are the problems with the lyrics, yes, and the lyrics have been a problem for more than fifty years, but every now and then the lyrics are also compact and brilliant and perfectly suited to the music, which can go anywhere, encompass any idiom, any form, any collaborators, any era. This Paul McCartney apparently can do anything, whatever he wants, when he feels like it, and he only feels like it sometimes.

I have chosen Egypt Station (2018), therefore, because it is from the period when the worm finally turned. For the sake of the discussion my feeling is that the genuine change began upon the death of Linda McCartney, because above all Paul seemed to be surpassingly devoted to his wife, and the first album Paul made after her death was the first one I actually purchased after a long disenchantment, viz., Run Devil Run. From 1999. It’s a rock and roll album. I will go further and note that I also very nearly chose, for our assignment, the Russian album, Back in the USSR, because it too is a rock and roll album with all of that sexy 1950s teenage charm that McCartney brings to the classics no matter when he plays them. But I do think that though both of these albums feature very energetic performances and are a lot of fun, only “No Other Baby,” from Run Devil Run totally does the thing I want a McCartney song to do, which is to shimmer with a human emotion that somehow everyone can identify with. Still, Run Devil Run was a beginning, not the deluxe change in perception, but a beginning. The real change, which took a while to rumble with momentum, began with Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, with Memory Almost Full, and with New. Three albums of new material in the 21^st century that in every case have fine songwriting in them. Though overlooked by contemporary rockcrit types (except Rob Sheffield, the McCartney apologist), these albums each have some great songs. They are the seeding of the field, the steppingstones, for the sudden and dominant McCartney of the 2010s.

Maybe it is simply that forgetting was required. Maybe it was simply that a new audience was required. Maybe history simply needed some other story about McCartney, because history needs the stories. Maybe all those three hour shows, in the stadia of the world, bulked out with an enormous helping of Beatles tunes, including ones by John and George, was required. But I think it’s another aspect of McCartney’s life, too, that paved the way.

Aging!

The contemporary McCartney (76, I think, at the time of the release of Egypt Station, in 2018) is noteworthy, in the album at hand, for a few divergent interests-dark prognostic (on “I Don’t Know,” “Dominoes,” and “Despite Repeated Warnings”), carnality (on “Come On to Me,” “Fuh You,” and “Hunt You Down”), and unapologetic reflection (of a kind) on “Happy With You,” “Hand in Hand.” This wide spectrum of interests, this panorama, is so in-your-face that there’s no perfect explanation excepting that McCartney has, as the saying goes, no fucks to give. Not even one. As one does at age 76. The album is suffused with an acceptance of aging (“I used to lie to my doctor,” he says on one song, an admission I can’t think of in even one other popular song), with the no fucks component of aging, which is an acceptance of self, and it has a curious side effect: at last, the reductive simplicity of many of Paul’s lyrics (“I just wanna fuh you,” e.g.) seems less like sloppiness and more like the way it is now for a man of a significant age, who still plays rock and roll. It’s who he is! And, in fact, this sloppiness is counterposed with spots of ridiculous beauty here and there, like the list of things the songwriter is happy about in the bridge of “Happy with You,” which includes throwing coins in the “Trevi fountain.” Just when you think he can’t do it at all, write a line of poetry, it appears that he can do it, yes, he just only wants to now and then, which is his privilege and right at age 76 (now, as I write these lines, age 82, I think). He has, as the saying goes, individuated.

On the first album (it’s a double LP!) of Egypt Station, there are mostly pop songs, and, I have to say, the first album (sides a and b) is a nearly perfect album of pop songs. There’s only one throwaway, “Who Cares,” which, though not the deepest of McCartney songs, does include the couplet “Who cares what the idiots say?/who cares what the idiots do?,” which is, you know, very good advice, and which here rings with experience. Back in the day, on “Pretty Love Songs,” Paul was pushing back on his critics, too, but there it was genteel and distant, so perfectly crafted that you couldn’t exactly feel him. Here you can definitely feel him.

Really my whole experience of this album opened up after hearing “Come on to Me” online somewhere, and/or seeing its ridiculously good video, I mean, really a first-rate video, a thing that could bring you to tears, a hilarious, beautiful, moving, unpretentious video about private longing, which says in a rather direct way what the album proves: deep down everyone kinda loves Paul. There’s not a single new musical idea on this song, as far as I can tell, except maybe the electric guitar in the bridge masquerading as a sitar, with horns doubling it. But the old ideas are employed with such giddy joy, gales of laughter, at the simplicity of it all, that you can help but admire the whole. This is an older guy, in his mid-seventies, talking about meeting a woman at a party! And really getting into it! One assumes it is a little bit about Nancy Shevell, his third wife, even though that was a few years back, but in a way it doesn’t matter at all who it’s about. It’s a pop song! About adults! And the reprise section, after the first dead stop, which starts, as we all know now, with McCartney’s shouted “Yes I will! Yes I will! Yes I will now!” is so funny and unstoppable, that it makes the song sprout a whole second crescendo. Hey, this groove is so good we just couldn’t stop, so we kept going, for the hell of it! Hang out and dance! (For the record, let me say that the incredible “security guard” performance in the video is by a non-actor, actually by a guy from New Orleans who is currently in grad school getting his masters of library science. He could not be more real or convincing or relatably genuine than he is in the video.)

The comparison, for “Come on to Me,” would be to “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” I suppose, but that song was by a young man, and this is by a man in the early blush of being, well, elderly. Also, as elsewhere on the album, McCartney’s voice is occasionally quite ragged, somewhat abraded by time, like a blues guy during the folk revival, and that only improves the paradoxical longing and frailty and comedy of “Come on to Me.” In a way, excepting one song from 2008 “Ring the Changes,” this is my very favorite recent song by Paul McCartney, and it’s the comedy, the wisdom, the poignancy, the acceptance of it that closes the deal. If this were the only decent enough song on the album, I’d think it was enough, but really the entire first side is great, and this continues on with side two, with “Fuh You,” and “Confidante.” There are sophisticated, ironic, earnest earworms here in superabundance.

Sides three and four contain the “experimental” tracks on Egypt Station, which means, mainly, that there are a lot of bits joined together in these songs, exactly in the spirit of “Uncle Albert,” or the Abbey Road suite. The best examples of this (though by no means the only ones) are the last two major songs, “Despite Repeated Warnings,” and “Hunt You Down/Naked/C-Link,” both of which have massive rhythmical transitions from section to section. “Despite Repeated Warnings” is an allegory about the guy who was running the United States of America in 2018, I think, concealed in an allegory about a sailing vessel. It needs its sections, because the story is rangy, dark, consuming, various. “Hunt You Down,” etc., by contrast, feels like a leftover, or, really, like three leftovers, and the thrill is just seeing how strangely they are grafted onto each other-exactly like you are turning the radio dial.

Oh, and that is to invoke the concept, because McCartney spoke of Egypt Station at the time of release as though it were a concept album. In his view the title alludes to a distant, somewhat magical radio station, not from the “true” Egypt, but from some imaginary one, a short-wave radio station, perhaps, from the distant reaches of another age, in which the songs are then broadcast (to you, oh listener), indicating a great, substantial variation of moods and styles from distant nation states. There is, of course, a little tone poem at beginning and end, like on Sgt Pepper’s, that marks the coming and going of the radio station itself. Or perhaps the coming and going of the concept. These abstractions are not terribly memorable, but they bracket the action. The third and fourth sides, then, demonstrate, much more so than the poppier material on sides one and two, the short-wave broadcasts to be found in McCartney’s superstructure. Every song, on the second disc, has some crazy, ingenious arrangement feature, like some funky almost-Brazilian break on “Back to Brazil,” and then a Paul-ish, but totally extended guitar solo on “C-Link.” A cut-and-paste psychedelic out-chorus on “Dominoes,” a long and somewhat exquisite flute solo on “Hand in Hand,” and so on. So generous is the amount of weird and perfectly deployed instrumental writing (a lot of it played by Paul’s excellent band) that in a way the album sent me back, e.g., to “Let ‘Em In,” and that disco fife-and-drums middle eight, which, you know, in all honesty, is really great, even if the song is just utterly ridiculous. Here the songs are better and the arrangements are inventive. He makes it look so easy that you forget that there is no one else who is quite as good.

Let’s recap then, it’s a two-album set (an hour of music) with a winsome conceptual apparatus, by a 76-year-old, in which arguably an entire album (of the two) consists of ridiculously effective pop songs, and in which the other disc is chockful of experimental innovations with timbre and rhythm. Much of the album, when not emotionally complex (as on, e.g., the excellent “I Don’t Know”) is about desire in the elderly class, a thing almost never rendered with so much wise and poignant acceptance. And from here Paul McCartney, the guy everyone disliked or felt betrayed by between circa 1976 and 1990, the author of “Ebony and Ivory” and “Mull of Kintyre” and “Wonderful Christmastime,” went out into the world, sang on Carpool Karaoke, played a set in the Grand Central Terminal and in the Cavern Club, and then suddenly, became universally acclaimed. This album was the launching pad for that.

Universal acclaim! After, arguably, thirty years of seeming like the author of cloying midtempo ballads for middle-aged members of the Grammy nominating committee, while letting down everyone else, suddenly universally acclaimed! This kind of acclaim just doesn’t come around that often. That one album by Outkast, OK Computer, To Pimp a Butterfly, Johnny Cash at the end of his life. It comes along very occasionally, and normally it doesn’t stay. But now we have Paul McCartney the universally acclaimed, beloved of history, author of sixty years’ worth of infectious melody writing, an artist utterly himself.

MW:

If a casual rock listener of a certain age could name only one of Paul’s solo or Wings albums, chances are it’d be Band on the Run. I regularly run the risk in Adam and Rick’s musically adventuresome and open-eared company of holding the middle ground-and by choosing to write about this record I fear I’m only entrenching my position. More challenged by the experimental than Rick and less likely to hear the true and the good in what might be dismissed by a listener less receptive than Adam, I end up confronting the fact that I’m often taken by songs that are pitched down the middle, though I might like “Tomorrow Never Knows” as much as-or more than-either of them.

But that’s a John question and we’re on Paul-finally!-my favorite, just as Band on the Run features my favorite post-Beatles song, “Jet.” I know that “All Things Must Pass” is a greater achievement, as musically all-encompassing and spiritually rich as it is, and that I should admire “Imagine” more than I do, but as we often reveal when we discuss the Beatles, the music which means most to us doesn’t hit hardest or persist longest because we understand its objective virtues but because it arrived at a certain time in our lives, often as we were changing into adolescents when the particular timbre of a voice, the sound of a guitar, a string of words that we may not have even comprehended enters the neural network as it’s developing and stays there.

In the summer of 1973, the season before Band on the Run was released in November that year, my family was traveling to Maine for a vacation. The state’s southern coast, Portland included, was not yet the province of the wealthy it is today, aside from Kennebunkport and a few other enclaves of old privilege. For instance, the then-shabby now chic village store at the top of the hill above the harbor where we caught the ferry did not stock the many specialty items it does today, luxuries, in any case, that didn’t exist at the time such as expensive microbrews, artisanal breads or single-source and locally roasted coffee beans. You could, however, procure root beer and potato chips, for example, or a glass jar of Fluff and Skippy peanut butter. But anything my parents required that was not available at the village store would have to be purchased at the Shaw’s supermarket a few miles away, a Shaw’s that was across the street from a Woolworth’s where I successfully lobbied my parents to drop me off while they shopped for food. The music section was at the front of the store and the abundance of record albums in the racks stopped me dead in my tracks, particularly Red Rose Speedway, the one bearing the image of Paul McCartney with a glam-inspired coif, a bright rose in his mouth.

At 11 I didn’t know what glam was but I knew what a Beatle was and that this was one of them, the same one, I’d later find out, who sang “Can’t Buy Me Love,” the first Beatles song I’d heard while trailing a cousin down our country road on my bike, his transistor radio at full volume in the basket strapped to the handlebars. My experience of music was not precocious by any means and, as I was an only child whose taste was not informed or accelerated by a hip older sibling. I was more likely to know the hits my mom sang while she cooked - “I Think I’m Going Out of My Head” or “Downtown” -than the music of the serious artists of the day like James Taylor, CSNY, Joni Mitchell. I did, though, already have a reverence for the Beatles. And this cover, with Paul as the main visual feature of a colorful and stylized layout, looked to me exciting and strange, the rose like a collage element, one that produced in me a dada-inflected feeling of disorientation.

It was the kind of dizzying excitement I felt when I’d hear the big single from that album, “My Love,” on the radio that summer, a song I would later think should have disarmed its many critics (who thought of it as sappy, lightweight fare) purely by the force of its sexual density. When I read Rick’s response to “Come On To Me” and his contention that it revises the sexual candor of an unabashed Paul that reaches back at least to “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road,” I even better understand that despite “My Love” being a pop ballad it is not a sexless one. It’s a song suffused by the feel and language of physical love: I knew even at 11 that the ‘it’ of “my love does it good” -as was the ‘it’ of “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road”-was more physical and sexual than, say, anything on “Angie,” that summer’s ballad by the bad-boy Stones, those reputedly uninhibited peddlers of sexuality, a band never accused of writing granny music, who, to the strain of minor-key acoustic guitar strumming, sang sentimentally of dreams going up in smoke and clouds not quite disappearing.

This might be a good moment to pause and reflect, as both Adam and Rick have done, on the misapprehensions listeners held about Paul during much of the pre-universal acclaim period (at least those who for a long while considered him a disappointing light-weight, lyrically slack, the granny-music purveyor of domesticity), the very Paul who brought the body and sex-nowhere more so than in the song’s lush wash of synths and keys, its smoky, even edgy guitar solo and harmonies which seem to prefigure the rich, hazy atmosphere of 10cc’s 1975 “I’m Not In Love”- into what might otherwise have been a treacly ballad. The physicality that is palpable between the singer and his “love” somehow reaches us even through the easy melody, lounge-y vibe (lounges were sexy in the 70s) and pretty, predictable orchestration. That this is so is proven to me by the fact that I became uncomfortable if the song came on the radio in the car when I was with my parents. I knew something was going on in “My Love.” There was a sense of the private and the intimate conveyed in a musical and lyrical language that a kid who was just starting to become a young man could hear-and it was the last thing I wanted to be listening to when my parents were around.

The window on the world of experience opened in a different manner when I first heard “Jet.” I went with my father on a visit to a friend of his, a consummate hockey guy who was the ideal coach and organizer. Coach C. himself called everyone “Coach,” kids and adults alike - he met so many people in the course of his indefatigable community-building that it was easier to use a one-fits-all title than sort and remember names. He had the gleaming, well-groomed hair of a 50s matinee star and the generic black glasses of an accountant or school teacher from an earlier era. If my 1950s-reared dad kept up a little with the times, sporting Elvis-like sunglasses or cultivating slightly longer sideburns that gave a nod to the decade we were living in, Coach C. was not one to acknowledge the current moment in his bearing or dress: he looked as if the 60s never happened.

His son and namesake, however, was a teen of his generation who loved rock music, looked a little counter-cultural (as much as one could in a varsity jacket) and, for all his success as a hockey player, seemed like he might have been pushing against the boundaries his straight-laced family has established. Bobby invited me up to his room once I’d shaken Coach C’s hand and nervously answered a few questions about the season in progress. Once I was seated in this shaggy-haired teenager’s domain, he asked if I’d heard this new McCartney song, “Jet.” I hadn’t. He became animated, bright-eyed, as he un-sleeved a fresh copy of Band on the Run and put it on his turntable. I caught my first glimpse of the stagey image of the band in a spotlight caught in some comic stop-motion pantomime. It had nothing of the strangeness or mystery of the Red Rose Speedway cover. I was in no way deterred by that fact, as I was the furthest thing from a young skeptic and never felt the slightest inclination to second-guess the mode of a rock star’s self-presentation.

Listening to “Jet” with an older guy I admired-he was maybe 16-who was eager to turn me on to music I hadn’t heard, I began to understand something about the passion to pass on the enthusiasm you had for a song to another person. Despite his shaggy hair he was not a rebel or a freak, just a good kid keeping me entertained for his dad’s sake so Coach C. could talk to my father, but he was also into sharing something he dug and I felt grateful for that. Bobby was letting me in on a secret that he, a more enlightened connoisseur of music with a few more years under his belt, understood - as if there could be anything “secret” about a huge hit song from what would become the #1 album of the year in the U.S. But in that moment it did feel like something special and rare, the transmission of a mystery to a neophyte like me.

He played it loud. Bobby didn’t seem afraid that his father was going to tell him to turn that crap down. Maybe that battle was played out on other nights or maybe the war was already over. The song hit me, that laconic brass line’s four-note run getting things rolling, the reggae-scratch of an electric guitar and Paul’s half-buried vocal extemporizing in the background, already in medias res. Something was beginning to gel but before the seductive rhythm could take over completely, the main motive chugged to life then accelerated with a driving rhythm guitar and sharp harmonies delivering a short syllable I couldn’t yet match with the title: “jet.” And, like my inability to process exactly where the sexiness of “My Love” came from, I couldn’t comprehend the import of the words-and I probably didn’t even try. The song was authoritative, irresistible. You didn’t need to know what it was about to be absorbed in it.

There’s a slippery slope between casual, improvised nonsense and a force that comes from language confidently constructed and irreducible to a simple meaning. For me, then as now, “Jet” was on the upper reaches of that slope. It doesn’t descend into the bromides of “Mamounia” (the b-side of the “Jet” single) or the mouth-sounds of “Mrs. Vanderbilt” which today comes across like a precursor to a “Men at Work” song. “Jet” didn’t skim past me innocuously but made me ask questions, if not on that first listen in Bobby’s room, then later. How was it that Paul “thought that the major was a little lady suffragette”? How could a major (a rank in a profession that was in that moment entirely male) become a little lady, let alone a suffragette? What was a suffragette? Who was getting married and who made funny faces when they heard the news? And who is Jet? Even the wistful, freeing image of a car ride and the passenger’s hair blowing in the wind ‘of a thousand laces’ wasn’t as simple as it sounded. A thousand laces would seem a simile for the blowing hair but instead describes the wind itself. Whatever the language suggested or might have meant, it was the full confidence of the performance, its force and presence, that impressed itself upon me. Part of that impact came from the way the song rocked and the certainty of Paul’s delivery, especially the way he sings the irrepressible ‘ooh’ in the ad-libbed outro, another signature example of Paul’s non-verbal vocalizing that enlivens so many of his performances.

Before I over-narrate even more than I have already the experience of hearing “Jet” that first time, I’ll write just one more thing. If the Latin of “mater” was lost on me then, it’s become central to the feeling of the song since: “Ah mater born Jet to always love me.” Paul himself doesn’t have an easy answer for why his mother is included in this song about nothing, really, however much it might include a dog and/or a pony and Linda’s sometimes-stern father:

Then it gets to the chorus, I go for some reason - and I really have no idea where this popped from - I do this ‘Ah, mater.’ And ‘mater’ is Latin for ‘mother.’ I don’t know why I stuck that in. Maybe it’s just a word I liked.

However it got into the song, that “mater” carries with it a lament and a sense of loss, Paul’s mother dead 17 years when “Jet” came out. There’s also the fact that the “ah, mater” section of the song is the hardest rocking part of “Jet,” sounding as if the Beatles were back together for a moment, conjuring with the amphetamine intensity of the all-night Star Club performances in Hamburg when rocking hard might have, among other things, been one way Paul and John consoled themselves for the loss of their mothers, even if they never thought of it that way. This section of “Jet” is joyous but also, somehow, serious, driven, needful. If it’s one of the most persuasive of Paul’s post-Beatles songs (and one of the most undeniable singles of the 70s), it’s also unaccountably emotional to me, nostalgic, a good deal sad and enriched by something well beyond any meaning we can glean from the words themselves. On this album that’s often ‘about’ escape, freedom, movement away from what was, this song somehow gets closest to what’s being left behind.