Paul McCartney made it cool to love love, like David Bowie made our eccentricities cool. My love for McCartney over his mates in The Beatles is colored by my relationship to love. But the sum of their parts profoundly influenced my earliest grasp of the human condition, when my Indian immigrant parents had neither the time nor the words to help me understand the depths of yourself that only heartbreak could find.
McCartney’s love for love was blissfully delusional. John Lennon’s had teeth. During his run with Wings, in fact, McCartney wrote the hopelessly ‘70s pop ballad, “Silly Love Songs,” in response to vitriolic critics and post-Beatles Lennon, who mocked his buoyant songwriting.
“I know what they mean, but people have been doing love songs forever,” McCartney told Billboard in 2001. “I like ‘em. Other people like ‘em, and there’s a lot of people I love. I’m lucky enough to have that in my life. So the idea was that ‘you’ may call them silly, but what’s wrong with that?”
“Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” are some of The Beatles’ graceful sonic and thematic transitions into the counterculture movement of the latter half of the ‘60s, ranking among 500 of the greatest albums ever recorded, according to Rolling Stone. McCartney’s defiantly flawed 1970 debut album, “McCartney,” is not one of those albums.
When its promotion publicly marked the end of The Beatles, the record confirmed that the utopian dream had died in the ‘60s along with the Civil Rights pioneers, victims of the Manson Family and tens of thousands of soldiers in Southeast Asia.
Yet, one of my favorite things about the album is that all roads to it began with love — and how much of that complicated an ostensibly simple legacy. Love may have been an impetus for the record, but how could something seemingly innocuous prevent it from becoming more to the public?
Sept. 20, 1969 will forever be known as the day Lennon quit the band, but not publicly since “Abbey Road” would be released in just weeks. By October, McCartney retreated to his desolate Scottish farmhouse with his wife, the rock photographer Linda Eastman, their two daughters and an assortment of sheep. Feeling worthless for the first time in his life, the former Beatle stopped keeping up appearances, harboring anger with himself and at the world. He was just 27 years old.
“This was an identity crisis in extremis ... when he did get out of bed, he would reach straight for the whisky, and, by three in the afternoon, was usually out of it,” said Tom Doyle in his McCartney biography, “Man on the Run.”
Granted that they just had a baby and been married for only seven months, tying the knot after just one year of dating, Linda had every right to be afraid for herself and her children. But without Linda’s compassion in spite of McCartney’s near breakdown in Kintyre, Scotland, and giving him the nudge towards making music again, McCartney told Doyle, “I’m not sure I’d have gone out of it.” When he began writing love songs again, it began with a 45-second jovial declaration of his love, “The Lovely Linda,” whose casual carelessness also establishes the approach of the record. (He also kept the sounds of Linda entering the room and his wholesome chuckles.) What started as rediscovering his love for music became a tracklist for an album. With a few Beatles throwaways, “McCartney” began to coalesce in early 1970 in London between his townhouse, Abbey Road and Morgan studios. “You would never have guessed that he had any problems at all, quite frankly,” Morgan’s house engineer later said.
All instruments on the record (including wine glasses and a bow and arrow) were played by McCartney. A first for any Beatle, instrumentals compete for space on the solo record — five in particular (“Valentine Day,” “Hot As Sun/Glasses,” “Momma Miss America,” and “Kreen-Akrore”) are more akin to jam sessions loosely structured by McCartney’s love for folk, blues and southern tunes. The same goes for vocal tracks, such as “That Would Be Something,” “Oo You” and “Teddy Boy,” which, without George Martin’s studio and orchestral ingenuity or contributions from Billy Preston, almost border on mundane if you’re not multitasking. But there’s an undeniable warmth and homeliness to them, especially on the track with Linda’s backup vocals, “Man We Was Lonely,” which is a twangy prelude to their professional partnership on the love-induced 1971 record, “Ram.”
What these songs do, if nothing else, is debunk the myth of Paul McCartney to reveal that he, too, is only a man in love — with both the people and things that give his life meaning. In regards to substance and form as equals, three songs eclipse all else. “Maybe I’m Amazed” bottles and convincingly sells the idea that love quells the worst of us, making it one of the greatest ballads ever conceived. Even 50 years later, “Every Night” speaks to the zeitgeist of being smitten by new love in your twenty-somethings. What sounds like a nursery rhyme in “Junk” is the synergy of consumer commentary and whimsical impressionism — the kind of impressionism that made Lennon so revered, but with McCartney’s lightheartedness.
But his love for musicianship amounted to a collection of lukewarm responses from fans and former bandmates (Lennon called the record “Engelbert Humperdinck music”) for these mostly sentimental “half-thoughts.” Discipline without quality control. McCartney himself never considered his responses in the self-interview sheet that came with the press’ advanced copies in the U.K. to be an official Beatles breakup announcement, Keith Badman writes in “The Beatles Diary Vol. 2: After the Break-Up.” When Americans caught wind of it, such as Rolling Stone critic Langdon Winner, he likened the record to the Trojan Horse that invaded Troy. A thinly veiled act of superiority for being the “first” to leave the biggest pop group in the world.
At best, “McCartney” is a revealing transitional album. The scent of The Beatles still lingers. The album — at times compositionally sketchy compared to other pop records of 1970, such as Simon and Garfunkel’s swansong “Bridge Over Troubled Water” or Elton John’s “Tumbleweed Connection” — would still hit number one in the U.S. and have a much more quiet influence on music history. While his record almost offensively contrasted with the polished studio sound of the Beatles, McCartney, in a Peter Pan syndrome-like state with his Studer 4-track tape recorder and newfound freedom, helped revitalize DIY techniques and a lo-fi sound before the punks of the late ‘70s and after independent jazz and blues labels at the frontend of the century.
“Light and loose” was the point, said McCartney in his infamous Beatles breakup self-interview. Attempting anything other than speaking simply and truthfully after the band had dissolved would’ve been a futile gesture, because what would be the point otherwise? The Beatles swansong record, “Let It Be,” a departure from the acid-dipped tuneage they mastered in the previous years, was released a month after “McCartney,” also to commercial success and critical confusion. But their greatest-pop-act-to-ever-live status never waned.
What makes “McCartney” a singular record is in the way that it brings the listener closer to the icon that is McCartney with its lack of embellishments. He gave himself permission to come undone when only the best had been expected from him for so long, and start anew. It wasn’t for critics or fans, but for him. McCartney takes the concept of the artist owing the world its idea of his identity and hurls it into the rolling seas of Kintyre.
It’s reductive to overlook “McCartney” and the former Beatle’s propensity for laying bare in between “Abbey Road” and “Let It Be,” and dedicating his breakup album to simple pleasures: home, family and love. “McCartney” isn’t the artist at his best yet, but at his most vulnerable and pure. You could call that silly, but what’s wrong with that?