Books: "The McCartney Legacy, Volume 2: 1974-80," By Kozinn & Sinclair

 

The McCartney Legacy, Volume 2: 1974-80

By Allen Kozinn & Adrian Sinclair

Dey Street Books; hardcover, 768 pages; $35.00

Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair have created another voluminous book on Paul McCartney's post-Beatles career in this second volume of The McCartney Legacy, focusing on his life and work from 1974 to 1980, a time dominated by his solo projects and his band Wings.

The starting for this volume is a period when McCartney is still in the afterglow of Band on the Run, an album that topped the Billboard 200 chart three times in 1974, and earned him his best reviews since his work with the Beatles. He is composing constantly, and recording in Nashville, New Orleans, a boat moored off the Virgin Islands, and Abbey Road in London, a 13th-century British castle, and his home studios in Scotland and Sussex.

McCartney also faced the challenge of rebuilding Wings, which meant not just having them ready for studio work, but also to tour Britain, Europe,and Australia before returning to the United States with the groundbreaking "Wings Over America" tour. That was the largest and most complex staging of a rock show up to that point, and Showco granted the authors exclusive access to the staff and archives. 

The book opens with the sessions for a "stealth Wings album," as the authors call it, that has remained under the radar McGear. This was produced by McCartney for his brother, Michael, who was known as Mike McGear. Nearly all the songs on the album were written by Paul, or co-wrote with Mike, and Wings served as Mike's studio band.

This six-year period saw McCartney produce four studio albums with Wings - Venus and Mars, Wings at the Speed of Sound, London Town, and Back to the Egg. McCartney also had the best-selling British single of the 1970s, "Mull of Kintyre," and a solo album full of electronic experimentation, McCartney II. These works showed McCartney's musical evolution, as he meshed his own melody-driven approach with what was popular at the time, disco, punk and electronic music. 

"Going into this project," Kozinn and Sinclair write, "both of us were steeped in McCartney's work and familiar with the broad details of his life, yet were were constantly surprised by things we discovered in various archives - his fascination with science fiction, several tantalizing collaborations that failed to bear fruit, film projects that were left unrealized despite multiple attempts to get them off the ground, and the passion he brought to his side career as a music publisher.

"We were surprised, too, by elements of Paul's personality that he normally Shields from public view; in fact, one aspect of Paul that might surprise readers is the depth of his insecurities. As distant observers, we tend to take his thumb-up confidence at face value, and we might think, 'This guy was one of the Beatles and had a ton of hits - what does he have to be insecure about?' Yet he was constantly second-guessing himself. The case of 'Mull of Kintyre' is a perfect example. Looking back, we know that it was a mammoth hit that sold more copies than every Beatles single. But those around Paul, in the months before its release, watched him vacillate between thinking that the song would be the biggest hit ever, and fretting that it was insane to release a Scottish waltz at a time when the charts were ruled by punk and hard rock. Almost invariably, he would go with his instinct, but only after an agonizing battle with self-doubt.

"It may be that insecurity is the force that drives Paul's perfectionism - his need to fill reel after reel with takes before settling on one he can live with - and that his perfectionism is at the heart of his success. It must be uncomfortable and annoying to complete a piece of art and to then be plagued by doubts and fears, not just - or even principally - about what the critics will write, but about whether the completed work matches one's vision of what it ought to be. But that's the process, and if Paul didn't go through it, his work would not be what it is. As his friend and bandmate John Lennon once put it, 'Genius is pain.'"

Lennon is a big part of this book, as he and McCartney never lost their competitive edge, and their relationship was far from straightforward. An example of that was how Lennon told the world he thought Band on the Run was an excellent album, while tossing the record around like a frisbee and calling it "bubble gum" in private. 

Along with this, Paul's relationship with Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono, was up and down at this time. In 1974, at a time they were separated, it was Paul who conveyed to Lennon what Yoko needed to reconcile. By 1980, Paul and Yoko's relationship hit rock bottom, and throughout Paul blamed her for driving a wedge between himself and John and meddling in The Beatles' business affairs

This was a period when McCartney proved his financial acumen, as he parlayed his own record sales into creating the biggest independent music publishing company in the world, which started with his purchase of the Buddy Holly catalogue. He also amassed the copyrights to hundreds of Standards and dozens of classic Broadway shows. This Midas touch he seemed to have led him to purchase the copyrights to the musicals Annie and Grease when they were still in development.

One of McCartney's more interesting projects came in October 1978, when he assembled a rock orchestra of famous names, including Robert Plant, Hank Marvin, Pete Townshend, David Gilmour, and John Bonham, to record an album as "Rockestra."

There were misses along the way, however, including when two songs McCartney wrote for major motion pictures in the late '70s were rejected by the producers, and he discovered one rejection when he noticed his name missing from a list of film credits in a newspaper ad.

McCartney's interest in science fiction in the mid-70s produced different results professionally. He wrote several songs inspired by the genre, "Magneto and Titanium Man," "Venus and Mars," and "Spirits of Ancient Egypt," but the feature films he developed were ultimately scrapped. This was despite the fact he collaborated on them with two masters of the sci-fi genre, author Isaac Asimov and television producer Gene Roddenberry.

These things are just the scratch of the surface on what you will find in this encyclopedia of sorts. It is full of thousands of never-before-seen documents, hundreds of interviews with producers, musicians, recording engineers, designers, and touring staff who worked with McCartney at this time. There also are exclusive interviews with all four surviving members of Wings - Geoff Britton, Joe English, Steve Holley, and Lawrence Juber. While they did not get to interview McCartney himself for this, the book is full of interviews he gave at the time of his projects to lend the work even more depth.