George was understandably upset when the Best of George Harrison album was released and half the songs were Beatles songs. Which begs the question: how hard could it be to come up with 13 great solo Harrison songs by the end of 1976?
Obviously, the All Things Must Pass album would be well-represented here. The actual album only includes "My Sweet Lord" and "What Is Life." I would include "Isn't It a Pity," "Let It Down," and "All Things Must Pass," even if that does make more than one-third of the album a re-release of All Things Must Pass. "Give Me Love" from Living in the Material World, "Dark Horse" from Dark Horse, and "See Yourself" and "Crackerbox Palace" from Thirty-Three and 1/3 are musts. Dang, still need four more....I guess I would need to include at least one song from each album, so I would add "Bangla-desh" from The Concert of Bangla Desh and "Tired of Midnight Blue" from Extra Texture so those albums are represented. Two more...gee, this is tough! Sorry, George, but I gotta go back to mine more from All Things Must Pass. "Wah-Wah," "Apple Scruffs," and "The Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp" are better than anything else on the latter albums. There, 14 songs, culling the least from All Things Must Pass and replacing them with the best from the latter albums.
I debated whether or not to listen to concert albums in this project. I'm not generally a fan of them. But Wings over America is a great album. This is where the extended, far superior version of "Maybe I'm Amazed" first comes from. This version of "Call Me Back Again" is superior to the original and this version of "Hi Hi Hi" is more rocking than the original. There are fun variants of the Beatles song "I've Just Seen a Face" and Wings' "Picasso's Last Words." There is a terrific cover of "Go Now" that I have never heard Paul sing before. The only flaw in the album is a new song, "Richard Cory," an attempt at a folk song, that thankfully disappears from all McCartney albums after this (looking this up after the fact, I see it's a cover of a Paul Simon song based on an old poem, but...bleh. You'll never find this on a Best of Paul Simon album either!).
Goodness, I'm getting sidetracked. While working on this project I discovered the existence of Live! At the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany. There are 26 songs on this album, some of which would find homes on their early albums, some I recognize from Beatles Live at the BBC, and some I've never heard before!
I got sidetracked there for awhile, listening to concert tracks and BBC tracks, and a lot of great Beatles music. That made it difficult to go back to solo records and...Ringo the 4th. Not a memorable song on the album and ...ugh... all so disco-y!
Quick, need to wash it down with "Mull of Kintyre." ...Phew!
But Scouse the Mouse, Ringo's children's album? That was a lot of fun! It's a shame the animated special was never made...and kind of weird that the album was produced before the special. "Scouse's Dream," "Scouse the Mouse," and "I Know a Place," are all breezy fun, enjoyable tunes, while "S.O.S." and "A Mouse Like Me" have some weight to them.
Equally enjoyable is Bad Boy -- man, Ringo was really cranking them out fast, trying for a hit! Well, not the song "Bad Boy" itself, which is more Ringo the 4th-type silliness, but "Who Needs a Heart" is pretty good, "Heart on My Sleeve" is even better, and "Where Did Our Love Go" is a real nice cover. Side B is pretty solid except for "Old Time Relovin'" (Reloving...?), and "A Mouse Like Me" sounds even better as "A Man Like Me," becoming my favorite track on this album - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO0zN9Axo7g&list=PL7C3C0039597B5677&index=10
Whew, I just listened to Wings Greatest Hits -- twice! It's hard to find any fault with this sterling selection of songs. My only complaints would be that the order of the songs seems very random and they don't fit well next to each other, and this should have been a two-disc album for twice the songs!
George Harrison's next album is George Harrison and it was really nice hearing George get serious about music again. "Blow Away" is a great song. I've liked "Not Guilty" since I heard it on the Beatles Anthology albums -- what a long time to sit on such a good song! I'm also partial to "If You Believe" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw8rp5RScp8 - I've never heard this one before but it sounds real pretty; love the guitar work on it. In fact, everything on Side B is at least pretty good, what I like to call "one draft away from perfect" songs.
Now it's back to Paul and, oh dear...Wings Greatest Hits was followed by Back to the Egg? It's been a long time since we got a Wings album full of filler, and such mundane filler that "Getting Closer" and "Arrow through Me," the good songs, sound too good for this album, like they wound up here by accident. To be fair, "Old Siam Sir," would probably make a good instrumental. "Baby's Request," alone on Side B, is promising. But the rest are...some of them are paired-up like mini-medleys, but while Paul has done some beautiful things with medleys in the past, here they feel crudely mashed together. Some of them are barely, or even literally not, even songs. "The Broadcast" seems like it was accidentally recorded over a real song.
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