I'm amused now to think that, when I heard McCartney II, I thought that was Paul's experimental phase. I was completely unaware of his pseudo-anonymous albums, where he called himself "The Fireman." Now I've listened to some of Strawberries Oceans Ships Forests (which I listened to out of order, having to jump back to 1993 for) and all of Rushes (the 1998 sequel album) and...well...it's very experimental stuff. Some of Rushes is almost not terrible, elevating it above John's and George's experimental albums, but that's really not saying much.
Which brings us back to Ringo. VH1 Storytellers: Ringo Starr, was a TV special turned into a "best of" album, with the added bonus that Ringo introduces each song with a humorous anecdote about that song. It's fun to listen to the stories and makes me wish more Best of albums had this kind of framing device.
Which, like a ping pong game, brings us back to Paul. In 1999 -- completely unknown to me at the time -- Paul came out with Run Devil Run, a really fun albums of rock n' roll covers. I've talked before about how much I love it when the Beatles, together or alone, cover their nostalgic, favorite rockers because they seem to be having the most fun when they're doing this. This album has several surprises -- apparently, Paul wrote three original songs that feel like rock n' roll oldies and hid them in the album so they would seem like covers. Surprisingly, the best song on the album is the most obscure oldie -- the 1958 skiffle song, transformed into a slower, haunting piece by Paul, "No Other Baby" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YipnDL3VrCw&list=PLNZ4pVtD8MsEYxFGTbGHJQ5guU7mFUdKZ&index=18 -- but in other cases Paul wisely knew better than to mess with the originals, like his slavish recreation of "Coquette." But there's not a bad song on the album.
And next we pong back to Ringo for I Wanna Be Santa Claus, the only solo Beatles Christmas album. I don't have access to the full album, but have heard the treacly title track "I Wanna Be Santa Claus," "Come On, Christmas, Christmas Come On" -- a solid rocker, if not overly Christmas-y, and his cover of "The Little Drummer Boy" -- which is no Mormon Tabernacle Choir version (or even Burl Ives version), but seems so appropriate for Ringo that it can be forgiven.
Paul's Working Classical is his third classical music album and his second best one, after Standing Stone. The highlight of the album is the inclusion of snippets of instrumental versions of some older and newer Paul songs (up through Flaming Pie), and not just with the vocals cut out, but actual new arrangements for different instruments. They sound really nice and, as snippets, they solve a problem a lot of instrumental covers have where, not the entire song really stands out well enough to be enjoyed just for the music, so you lose your place in the song if you're mentally singing along. These snippets highlight just the most iconic-sounding bits from the songs. Unfortunately, the original tracks also sound like they're just snippets, even the ones that kind of ramble on for up to 12 minutes.
From August of 2000, just four months before getting the Beatles' 1 CD for Christmas (I think most of the family gave each other copies, in fact), Paul then came out with Liverpool Sound Collage, yet another of those experimental albums. The first piece, "Plastic Beetle," isn't too bad, and it's kind of fun hearing random noise punctuated by the Beatles just talking and laughing. But "Peter Blake 2000" is just someone saying "Blake," I'm guessing, 2000 times and it was so awful I bailed on listening to the rest.
Which brings me to 2001 - the 21st century, at last! -- and Ringo's The Anthology ...So Far. This is Best of album, with material from the first three All-Starr Band albums, but there is so much extra material here that it feels like I'm listening to something brand new, or at most just similar to the previous albums. There's Ringo covering the songs you expect him to, and people from The Band, The Who, The Eagles, The Guess Who, and Billy Preston performing songs you would expect them to, and then surprises like Peter Frampton covering "Norwegian Wood" and Rick Danko of The Band covering Buddy Holly. Granted, I had to look up the names of everyone on this album other than Ringo, Billy Preston, and Joe Walsh of The Eagles because I'm not an expert on these bands, but I liked everything I heard and I'm sure that, had I been aware of this 3-CD set at the time, I would have snatched it up and fallen head over heels for the All-Starr Band, instead of wondering what that was all about all these years.
Which brings me to the multi-disc CD set (2 instead of 3) that I did get, Wingspan (though I didn't get it right away in 2001, but a few years later). And...well, what is there to say I haven't already said about dream Best of collections for Paul? It doesn't make sense to compile another Best of Wings collection because there's been no new Wings music to add to the last one. Though on the other hand, this is the one I bought and not the previous one, so maybe from a marketing standpoint this did make sense.
It's also worth pointing out that Wingspan includes a lot of past singles, while I've been sticking to songs that appeared on albums. The weakness of my approach being that it left "Live and Let Die" out of contention.
No comments:
Post a Comment