The 1972 song Paul McCartney thought no one would buy: “God, John’s crackers”
If there was any Beatles member who looked like he was going to have a great solo career, it should have been Paul McCartney.
After all, John Lennon was the more experimental of the songwriting duo, and even though the rest of his bandmates were bound to have the right people behind them, no one would have doubted that the same person who wrote all those whimsical ditties would eventually find the time to make even more masterpieces on his own. But that’s really what happened when the world’s heart broke after the Fab Four announced their split.
If we’re being completely honest, Macca was practically the casualty of the band in many respects. No one liked the idea of him making demos with Wings and going too experimental on RAM, and while most of those people would have been absolutely wrong for doubting him, it’s not like they didn’t have a point. McCartney was too ahead of the curve, and he needed a few more years before people actually started to take him seriously again.
Then again, a lot of those early records do have their fair share of highlights as well. Wild Life may have been torn through the mud as one of his all-time worst records, but since the record has a strange freewheelin’ vibe to it, it’s actually a lot more charming than a lot of people give it credit for. McCartney could still make a catchy song, if not an annoying tune, when he wanted to, and he was going to leave all of the political sloganeering to his old mate.
Lennon was always the one who was ready to talk about real issues, and when he came out with tunes like ‘Power to the People’, the world was ready to listen. Here was someone who had been through some of the biggest emotional hurdles that someone could go through in primal therapy, but when McCartney decided to throw his hat into the ring, he had more than a bit of cold feet when he started working up ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’.
He was willing to do everything he could to stand up for his Irish brethren, but he didn’t expect the record to do anything, either, saying, “I always used to think, God, John’s crackers, doing all these political songs. I understand he really feels deeply. So do I. I hate all that Nixon bit, all that Ireland bit, and oppression anywhere. I think our mob do, our generation do hate that and wish it could be changed, but I always used to think it’s still cool to not say anything about it, because it’s not going to sell anyway and no one’s gonna be interested.”
The song did have a great message, but no matter how much goodwill the song had towards its subject, it doesn’t really have the same kind of songwriting power as Lennon’s best moments. McCartney still sounded like a guy who was singing pop songs that just so happened to be about politics, and since Lennon was coming at it from a different angle on ‘The Luck of the Irish’, neither of them were actually in the best frame of mind when trying to stand up for what they believed in.
In fact, some of the best commentary about the state of the world didn’t come from Lennon or McCartney; it’s George Harrison. Ringo Starr was never going to be that committed to causes, but even if Harrison never spoke out against political injustice in his songs, all of his tunes were basically reminders to both his audience and himself about the state of the world and how we all should be treating each other going forward.
So while ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ did give McCartney more than a few accolades in Ireland and even climbed the charts in Spain, he would get a lot better when he had a few more political tunes under his belt. This wasn’t his usual wheelhouse, but if he could make a record like ‘Despite Repeated Warnings’ years after the fact, he was clearly willing to hone his craft a little bit more.
