“Really torture”: the Paul McCartney song that Wings struggled to record
The whole point of being a rockstar is not looking at anything as work. Yes, it’s supposed to be a business, but for anyone who gets to play music for millions of people and create magic in the studio, it’s supposed to be an absolute laugh throughout every part of their daily routine. While Paul McCartney would have admittedly had some issues living in the shadow of The Beatles, his band remembered recording this deep cut being torture to get onto the final tape.
Looking at Macca’s solo career starting out, he was really going to need some bold reinvention if he wanted to be on equal footing with his former mates. McCartney was considered no more than a demo album when it was first released, and despite being given its credit for the masterpiece that it is now, RAM was greeted with mixed feelings at the time and was slagged off by the critics from the minute they heard it.
So, if McCartney wasn’t going to get respect on his own, maybe he could get it if he formed another band. After all, John Lennon had the Plastic Ono Band to help him throughout his early years, so Wings felt like McCartney’s version of the same thing, with Linda filling out the lineup alongside Denny Laine and drummer Denny Seiwell. For a group with a Beatle in it, though, you’d think that we would get something a little less ramshackle than the jam sessions that turned up on Wild Life.
Although it’s easy to cut him some slack for breaking in the band, Red Rose Speedway was him inching towards something bigger, especially with the radio-tastic ‘My Love’. However, one must never forget that McCartney is a perfectionist, and it was clear that he was asking for more than the band could do on the medley of songs at the end of the album.
This kind of idea had already gone down well on Abbey Road, but comparing this version to one of the best musical movements of the 20th century is hardly fair. Whereas Lennon claimed the Abbey Road medley was a bunch of songs stringed together, this is a more accurate version of that sentiment, complete with distinctive breaks where one tune starts and another begins.
It would have been hard enough to keep track of what everyone was playing, but producer John Leckie remembered the band working down to the bone to get the vocals right, saying, “Around one microphone, you’d have Paul, Linda, and Denny Laine singing. And there’s something about singing around one microphone rather than singing around three. You do them around one microphone, and then they have to balance themselves. I remember it being really torture for the band doing ‘Hold Me Tight’ and ‘Lazy Dynamite’ because it’s very empty.”
But for what it is, the medley is a pretty good time throughout all of its 11 minutes. Hearing them bringing back different musical themes throughout the piece is pretty fun, and although Linda’s voice is not nearly as professional in the mix, hearing her harmonies on tunes like ‘Hands of Love’ is a lot more endearing than what Yoko Ono was doing on some of Lennon’s tunes around the same time.
McCartney never lost the bug for making medleys, either, and eventually melded different pieces together on future solo projects like Memory Almost Full and Egypt Station. Compared to most of the Wings discography after Band on the Run, Red Rose Speedway feels like the one that’s the most playful, and for any Beatles fan, it was nice to see McCartney starting to get his groove back.
