The rhythm section Paul McCartney considered “the best”
Anyone who ever tried to tell Paul McCartney what to do after The Beatles was bound to have to take a cold, hard look in the mirror. Macca practically wrote the rulebook on what great melodies are supposed to sound like, and even if they weren’t the most inventive songs anyone had ever heard, it’s hard to argue with what he could do when left to his own devices in a studio. While a lot of what he did with his old band has been mythologised endlessly, one of the most criminally underrated sides to his music comes from his sense of rhythm.
This is strange, considering we first got to know him as the bass player for the Fab Four. McCartney could definitely hold down a groove and play off of Ringo Starr perfectly, but when listening back to their story, his bass playing usually gets glossed over as a secondary part of his sound, with everyone usually focusing on what he could do when he and John Lennon sat down to write a song together.
If you listen back to a track like ‘Something’, though, McCartney was always a more complex musician than anyone gave him credit for. He wasn’t going to play a lick that made Steve Vai hang his head in shame, wondering how the hell he did it, but he certainly knew what little piece of ear candy would lead the listener into the next part of the song, like when he plays a little bit busier while the rest of the band is stagnant.
But by the time he reached his solo years, McCartney knew that he could work with the best in the world if he wanted to. Even though his first years saw him turning in time in Wings and starting all the way back at zero, the 1980s were when he really got to shine, with Tug of War being the moment when he embraced his pop side again.
Even though there are songs that people consider the musical equivalent of getting tased in the genitals, like ‘Ebony and Ivory’, it’s not like McCartney couldn’t play well with others. In fact, if this were a just world, ‘What’s That You’re Doing’ would be the song that everyone would have remembered from this era, featuring Stevie Wonder playing some of the funkiest grooves to turn up on a McCartney record.
Almost anything that has Wonder’s sonic touch would have been better in the 1980s, but McCartney thought what really made the record go was getting Steve Gadd and Stanley Clarke on drums and bass, respectively, saying, “I wanted to play with Stevie Wonder, and we did two together instead. I wanted Steve Gadd on drums and Stanley Clarke on bass simply because they’re the best, and I wanted the best. Why not?”
And that’s not McCartney giving his light praise. Looking at both men’s resumes, it reads like a star-studded look through the 1970s music scene, with Gadd laying down the phenomenal solo on Steely Dan’s ‘Aja’ and Clarke working with some of the biggest names in jazz like George Duke and Chick Corea. McCartney wasn’t even the first one to try to get a bit more rhythm in his tunes, with George Harrison already tapping Willie Weeks to add raw magic to his 1979 album.
But even if they have a unique jazz vocabulary, Clarke and Gadd weren’t about to turn Tug of War into a jazz record on a whim. They wanted to serve the song in whatever way possible, and as long as Gadd was counting off the intro to the song, no one had to worry about the drums ever again.
