The 1979 album Paul McCartney called a complete disaster: “Didn’t do well”
When any musician reaches the level Paul McCartney reached, they don’t really need to try anymore if they don’t want to.
The biggest names in music don’t need to be making something that’s going to rival what they did in their prime, but Macca has made it a priority of trying to make some of the best songs that he can as long as he’s still standing, whether that’s a decent rocker or the kind of tunes that his parents would have been proud of back in the day. But sometimes when you have amassed that many hits, it’s not as easy to see what the true classics sound like.
Because as much as McCartney liked the idea of having a solo career, it was virtually impossible to compare anything he did to that of The Beatles. The Fab Four had been making some of the greatest songs that anyone had ever made, and even if McCartney managed to do at least a fraction of what they had done, it still wouldn’t have been enough to make up for some of the anthems that he gave to the world.
But it’s not like he was going to roll over and fade into obscurity, either. He wanted to push forward with every record he made, and while he got a lot of unjustified scorn for it, like when he began working on RAM, Wings was at least his way of trying to create some sort of offshoot of his old band. He and Denny Laine weren’t going to be the same partnership that he was in with John Lennon, but Wings’ career has always been a little bit odd in the public eye.
On paper, you would have thought that McCartney created one of the worst bands in history based on what the critics were saying about Wild Life, but McCartney had more than enough gas in the tank to make some stunning pop songs. ‘Listen to What the Man Said’ and ‘Band on the Run’ deserved to be praised just as much as ‘Eleanor Rigby’; it’s just that most of his audience were being told that he was the biggest flop of the Fabs.
So when Wings eventually folded after Back to the Egg, even McCartney admitted that he felt like he was spinning his wheels, saying, “The critics gave us a hard run, but I was particularly hard on us. I remember looking at a book, there was an album we did, I think it was Back to the Egg, which didn’t do well, and I remember thinking, ‘God, complete disaster.’” Getting to only number eight on the charts would have been a disappointment for any member of the band not named Ringo Starr, but it’s not like McCartney was in shambles by any stretch.
In fact, Back to the Egg might hold the title for being one of the strangest Wings albums in many respects. He was still trying to make genuine pop songs like ‘Getting Closer’, but after going through the mellow grooves on London Town, a lot of what turns up here sounds like McCartney trying out every single genre that he can think of and seeing where it goes. And, surprise, surprise, he’s actually pretty decent at all of them.
His attempts at punk might be cute at best on tracks like ‘Spin It On’, but when he’s not putting muscle into everything on tunes like ‘Rockestra Theme’, his flirtation with synths on ‘Arrow Through Me’ remains one of the few times where a rockstar flirted with disco and actually managed to pull it off. And even by his granny music standards, ‘Baby’s Request’ is a fairly decent little tune to close out the end of the album.
No, it’s nowhere near the same fireworks show that Venus and Mars were, and even McCartney II deserves a little bit more praise for how absolutely bonkers it is, but Back to the Egg is the kind of album that shows McCartney at a transitional point in his career. He was ready to close this chapter of his career in many respects, but he had to wait a few years before his luck ran out after his drug bust.
