The lyrics that Paul McCartney was embarrassed by
The entire mentality of most pop songwriting can be traced back to the legacy that Paul McCartney helped build. As part of a writing duo with John Lennon, McCartney turned The Beatles into one of the greatest creative entities that rock and roll had ever seen, turning in one classic after another throughout the 1960s. Even though McCartney has always been humble about writing a handful of his classics, he admitted that one of his more celebrated songs could have used more work.
By the time that McCartney had started his solo career, he was practically dead in the water creatively. Thinking that he would be a part of the Fab Four for decades to come, McCartney was heartbroken when everything crumbled around him, leading to months where he spent the days at his home not wanting to go out for any reason.
While his first handful of albums with Linda McCartney saw him creating more adventurous music on his own, McCartney thought he could thrive if he had a band behind him. With the help of Moody Blues guitarist Denny Laine, Wings was born in the early 1970s, quickly taking flight once McCartney began turning in songs like ‘My Love’ and the colossal smash ‘Band on the Run’.
After the band got their bearings, they started to come into their own in the late 1970s, including the massive album Venus and Mars. Sounding like a rock concert on the other side of the cosmos, McCartney had the perfect opening for the record, gently strumming an acoustic guitar before blasting down the doors with the song ‘Rock Show’.
Compared to the other songs on the record, ‘Venus and Mars’ is more subdued. While the song is only meant to create the template for the rest of the album, McCartney admitted that the track wasn’t near the extravagant opening that he would have intended to put out.
Even though the song does a great job of bringing across the celestial sounds of another world, McCartney thought the lyrics could have used a bit of work. Instead of the different word associations he had going at the time, McCartney thought the song was a bit too trite than what he was used to.
Looking back in his anthology book The Lyrics, McCartney thought that the track wasn’t near the kind of opening that he wanted, saying, “I was really throwing all of these ideas of the planets and ‘the stars’ and the live show – all of these period words – into this one song, which I don’t perform a lot, because of the embarrassment factor. But I’ve also met people who love this song, so I’ve kind of learnt to shut up about it”.
Despite the dated vernacular put into the song, McCartney would eventually segue the song into different pieces of his live set. Instead of going right into ‘Rock Show’, McCartney occasionally used the song as a prelude to the uptempo rocker ‘Jet’. Even with the subpar lyrics on his part, Venus and Mars proved that after years of being known as one of the casualties of The Beatles, McCartney was about to become a classic songwriter yet again.
