The one supergroup Paul McCartney always wanted to join
Paul McCartney didn’t really need to check too many boxes in terms of which bands he needed to join.
The Beatles are already a high bar for anyone to match, and even if he had a wealth of people willing to work with him, watching him turn Wings into a force to be reckoned with was one of the greatest second acts he could have hoped for. But as he started getting a bit older, he started to see that there were some new kids on the block that he would have gladly shared a stage with.
Then again, there were always different avenues that Macca could explore on his own half the time. Although not all of his music was in fashion throughout his solo career, hearing him dip his toes into electronic territory on his series of Fireman albums with Youth i always refreshing, and even into his 80s, he still manages to make records like Egypt Station that sound as vibrant as he did when he first started making his solo masterpieces.
But even with the great music he could make on his own, it’s not like every single one of his collaborations knocked it out of the park, either. The Michael Jackson duet ‘The Girl is Mine’ is generally seen as the worst song on Thriller for a reason, and while both McCartney and Stevie Wonder have each done great work in the past, there’s no reason why anyone needs to go back to a song like ‘Ebony and Ivory’.
For the first time since the 1970s, though, the 2000s saw McCartney get a bit of the energy back into his music. While there’s nothing wrong with the more downtempo music throughout the 1990s like Flaming Pie or even the strange detours like Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, a song like ‘Only Mama Knows’ is still one of the most energetic tracks of his career that most people had been dying to hear since the days of ‘Junior’s Farm’ and ‘Jet’.
Although the opportunity was there to jam with a lot of the newer acts, McCartney felt a little bit dejected knowing that he never got to work with Them Crooked Vultures, saying, “We went out for a bite to eat afterwards and Dave told me he was starting this band with Josh [Homme]. I asked him who was playing bass and he rather sheepishly told me he’d approached John. So you read it here first; Paul McCartney was nearly the bass player in Them Crooked Vultures.
Admittedly, it’s not like the band were in shaky hands with John Paul Jones or anything. Dave Grohl had his dream band to work with, and while McCartney could have easily added the odd keyboard line to things, there’s a good chance that some of his melodic sensibilities would have clashed with whatever Josh Homme was trying to get across when working on tracks like ‘New Fang’.
Then again, that didn’t stop McCartney from going back and becoming the unofficial frontman of Nirvana for a few seconds on ‘Cut Me Some Slack’. Despite Kurt Cobain saying that he was far from a fan of McCartney’s brand of pop music, hearing him break out his Little Richard pipes and play with a grungy guitar made out of a cigar box was the kind of edge that he could have easily brought to the Vultures had he got the call.
Things may not have worked out, but part of the joy of rock and roll is being in the right time and place to see something through. McCartney was there for a lot of those classic moments when with the Fab Four, but he was more than willing to watch from the sidelines when he heard one of his fellow rock icons making magic happen.
