The Paul McCartney song he said should have never been made: “That’s really lousy”
The biggest goal for Paul McCartney seemed to be to go through life without too many regrets.
Not everyone gets to be in one of the biggest bands in the world, and sometimes all it takes is the right kind of people to come together to make the best songs that anyone has ever heard. But while he and John Lennon rarely had a dry session when they got together, there were bound to be a few times in his solo career where Macca couldn’t come up with the goods as he should have.
Granted, it’s a lot easier to be forgiving when talking about one of the single greatest songwriters of all time. McCartney has been making songs for a lot longer than most of his audience has been alive, so by nature, that means that not everything was going to be perfect. But ever since coming out with his first solo record, McCartney was always interested in playing around with what he could do in the studio rather than trying to make something perfect.
Because as he had seen from working with the Fabs, perfection doesn’t always mean getting the best take. He had embarrassed himself one too many times in front of his bandmates trying to be the dictator of his own tunes, but when looking at how many times the band went over a tune like ‘Because’ only for it to be perfect one of the first times around, it was a lot easier for him to start settling with the take that felt the best than something that was technically flawless.
And it probably helped when bringing his wife, Linda, into the studio. Linda would have been the first to say that she wasn’t the greatest singer in the world, but that’s half of the charm of listening to an album like RAM. Despite getting torn apart by the critics at the time, you can feel the energy and charisma spilling out of every single track, even if it wasn’t the kind of masterpiece that everyone expected out of him.
But when putting together Wings, he did end up shooting himself in the foot a little bit. The band members were all fantastic at their instruments, but seeing how Wild Life was meant to capture the spirit of them jamming in a room, that didn’t mean the most inspired takes were going to make it onto the final record. And while ‘Bip Bop’ may have been a fun tune for him to play at home, McCartney made sure that he didn’t have to return to it again.
Compared to the other experiments that he made at the time, Macca said that he would gladly have chucked the song out had he known how annoying it would become, saying, “Looking back on some of it now, I think, ‘You didn’t finish the bloody thing.’ So . . . yeah, I might have been a bit soft, and some of it might have been a bit unfinished. And sometimes a critic will say, ‘That’s really lousy’ – and I’ll tend to agree with him: ‘He’s right, it’s not very good, that one’. I know there are quite a few tracks on my albums that I just don’t like now. Like ‘Bip Bop,’ off Wild Life – oh, God, I can’t listen to it; it just goes nowhere.”
And from a writing standpoint, it’s not like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ or even ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ for that matter. This was him trying to be as primitive as possible, and while that can work in moderation, giving the audience this after making an album like Abbey Road must have felt like a slap in the face. Then again, is it all that different from what John and Yoko were doing when making Two Virgins?
Sure, it wasn’t as avant-garde as that, but it was all about McCartney trimming things down and making everything simple all over again. The Fab Four had already talked about getting back to where they once belonged towards the end of their time together, but this is what happens when someone goes a little bit too far in that direction.
