“Could stand up”: The song Paul McCartney thought should have been remade
Not every classic song has to have the greatest recording behind it to become legendary. An album like And Justice For All by Metallica will forever be a mainstay of heavy metal badassery, but the fact that it still sounds like it’s being performed in an alternate dimension where bass doesn’t exist will always be a point of contention for fans. Most people didn’t have to worry about that regarding The Beatles’ masterpieces, but Paul McCartney had his work cut out for him when he flew solo for the first time.
Then again, Macca seemed like the last person who would have too many problems getting any of his ideas down on paper. After all, he was the perfectionist in the group, so it wasn’t impossible for him to think of the right idea for how a song should be constructed and throw it into the mix, like writing ‘Come and Get It’ for Badfinger or those points on The White Album where he would make entire tracks on his own.
So when fans got to hear his first official solo outing, McCartney left a lot of fans confused. There was a surefire hit on the record in ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, but the rest of the album felt like it was thrown together half the time. But if Macca was going to go solo for the first time, he wanted to make sure that he laid himself bare as well, much in the same way that John Lennon had done on Plastic Ono Band.
McCartney wasn’t going for a confessional style of writing, but the majority of the instruments were fairly minimal compared to everything else in his catalogue. Considering RAM was the next thing he put out, it’s strange for him to make something that sounded this unfinished, especially a song like ‘That Would Be Something, which, while great in its own right, wasn’t going to endear him to fans wanting the simple verse/chorus song structure.
While most of the album feels like a demo rather than a proper studio recording, some pieces are close to done in many respects. ‘Teddy Boy’ is a nice piece of fluff from his Beatle days, and ‘Junk’ is gorgeous even played on an acoustic guitar, but looking back on the album, he felt like the song ‘Every Night’ could have benefited from having a bigger arrangement behind it than what it eventually got.
The barebones version of it does sound promising, but McCartney felt that there was a chance that he could have made it a little more refined, saying, “Going back to earlier songs, ‘Every Night’ could stand up to being remade. Other people have made good recordings of it, and I remember that when I played the McCartney album to Ringo, he said that he preferred my original solo version, when I had first sung it to him.”
The song does feel more like a studio creation with the different overdubs of guitars, but that’s hardly a knock against it. The whole point of the record was to capture McCartney in his natural habitat making music only for himself, and having this song as one of the foundations of the record does make you feel like a fly on the wall as every single piece of the track is being laid out.
The Unplugged version that McCartney would do later had a few more refined elements to it, but the flawed version will always be the definitive way to listen to the track. It has a bit of rough edges and doesn’t have the kind of knockout chorus many would expect from one of The Beatles, but McCartney fans would have it no other way.
