“Throwaways”: How Paul McCartney almost discarded one of his best albums
It’s easy to trust Paul McCartney to know when he has a hit on his hands.
From the minute The Beatles began, he was already making the best music that any other rockstar had attempted, and his work as a solo artist was all about trying to find that one pop marvel that he hadn’t touched on before. But when the hit of the initial breakup finally sank in, it would have been enough to break nearly anybody.
Macca was not ready to move on from his old band, and given how much Allen Klein pitted them against him, he had both lost his best friends and was now being painted as the villain of the band’s story for daring to work on a record on his own. It probably didn’t help the initial hype surrounding the first records that he put out, given that most people were thinking that he had lost his mind.
Granted, the critics were more than a little bit harsh in many respects. RAM was certainly ahead of its time in many ways and had more than its fair share of great tunes, but since all that the press wanted to hear was whatever new singer-songwriter tunes were coming of John Lennon, they weren’t going to have any tolerance for McCartney getting a little bit whacky on tracks like ‘Monkberry Moon Delight’ or cutesy on ‘Heart of the Country’.
RAM was certainly his first major statement as a solo artist, but whenever McCartney or the band talked about his actual solo debut, it was always treated as an afterthought. Since the album itself contained a Q&A with McCartney announcing that the Fab Four were over, it felt like more of a PR announcement than a proper album, which wasn’t helped by the fact that most of the songs were glorified demos.
If McCartney hadn’t known better, though, he would have accidentally left a lot of these demos to be thrown out, saying, “They weren’t quite throwaways. That was the whole idea of the album: all the normal things that you record that are great and have all this atmosphere, but aren’t that good as recording or production jobs. Normally, that stuff ends up with the rest of your demos, but all that stuff is often stuff I love.”
At first, it’s easy to look at this record and think it’s a shadow of what All Things Must Pass or Plastic Ono Band were, but McCartney was onto something much bigger. ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ was considered one of the main highlights at the time, but the more homemade spin he puts on tracks like ‘That Would Be Something’ and ‘Junk’ helped give it a more organic feel that is more indebted to what the modern indie scene sounds like.
This probably explains why he ended up revisiting this kind of approach two more times throughout his career. While he did reserve a handful of his experimental moments for projects with The Fireman, McCartney II and III both offer their own unique versions of what his music sounded like at the time, whether that was the first sequel of him experimenting with synthesisers or the late-period record of him trying to make sense of everything going on during a global pandemic.
The rest of his bandmates were making forward-looking music, but the amount of charm on this one record is the reason why McCartney was going to last. Not everyone could get away with releasing what amounted to a bunch of demos as a full record, but from the cheeky laugh he has at the end of ‘The Lovely Linda’ to the strange instrumental detours like ‘Momma Miss America’, it’s impossible not to see what ‘The Cute One’ still had to offer.
