Wings Wild Life

After Ram, McCartney backtracked from audio sophistication and recorded Wings Wild Life, the birthing pains of a touring "band" he'd created with:

his wife Linda
Denny Siewell, the drummer from Ram &
Denny Laine, a former member of The Moody Blues

The album bombed, unfortunately, probably because of Ram. If Wings Wild Life had been released after McCartney instead, it would probably have fared much better. It's rough, it's raw...but it does have some redeeming features if you'll give it a chance. I'll review it track by track...because it's not really an album of ambience...it's just that some tracks work and some don't:

Mumbo...an instrumental nonsense rocker with indecipherable words...er, well, put it this way, it's far more interesting and funky that Why Don't We Do It In The Road from The White Album...but isn't as good as it should have been to be the opening track of a Paul McCartney album.

Bip Bop...Inane, totally ridiculous and with Mumbo altogether a god-awful way to start an album...but it's got a fingerpickin' groove that sometimes sounds pretty good.

Then things start to improve with a dare-I-say-it, slightly sexy, reggae-ish cover of Love Is Strange, (before reggae was known to pop) with what I believe to be Linda McCartney's best/only decent harmony vocals.

Next-up, the title track, Wild Life, is nothing special...but like on Abbey Road's Oh Darling! the vocal is so strong that the song quality doesn't matter. It's cool!

Some People Never Know & I Am Your Singer are the kind of McCartney slush that infuriate you one day and sound great the next...I'm sure you know what I mean. They're so inconsequential...but sometimes just what you need...Aaaaaaagh!

Toomorrow...ahhh! (not aaaaagh!) nice. A piano based, deightful stop-start ballad (?)...that sounds like it would have fitted on The White Album very nicely...and hopefully John would have scowled enough for McCartney to get the message and tighten up the words.

And finally, Dear Friend a truly lovely, poignant olive branch for John Lennon after the bitterness caused by McCartney suing the other Beatles in order to end the group as a financial identity. Unfortunately Lennon had (with the gleeful help of George Harrison) already penned his reaction, the scathing How Do You Sleep, from Imagine.

In hindsight, thirty years five later, Wings Wild Life is nowhere near as threatening as it once was, when Rock'n'Roll was developing at incredible speed and any RETRO step, like this casual, underproduced, even almost "jamming" album, seemed to be taking it off its cosmic trajectory.

If Wings Wild Life was released now, we'd think:

"Oh, Paul's doing a laid-back album, great."

Then, when Rock'n'Roll was so much more serious, McCartney's indulgence of taking time out was close to sacrelige. Give it a listen, you may be surprised, you may even enjoy it.

For more info, see:

wikipedia Wings Wild Life

The remastered edition also has Wings 2 singles:

Give Ireland Back to The Irish, McCartney's reaction to the Sunday Bloody Sunday massacre, which was banned by the BBC. McCartney replied by issuing Mary Had A Little Lamb (pop version) two months later as if to say: "Ban that!" They didn't...but the critics hated it!