McCartney (1970)

With the Beatles' future uncertain in late 1969 and early 1970, Paul McCartney, eager to continue making music, conceived a solo album on which he played all of the instruments, with basic recording equipment and  low-fidelity sound, as an exercise to keep himself active.  By the time he released the LP in the spring of 1970, it had become his declaration of independence from the Beatles.  It was an inauspicious one at that.

McCartney has its charms as a home-made album, especially in marked contrast to the polish and perfection that defined Abbey Road, and it's as rough-hewn as Let It Be was intended to be - maybe more so.  But there's little on the album that stands up to repeated listening.  Paul was more interested in getting something out for the sake of itself, and it shows in the casual approach he took not necessarily to arranging the songs but in writing them.  A song like "Man We Was Lonely" is a fragment that expresses an idea more suitable for a single verse, and the premise of "That Would Be Something" is more suitable for a single lyric.  Other songs fare better because of their simplicity. "Junk," a paean to the flotsam and jetsam of life that had been a candidate for a Beatles record, is a quaint and plaintive number, and "Every Night" - which Phoebe Snow covered masterfully - is a fine folk-style ballad.  And both are prime examples of Paul's gift for melody.  But mostly, McCartney is little more than pleasant, something that doesn't leave you much to ponder as soon as one track ends and another begins.  For example, another song originally conceived for the Beatles - "Teddy Boy" - is a story of a mother-son relationship that doesn't give us any reason to care for Paul's protagonists.

McCartney does have a warm, fuzzy down-home feeling, and it was packaged with family photos to drive the point home that his wife Linda and their two little girls inspired that feeling - the better to show that Paul was happier now than he had been when with the Beatles.  But Paul confuses happiness with complacency, and the result is rather wanting; there are five instrumentals here, mostly ad-libbed, and they're so forgettable you can't remember how they sounded as soon as you've heard them.  The one song that stands out, of course, is "Maybe I'm Amazed," an urgent ballad that recalled Paul's best work with the Beatles and is a harbinger of his best solo work going forward.  If only there had been more of that here.

But then, such urgency wasn't the objective; Paul simply wanted to make a record that didn't sweat the details.  The takeaway, though, is that, as McCartney was recorded with a shrug, that's precisely the best way to respond to it. In retrospect, McCartney isn't a farewell to the Beatles or a blueprint for a solo career that would include a new band in the form of Wings.  It just . . . is.