Chaos and Creation in the Backyard
Paul McCartney
The last time Paul McCartney made an album in the vein of his latest CD, Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, John Lennon was alive to hear it. McCartney had just cast off Wings, the notoriously ephemeral quasi-band comprising his blithe novice-musician wife, Linda, and their loyal mate Denny Laine (augmented on some records by a floating assortment of players varying in ability) after nine years, ten LPs, and countless critical gibes at the slyly criticism-proof "Silly Love Songs." With the benefit of nine days of stock-taking in a Tokyo jail on a charge of marijuana possession, McCartney retrenched; he re-grouped without a group, playing all the instruments on an album called McCartney II in 1980. "He sounds depressed," Lennon told a writer for Playboy not long before he was murdered twenty-five years ago this month. Indeed, with the exception of the intricate, bouncy single "Coming Up" and the grating "Temporary Secretary," most of the songs on the record were startlingly, uncharacteristically, almost refreshingly lugubrious and dull. McCartney was ready to re-claim his musical identity, if only he could find it. The album was a titular sequel to his first solo venture, made ten years earlier, immediately after McCartney had left his previous band. McCartney, much like the records John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr each made immediately after the Beatles disbanded, was an act of purging. Yet unlike Lennon's Plastic Ono Band (a Janovian scream of self-defined genius in pain), Harrison's All Things Must Pass (a creative awakening in the name of pop mysticism), and Starr's Sentimental Journey (an outrageous attempt to croon standards, with some elegant arrangements by Oliver Nelson and Chico O'Farrell), McCartney was less an effort to establish an individual identity as it was an attempt to purge the Beatles of its group identity. I don't need those other three (nor anyone else besides my wife), McCartney seemed to be saying. I can do it all, just as well, by myself, in the backyard of my estate in Scotland. The album was something of a cheat: supposedly home-made on lo-fi equipment, it was only partly so. Several of the most striking tracks, including "Maybe I'm Amazed," "Junk," and "Every Night," were recorded in secrecy, over time, in top London studios, and the best songs ("Junk" and "Teddy Boy") had been composed years earlier, with the Beatles in mind.
Still, McCartney was impressive and appealing. It was also flawed by an excess of fragmentary, slipshod tracks--harbingers of Paul's long solo career. By making proudly Beatles-esque music all by himself, writing every word and playing and singing virtually every note (Linda contributed some background vocals, though not many notes), McCartney shook off Lennon, Harrison, and Starr to try to prove that what remained without them, Paul McCartney, was the Beatles. By simultaneously corrupting the effort, mingling the sophisticated, burnished moments with others of maladroit noodling, he laid claim both to the esteem of the Beatles' achievements and to the license to coast off them as he chose.
The new CD is, essentially, McCartney III. It brings McCartney playing nearly all the instruments--various guitars, piano, organ, bass, drums, miscellaneous percussion, autoharp, recorder, even cello, flugelhorn, and toy glockenspiel. (Several tracks have additional string and brass sections, and a few guest soloists handle specialty instruments such as the duduk, an Armenian woodwind.) As with McCartney and McCartney II, this effort is an attempt at re- definition--in this case, a clarification of McCartney's creative identity after more than a decade of diffusive fiddling, sidesteps, dalliances, and half- hearted experiments. For his previous album, released four years ago, McCartney wrote the songs hastily, in some cases finishing them in the studio, and he recorded the music with unfamiliar young studio musicians under Los Angeles producer David Kahne. The result, Driving Rain, was even weaker, more scattershot than his preceding recording of original material, Flaming Pie, from 1997, a toy chest full of colorful, misshapen playthings, including two songs written while they were being recorded: a duet with Steve Miller and a nonsense riff called "Really Love You," co-credited to Ringo because he supplied the backbeat. McCartney explained that working on the Beatles' Anthology of obscurities had inspired him to make Flaming Pie, which not only derived its named from a vintage bon mot by John Lennon but whose music sounds very much like Beatles rejects, demos, and outtakes. (They were nominally improved by Jeff Lynne, their producer, who tried brushing the album with that metallic ELO sound.) Both records had notable high points, though: Driving Rain's "She's Given Up Talking," a cryptic story-song, and Flaming Pie's "Calico Skies" and "Heaven on a Sunday," a pair of lovely ballads.
Between the two albums, in 1998, McCartney lost his wife to cancer and wrestled with the grief, recording a raw, bleak album of early rock and roll numbers (and a few originals in their style) with a tight little pick-up band. Named Run Devil Run for a sign that he saw on a New Orleans drug store, the record is a small triumph, but it is essentially not Paul McCartney music. A month later, he released a collection of short pieces in the classical mode, Working Classical, his third CD of concert music, following the well-meaning work of apprenticeship, "Liverpool Oratorio" in 1991, and the overwrought "Standing Stone" six years later. Like every one of his pop albums, including the worst, Working Classical is, by turns, uncommonly tuneful and pleasant (most notably in a pair of sweet, pretty tone poems, "A Leaf" and "Spiral") and numbingly trite (as in the string-quartet versions of "My Love" and "Lovely Linda").
He sees every musical venture as a rail journey, McCartney explained in a recent interview to promote Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. "It's like sort of stepping on a train," he said. "I don't worry about other trains I've been on, just this new train, and that's exciting. You just have to realize that perhaps you can't always have as great a journey as you had in the past." Of course, riding a locomotive is a passive experience. It is not much like the active and often arduous creative processes that composers and musicians typically describe. If McCartney thinks of himself as a mere passenger in the course of his work, one wonders: who, then, is steering? Who, or what, is running the engine? His producer? His collaborators? His audience? Each of them influences him, sometimes mightily. But the primary traits of his music--its casualness, its buoyancy, its disarming juvenility, its caprice, its wild unevenness in quality--suggest that McCartney tends to entrust his destiny to only one driver: himself. His own talent took him so far for so long that he has become content to go along for the ride.
