Ahh, the 1970s. It gave us regrettable ubiquity like avocado-green kitchen appliances, the gas-guzzling Oldsmobile Cutlass, the reverse-heeled Earth Shoe, fondue pots, shag carpet, leisure suits, waterbeds, mullets, and a brand of soft-in-the-head and softer-on-the-ears rock music that was a 360-degree turn from the prior decade. It was a laundry list of sins that cultural critics crucified with amphetamine glee, especially popular music’s turn toward airy, easy listening.
On the musical front, the mightiest of the Beatles‘ melody makers, Paul McCartney, was especially reviled for his saccharine turn. Much of “the cute Beatles” 1970s and later output, especially with his band Wings, made him a whipping boy for critics and fans alike. “My Love”, “Another Day”, “Wonderful Christmas Time”, and the soft self-defense of “Silly Love Songs” were gossamer-light lyrical nothings whose undeniably infectious melodies propelled them to the upper reaches of the charts. I, for one, reluctantly admired a good bit of it, his sometimes narratively vacuous but chart-scaling sonic earworms. I always felt they should be celebrated more for what they are and what they accomplished than for what they weren’t.
As someone who watched the 1960s unfold as a child too young to participate actively, I could see that society was tired of grand statements and the kind of collective action that produced little change (aside from ending the first of our continuing litany of failed regime-change wars). By the 1970s, the US was turning the dial to “let’s just chill” after the frenzy, marking the beginning of an era of self-absorption that is now in overdrive, thanks to social media.
These shifts in mind and heart needed a mellow, much less ambitious soundtrack to wind down with. Earlier revolutionaries like McCartney delivered it, alongside the new genre’s consistent hitmakers like Bread and one-hit wonders like the Starlight Vocal Band (“Afternoon Delight”) and Starbuck (“Moonlight Is Right”).
By the early 1990s, some of the era’s most adored hipsters began to reveal their guilty affection for this confection. Sonic Youth, Shonen Knife, and even the Circle Jerks covered the Carpenters, while the White Stripes and the High Llamas did the same for Burt Bacharach. Over time, the lightest tracks by Free Design, Hall & Oates, Toto, and Fleetwood Mac were re-recorded by everyone from Hole to Weezer to Vampire Weekend.
So why didn’t these “cool kids” of modern rock show the same fanboy fascination with Maca’s “Me Too” era schmaltz? Why not cover some of his softballs with the same wink and a nod they bestowed on the artists above? We know that many of the 1990s and 2000s’ most successful songsmiths, from Kurt Cobain to Billy Corgan, grew up marinating in McCartney’s lightest-weight radio classics, whether in the family car or wafting out of every window in suburbia.
On 21st May, McCartney was present for one of this year’s most publicized media moments, the final episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He marked the send-off not with a rendition of the Beatles’ “The End”, but with a song that foreshadowed both the design and success of much of his 1970s output, “Hello Goodbye”.
“Hello Goodbye” was released in November 1967, mere months after the Summer of Love and well before the wave of 1970s soft rock. It topped the charts in the US, the UK, France, West Germany, Canada, Australia, and several other countries. The B-side of this pop confection? John Lennon‘s most artsy Beatles single, the majestically off-kilter, lyrically DADA orch-pop “I Am the Walrus”.
So, what did Sir Paul think of the lyrics to “Hello Goodbye?” They were conspicuously absent from his 900-page, two-volume book covering more than 150 of his songs, 2021’s The Lyrics – 1956 – Present.
According to legend, this proto-1970s nugget came about through an exercise in “word association” between McCartney and his assistant, Alistair Taylor. Maca began playing his harmonium and asked Taylor to call out the opposite of each word he sang. Black and white, yes and no, stop and go, hello and goodbye, it went. Whether Paul already had the melody in his head or made it up on the spot, only the Beatle knows for sure.
Like much of McCartney’s 1970s and 1980s output, the single-syllable words of “Hello Goodbye” don’t amount to much more than a nursery rhyme. Sometimes, his lyrics are just a cheap plastic hanger upon which he drapes the most splendid melodic garment, something he has the singular ability to produce in staggering abundance.
With Paul, it’s always been a simple matter of supply and demand. “I Will”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “I Follow the Sun”, “Let It Be”, “Maybe I’m Amazed”. He certainly had many songs with wonderful lyrics, some very profound reflections on the human condition. However, the faucet of music, the melodies and chord changes that swam endlessly through his mind and out to his hands, far outstripped his ability to marry them all with top-flight words.
For much of the 1970s, McCartney was like a boxer who had been beaned with a wicked punch but could still counter on instinct. His counterpunch has always been his music and its delicious melodies, the endless bounty of hooks that came from his adoration and absorption of everything from primordial rock ‘n roll and R&B, British dancehall, the Great American Songbook, Brill Building staples, and European Classical, with a spicy side dish of avant-garde.
Can Paul McCartney’s so-called easy-listening bend, which began with “Hello Goodbye” and peaked in the 1970s, be another kind of greatness? Maybe so.
Look at the lyrics of some of the greatest songs, and you’ll see a similar simplicity. Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me”, Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me”, Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend”, and “Baby Love” by the Supremes were huge hits, adored by critics but never called out for their lyrics. What about John Lennon’s “Imagine”? A wonderful, simple sentiment whose music honestly doesn’t hold a candle to B+ level Maca output.
At 83, Paul McCartney’s forthcoming album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, may well be his last studio offering. His voice is a little ragged, but his melody-making seems intact. Many are calling it a late-career masterpiece; a smaller number are calling it a return to the mixed-bag form of the 1970s – occasionally spectacular, sometimes a tad too sweet and half-baked.
I look forward to hearing it either way, for both what may be profound and what may be purely entertaining to my ears, great melodic music with some simple words added upon it. As much as I love my Sun Ra, Sonny Sharrock, Beefheart, Bill Orcutt, Terje Rypdal, Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, Robert Wyatt, Love, VU, and Krautrock, even the hippest of us cannot live on skronking free jazz, art rock, and electronica alone.
Sometimes you need to, as the great philosophers of hair metal, Def Leppard, say, pour some sugar on it.