Paul McCartney – "Smile Away" (1971)

I was walking down the street the other day

Who did I meet?

I met a friend of mine, and he did say

“Man, I can smell your breath a mile away”

I find myself still trying to come to terms with the Beatles more than fifty years after they broke up.

No group I know generated more good song ideas.  But few of those ideas were fully developed into a wholly satisfying final products.  (I know how they felt.  I get all excited whenever I come up with a good idea for a new 2 or 3 lines post, but all too often I do a half-assed job of executing that idea.  Rather than spending the time and effort necessary to realize my idea’s full potential, I just hit “publish” and move on to the next brilliant idea.)

The 16-minute-long, eight-song medley on side two of the Abbey Road album is the best example of the Beatles’ ability to come up with great song ideas and their lack of stick-to-it-iveness when it came to carrying those ideas across the finish line.  

The songs in the medley had nothing in common either musically or lyrically.  None of them could have stood on their own two feet – most of them were fragments that had been put to one side because the Beatles didn’t know how to turn them into fully-realized songs.

But sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that was never truer than with the Abbey Road medley.  

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If Paul McCartney and George Martin hadn’t figured out a way to meld those eight song ideas into a medley, Abbey Road might have ended up as a real train wreck. 

Almost everyone loves “Come Together” and “Something,” but I don’t think those tracks are anything special.  “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is one of the best Beatles songs ever, but the rest of the album’s tracks – “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” “Oh! Darling,” “Octopus’s Garden,” Here Comes the Sun,” and “Because” – are godawful.

But the medley makes you forget all of that.

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I think the Beatles as a whole are overrated – not because they didn’t record a lot of great and near-great songs, but because many people rate the Beatles so highly that it is almost impossible for them to be otherwise.  I’ve decided not to include them in the group of overrated recording artists featured in this year’s “29 Posts in 29 Days” for two reasons.  First, there are a lot of other bands that are much more overrated than the Beatles.  Second, I don’t want to deal with all the caterwauling that would ensue if I did say they were overrated.

Paul and Linda McCartney in 1971

But I have no qualms about calling Paul McCartney overrated.  

That’s not really based on McCartney’s Beatles career, although he did write a lot of the Beatles’ crappiest songs.  On the other hand, he wrote some of their best ones.  (I can’t for the life of me comprehend how he came up with “Helter Skelter,” which is an astonishingly good record.)

McCartney gets the dreaded 2 or 3 lines “overrated” grade based on the twenty-odd solo albums he’s released since the Beatles crashed and burned.  (I’m counting the Wings albums in that number.)

I never bought a single one of them, and can’t claim to be all that familiar with their contents except for the two dozen of so singles that were top ten hits between 1970 and 1985.  (Lack of knowledge never stopped me from making grand pronouncements before, and it’s certainly not going to stop me pronouncing Sir Paul overrated today.) 

I always had a soft spot for “Maybe I’m Amazed” (from McCartney’s first album), and “Jet” and “Too Many People” are pretty good.  

But most of McCartney’s other well-known songs are crap – some (like “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” and “Helen Wheels”) may be enjoyable crap, but most of the rest (including “Another Day,” “My Love,” “Live and Let Die,” “Band on the Run,” “Listen to What the Man Said,” “Hi, Hi, Hi,” “Silly Love Songs,” and “Ebony and Ivory”) are unlistenable crap.

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After writing this post, I had the brilliant idea of checking what legendary rock critic Robert Christgau had said about McCartney’s solo albums.  

Christgau repeatedly hit the nail on the head when it came to McCartney:

On McCartney (1970):  “Paul is so charming a melodist (and singer) that even though many of the songs are no more than snatches, fragments, ditties, they get across, like ‘Her Majesty’ extended to two minutes.” 

On Ram (1971): “[M]ost of the songs [on Ram] are so lightweight they float away even as Paulie layers them down with caprices.”

On Wild Life (1971): “McCartney is coming to terms with his own fluff – the overproduction sounds less cluttered this time – but it's still fluff, and not even goosedown.”

On Band on the Run (1973): “I originally underrated what many consider McCartney's definitive post-Beatles statement, but not as much as its admirers overrate it.  Pop masterpiece?  This?” 

On Tug of War (1982): “Most rock-and-rollers look like simps or cynics by the time they hit thirty-five.  Others retain the irrepressible exuberance of a Stevie Wonder, or . . . age gracefully into fresh-eyed wisdom, like Neil Young and John Lennon.  But no matter how serious and sensible he gets, McCartney's perpetual boyishness conveys the perpetual callowness of a musical Troy Donahue.”

On Pipes of Peace (1983): “I’ve finally figured out what people mean when they call Paulie pop – they mean he's not rock.  But to me pop implies a strict sense of received form whether crafted by the dB’s or Billy Joel.  McCartney's in his own world entirely, which is the charm of his music.  And of course, a reliance on charm has always been his weakness.”

(I could continue, but you get the picture.)

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I originally planned to feature “Long Haired Lady,” a song from McCartney’s Ram album that I heard for the first time last week on my satellite radio.

It’s a real stinker . . . and to make things even worse, it’s 5:54 long.

Life’s too short to waste 5:54 listening to “Long Haired Lady.”  (If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can click here to listen to it.)

Instead, I’m featuring “Smile Away,” another song from Ram.  

“Smile Away” is essentially a song fragment like the songs in the Abbey Road medley.  McCartney could have continued to work on it and develop it into a real song.  Or he could have made part of another medley.

But he did neither.  Instead, he stretched it out to 3:51 in length without coming up with any additional substance that would justify the song’s length – he just keeps repeating parts of the song until it was long enough to suit him.

I still like it, although I’m guessing that if I listened to it regularly, I would tire of it very quickly.

Click here to listen to “Smile Away.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: