Paul McCartney

December 10: Wings over America was released in 1976

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen

Wings over America 2 cover

A three album set from Wings!

Wings over America is one of the reasons I miss vinyl, it was big in every sense of the word. A triple album, with a poster and a cover designed by Hipgnosis.

Originally, Wings over America was to be a two-record set, but this was rethought due to the success of a bootleg called Wings from the Wings, released on a bicentennial red, white and blue triple record set, recorded on 23 June 1976 at The Forum (Inglewood, California).

Wings over America 1

This caused McCartney to redo the official release as a three-record set covering the entire concert, including Denny Laine’s “Go Now”, a song from his time as a member of The Moody Blues. This song was only performed 21–23 June 1976 at the Forum.

paul_mccartney 1976_02

Compiled from all recorded shows of the band’s Wings Over America Tour that spring, Wings over America was another success for Paul McCartney and Wings, reaching number 1 in the US in early 1977 (the last in a 5-album stretch of consecutive number 1 albums for Wings) and number 8 in the UK, and selling several million copies.

Wings Over America was reissued as a double-CD in 1984 on Columbia Records and later on Capitol Records.

Maybe I’m Amazed:

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Nov 29: Concert for George 2002

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen

On November 29, 2002, a year after his death, a tribute concert for George Harrison was held at Royal Albert Hall. Friends and family gathered to play his songs, and it was an impressive, if predictable, roster:

Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Billy Preston, Tom Petty, and Eric Clapton, who also served as musical director, took center stage, but George’s son Dhani Harrison was also there, as was Ravi Shankar’s daughter Anoushka, early British rock & roller Joe Brown, and Gary Brooker. Unlike many all-star lineups, everybody had a close personal connection to George.

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August 6: The Beatles released “Help!” in 1965

Posted on by Egil Mosbron

The_Beatles-Help_-Frontal

.. a big step forward, exploring doubt, loneliness, alienation, adult sexual longing, acoustic guitars, electric piano, bongos, castanets, and the finest George songs known to man. … Help! was utterly ruined in its U.S. version, which cut half the songs and added worthless orchestral soundtrack filler, so it’s always been underrated. But Help! is the first chapter in the astounding creative takeoff the Beatles were just beginning: the soulful bereavement of “Ticket to Ride,” the impossibly erotic gentleness of “Tell Me What You See,” the desperate falsetto and electric punch of “You’re Going to Lose That Girl.”
~rollingstone.com

…. the album’s masterpiece is McCartney’s brooding, deceptively simple chamber-pop ballad “Yesterday.” …  it’s compositionally complex, one of the first major pop songs to draw directly from classical music, juxtaposing acoustic guitar with a string quartet, shifting from minor to major chords. It set the stage for one of the most groundbreaking and innovative periods in The Beatles’ career, not to mention pop music in general.
~Mark Kemp (pastemagazine.com)

Help! – from a 6-song set filmed for British television in August of 1965:

From Wikipedia:

Released 6 August 1965
Recorded 15–19 February, 13 April, 10 May& 14–17 June 1965,
EMI Studios, London
Genre Rock
Length 34:20
Label Parlophone
Producer George Martin

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Nov 17: Let It Be Naked by The Beatles was released in 2003

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen

Let It Be… Naked is a remixed and remastered version of their 1970 album Let It Be. The project was initiated by Paul McCartney, who had always felt aggrieved that Phil Spector’s production did not accurately represent the group’s “stripped-down” intentions for the original album.

Let It Be… Naked presents the songs “naked” – without Spector’s overdubs and now including the incidental studio chatter featured between most cuts of the original album. Let It Be… Naked also replaces “Dig It” and “Maggie Mae” with “Don’t Let Me Down”, originally featured as the B-side of the “Get Back” single.

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