June 8, 2011

On that fateful day in 1957 when Liverpool schoolboys John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison first picked up their guitars and started jamming together, visions of worldwide stardom hadn’t exactly been haunting their dreams. To begin with, they were just learning how to properly play their instruments, and, enthusiastic or not, British teenagers never made the charts via anything that was even close to actual rock & roll.

The best the Quarrymen, as they then called themselves, could hope for was maybe a little pocket change from playing local dances, an opportunity to score some chicks, and the exhilaration of performing their music live onstage. I’m sure that sounded like a fair shake, too. Even at the beginning of their development, though, there was something elemental about the noise these guys made together. Listen, for instance, to this instrumental, entitled “Guitar Bop,” which was (poorly) recorded during a much-needed April, 1960 rehearsal.

“Guitar Bop”

You know what? That rocks like crazy, even if they barely know what they’re doing and it takes about half the song for it to properly gel.

That rawness had more or less been buffed to a commercial sheen by the time the Beatles appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in February of 1964, where they instantaneously lit a fire under the asses of millions of kids. John, Paul, George , and Ringo, and their eventual buddy in THC and beyond, Bob Dylan, would quickly blow the doors off rock & roll— suddenly, anything was possible. But, underneath all the expanding consciousness and studio razzle-dazzle, the group’s sound forever contained hints, both subtle and starkly pronounced, of their four-on-the-floor origins.

The lessons the Beatles learned from stacks of scratched American 45’s, and while toiling in a series of rickety, smoke-filled dancehalls, were pivotal, and years later would actually help one of them re-discover himself in the wake of tragic loss.

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There’s no way, of course, to precisely pin down what effect Paul and Linda McCartney’s marital bliss had on McCartney’s recorded output in his post-Beatles years - the above photo captures the first time the couple laid eyes on each other, at a “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” release party - but these two people obviously loved each other deeply and without hesitation. McCartney must have been shattered when his soul mate, the mother of his children, lost her battle with breast cancer in 1998.

But a surprise embrace of the music of his youth would lead McCartney to take his first steps back into the world after his wife’s death. It also inspired some of the hardest-rocking performances of his career, and I’m including the stuff he recorded before forming Wings. If you know what I mean.

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McCartney was just a couple weeks shy of his 57th birthday when he and a bunch of similarly-aged musicians, including Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, entered Abbey Road studios to cut “Run Devil Run,” a collection of roots covers (plus three equally primitive McCartney originals) that quite often approaches flowing magma levels of good old-fashioned, plug-in-and-play intensity.

This record strongly suggests that, post-Beatles evidence to the contrary, Sir Paul was (and probably still is) utterly capable of going straight-up punk, at least from a sonic standpoint, and of doing so with the same good-nature he’s brought to both his most successful hits and a stack of rather unfortunate solo albums.

He’s not putting on a fashionably stern face, in other words, to make it seem like he’s suddenly developed some guts. The guts were formed almost 40 years earlier, when he and his band mates slicked back their hair, bought motorcycle jackets, and played hours-long shows to houses packed with aging whores and drunken sailors. Maybe he grew too willing to write silly love songs over the years, but he had been there. And he remembered it.

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McCartney makes it clear in “Run Devil Run”’s entertaining liner notes that spontaneity was the order of the day with this record, and he wasn’t afraid to teach his band mates a long-forgotten tune on the spot, then record it as quickly as possible to maintain the freshness:

“I’d say to the guys, ‘Anybody know “She Said Yeah?” They’d say no, because they were slightly obscure choices, I’d say okay, this is how it goes. We’d take five or ten minutes - and that’s how we did it in the Beatles - because how many times can you go through a song without everyone getting bored? We’d spend 15, 20 minutes top whack and everyone’d go yeah, got it…”

…and that version of “She said Yeah,” a little-known Larry Williams R&B chestnut from 1959, wound up sounding like this. Crank it up!

“She Said Yeah”

Sure, a lot had happened in rock since 1959, but what you’re hearing here is the continuing rumble of the Big Bang, an ongoing vibration that moved through people like Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Elvis, and beyond, with the “beyond” part being led, to a large degree, by the very guy pounding the bass and singing these tunes.

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McCartney’s Little Richard obsession is well-documented in biographical accounts of the Beatles’ rise and on such Richard-riffic Fab Four recordings as “Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey” and “Long Tall Sally,” both of which feature Paul singing and “whoooooooo”-ing from the lower reaches of his diaphragm. It’s expected, then, that a record like “Run Devil Run” would contain at least one Richard tune, but I was thrilled when I picked up the disc to see that McCartney chose to cover the Quasar of Rock's relatively little-known ditty, “Shake a Hand.”

When I was in college, I wore out the grooves on my long-sought copy of “The Fabulous Little Richard,” and one of my favorite tracks was “Shake a Hand.” Richard grinds it out, relatively speaking, at a medium-shouting, medium backing tempo, then screams into the upper reaches of lovelorn exasperation during the chorus.

"Shake a Hand" is right in the vicinity of the best thing I’ve ever heard Richard do, and that’s no small accomplishment, so I’m not about to sit here and tell you McCartney and his pals smoke the original version. But the “Run Devil Run” band - for the most part, McCartney (bass and guitar), Gilmour (guitar), Mick Green (guitar), Pete Wingfield (piano), and Ian Paige (drums) - is ridiculously driven, and I wouldn’t be surprised if McCartney could believably deliver this kind of lyric on his death bed.

“Shake a Hand”

That would certainly do for famous last words.

I have no idea, by the way, what the concept of shaking a hand is supposed to imply here, but it seems goddamned imperative the way McCartney sings it. He sure doesn’t sound as if he’s approaching 60 years-old, that's for sure— Mick Jagger couldn’t have sung it that well at that age if you offered him a truckload of prime stock options as incentive. Frankly, he couldn’t have sung it that well when he was 25 and still gave half a shit, and that’s not intended as a complete knock on Jagger. It’s just a fact.

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“Run Devil Run”’s closing track, a cover of the absurd-leaning-toward-profound Elvis Presley tune, “Party,” finds McCartney so amped-up, you’d think he got his hands on one of those asthma inhalers - they were loaded with speed - that the Beatles abused in order to play at peek froth for hours on end back in their Hamburg days. Once again, you need to batten the hatches…

“Party”

Now, any song that contains verses like…

I never kissed a bear
I never kissed a goon
But I can shake a chicken in the middle of the room

and…

Now Honky Tonky Joe
Is knockin’ at the door
Bring him in and fill him up and set him on the floor

…deserves to be sung with gusto. McCartney even leaves out the verse containing the deathless line, “Everybody come and taste the possum Papa shot,” probably because he couldn’t properly translate it from Elvis’s slurred vocal (I’ve read some hilarious interpretations on various Internet lyrics sites, including “Everybody come and taste the pasta parmesan!”) But he fully answers the call on this one, and then some.

Perhaps the most telling moment on all of “Run Devil Run” appears right at the end there, when Beatle Paul simply refuses to let the party die, shouting out random phrases from the song as if they’re a lifeline that will see him through his current emotional tempest and any coming storms.

Deep down inside, and often much nearer the surface than most people realize, Paul McCartney remains a true believer, and he’s kept the party going for a lot longer than he could have possibly imagined when he was stretching his fingers into the chords of “Guitar Bop.”

It may be pretty hard to locate these days, but only a fool could think that rock & roll will ever die.

DOWNLOAD: “Run Devil Run” by Paul McCartney (1999). If you’re just after a few tracks, go for the ones covered in this article, as well as “I Got Stung” (another Elvis obscurity) and the slowly-burning ballad, “No Other Baby,” an old skiffle song that nobody outside of McCartney even remembers. He sings the hell out of it, too.

Paul Tatara