Atwood Magazine’s Aidan Moyer reviews ‘One Hand Clapping’ and Paul McCartney: Eyes of the Storm, on display at the Brooklyn Museum through August 18.
Stream: ‘One Hand Clapping’ – Paul McCartney and Wings
On the eve of Paul McCartney’s 81st birthday, Conan O’Brien set up an interview at the Tribeca Film Festival to promote Paul’s photobook and touring exhibit, Eyes of The Storm.
Their first conversation since a 1995 interview promoting Flaming Pie, the live ticketed event was announced in April and sold out immediately. I made a vow at that moment: Nothing on Earth could stop me from being in that audience.
I began a months-long journey to get my foot in the door, applying for a press badge, eyeing McCartney fan pages for spare tickets, scanning possible radio contests-nothing. Yet I found myself at the front of a queue line for six hours, making friends with two twins from Miami, an Irishman and a grandma who’d once shared a joint with Paul betwixt two open taxi windows in 1976. Internet legend Mark Rebillet brushed through the crowd. I was nicknamed “Wings Rush I Guy” by the staff, who occasionally stepped outside into the line and offered words of encouragement.
Six hours passed. And then, the most magical sentence in the English language:
“Would you like to purchase a face value student ticket?”
Through a randomized lottery I wound up about 30 feet away from the stage, and immediately felt my pupils dilate to three times their standard size.
Some of the talk was a blissful blur; when it ended, I hit the streets of Manhattan and scrawled the following in my Notes app:
As Paul McCartney approaches 81, he seems to be reaching a new paradigm. Still pulling from the same drawer of reliable anecdotes, the tenor has changed. Wistful but biting, tactful and bemused, he seems at once more youthful and ancient than ever. The personality quirks which caused him to butt heads with John and George have lost their rough edges – though they bickered he “loved them for it.” He casually texts Elvis Costello. He chides Springsteen for endless concerts, as the Beatles “only played half an hour!”. He affects mock rage and lunges towards stage left, and doesn’t let up. I see him sit like a marble statue, chiseled in 3/4 view but unmistakably Beatle Paul with arched eyebrow. A thought crosses my mind – “there he is. That’s The Legend.” Yet Conan flicks to a photo of George and Judy Martin, and Paul seems to genuinely trails off in memory for a moment. Conan O’Brien is one of the quickest wits of his generation, but I see a different man onstage. He seems slightly terrified of fumbling his questions. But neither misses a beat. Paul chuckles as Conan imitates a mock “McCartney high school reunion” – “I feel like I’ve done pretty well for myself, opened a hardware store… ah, damnit, there’s McCartney again!” Still there is an earnestness as Conan points out photos taken by an old Beatles friend, the late Astrid Kircherr. Paul seems genuinely impressed. Conan turns a bit serious when he says “I’ve been interviewing people for over 30 years and I’ve never talked to someone, between the Beatles and Wings and your solo career, who’s brought so many people so much joy.” The crowd erupts into thunder and I muster two words: “f*ckin’ A.”
On the eve of McCartney’s 82nd, I took a bus from Philadelphia to New York to finally catch the Eyes of the Storm exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. Though nothing could capture the visceral energy of the Tribeca conversation, immediately seeing four giant portraits of the Fabs set against a crimson wall was a welcome treat. Divided into four rooms and supplemented by a Beatles and solo McCartney soundtrack (“222,” a bonus track on Memory Almost Full, plays over the Miami section), the exhibit chronicles The Beatles’ trips to London and Paris in ‘63 and to America in early 1964. Paul, then 21, brought along a pentax film camera to capture it all with fresh eyes. These rare, unguarded shots of four men on the cusp of eternal fame and the whirlwind of starlets, swimming pools, chimpanzees, old and new friends around them were apparently in Paul’s archive for fifty years. There’s actress Jane Asher, Paul’s former fiancee whose ginger hair looks blonde in black and white; her brother Peter, a musician and Austin Powers lookalike; George, wearing two hats because ‘he thought it would be funny. It was’; John, pensively biting his nails and wearing his glasses that were verboten onstage; manager Brian Epstein casting a downward glance; Ringo with cigarette perpetually in hand. Everyone looks impossibly young and brimming with curiosity, energy and an insatiable hunger.
Then, all of this was novel; now, Paul has seen it all and learned how scary it can turn. The Beatles refused to play segregated gigs early in their careers; by 1968, Paul wrote “Blackbird” to honor the Little Rock Nine. John, Paul, and Ringo pose in Central Park, February 1964, with the Dakota building overlooking the treeline. Sixteen years later, John Lennon is gunned down in the lobby of his home in the Dakota apartments, right down the street.
Noticing how well-composed some of the photos are – frames-within-frames, a policeman’s holster without a face attached, sprawling cityscapes and soft focus portraits with natural lighting – I turn to my friend Sophie and lament “can’t this guy just be good at one thing? It’s not fair.” A treasure trove of photos tucked away in a bottomless archive, Eyes of The Storm is a genuine delight. Special kudos to exhibition designers Sonjie Feliciano Solomon, Lance Singletary, graphic designers Emma Gregoline, Adam O’Reilly, Xochitl Perez, Eric Price, Troy Vasilakis and the whole Brooklyn Museum staff for an excellently curated experience.
June 14 also saw the official release of the oft-bootlegged One Hand Clapping sessions.
Conceived as the soundtrack for a television film promoting the then-new Wings lineup of drummer Geoff Britton and wunderkind guitarist Jimmy McCulloch, Britton was fired only months later and replaced by Joe English. This became the second of four Wings films shelved for lineup changes:
- The Bruce McMouse Show, a cartoon-live action-hybrid concert film co-starring a family of mice who live under the stage as Wings rock out. Drummer Denny Seiwell and guitarist Henry McCullough left over pay squabbles at the dawn of the Band on the Run sessions, and the mostly-finished film remained unreleased from 1973 until 2018.
- The 1974 One Hand Clapping documentary, complete with voiceover, individual band interviews and a rare acoustic backyard solo set from Paul, was axed until McCartney slipped it into the Band on the Run archive box set in 2010.
- The Wings Over America concert film was recorded in 1976 and by the time of its 1980 release, Jimmy McCulloch had tragically died the year prior, aged 26.
- A proposed Band on the Run film exists as a script in the archives of Laurence Juber and Steve Holley, written sometime in the late 70s and eventually folded into the Give My Regards to Broad Street feature in 1984. Once it hit screens, Wings-and Paul’s mullet-had been history for three years.
Also proposed were a film in which Wings played two bands, themselves and a group of rock-and-roll-aliens, and a film adaptation of Marvel’s Silver Surfer with a McCartney soundtrack.
In its remastered sonic form, One Hand Clapping is the latest in a series of unearthed McCartney treasures.
A rough-and-ready Wings take to Abbey Road, sometimes backed by an orchestra, and run through mostly live numbers that scarcely received concert airings. “Tomorrow” and “Power Cut” have never been performed by McCartney outside of the original albums, the latter receiving a Gaelic flair in an organ pastiche. For the first time since The Beatles’ dissolution, Paul runs through “Let it Be,” “The Long and Winding Road,” “Lady Madonna,” and a medley of cabaret songs he composed as a teenager. His voice is in its prime and free of the post-Fab jitters about tackling unimpeachable material. Britton and McCulloch shine on punchy versions of “Junior’s Farm,” “Soily,” and “Jet.”
As always, it is a pleasure to hear the Moog lines and harmonies of the late Linda McCartney and an unheard version of Denny Laine’s cover of “Go Now” only months after his passing in 2023. With the benefit of hindsight, Wings sound confident in the studio and ready to hit the road, buoyed by a string of mid-70s hits -it’s a shame this incarnation never toured.
The new collection of 26 tracks, a book of unseen photos and a subsequent gallery tour, plus the recent releases of “Band on the Run” work tapes (“ The Underdubbed Mix”) and the first remastered print of Let It Be since the early ’80s all beg the question:
Just how much is sitting in Paul McCartney’s archive?
Offhand: A finished and never-released 1987 album, Return to Pepperland, an entire concept album for a Rupert the Bear movie, live band recordings from Glasgow in 1979, the never-released Beatles sound collage Carnival of Light, selections from Linda’s polaroid archives, a 1980 memoir penned in prison (“Japanese Jailbird”), and reams of notebooks, demo tapes and curios from a seven-decade catalog.
On Paul McCartney’s 82nd birthday, he is gearing up for a tour of Europe and Latin America, popping over to daughters Stella and Mary’s respective fashion and photo exhibits, producing his son James’ latest recordings, and continuing work on a mysterious new album and a musical adaptation of It’s a Wonderful Life, his first foray into the genre.
In between contributions to Ringo Starr’s EPs and Rolling Stones albums, spearheading the last Beatles song, “Now and Then,” giving Bruce Springsteen an Ivor Novello award and surprising the graduating class of LIPA at commencement, Paul McCartney dips into the archive and continues to prove what the world has suspected since ‘64: No one does it better.
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Stream: “Soily” – Paul McCartney & Wings
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© Aidan Moyer
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