The album Paul McCartney thought wasn’t recorded in time
Time is always every artist’s worst enemy. As much as they might try to get everything done in time to meet a deadline, there will always be things they wish they could have done differently had they had a few more months to flesh out a song or put a few more overdubs on one of their recordings. While Paul McCartney usually took things as they came during his solo career, he always regretted not getting around to releasing one specific breezy rock and roll album sooner.
But listening back to Macca’s career, every one of his albums was about expanding his craft a little bit. Even when he released some of the most boring music of his career in the late 1980s, it was clear that he was still going for something current, even using producers like Hugh Padgham to try to get the right sound that put him in the same league as Phil Collins.
Once he started working on The Beatles Anthology, though, he found a reason to embrace his past more. Instead of running away from The Beatles’ legacy, it might have been fine to dip his toes back in and see what made those classic songs work so well in the first place. But McCartney wanted to go much further than that, and that meant going back to the music he loved as a kid.
Although he had made a handful of cover tunes for the Russian market in the 1980s, he hadn’t tapped into that classics itch until working on Run Devil Run. Using a starstudded cast of musicians, this is a more energised version of what John Lennon’s Rock ‘n’ Roll should have been, complete with McCartney channelling Little Richard and screaming his lungs out on the title track.
Despite sounding like he’s had a great time, McCartney was still in emotional repair following the death of his wife, Linda. She had worked with him on the album Flaming Pie, but the complications of her breast cancer had taken their toll on her body, leaving McCartney an absolute mess when she passed away.
While his eternal optimist attitude never let him show that vulnerability in public, McCartney said he did regret not having Linda around to see the album come out, saying, “It’s also something Linda was very keen on me doing. She kept really bugging me about it because she was a big rock ‘n’ roll fan. Obviously, I regret she isn’t here to hear it. That’s a major regret, but never mind. We did it for her. She’s still there, bugging me — ‘Come on, man, get it right!’ OK, baby.”
Considering that this was the first album that McCartney had made since Linda’s death, you would hardly notice any wear and tear in his voice. Those screams are still as powerful as they were when he made ‘I’m Down’ back in the day, and even when he tones it down on tunes like ‘Coquette’, he seems more interested in making something that his other half would have b
een proud of.
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