Paul is 64 and has put out half that many albums between his solo career and his work with a little band called The Beatles. As his latest album, Memory Almost Full, (reviewed on page 14) nears its release date of June 5 and his entire solo catalogue is made available on iTunes, the question is, do we still need him? Will we still feed him?\nTo help guide you through his diverse solo collection, we here at WEEKEND bought as many Paul albums as we could find, got a lot of help from some experts (rock music historians Glenn Gass and Andy Hollinden) and set out to give you a guide to post-Beatles \nPaul McCartney. \nGass, eager to get back to dissecting Paul after his year off from teaching the Beatles class he created, helped analyze how Paul's music has been received. Hollinden, fresh off a year of teaching the class, gave his insight into the songs and albums that made up the last 35+ years of post-Beatles Paul. \nWe analyzed his big albums like McCartney, Ram and Band on the Run and dug into the dollar bins to find lost treasures. We've got in-depth analysis of the rare (Rushes, which doesn't even have Paul's name on it), the average (Wings at the Speed of Sound and Tug of War) and albums not worth trading your lunch money for (Venus and Mars, Pipes of Peace). \nSince he spent six years co-headlining the world's biggest band, it's hard to dissect any of Paul's solo work fairly, especially after his songwriting partner, John Lennon, was martyred in 1980. In the wake of John's death, Paul's work of the 1980s became slightly more trivialized. Even his first albums, McCartney and Ram, really suffered because they were often compared to Lennon's first solo works, Plastic Ono Band and Imagine. The albums, "seemed to confirm the suspicion that John was the heavyweight Beatle, and Paul the fluffy 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' guy," Gass wrote in an e-mail. \nBut decades after these albums were released, Gass re-examined them and found little fault in much of Paul's solo career. "Now, all these years later, those early Paul albums have an offhand charm that is really appealing, and I think they have held up surprisingly well," Gass wrote. "Shows what expectations can do ... Everyone was comparing them to "Penny Lane" at the time, and nothing is going to hold up well under that kind of scrutiny." \nBy most historians accounts, Paul was the Beatle who wanted to continue touring and longed to be in the spotlight. He fufilled this desire by forming Wings, who stayed together from 1971 to 1981 with some lineup variations. Gass said that Wings got off to an even worse-received start than Paul's solo career with their first album, the unimpressive Wild Life. He agrees with Hollinden that Paul finally hit his stride with Band on the Run, which he called a great album by any measure. Wings' albums were so succesful that if you grew up in a certain time period, you'll remember McCartney as that guy from Wings, but anyone born after 1980 remembers him first and foremost as a Beatle, who happened to also have a solo career. Gass put it best, saying, "'Did you know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?' was a joke that you really did hear quite often in the late seventies. Needless to say, you never hear it anymore. Time has a way of sorting things out."\nPaul has had a resurgence over his last couple albums and wildly successful world tours, but there was a time when he struggled creatively post-Wings. His albums London Town and Tug of War rarely come off the shelf, Venus and Mars is a pretty dated and tacky Wings album and Pipes of Peace, one of his collaborations with Michael Jackson, is weak except for the title track. Even some of his big '80s singles like "Ebony and Ivory" come across as simplistic today. "Through the 1980s and 1990s Paul kept busy -- too busy, as even he admits now," Gass wrote. "He did too many albums, included many half-baked ones. His collaborations with Elvis Costello were interesting, and his ones with Michael Jackson were appalling." \nDespite Paul's less than stellar solo work at the tail end of the 20th century, his career seems to be rebounding a bit in the 21st. His last two albums, Chaos and Creation in the Background and Memory Almost Full, carry more reflective tones and seem to harness some of his youthful charm. He appears to have accepted his place.\n"He did, though, finally let enough water go under the bridge to quit fighting and embrace his Beatle past," Gass wrote. "His tours became, and remain, joyous events, and he seems finally OK with the fact that his best and most popular work was done before he was 28. Happily, his last album, Chaos and Creation, was terrific, and I am really looking forward to the new one. He may be going through a late-career renaissance similar to Dylan's. Lord knows, no one deserves it more."
WEEKEND also recommends "C-Moon," "Jet", "My Love," "Take it Away" and "Silly Love Songs"
