Various Artists
Listen To What The Man Said: Popular Artists Pay Tribute To The Music of Paul McCartney (Oglio)
Coming Up: Independent Artists Pay Tribute To The Music of Paul McCartney (Oglio)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2002

The very reasons that pop aficionadoes so gleefully deride him are essentially what make Paul McCartney ideal for a tribute album. Songs as starkly honest and resonant as those by, oh, let's be random and say John Lennon tend to make performers look like fools unless they happen to be geniuses themselves (cf. Melissa Etheridge's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" v. Neil Young's "Imagine"). The very insignificance of McCartney's lyrical content, on the other hand, absolves anybody daring to cover him of wrongdoing. The results won't change the world, sure, but at least some lucky musician gets to grab hold of a fine pop song for four minutes.

So even though it's not a very sexy idea (low-risk propositions never are), it's frankly a wonder that nobody's thought of putting together collections like Listen To What The Man Said and Coming Up before now. Both CDs put together constitute a moderately comprehensive survey of McCartney's oeuvre, as well as a handy reminder that despite your selective recollections, his songs actually tend to split into two camps; when he's not celebrating domesticity (or mourning its loss, or anticipating its return), he cheerfully makes a beeline for the surreal and bizarre (check "Jet," "Band On The Run" and "Temporary Secretary," one two). It's the (relatively) hitless latter group that's largely absent from McCartney's Wingspan package, which (along with the Matthew Sweet-endorsed documentary) seems to have unofficially primed the pump and provided coattails for these CDs to grab a hold of.

One thing remains clear, and it is the same flaw that dogs nearly every tribute album you can name: these songs are, with very few exceptions, better heard in their original versions (although I can appreciate that some folks might be wary of wading again through McCartney's full catalog). And, sorry, you'll find nothing from the Beatles era. The selections chosen (to demonstrate that Macca's crucial output didn't stop when he said goodbye to his schoolmates, one presumes) are all solo McCartney or Wings, which only an idiot or a McCartney would not consider to be the same thing. We are, however, spared a runthrough of "Uncle Albert (Admiral Halsey)," although keen listeners will spot an homage to this most annoying of all McCartney songs during Cliff Hillis's version of "This One."

Released separately, Listen and Coming Up are as independent of each other as Use Your Illusion I and II, which is to say that they're not. The only possible excuse for someone being interested in one but not the other would be if he or she were a hardcore fan of a specific contributor but not ­ – and it seems preposterous for me to even complete this sentence ­ – a fan of McCartney. That said, each CD develops its own unique character, although this is more of a conceptual consideration, especially considering that the titles each lie to you twice before the shrinkwrap's been torn off. The distinction between the "popular" artists showcased on Listen and the "independent" artists on Coming Up seems somewhat arbitrary; have the Merrymakers and Linus of Hollywood burned up the charts since last I looked? "Coming Up," meanwhile, appears on Listen (in a muscular version by the John Faye Power Trip), and although the Judybats give us its uncharacteristically moody B-side, "Listen To What The Man Said" is nowhere to be found (a situation I chalk up to collective good taste).

The true difference between the two CDs lies in the choice of material. Listen tends toward a more hit-based selection, both in terms of individual songs and albums (nearly half of the disc derives from just two albums, Band On The Run and McCartney). Coming Up is a touch more experimental, with a spectrum of sources wide enough to include not only a song from 1997's Flaming Pie (Phil Keaggy's multi-acoustic "Somedays") but four single-only cuts, including two B-sides (one of which, "Oh Woman, Oh Why," is more than 30 years old). The overlap is kept to a minimum, with only three songs making appearances on both CDs. Matthew Sweet's and Mark Bacino's arrangements of "Every Night" cancel each other out by being mostly indistinguishable not only from each other but from McCartney's original. SR-71's punky "My Brave Face" on Listen is the victor by judges' decision over Star Collector's power-poppier runthrough, despite the latter's superior "Now that I'm alone again" harmonies. As for "Maybe I'm Amazed," the Virgos' cover from Listen takes it by a country mile over Gadget White Band's more pedestrian bar-band take by virtue of a combination of tougher guitars, the muted-bass attack on the ascending riff and a vocal take by Brett Hestla that so accurately nails the spirit of McCartney's lost-marbles screaming that it no longer qualifies as imitation or even homage but instead achieves a sort of brilliance on its own.

After that, it's every song for itself. The reunited Soft Boys crank out a fine version of "Let Me Roll It" that is perplexingly straighter than the original and less perplexingly (but still dismayingly) credited only to Robyn Hitchcock. Owsley does nothing particularly different with "Band On The Run" and admits as much, and it still sounds pretty damn good. Cherry Twister's "Another Day" (in which a liberated Eleanor Rigby gets a job and sleeps around) makes an implicit argument that the song would be hailed as a moving slice-of-life précis if it were by, say, the Zombies (which this version might as well be). McCartney II turns out to yield fertile ground for both discs (possibly because Paulie's performances were so awful to begin with): the Andersons crassly admit that "Temporary Secretary" isn't a particularly good song and spit out a killer version nonetheless, while Sloan's "Waterfalls" is just plain lovely without being cloying. In a song declaring, "I need love/Like a second needs an hour/Like a raindrop needs a shower," that's nothing less than a small miracle.

Which is, quite frankly, what McCartney has been giving the world for the past three decades (I posit that his stock-in-trade before that was large miracles). The last track on Coming Up sets it out about as plainly as possible. It's "Back On My Feet" (from a mid-'80s single), and as performed by Cockeyed Ghost, it starts out as ultra-slick pop-rock, with a too-bright piano and ultra-processed guitar and drums (ready reference: Split Enz's "Strait Old Line"). Somewhere around the first chorus, though, the instruments gel into a unit, not fierce but friendly and encouraging, and that tingle of ineffible magic begins. The song bursts into a chorus of optimistic longing, full of harmony vocals that surround the melody as if protecting it from harm when we know good and well that it's indestructible. The song closes on a repeated bridge of impossible tunefulness, leaving the world with a simple fact, the true reason for putting together a McCartney tribute and the only one necessary: the guy absolutely deserves it.

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