Pepper’s levels of effort into fluff like Red Rose Speedway. He’s the hardest working lazy artist in existence. So at this point, he had two options – push forward with the ambition, or slip back into the understated and etc. He’d begun his solo career with the understated and utterly unambitious McCartney, regrouped to create the marvelous Ram, slipped back into understated and utterly unambitious (with an added helping of sloppy on the side) with Wild Life, then showed glimmers of ambition again with Red Rose Speedway, which was the stepping stone to a couple of solid (if critically overrated) albums with Band on the Run and Venus and Mars. The former is an album by a musical giant trying to “get back to where he once belonged”, the latter sounds like an album made by a bored rock star, one who got back to the top and couldn’t figure out what to do when he got there.Īt the Speed of Sound came along at a critical juncture for McCartney. With Band on the Run McCartney was clearly working hard to get back to the top, there was a hunger, an ambition to the album that is utterly lacking on the lackadaisical At the Speed of Sound. I know it’s not a popular opinion among McCartneyphiles, but I don’t find Band on the Run to be the masterpiece it is reputed to be – however, it’s a far stronger album than At the Speed of Sound. Shuffling around in circles trying to figure out which direction he wants to go. Coasting along on the fading momentum from Band on the Run and Venus and Mars. And what exactly is it that McCartney is doing at the speed of sound? Resting on his laurels. Kind of a clever title, though, Wings At the Speed of Sound. Almost like he knew which album was the stronger one to build a setlist around. So I listen to Wings’ At the Speed of Sound and I think to myself, “you know, Paul, you were pretty smart about building Wings from a rinky-dink glorified garage band that showed up unannounced to play at British universities, to a fairly professional band that toured Europe, and then from there to a band of rock superstars conquering America, and then this is the album you’re gonna tour America with for the first time in a decade”? It doesn’t make any sense – McCartney was smart enough to start small with Wings as a touring unit, he worked his way step by step back to the biggest touring market of them all, the arenas of America – and when he finally ascended to that point, he toured with an album as uninspired, slight, unexciting, and tossed-off as At the Speed of Sound? I think it’s telling that only four songs on the album found their way into the setlist for the tour, while he played almost the whole Venus and Mars album every night.
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