Paul McCartney's team-up with Rihanna and Kanye West on "FourFiveSeconds" earlier this year was met with surprise and bewilderment by some, but if you go back far enough you'd see it's just par for the course in the mind of Macca. Ever since the Beatles covered the Cookies back in '63, McCartney has been testifying to his love of R&B. "Smokey Robinson was like God in our eyes," he once said. There was a reason Billy Preston's Rhodes solo fit so perfectly in "Get Back", after all. Paul McCartney was an R&B lover before he was ever a Beatle.
In McCartney's solo material, however, you have to fast forward to 1982's Tug of War and 1983's Pipes of Peace to hear how that R&B influence evolved in his distinctive sound. It is within these two misunderstood albums in the Macca canon that the square root of "FourFiveSeconds" can be discovered, particularly upon the release of this latest pair of deluxe editions as part of the ongoing Paul McCartney Archive Collection series.
In one sense, Tug of War plays out like the album we might've gotten had Lennon and McCartney taken up Lorne Michaels' famous $3,000 offer to reunite on "Saturday Night" in 1976. George Martin sits at the controls on a Fab Four-related project for the first time since Wings' "Live and Let Die" (unless you count the 1978 soundtrack to the unmentionably awful "jukebox musical" Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band). The specter of Lennon's tragic death and the unresolved differences between the two lifelong friends loom large across much of this material, especially the jubilant "Ballroom Dancing", the symphonic title track and "Here Today". The latter is the album's most direct reflection on Lennon's death, and it's a song McCartney has been regularly incorporating in his concerts the last couple of tours. Whatever Paul might not have said in the press at the time of Lennon's assassination, he certainly said here.
The nucleus of Tug, however, is McCartney's yin-yang pair of collaborations with Stevie Wonder. Of course we all know "Ebony and Ivory", pure ground-zero Macca schmaltz tethered by a goofy yet endearing analogy to the synchronicity between the piano's keys. Strangely enough, the song's message has grown more urgent over the years, while the utterly Triple A orchestrations of the music itself grows as dated as that Joe Piscopo/Eddie Murphy send-up on "Saturday Night Live". The key moment comes earlier on the album with "What's That You're Doing?", a tour de force of Hotter Than July-era Wonder funk that can be seen as the ColecoVision to the PS4 of "FourFiveSeconds".
Some critics derided McCartney for aging gracelessly upon the release of the electro-tinged Pipes of Peace in '83, right as he turned 41. However, a good listen to the album today reveals some ways it was ahead of its time. With the ballad "So Bad", McCartney confirmed his aforementioned Smokey worship by paying homage to Robinson's "Quiet Storm" era, emulating the Motown great's cool falsetto to such perfection that Smokey himself had a little bit of a rough time emulating it on his own cover from The Art of McCartney. Then there is "Tug of Peace", an early, primitive version of a mash-up that brought together the title cuts of these underappreciated albums. The blend is clunky, but it foreshadows his electronic music work as the Fireman and on Liverpool Sound Collage.
Then there's "Say Say Say", written in collaboration with Michael Jackson. The song was a simpatico matching of minds, combining Paul's harmonies and Jackson's meticulous sense of rhythm. Mark "Spike" Stent's magnificent 2015 remix of "Say" on the bonus disc of the Pipes reissue stretches the groove to nearly eight minutes, buoyed by a rocksteady 4/4 handclap beat that conjures up visions of the New York City Breakers dancing in your head. On "The Man", the Macca/Jacko duo sways a little closer into Paul territory with its strummy acoustic charm and Wings-esque bombast, showing that beyond "Say Say Say" and "The Girl Is Mine", they were a potent creative team before it all imploded in a dust of Beatles royalties and Nike ad money.
The extras dug up for the Tug of War reissue (the Super Deluxe Edition of each also contain DVDs of era-appropriate ephemera) make for some interesting listening—demo versions of "Wanderlust" and "The Pound Is Sinking", and a version of "Ebony" with just McCartney on electric piano. But those pale in comparison to the veritable alternate LP included in Pipes of Peace. The previously unreleased "It's Not On" sounds like Ween, while the tremolo guitar that floats across another rare cut, "Simple As That", could be the secret template for The Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?". Elsewhere, proper album tracks like "Average Person", "Keep Under Cover" and "Sweetest Little Show" in demo form sound like they could have been leftovers from Ram. In all, this reissue series continues to shine a new light on McCartney's varied solo output, finding new stories they tell.
