McCartney plays Auckland

Paul McCartney played a wonderful, crowd-pleasing, 40-song show at Mt Smart in Auckland last night. To appreciate just how deep McCartney's catalogue is, however, consider that the list of songs he played the last time he was in Auckland (in 1993) that he didn't play last night includes:

Drive My Car
Coming Up
Another Day
We Can Work It Out
Michelle
Here, There And Everywhere
My Love
Magical Mystery Tour
The Long And Winding Road
Paperback Writer
Fixing A Hole
Penny Lane
I Saw Her Standing There

A show consisting of just these 13 songs would contain more landmarks than almost any other rock show you'll ever see. All Hail Sir Paul!

Update: And consider these songs that McCartney (solely or mostly wrote but) omitted both times:

She's Leaving Home
I'm Looking Through You
She Loves You (a super-close co-write w. Lennon)
I Want To Hold Your Hand (another super-close co-write w. Lennon)
Fool On The Hill
With a Little Help From My Friends
Let Him In
For No One
Got to Get You Into My Life
Eight Days a Week
Hello Goodbye
Martha My Dear
Wonderful Christmas Time
Step Inside Love
When I'm 64
You Won't See Me
No More Lonely Nights

It's hard not to conclude that McCartney could play a show consisting just of songs that he never or very rarely plays that would still probably be the most monumental show (short perhaps of an Abba or Smiths reunion, or a Bowie or Prince resurrection) that you could ever hope to see.

The 5th Dimension's The Magic Garden

A seriously amazing record from December 1967, The Magic Garden is a concept piece about love and a specific love affair in something like the way Demy's films from the period tend to be.

Every song is excellent, but my two current fave tracks are:

and:

I mean, good God, they kill. The album is definitely some kind of masterpiece. I almost can't believe I never heard of any of it until this Onion AV-Club article.

Ok, one more (this time w/ uncool dancing):
Just, wow.

Update April 11, 2011: All but one song on TMG is written by the legendary Jimmy Webb. The exception is a very soulful, funky cover of Ticket to Ride. This song (from Help!, e.g., here) is one of Lennon's best. It's the ancestor of all of the mildly perverse, bitchy ‘I’m not happy but I’m not sad either’ alt-pop-music (with, ha ha, triumphant pulsing music underneath) that so many of us have loved ever since. TtR claims the whole spectrum of vexation and boredom and general pissiness for pop music, and makes it danceable and almost metallic. A couple of days a week I’d say it was the best, most subversive pop hit since Heartbreak Hotel.

Anyhow, 5th Dimension's TtR cover is exemplary. In my view, too, Lennon's ode to nasty ambivalence (with its booty-shaking underpinning pushed to 11!) fits beautifully within TMG's overall song cycle (about a tumultuous relationship), albeit as a spectacular jolt of earthy energy. Some fans have wanted TtR pushed to the TMG's margins, and apparently some editions of the album, which has even had its name changed a couple of times, have accommodated that desire. I think it works great as a side-ender/mid-point:

An odd feature of 5th Dimension's TtR cover, however, is that they change Lennon's middle eight couplet from:

She oughta think twice/She oughta do right by me.

to:

She oughta think white/She oughta do right by me.

The punchier, full rhyme of white/right sings better than twice/right, but it's still a surprising change, after all, if full rhyme singability was the principal concern, why not go with repetition, right/right? 'White' was evidently, quite specifically chosen, but with what purpose?

On the one hand, the Fifth Dimension were unfairly/absurdly criticized at the time for being 'too white', just as many Motown acts were (see this article for some of the details; it's evident that the nasty criticism is a class thing more than a race thing, but it's still painful). On the other hand, their TtR cover (on which the players were members of the racially mixed Wrecking Crew) is the 'blackest' thing on TMG by far (insofar as we can make sense of such ideas). Presumably the rhyme substitution is making some real point or specific inside joke. But what exactly? Does anyone have the political nous about the 1967 West Coast scene to really decode this matter?

Step Inside Love

The stunning opening to Cilla Black's original tv show:
This is a very fine performance and arrangement of a White Album out-take that Paul McCartney gifted to his scouse friend and fellow George Martin producee. McCartney's original demo. had traces of Jobim in it:

but Cilla's version rotates that influence 90º through Bacharach's appropriation of that tradition, surprising/climaxing with a trace of Bond/John Barry in the chorus. Marvellous stuff that anticipates some of where McCartney would go post-Beatles.

It would be interesting to know how much of Cilla's arrangement McCartney was responsible for. And if the answer to that question is 'a lot', whether he'd have thought of developing the song in that direction without Cilla's Bacharach-laden example in front of him? At any rate, here's a snippet of Paul and Cilla setting up to record the song:

Fab.

You've got to hide your love away

You're making your second film in just over a year, and it's full of knock-out new numbers including Help!, Ticket to Ride, and You've got to hide your love away, any one of which we'd gladly trade Oasis's whole career for.

Still, you're so talented and on fire that, while you're filming, one band-member continues to noodle around on some other little song that he's working on, plonking away on a sound-stage piano every chance he gets. According to wiki, Richard Lester, Help!'s director, eventually lost his temper:

[T]elling McCartney to finish writing the song or he would have the piano removed. The patience of the other Beatles was also tested by McCartney's work in progress, George Harrison summing this up when he said: "Blimey, he's always talking about that song . You'd think he was Beethoven or somebody!

That additional song, which was surplus to the film's requirements and finished later, nonetheless made it onto the end of the Help! album (i.e., as its second to last track). Originally given the dummy lyric title, 'Scrambled Eggs', we know that song as Yesterday. The Beatles had some pretty good days at the office in 1965!