The title One Hand Clapping, taken from a Japanese kōan, says everything there is to know or almost everything about Paul McCartney's 1974 sessions with his Wings at Abbey Road, in the sense that these are performances seen little and even less heard. For years, everything that didn't come out of those studios in the form of bootlegs had to be imagined. If these recordings are known, it is thanks to those who posted images on YouTube taken from old video cassettes or because of the bonus tracks included in the reissues of Band on the Run And Venus and Mars. Fans who learned of the existence of these sessions had to go and look for them who knows where.
But now McCartney has decided to promote One Hand Clapping from a footnote in its history to an episode of a certain importance, giving it the dignity of a record in its own right. With hindsight, and it is a hindsight that has had half a century to mature, he understood that this is special stuff.
One Hand Clapping was conceived as a television special. In the past McCartney has dismissed it as nothing special. «We titled it One Hand Clapping for no reason, and nothing much happened when I turned it around”, he said about ten years ago. It happened in the summer of 1974. After recording Band on the Run with the sole support of his wife Linda and Denny Laine, Macca had recruited guitarist Jimmy McCulloch and drummer Geoff Britton into the ranks of Wings. The sessions were held over six days in August with the aim of preparing the two for the next tour and testing them for the sessions Venus and Marsthe album that would be released in 1975.
Macca was flying high at the time. At 32, he had released five albums as a solo artist, with Linda or Wings, proving he could do without the Beatles, who had broken up four years earlier. A good part of the songs tested with Wings were, so to speak, an extension of the writing style inaugurated with Let It Be And The Long and Winding Road (songs which were also sketched out during the sessions One Hand Clapping), but also with Get Back. It was his musical vision, without the discord and contrasts of the sessions Let It Be. It is Orpheus who goes away along the long and winding roadrefusing to come back (For the record, around the same time the other Beatles were also declaring their independence and dependencies).
Listen One Hand Clapping It's a blast, and it must have been a blast to record it too. It's not particularly serious music, but it sounds good and that's probably because the musicians were pretty relaxed in the studio. It doesn't contain all the pieces recorded on that occasion, it isn't there for example Suicidean easy listening song that McCartney unsuccessfully pitched to Frank Sinatra, but it offers a nice portrait of the group at the time.
Approximately half of the 32 recorded tracks have never officially seen the light of day and it's a shame because in some cases they are revisitations of rather well-known songs: this version of Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five it's funky and has a nice urgency, with Linda's synths adding to the tension; Wild Life it's more soulful and sad than the version included on the album of the same name (and Macca doesn't sing “aminals”); the reggae guitar of Jet it's tougher than ever; in Live and Let Die the vocals are rougher than the single for the James Bond film. McCartney growls towards the end, refusing to call it quits, rather letting it die, as per the title.
Even in backyard tape included as a seven inch on the vinyl release of One Hand Clapping the band plays particularly lively. A few months before John Lennon resumed his infernal collaboration with Phil Spector, reworking the songs he had loved as a boy with mediocre results on the album Rock'n'RollMcCartney was having fun with an acoustic guitar in the back of Abbey Road playing Twenty Flight Rock by Eddie Cochran, the first song he and Lennon had done together. Unlike his friend, he gives the impression that he is actually having fun (and singing Peggy Sue with more enthusiasm than Lennon does in Rock'n'Roll).
Other pieces of One Hand Clapping instead they are a little too improvised. As evidence they are fine, but they shed no new light on Macca's hits. Maybe I'm Amazed it has all the power of the song, but it doesn't live up to the throat-busting intensity you hear in Wings Over America. The Beatles trilogy formed by Let It Be, The Long and Winding Road And Lady Madonna it sounds fantastic, but it's less than three and a half minutes in total, with McCartney moving from one song to the next as quickly as he left the group. Band on the Run has an uncertain start, with imprecise guitar parts and Linda almost losing her keyboard attack. In the video of One Hand Clapping she is seen making a face of embarrassment, although Paul doesn't seem to care.
The absence of the video part, the quality of which has never been exceptional, is not a problem, in fact, it's the opposite. Much of the TV special that never aired and was released as a bonus DVD in 2010 Band on the Run consisted of close-up shots of the musicians' faces. Director David Litchfield was essentially a journalist, he himself admitted that he wasn't cut out to be a director. “Paul said the documentary wasn't meant for the public, but for him, Linda and the band,” Litchfield explained. «My magazine, TheImage, was about to fail, this job saved my life.” And yet thanks to Geoff Emerick, the Beatles' longtime sound engineer who recorded the sessions, and Steve Orchard who gave them a modern sound with the new mix, it seems that McCartney is there, singing for you in your room.
It's this sense of intimacy that makes it special One Hand Clapping and, ultimately, more similar to a real album or an official bootleg (which it actually is) than the soundtrack of a concert film. The Wings lineup that cut him didn't last long. McCulloch and Britton never bonded and the drummer left almost immediately after the release of Venus and Mars. But for a few days in 1974 and for the sessions of Venus and Mars it worked. One Hand Clapping it's the sound of the birth of a band.
From Rolling Stone US.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
