Monday Guest Album Review Blogging

Courtesy of our good friends Sal and Tony at NYCD:

PAUL McCARTNEY - MEMORY ALMOST FULL.
About 1972, people began to realize that the Beatles, who made some of the greatest music of all time when together, also had the ability to make some of the worst records since the invention of the cylinder as solo artists. So for every Band On The Run or All Things Must Pass, we got stuck with a Wild Life or Dark Horse. We dealt with it -- tried to ignore the lesser records, loved the good ones, and hoped against hope that they'd come to their senses and get back together.

Beginning in the early '80s, when we all found out the hard way that Beatles can get older and even die, and that a reunion was no longer possible, there arose a curious breed of music fan called Beatle Apologists. Their job was to find the minutes of brilliance or even competence amidst the forty minutes of dreck that made up most Beatle solo albums, and use them to justify the whole sorry mess.

It seems like a large percentage of Beatle apologists have become record reviewers over the years. That's why records like Off The Ground, Gone Troppo, and Stop And Smell The Roses (by Paul, George and Ringo, respectively) received respectful, even mildly encouraging reviews upon their release. The bar was set so low that all a Beatle had to do was put any sort of garbage on a piece of plastic to prove he hadn't joined John Lennon in the great beyond, and by golly, that was good enough for the apologists.

Along with Beatle apologists emerged a somewhat more cynical group, the Beatle realists. They loved the Beatles too, and dutifully bought all the solo records out of some strange sense of loyalty. The difference between the realists and the apologists was that the realists were able to hear just how bad most of these records were. Conversations between realists and apologists usually go something like this:

APOLOGIST: You know, there are a couple of really good songs on this new Ringo Starr CD.
REALIST: No. There aren't.

Just to clarify, we love Sir Paul. So much so that we are still listening to Memory Almost Full, looking for that hidden gem in this mess of an album. As of listen # 6, it's still dreck.

There's more over at their blog, so get the heck over there and give them some love.