Spoiler for the eighth installment of Oobu Joobu, airing 7/12/95 in New
York
(and the following weekend in many places)
Week 8 00:27 Intro. 01:45 Jet 05:45 Keep Under Cover 08:40 Johnny B. Goode - Chuck Berry 12:00 Get Out of My Way 16:35 Apology 19:58 Three Cool Cats 23:40 Don't Break the Promises 24:50 Don't Break the Promises - 10cc 30:30 Pesto Sauce - Linda 32:00 Peacocks - Linda 35:10 Comedy Bit - Steven Wright 35:45 I've Just Seen a Face 38:20 Fun with Glasses 40:45 Winedark Open Sea (Rockin' Version)
Generally speaking, Paul McCartney doesn't change songs around much. Whether he's doing a rock and roll oldie, a Beatle tune or something from his solo catalogue, he usually plays things pretty much the way we're used to hearing them. This makes it all the more exciting when he totaly revamps a song, as he did with "I Wanna Be Your Man" and "Can't Buy Me Love" for his "Up Close" MTV special a couple years back.
Paul hasn't played anything that radically changed on "Oobu Joobu"--until now. Episode 8 gives us not one but two fascinating reworkings of songs that are already familiar to serious Paul/Beatle fans, if not to the general public. The real stunner here is "Winedark Open Sea", which was presented as a shimmering, slow love song on "Off the Ground". In the rehearsal version presented here, it is completely recast as an out-and-out rocker, different enough from the original that it took me a while to recognize it--and it's one of my favorite Paul songs! Less radically changed but still fresh and exciting is "Three Cool Cats", the Coasters nugget that was memorably recorded by the young Beatles at their Decca audition, with George on lead. Here--also at a tour rehearsal--Paul takes lead with his current band for a slower, funkier arrangement of the song. The performance starts off with so many repetitions of the title that you suspect Paul has forgotten the verses, but he handles them with aplomb, even doing all three voices from the end of the middle eight ("I want that little chick" etc.).
Also presented from tour rehearsals and soundchecks: a very strong "Jet" with raw vocals from McCartney; a straightforward "I've Just Seen A Face"; and a typically rollicking "Get Out Of My Way", from the St. Louis soundcheck of 4/29/93, on which Paul completely skips a verse. (By the way, Paul played the song on that occasion as a request for Beatlefan correspondent Rick Glover, whose "Crash Bang Wollop" sign was a fixture on the 93 tour.) There was also an interesting bit with Linda running her finger over a glass to get a musical sound while Paul scrambled to match it on piano--apparantly a spontaneous thought and not an attempt to play "Glasses" from the "McCartney" LP. Paul follows this by playing a recording of a Mozart piece written for glass harmonica--it sounds like this piece may have inspired "Glasses", although it would have been nice to hear Paul comment on this directly.
Another treat is a bit of a demo for "Don't Break the Promises", one of several songs written by Paul with Eric Stewart for the "Press To Play" album, but left of that album and eventually released by Stewart's band, 10CC. We get just enough to get a good feel for how Paul would have handled the song, and from there we go into 10CC's recording. Similarly, we go from an early version of "Keep Under Cover"--this one available to collectors on the "Tug of War Demos and More" boot, which appears to be a favorite of Paul's--into the official version from "Pipes of Peace". While Paul gives a clear explanation of what's going on with "Promises", he says very little about "Cover", so that anyone not familiar with the song--and that probably includes most of the show's listeners--won't know why the song changes in feel along the way.
Linda gives a recipe for pesto sauce and then contributes "Peacocks", an odd studio outtake with vocals consisting entirely of bird imitation and nonsense syllables. It's fun in its own way.
This particular installment is rather light on outside material, including only Chuck Berry's classic "Johnny B. Goode" and a sprightly early reggae record called "Apology", for which Paul tells us the name of the record shop where he bought it, but not the name of the artist. (So much for *his* fifteen minutes of fame!)
The show concludes with a nice bit of business in which Paul repeatedly says goodbye, which dissolves into hellos as Paul pretends to have just arrived. Would have sounded right at home on the final Beatles Christmas record.
This show offered some of the strongest performance of the series thus far, and there are several strong contenders for the song of the week, but I have to go with the electrifying transformation of "Winedark Open Sea".
One minor correction from last week--the Bill Haley concert Paul talked about was at the Liverpool Odeon, not the Empire.
... Welcome to Oobu Joobu. Whew! Just made it.
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