Band on the Run @ 50: Underdubbed or Underwhelming?
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- Опубликовано: 15 сен 2024
- Join us as we revisit Wings' landmark album "Band on the Run", celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2023. We'll take a nostalgic deep dive into the album's creation, standout tracks like "Band on the Run", "Jet", and "1985", and its legacy as one of Paul McCartney's greatest achievements. We'll compare it to The Beatles and debate whether songs like the title track stand up to the Fab Four's best work. We'll also discuss highlights (and lowlights) of the various 50th anniversary "Super Deluxe" editions. From its unique origin story recorded in Nigeria to its enduring pop brilliance, this is the definitive discussion of "Band on the Run" for longtime fans and newcomers alike. So take a trip down memory lane with us and rediscover why this classic still means so much 50 years later!
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The underdubbed versions of Jet and Bluebird (no horns, more guitar and vox presence) and Let Me Roll It (drenched in reverb and alternate vocal) are awesome! And getting an instrumental mix of 1985 with different lead guitar lines and no (awful) title track tag at the end of the song is really nice too. So glad we got these versions as an alternate experience.
Wings were at their absolute pinnacle with BOR.
However the early Wings were just as good as anything he did with the Beatles.
Wildlife was perfect.
RIP Henry McCullough. Most underrated guitarist Paul ever had in Wings.
I'm with you on Wildlife (not so much with the "as good as The Beatles" opinion). I've no idea why this gem of an album attracts such opprobrium.
I had the double vinyl album on order, complete with the underdubs disc, then Macca did us all the favour of releasing snippets from a couple of the underdubbed tracks (Manmunia and BotR). I think you know where this is going regarding my final purchasing choice.
I got this as a christmas present from my sister.....50 years ago. I played it continuously. I slowly went off a few tracks. Paul can be wearing if you listen to him too much. He did go downhill a bit over the next decade although venus and mars was fine. However, he used to put albums out when he should have spent more time on developing material. RAM is still his best. I hear that he has put out a few good songs in recent years but I just lost touch with him. The banal lyrics can be wearing over time. 50 years...its been a long journey for both of us.
Since I was a kid I thought it sounded like John Lennon on the last "If we ever get out of here". Probably Paul or Denny imitating him, but for a second there I can still hear John.
So underwhelmed. Let's hear the demos!
And Outtakes!
Yes, that's what we needed. There were several copies of the demo tape that was stolen in Nigeria (a tale that has grown in the telling) and Joe English certainly has said he has one whilst it is hard to believe that a musical life as carefully curated/archived as Macca's doesn't have the masters.
I thought those were stolen in a robbery.
@@derekroberts6654 Bit of an exaggeration by Paul. His copy was stolen in a mugging apparently. but there were other copies (Joe English for instance).
Loved Lennons Beatle stuff(mostly) but his post Beatles stuff(in the 10 years after) wasn't up there with McCartney and Wings, Band on the Run was a great album, and the Wings over America album made you want to have been there.
Agree... Reckon this one was definitely the best of the post breakup records from all
Underdubb? Just give us the demos! No, give us the song notes in a roughed up notebook and we have to sing the songs ourselves!
A half decent ai tool could probably produce the same output
I kinda compare underdubbed to Lennon’s “Double Fantasy Stripped”….
Curious to know why you think Paul "could never look John Lennon in the eye with something like Mamunia" and that George Harrison "would have walked out". Can you explain?
Don't get me wrong the song is OK - but this is what competition did in the Beatles and it wouldn't/shouldn't have been presented as a potential Beatles song had they'd still been together.
I couldn't imagine John tolerating this let alone attempting to sing as the back up and George would have been pssed that something like this would have been considered to result in one of his songs being passed over again.
You don't agree?
@@theindieminers I like it quite a lot the way it is, but I can also imagine liking it in a different arrangement that would have emerged if it had evolved in the Beatles. Lyrically it's message is not too different from Rain, and yes I can imagine John giving it's shape a tweak with his own point of view. George may not have appreciated it, on principle, being another McCartney offering, but wouldn't i think have had any really good reason to be put out about a song that appreciates the cycles of nature. It's a decent tune with lots of potential.
@@theindieminers I'll call your Mamunia and raise you Lennon's I'm The Greatest.
This is one too many scraping of the barrel ! There was no under bed version of the song BOTR . Visconti came up with the riff that linked the electric and acoustic section of the song when he did his orchestral score !
Over hyped!
This is a bizarre opinion. Elsewhere you dismissed this pre-overdub mix as "a fake" because Visconti supposedly claimed, somewhere, to have composed the orchestrated BOTR link which we can actually hear was already there in this raw band arrangement. I asked you for a source but you couldn't supply it, so here's my conclusion:
I have read several accounts by Visconti, including in his autobiography, and a Mojo interview, and I find no place where he says that he composed the link section in BOTR. So I've looked for the source you say you can't find... and i can't find it either. If it does exist, then it would need re-reading carefully to make sure some ambiguous statement such as "I wrote the score" is not being misinterpreted in memory. And if there *is* a place where he unambiguously claims to have *composed* the passage, you'd then have to ask how plausible the claim is.
Not only do we have this newly-released pre-orchestration mix (identified as an Emerick EMI mix dated 14 Ocober 1973, two weeks before the Visconti overdub session) but we also have deconstructed demixes of the familiar final pressing (search on RUclips) where you can hear the isolated guitar *and* bass tracks normally buried beneath the orchestration, playing the passage in question.
How and why did they get there? Did Emerick and Wings "fake" this in 1973? It would have been pointless to add inaudible band parts after the orchestral overdub session, and you need to think about how this overdub would have been accomplished at all in practice if Visconti had had to compose a link in a vacuum.
Visconti said Paul played him a cassette tape of the Wings recording, just the section of BOTR where he wanted the orchestra. "I only heard the beginning of Band On The Run, because that's where the strings were [to be], and then he stopped the tape . . . ." What was he hearing? 10 seconds of silence? Such a lack of ideas doesn't sound at all like Paul, and makes no practical sense. Did the band leave a long blank without thinking about how it should be filled? Why would Paul decide to assign five bars to an empty link section if he had no plan for it?
As Visconti said, "[H]e liked to dictate parts, you know, half of it was him whistling a part, or playing a top line on the piano, and he'd only play the snippets of the song that he wanted me to write on . . . Paul sat at the piano with me sitting next to him and played me snippets of songs on a portable cassette player, while on a second one he recorded his comments and his piano doodlings for string ideas. Some ideas he wanted me to strictly adhere to and some were just sketches that I was asked to improve upon."
The idea that Paul gave Visconti a five-bar silence with no instruction but "fill that space with something, Tony" is IMO so unlikely it should be dismissed. If there *was* just 10 secs of silence on the tape, it's more likely that Paul might have sung/played on the piano what he wanted to hear. But given the actual evidence, by far the most likely scenario is that Paul said "I want horns and strings to dramatise this tune" and played him a cassette snippet of the guitar-and-bass link section from the Wings track - the same guitar and bass tracks that have always been there buried underneath the orchestration on the final mix, and which we also hear now clearly revealed on the 14 Oct 1973 pre-overdub Emerick mix.
I thought that this ‘underdubbed’ version was just a rough mix made by Geoff Emerick so that the Orchestration could be written and done. The instrumentation on underdubbed is the actual album but some of the vocals were redone in UK (I think?) and the original demos that were stolen (the mugging incident) were just working demos before they started recording (in Lagos)? But that’s just what I’ve read and I might be wrong?😂
Spot on.
It was a Beatles record Paul borrowed Johns vocal sound and Georges guitar sound
look at it like this... we used to hunt down bootleg records growing up. Now? Well... they ALL give us a "bootleg" version. Paul. John. Beatles. Kiss. Dylan. Etc... I dont think rating them as legit albums is fair. Example: My Glyn Johns KUM BACK boots were great prior to Let It Be being issued. Now we have a box set for Let It Be. Bootleg stuff included. If you look at it this way, then its just them doing the boot search for us :)
I thought releasing the Glyn Johns mix had some form of merit given it could have been the version that we all ended up with and it was different to the final version... That aside, with this one the "value" was in that this was a rough mix of the recordings you hear on the record before things like orchestration was added... So It just didn't really add anything for me in the way that an alternative take might have
this is more like a stripped down disc but still kinda cool to hear. I think we are just used to getting lots from MACCA in those archive sets... we are a little spoiled :) @@theindieminers
I have to find this vid in English ! I'm sure it's pretty insightful .
(Lol , Just kidding , guys .
👍🍻)
Glad (or hope 😅) you enjoyed the video... Thanks for watching! 😊
@theindieminers Lol. Thanks for being a good sport, because I actually think the accents are GREAT ! As a Southerner , in the USA , I get poked at a little for my drawl , and thought -" They ought to get a load of THESE guys' accents !"
On the vid : We've survived for 50 years without an underdubbed 'Band On the Run' , and I , for one , will continue to do so . Probably my favorite , non-Beatles , album by Paul , too !
All good mate! We do from time to time get comments but its all in good fun. I mean, one time we got called Kanagaroos when really offended someone... But definitely underdubbed felt like a gimmick but it's great album still nonetheless.
underwhelmed with underdubbed. Not as good as the original release but it is ok
Achieve something yourselves,fuck me 40 no 1 hits to sfa hits.
I don't know mate, I think we've achieved a lot here at indie miners. I mean we give a forum for uneducated boomers like yourself a platform to comment on. Rock on champ 🏆
I love the Underdubbed, it allows buried details space to breath and the sound quality is really great, very immediate. Let It Be Naked is far superior to the original release, I don't think Underdubbed is better than the original but it brightens the sound and kind of puts you in the middle of it, well worth it.