Paul McCartney - McCartney (1970) Part Seven

ALBUM 1 - Paul McCartney - McCartney (1970)

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1. The Lovely Linda
2. That Would Be Something
3. Valentine Day
4. Every Night
5. Hot As Sun / Glasses
6. Junk
7. Man We Was Lonely
8. Oo You
9. Momma Miss America
10. Teddy Boy
11. Singalong Junk
12. Maybe I'm Amazed
13. Kreen-Akrore

Momma Miss America is really a case of two completely different instrumental pieces slammed together.  As Paul himself said in 1970, "I made it up as I went along.  First there was a sequence of chords, and then a melody on top.  Piano, acoustic guitar, electric guitar and bass.  Originally it was two pieces, but they ran into each other by accident and became one."

The first part of it seems to be a piece originally titled Rock n' Roll Springtime (a working title obviously, as most songwriters do), if the person shouting at the beginning is anything to go by.  I guess the guy is the engineer recording the session.  It is a basic three chord trick around A minor, D minor and E minor, with some passing chords (Bm to Am, Em to Dm, and F#m to Em).

I am hoping that I have worked out the song properly, as it isn't included in the McCartney songbook that I own, and finding music for it online is tricky.  I ended up just learning it by ear in the end.

The second section of the song is a fairly standard jam style piece in G major, incredibly close structurally to Rock n' Roll Springtime in fact, though in a different key of course (it still works around the root, fourth and fifth chords mainly, though with some differences, which we'll chat about in a short while).

Here we see four bars of G, 2 bars of C, 2 bars of G, and then 2 each of D and G.  This is then repeated before the piano almost becomes the main instrument in the third run where it becomes four bars of G, and then a run of D, C, Bm, Am, and back to G, and then a run of D, C, and G.  The rest of the piece is pretty much akin to these sections really.  It is a jam through and through, and obviously laid down relatively quickly, with the electric lead guitar obviously improvised over the top after everything else.

This second section has a much more raw feel to it than Rock n' Roll Springtime.  Because of the raw edge to it, it is just the right side of rawness to be easy to listen to, and fun sometimes.

In all honesty I think that both instrumental pieces work to a degree, but as McCartney's cut and paste approach goes, these probably should have remained as separate pieces, or been linked some way or another to make them flow better than just having the first piece stop, and then after a moment the second one starting.

Sometimes his cut and paste style can work really well on material such as Band On The Run and Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey (in fact, Live & Let Die as well considering it's a rock ballad with a reggae middle eight), where time was spent on them.  Here though it is a case of "well they're on the same tape and both are sort of bluesy-ish, so let's keep them together as one piece."  As I said I think that they both work separately really well, but as one piece not so.  Fun to play though.

The next song we will be looking at will be the almost childlike Teddy Boy.

Links-

My version of Momma Miss America

An interesting use of the track (don't take note of the chat at the beginning, that's just chat which has been sampled at the front to make it seem like their talking between themselves)

Paul McCartney Chord songbook at Amazon UK