Just a few notes on the listings…  Any songs that are struck through are actually sung by someone other than the specified ex-Beatles, whether it is Yoko Ono or Denny Laine.  Meanwhile songs in italics are instrumentals.  These two types of songs are far less likely to make the cut for the album, as there are not a lot of previous examples of these two types of song on the officially released Beatles albums.

By the time John’s son Sean was five, he no longer required (or was able to keep) all of his father’s attention.  After a particularly productive jaunt to the Bahamas, John decided the time was right for a comeback. So he found a new record label, Geffen, and a new producer, Jack Douglas, and he released Double Fantasy.  Not only was this his first album in five years, it was his first collaboration with Yoko since 1972’s Some Time In New York City.

Although John had predicted it after hearing the B-52s, Yoko’s tracks on this album were far more cutting-edge, forward-looking, and even commercial than Lennon’s.  John’s half of the album was just as pastoral and domesticated as critics accused Paul’s records as being.

As for Paul, Wings were never quite the real band he was hoping for.  But even the facade of Wings was pretty much over by 1980. Their tour of Japan had been scrapped last-minute after Paul spent 8 days in jail for entering the country with a small amount of marijuana.  And much like the last time his band broke up at the beginning of the decade, Paul decided to record a one-man-band record entitled McCartney. I was always a little disappointed that he didn’t release an album called McCartney III in 1990. In fact, after this album Paul never quite returned to this “playing all the instruments himself” technique.

The biggest difference between McCartney and McCartney II is that Paul had gotten into synthesizers.  Also McCartney II has far fewer instrumentals than its predecessor, with only two and a third with only a few words compared to the five on McCartney.  Unfortunately, Paul decided to use a racial epithet in the title for one of these instrumentals. Since there are no words in the song, it was completely unnecessarily. It’s not as horrific as the single from Some Time In New York City, but still completely egregious.

While Double Fantasy should have been a pleasant, if unassuming, way to ease Lennon back into the music business, some asshole with a gun turned what should’ve been a minor entry in John’s catalog into a career capstone and summary of an entire lifetime.  One of the less important tragedies of John’s murder is the way it catapulted Double Fantasy into a prominence and importance that its modest charms could not really live up to. John clearly intended this album to be commercial, although who knows how well it would’ve sold had he not been killed.  Death is the ultimate publicity stunt. As John himself said, “Everyone loves you when you’re six feet in the ground.”

George on the other hand, was either so uninterested in or unable to be commercial that when he first submitted Somewhere In England to Warner Bros they rejected it and insisted that Harrison record four new songs, although the tracks they chose to cut (including a pair of Hoagy Carmichael covers) weren’t really that much better than the ones that stayed.

One of the new song that George recorded was a song he initially wrote for Ringo, All Those Years Ago. Having ditched Vini Poncia by 1980, Ringo had decided to go back to the Ringo drawing board for the first time since Ringo’s Rotogravure. All four of the Beatles had written songs for Ringo to sing: Paul had Attention and Private Property, George had All Those Years Ago and Wrack My Brain, and John had the unfortunately titled Life Begins At Forty and Nobody Told Me. Ringo even wrote two songs himself (the last two for which he would have sole songwriting credit), Wake Up and You Can’t Fight Lightning which as originally going the be the title of this new Ringo Starr album. But much like Somewhere In England, the released album was changed a bit from its original conception.

John died just days before he was to lay down his tracks for the album, and Ringo didn’t feel comfortable recording them without him (although he would cover Grow Old With Me in 2019). George’s song All Those Years Ago was done in a key that was out of Ringo’s vocal range, and so that was never completed. Ringo even decided that his own songs weren’t strong enough and cut those too. The final album, now titled Stop And Smell The Roses was filled out with songwriting and production work by Ron Wood, Stephen Stills, and Harry Nilsson; and was one of Ringo’s best in a long time. But nobody noticed and the album did not sell well. While John’s death may have helped sales of Double Fantasy, it may have been hard to convince Beatles fans to invest in the lightweight whimsy of a Ringo Starr solo album in the wake of such tragedy.

I have started this playlist with John’s (Just Like) Starting Over, which is a good thesis statement for this round as we are getting the whole gang back together after an extended absence. From he we have Coming Up, a song from McCartney II although the single is not actually on the album. For whatever reason, Paul released the live version by Wings as the single, which kind of feels like twisting the knife in an already dead body; but the single did pretty well on the charts.

From there we have the song George originally wrote for Ringo about John. John had given an interview in which he complained that he was barely mentioned in George’s autobiography, I Me Mine, and this song was meant to be an apology for that. To be fair, hardly anybody was mentioned in George’s book. Not so much an autobiography, I Me Mine was more of an interview padded out to book-length with the inclusion of all of George’s handwritten lyrics. Despite being lavishly produced and expensively produced, George’s book was skimpy not only on details, but on content. However, after Lennon’s death, Harrison reworked some of the lyrics to either express his grief or cash in on his friend’s death. By having Paul overdub some bass onto the track, the single did pretty well, mostly on the novelty of having all living Beatles playing on the same song for the first time in ten years. Unfortunately the more Ringo-styled bounce and feel to the track do not fit well with the morose subject matter, and as a result the song has not aged as well as song tributes to Lennon’s death, like Paul Simon’s The Late Great Johnny Ace.

From there we have the other song George wrote for Ringo, Wrack My Brain, although he did also produce Ringo singing a cover of You Belong To Me for the Stop And Smell The Roses album. This was the first, and best performing, single from the album. Even though it is a fun little ditty, it didn’t exactly set the world ablaze. From there we slow things down a little bit with John’s tribute to his son, Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy). The song is probably best remembered for including John’s last really great lyric: “Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.”

Not to be outdone, we have a McCartney ballad, Waterfalls. While it didn’t do much as a single at the time, the song did surprisingly enough become the basis for the TLC hit of the same name. Much like Rod Stewart’s Forever Young is neither a cover nor completely independent from Bob Dylan’s Forever Young, there’s not a lawsuit to be had, but definitely a tip of the hat. While working our way through the slower ballads, we end Side One with George’s surprisingly soulful cover of Baltimore Oriole. Why George recorded this at this time is hard to say, but I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for this version.

We open Side Two with Woman, a song that is probably not intended to be a direct sequel to Rubber Soul‘s Girl. While that is a plaintive and straightforward love song, I thought it best to segue from that to Temporary Secretary, a song that was considered for years to be Paul’s most annoying track. Recently though, it’s had a bit of a resurgence as a club track, and surprisingly, the song that gained quite a bit of estimation since it was released. Paul even includes it in his live set these days. I do enjoy how abrasive and obnoxious it is. Something that is particularly rare for Paul McCartney.

Next up is George’s Teardrops, another tune that like All Those Years Ago where the peppy, funky music is totally at odds with the downbeat and melancholy lyrics. From here we get one of the songs that Paul wrote for Ringo, Private Property. The second single from the album, it did even worse than Wrack My Brain. Both Linda and Denny play on the track and give you a slight indication of what Wings would’ve sounded like had they continued on post-Back To The Egg. While there’s not a lot of John tunes to choose from on Double Fantasy, I chose I’m Losing You, as it is almost the only Lennon track on there that shows any sort of anger or pain. As much as we want to think of the last five years of John’s life as the happily-ever-after that he always deserved, it wasn’t ever as simple as that. From there we get another new song that George had to record for Somewhere In England. In a bit of a case of biting the hand that feeds you, the lyrics of the song are all about how pissed he is that he has to record new, more commercial songs for his record company. But it is surprisingly fun and easy to dance to.

While there are number of tunes that I really like from McCartney II like One Of These Days, On The Way, and Darkroom, I decided to end the album with the perennial seasonal classic Wonderful Christmastime. I think people have heard these song so many time that they forget just how wildly inventive it was at the time. Although credited to Wings, it was recorded during the McCartney II sessions and features many of the strange and experimental synth textures as that album. For chronological reasons, this tune is often lumped in with the Back To The Egg bonus tracks, but it really fits much better with the McCartney II vibe.

And really what better way to end an unintentionally tragic playlist than with a simple wish for a merry Christmas and a happy new year. Plus Paul referencing George’s Ding Dong, Ding Dong is a nice note to close on.