FEATURE:
Paul McCartney at Eighty
Forty Years of Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s Ebony and Ivory
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A Paul McCartney song…
that has always had to fight for respect and recognition, Ebony and Ivory was released on 29th March, 1982. The lead single from McCartney’s Tug of War album, it has had its critics through the years. McCartney’s first major duet, it is wonderful hearing him and Stevie Wonder unite on a song about racial harmony. I wanted to look at a few specific songs as I continue a run of forty features ahead of McCartney’s eightieth birthday in June. I will look at a famous Beatles and Wings track in future features. Now, I am keen to explore forty years of one of his most underrated tracks. Seen as too sentimental and lacking necessary anger and depth, some felt that a wealthy Pop musician writing about racial tension and the need for togetherness lacked authenticity and impact. It would be a few years before the golden age of Hip-Hop began – where we saw groups like Run-D.M.C. and Public Enemy articulate such topics with more anger and personal experience. I feel it is a classic McCartney track that deserves reinspection. Although it was never intended to change policies and bring about revolution in the same way many Hip-Hop artists of the 1980s and 1990s did, Ebony and Ivory has plenty of heart and is not just intended to get up the charts and cheapen something pure. Reaching number one in the U.S. and U.K. (and many other countries), I have a lot of love for Ebony and Ivory. There are a couple of articles that discuss a song that, whilst it has divided people, remains played and loved by many. The Beatles Bible give us a bit of information about Ebony and Ivory’s release and success:
“Ebony And Ivory’, a duet between Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, was released as a single on 29 March 1982.
Produced by George Martin, it was the lead single from McCartney’s Tug Of War album.
‘Ebony And Ivory’ topped the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks, and became the fourth biggest hit in the USA in 1982.
The single was McCartney’s longest spell at number one in the USA as a solo artist, and the second-longest behind ‘Hey Jude’ including his Beatles work. It was also Stevie Wonder’s longest chart-topper, and enabled him to become the first solo artist to top the US chart in three consecutive decades.
It also topped the singles charts in Canada, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Norway, Spain, the UK, and Zimbabwe. It was a top 10 hit in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa, Sweden, and Switzerland”.
Stereogum run a series where they look at number one singles through the years. Although they were not overly-kind about Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s Ebony and Ivory, they gave us some background about when they song was written and why:
“When I wrote the song, I thought, ‘Maybe we don’t need to keep talking about black and white. Maybe the problem is solved… Maybe I’ve missed the boat. Maybe it should’ve been written in the ’60s, this song.’ But I after I’d written it and recorded it, you look around, and, you know, there’s still tension.” That’s a very astute decades-old observation from Sir Paul McCartney, the man who attempted to heal racial tensions in the most trite, simplistic manner imaginable.
The central metaphor of McCartney’s song “Ebony And Ivory” is so basic that it doesn’t really bear explaining, though McCartney still explains it all over again anytime anyone asks him about the song. McCartney had just been through a few personal upheavals. His band Wings had officially broken up in 1981, when Denny Laine, the only longtime member of the band who did not have the word “McCartney” in his name, quit the group. And of course, McCartney was also mourning the death of his former bandmate John Lennon. He was also, at least in some sense, playing catchup. There’s some possibility that “Ebony And Ivory” is McCartney, long considered the glibbest of the Beatles, doing his best to inject some level of profundity into his solo work.
When McCartney first wrote “Ebony And Ivory,” he’d just gotten into a fight with his wife Linda, and he was thinking that they should be getting along better. Without working particularly hard on it, McCartney stretched his analogy to encompass conflicts between black and white people — a problem that, he thought, had maybe been solved. Maybe that general overall cluelessness is why “Ebony And Ivory” is so blasé and tossed-off, why it’s utterly lacking in anything resembling urgency.
Talking to Bryant Gumble on Today in 1982, McCartney said, “I wanted to sing it with a black guy.” The first black guy who came to mind was Stevie Wonder, the man who’d recorded what many consider to be the best Beatles cover ever recorded. (Wonder’s 1971 version of “We Can Work It Out” peaked at #13.) Wonder was happy to do it. Talking to Dick Clark shortly after the song came out, Wonder said, “I won’t say [the song] demanded of people to reflect upon it, but it politely asks the people to reflect upon life in using the terms of music… this melting pot of many different people.” Right now, all around us, we can see how well that approach works.
McCartney and Wonder recorded the song together on Montserrat, in the West Indies, with both of them playing a bunch of different instruments. McCartney played bass and guitar. Wonder played drums. Both of them played pianos, synths, and percussion. Linda McCartney and Denny Laine sang backup, and so did 10cc’s Eric Stewart, a man who’s previously appeared in this column as a member of Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders. (I’ve seen some reports that Isaac Hayes also sang backup on “Ebony And Ivory,” but I can’t find confirmation of that anywhere reliable, and I sure don’t hear him.) The Chieftains’ Paddy Moloney played pipes. George Martin, McCartney’s old Beatles collaborator, produced the track. While McCartney and Wonder were recording together in Montserrat, they also came up with a much better song that also appeared on McCartney’s Tug Of War album: “What’s That You’re Doing?,” perhaps the nastiest soul/funk track ever released under McCartney’s name”.
On its fortieth anniversary (29th March), I wanted to salute a song that remains underrated and a little maligned. It is a beautiful song of unity and understanding from an artist who had every right to discuss it through music. Ahead of Paul McCartney’s eightieth birthday in June, I will dissect one or two of his other songs. I wanted to use this feature to spotlight the lead single from Tug of War. A brilliant single from a terrific album, Ebony and Ivory is something that people should…
EMBRACE and love.