Producer: George Martin
Track listing: Tug of War / Take It Away / Somebody Who Cares / What’s That You’re Doing? / Here Today / Ballroom Dancing / The Pound Is Sinking / Wanderlust / Get It /Be What You See / Dress Me Up as a Robber / Ebony and Ivory
May 29, 1982
3 weeks
More than a decade after the breakup of the Beatles, Paul McCartney reunited with the band’s famed producer to work on their first full album together since Abbey Road.
It wasn’t the first time George Martin had worked with McCartney since the Beatles days — the two shared the production credit of McCartney and Wings’ 1973 hit single “Live and Let Die” — but the collaboration couldn’t have had come at a better time. Although McCartney had continued to have commercial success with such albums as 1980’s number-three hit McCartney II, critics pointed out that the former Beatle was sorely missing a sounding board.
“My role in the album was to goad Paul a bit,” Martin told Billboard‘s Paul Grein. “I think when he and John Lennon split, he missed John’s goading enormously…I think Paul missed that spur.”
Both McCartney and Martin knew that fans would expect a lot from the pairing. “We both tried very hard on this one,” Martin told Grein. “Paul and I knew that people would be looking at it because it was the first time we’d worked together in so long. We talked about it for a couple of months before we went into the studio. We decided early on the general theme of life as a tug of war, a constant struggle of pluses and minuses.”
While McCartney and Martin were working on Tug of War, Lennon was assassinated on December 8, 1980. “We were already halfway through the album when John died,” Martin told Grein. “I remember I rang Paul that morning when I heard the news and said, ‘I don’t suppose you want to come in today,’ and he said, ‘Yes, I must come in today; we must work as usual.’ Well, we didn’t work; we chatted most of the day, but at least he got out of his home. It was a tremendous shock for him.”
“If You Were Here Today” was written for Lennon and expressed many of McCartney’s feelings that he hadn’t previously verbalized. “It was always a very difficult question after John died, to deal with the finality of it,” McCartney told his fan newsletter Club Sandwich. “He had been making digs at me, in ‘How Do You Sleep’ and all of that stuff, and I’d not really addressed any of those comments … So I addressed them in ‘Here Today,’ saying, in effect, ‘If you were here today you might say that such and such a thing is a lot of bullshit, but you and I both know that it isn’t.'”
The making of Tug of War, which included guest appearances by Stevie Wonder, McCartney’s former Beatles mate Ringo Starr, and rock pioneer Carl Perkins, was quite a protracted process McCartney recounted the recording of “Ebony and Ivory” in Club Sandwich: “We started it off in Montserrat, with Stevie Wonder, and then had various sessions in England, without Stevie, to finish it off, including one at Strawberry Studios South, in Dorking. We spent a lot of time fixing and polishing but it was worth it, not only because it was a good track, but because it became Stevie’s first Number One single in Britain.”
In fact, McCartney told Timothy White that the albums he spent the most time making were Tug of War, from 1980 to 1982, and its follow-up, Pipes of Peace. “We took so much time, when I saw the bill for it all I thought, ‘I could have made an entire studio for this!'”
Yet McCartney told White he was pleased with the results: “Tug of War worked as a commentary on my career thus far, an accurate summing up.” The album also earned McCartney another pair of chart-toppers. On May 15, 1982, “Ebony and Ivory” hit the top of the Hot 100. Two weeks later, Tug of War joined it at Number One.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of May 29, 1982
1. Tug of War, Paul McCartney
2. Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet, Rick Springfield
3. Asia, Asia
4. Diver Down, Van Halen
5. Stevie Wonder’s Original Musiquarium 1, Stevie Wonder