When I became a fan of his back in the early 70s with Ram and then after Ram going backwards to see what his first solo album was all about -- and liking it a lot, though I never was a Maybe I'm Amazed person. It's a great song but to me I like other quirkier songs on that album that are less blatantly pop oriented. And then of course Wings of Wildlife and then as the years went by Red Rose Speedway and Band on the Run. That album kind of ended my feeling of being a fan of McCartney. Venus and Mars and Rock Show, of course, were very cool, but not enough to sustain that album.
From then on I kept looking forward to the next album, but I kept being disappointed, so my interest in Paul steadily diminished over the decades. Even so, I would check out this or that album just to make sure, like Press to Play, which to me only had one interesting song, angry. Or much later, Memory Almost Full, and again there were two good songs on that one but two out of a whole album isn't much to sneeze at.
Anyway there was no internet back then though that didn't prevent certain celebrities from self promoting in grandiose ways. I just noticed as the '80s unfolded into the 90s that Paul wasn't doing much in terms of getting on TV or having cameos and movies or maybe doing duets with famous people or doing interviews, whatever. I wished back then that he would do more like that. But at the same time I was wishing he would do more I was also not really into him anyway. So a long time elapsed into the 2000s and occasionally I would check back with him and say okay what are you up to now have you any kindled your old inspiration or are you still doing mostly schlocky stuff? The first decade of the century I didn't really investigate Paul, but into the second I joined Beatles Bible and other people would mention now and again various albums like Chaos and Creation or Flaming Pie or Egypt Station and I would check out a few songs from these albums and be very unimpressed and say well I guess he's still not rekindled his inspiration so I'm not really missing anything...
Then I started noticing into that second decade of the 21st century that he was suddenly appearing everywhere and he was touring more than ever before and he was on this show and that show and doing all kinds of internet stuff. I think if anybody really researched this and did an honest measuring of it comparing his last 10 years with all the time previously since he first began his soul career, they would find that his self-promotion has skyrocketed and he has become very industrious and almost treating himself like a marketing company or something. That's what I wish he was doing back in the late 70s!
When in the summer of 1980 I suddenly saw him on Saturday Night Live, I thought wow this is fantastic! But that kind of a thing was very rare back then, whereas now it's very common for him. I remember I was working as a security guard in Seattle, I had just finished my first BA degree at the University of Washington, and I was working to make some money and deciding what I wanted to do. So anyway there was this one guy among the security guard team -- we were guarding the Rainier Bank Tower vault down in the parking garage below ground level -- the only guy there other than me who was like a super Paul McCartney fan. This was exciting for me because with the exception of two of my high school friends, I didn't know anybody who liked McCartney, and there was no internet to find more that might exist around the world. So anyway one night as he was getting off his security guard shift and I was walking towards him to start mine, I said hey did you see Saturday Night Live? He said yeah that was pretty cool wasn't it! And he recounted all the characters that Paul had impersonated in his special video he made including of course, Buddy Holly.