Paul during his "middle years" | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

I’ve been a fan of McCartney since the early seventies. The first five albums or so I really liked, but then I started being disappointed by his albums typically from Back To The Egg forward. I still kept hoping that it will turn it around and put out stuff I thought was better like you used to, so every time a new album came out I would try to check it out, although by the late 90s I think I pretty much given up.

But aside from whether he was putting out good albums or not I would have followed him if he had made himself much more socially visible in movies and TV shows and so forth. It just seemed to me that through the 80s 90s and early 2000s he was sort of laying low and not really getting his face out there. It’s only now in retrospect as I do a little research that I see that in fact he was doing a lot of stuff.  There’s all these music videos and other videos of him that recently I have been discovering on YouTube that spanned from the 70s all the way to the early 2000s, which I never knew about. For example that long video of him in Liverpool where he’s sitting in a bar with all these people and getting drunk and singing I never knew about that until like decades later. Or a long video montage of what looks like the late 70s, with him enjoying his family in various locations. 

And then just the other night I was listening to some album he did of electronic music (not sure whether the album was done at one time or includes a span of time) where a few of them have videos that he himself did, like one where he’s in an attic looking through a treasure chest and finding a book of his own drawings when he was a child and it’s filmed as though it were some kind of a movie of a treasure hunt.  In that one he looked sort of like the 80s to 90s McCartney, and I never knew he had done stuff like that.

So I guess he actually was making himself visible and putting his face out there through the 80s 90s early 2000s.  The main reason I didn’t know about it is because there was no Internet back then. Back then, there was only television and oftentimes if you’re an American you may not ever even see some production he might have done originating from the UK. And other than TV there was maybe radio but I didn’t listen to much radio especially through the ’80s and ’90s and 2000s, and then there’s fan magazines — but I didn’t go around hanging around stores picking up music fan magazines.  Once in a blue moon I might pick up a Rolling Stone if they had an interview with Carlos Santana or something like that but that’s about it.

Plus — for those still reading and not bored silly from my narrative here — there were gaps of time that lasted maybe two to three years at a time when I literally had no television, either throwing it away or moving to a place where I just didn’t bother to buy one.  So for instance, I missed out on giant swaths of Saturday Night Live — completely missing pretty much all of Eddie Murphy’s time there as well as Joe Piscopo.  Luckily, at least I was able to catch (live) his Saturday Night Live performance/video of “Coming Up “.