Whether you were a child of the ’60s or (like me) of the ’70s, the Beatles’ perpetual presence on the radio seemed something of a birthright. Every “official” Beatles single between “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “The Long and Winding Road” reached the Billboard Top 40, and for five years after the band’s 1970 breakup all four members were reliable fixtures on AM radio. That omnipresence began to fade in 1975 as John Lennon went into retirement, George Harrison’s hitmaking became hit-or-miss, and Ringo … well, Ringo seemed to lose his mojo right around the time he found producer Arif Mardin.

But Paul McCartney found a way to remain radio-relevant straight through the ’70s, making the Top 40 even with drivel like “Letting Go,” “Girls’ School,” “London Town” and the singles from Wings’ last album, the brutal 1979 Back to the Egg. (His chartmaking prowess survived a lot of lousy singles, to be sure; it’s not for nothin’ that McCartney-written “classics” made my lists of the Worst Number One hits of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.)

A couple of funny things happened to Macca on the way to the ’80s, however. Sixteen days into the new decade, he was handcuffed at Tokyo International Airport while trying to smuggle a rather large quantity of weed into the country, and instead of giving him a slap on the hand and looking the other way, Japanese authorities locked him up for nine days and threatened to throw away the key (before eventually relenting). He returned home to find erstwhile bandmate Denny Laine exploiting the event with a single called “Japanese Tears,” and suddenly Paul found himself without a band once again.

He retreated to a home studio, much as he had as the Beatles were splitting, and emerged with a solo album that was even more idiosyncratic than his first one had been a decade earlier. But then, after the first single from that McCartney II album (“Coming Up”) topped the charts in customary fashion, he released another one – and it didn’t even make the Hot 100, much less the Top 40.

That single was “Waterfalls” (download), a lovely ballad whose quality is hard to deny, but whose utter pop-chart failure is easy to understand. Its lethargic pace and bare-bones production values hardly fit on the radio during the summer of 1980 alongside “Funkytown,” “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” and “Upside Down” – Christopher Cross’ “Sailing” was about as slow as programmers were willing to go. (more…)