Friday Night Videos

At long last — Friday Night Videos returns!

It’s a little late in the season to bring back Summer of Covers, but I did get some stockpiled for 2017. Assuming President Trump hasn’t started a trade war that crashes the economy, or that President-for-Life Clinton hasn’t shut down the entire internet because of something one guy on a blog said.

Anyway, I did come up with the idea of finding a few deep cuts and forgotten gems for you, and tonight’s song is one of those gems.

Growing up in the ’70s it was pretty much impossible not to become a Wings fan, or at the very least be able to hum any of their numerable and hummable hits. For me that started with “Band On The Run” and ended with the band breaking up. Wings wasn’t a vital band like the Beatles, but they were always listenable.

ASIDE: Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles, post-Wings solo career somehow survived recording the execrable “The Girl Is Mine” alongside Michael Jackson on the otherwise flawless Thriller, but that’s another story.

Wings vacillated between pop-fluff numbers like “Silly Love Songs” (which is a song I love because it’s silly), and AOR-material like “Helen Wheels” or “Rock Show.” But that’s just typical McCartney: Serving up each bite of thick-cut steak alongside a sundae of triple fudge death-by-chocolate. He also made the pairing work, almost every time.

I’ve spent the last decade or two trying to fill every nook and cranny of my music collection with every single dang song I could still remember and could still stomach listening to. Needless to say, there’s some real crap in there, but sometimes a crappy song, infrequently played, can take you right back to that perfect summer day when you were young and foolish and deep into your first crush.

Somehow though I’d completely forgotten about one Wings song. In fact, I’d forgotten all about their final album, Back To The Egg. I’d even forgotten about the catchiest song on their finally album — a song which I first heard on a summer day when I was young and foolish and deep into my first crush.

Melissa and I were watching something on TV last week, and something on the soundtrack went PING! in the reptile part of my brain. ’70s keyboards. Irresistible bass. And then McCartney’s unmistakable voice singing “Ooh, baby.”

And that was it. That was all they played.

So I searched “McCartney lyric ooh baby,” hoping to get something fewer than 11,000 different song titles.

Sure enough though, the first hit was tonight’s Lost Gem, “Arrow Through Me.”

It’s as slick and as catchy and as true as anything McCartney ever recorded, and the only thing I don’t like about it is that I spent the last 25 years or so without listening to it.

But starting right now, I’m making up for lost time.