Listen To What the Man Said in Frytown, Iowa

To complete the trifecta of recent Beatle-related finds in 42N country is this 1975 single, Listen To What the Man Said from Wings. Found today is this 45 rpm single with its original picture sleeve at an auction in Frytown, Iowa (latitude 41.57N, longitude 91.73W.) While the record is in great condition the sleeve is punctured through the center.

The single is from the group's 1975 album, Venus and Mars, the followup work to the landmark Band on the Run album. On July 19, 1975 Listen To What the Man Said achieved number 1 on the (US) Billboard Hot 100 chart. Also in 1975, Wings begin playing concerts in Australia in anticipation of their upcoming 1976 world tour. That year McCartney played several locations in the US marking his return to American venue concerts since performing at Candlestick Park with the Beatles a decade earlier. Watch Paul and Wings sing Listen To What the Man Said at the Seattle King Dome here.

Sometimes the search for whatever you seek (like a record or ancestral connection or a job) contains long voids. Sometimes your search brings multiple successes and in quick succession. Within the past 48 hours I have found three Beatle-related items, actually four but did not report the fourth (a Mary Wells song sheet) due to condition issues. The wonder of it all. Know that.

Paul McCartney's Silly Love Songs Celebrates 33 years

On April 1, 1976 Capitol Records released, Silly Love Songs from the LP album Wings at the Speed of Sound in the United Kingdom. The single was released in America on April 30th. The song went on to become the biggest selling record for the year according to Sales Charts and achieved the number one position twice for a total of five weeks in 1976. Silly Love Songs is Paul McCartney at his bass intro pop best and represented an old guard tip to the then current disco era. The song accompanied the band's Wings Over America Tour, which repositioned McCartney as the top act in the United States since he stopped touring with the Beatles in 1966 (August 29th at San Francisco's Candlestick Park.) The Wings tour was recorded and issued in December 1976 as a three-record LP set and later released as a movie.

All that aside, this past weekend I found the lightly played 45-single (above) at a thrift store for 38 cents. You too can find the 33-year old song on vinyl by visiting eBay where the record sells for about $6.00 - and what's wrong with that? Know that.