Dear Walter

Many of you know how much I love the Walter Martin Radio Hour. I’ve been listening (and subscribing) to it almost since the beginning, and it’s been a constant source of pleasure and indeed joy for me. His enthusiasm is certainly contagious, but the real value here is the depth of his musical knowledge and the sheer number of tracks that he has exposed me to that I would not have known about otherwise. (Here I think especially of his recent three-hour playlist of Jamaican pop music from the Fifties to the Seventies.) But his constant ragging on Paul McCartney in this wonderfully long Beatles season has annoyed me. I must mouth off. My first annoyance came when Walter did his series on Paul: he said almost nothing about Paul’s work since 1978 or so, and for his playlist of that period picked outtakes, oddities, and stuff Linda did. (Walter likes Linda.) Paul has produced a buttload of mediocre music, to be sure, but there are also some really good things — I think particularly of…