Guide Assessment
Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run
By Paul McCartney; edited by Ted Widmer
Liveright: 576 pages, $45
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What’s there left to learn about Paul McCartney in 2025? Really, fairly a bit. The octogenarian megastar is seemingly ever-present, popping up on social media feeds along with his affable avuncularity, his relentlessly sunny, two thumbs up ‘tude. Yet despite the steady trickle of Beatles scholarship that continues to be published, including Ian Leslie’s insightful e-book, “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs,” earlier this 12 months, McCartney is a cipher, a clean web page. He has masterfully created the phantasm of transparency, but his life stays stubbornly opaque. Does the person ever lose his mood? Has he ever cheated on his taxes? If there’s a chink in McCartney’s armor, we’re nonetheless searching for it.
Denny Laine, Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney and Denny Seiwell in Osterley Park, London, in 1971.
(Barry Lategan / MPL Communications )
But in keeping with this new e-book, an oral historical past of McCartney’s band Wings, there may be nonetheless a lot to be excavated from what’s the most examined life in pop music historical past, particularly when it comes from the horse’s mouth. The e-book is ostensibly “authored” by McCartney although it’s an oral historical past that has been edited by Ted Widmer, an estimable historian and a former speechwriter for Invoice Clinton. Widmer has additionally written third-person interstitial info to information the reader via the story.
Stitching collectively interviews with McCartney, his spouse Linda, erstwhile Beatles, and the varied musicians and different key gamers who discovered themselves pulled into the Wings orbit throughout the practically decadelong tenure of the band, “Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run” is a clean, frictionless trip throughout the arc of McCartney’s ’70s profession, when he continued to mint extra hits, and secured a lock on an enormous profession that’s presently in its fifty fifth 12 months.
Joe English, Jimmy McCulloch, Linda McCartney, Paul McCartney and Denny Laine in 1976.
(Clive Arrowsmith / MPL Communications)
Exhausting as it’s to fathom, McCartney has had pangs of doubt regarding his artwork and profession, by no means extra so than within the rapid aftermath of the Beatles’ breakup in 1970, when he discovered himself at free ends, uncertain of the right way to observe up probably the most spectacular first act in present enterprise historical past. Within the rapid aftermath of that epochal occasion, McCartney retreated to a 183-acre sheep farm on the Kintyre Peninsula in Argyllshire, Scotland, along with his spouse Linda and their younger household. In line with the e-book, there was uncertainty about his capacity to put in writing songs that might stand alongside his Beatles work. Therefore, his first solo providing, “McCartney,” was principally tentative, half-baked notions for songs, interlaced with a couple of absolutely realized compositions like “Maybe I’m Amazed,” all recorded by McCartney in his residence studio.
House recording classes for the McCartney album in London, 1970.
( Linda McCartney / © 1970 Paul McCartney beneath unique licence to MPL Archive LLP)
However the gentleman farmer couldn’t keep down on the farm for lengthy. Ultimately, the outdated impulse to be in a band and to carry out turned McCartney’s new crucial, however he would go about it in a completely totally different method. No extra tenting out in Abbey Highway studios, the Beatles’ favourite laboratory, hiring out string sections and horn sections, ruminating over tracks for so long as it took. McCartney would as a substitute take an incremental DIY method, beginning modestly and progressing accordingly. As a substitute of meticulously recording tracks, information can be dashed off spontaneously. Bob Dylan turned a sort of North Star for the right way to method a file: “Bob Dylan had done an album in a week,” says McCartney within the e-book. “I thought, ‘That’s a good idea.’’’
Paul McCartney, Wings Over the World tour, Philadelphia, 1976.
(Robert Ellis / MPL Communications)
It was around this time that McCartney hired Denny Laine, who became (aside from wife Linda) the only full-time member of Wings for the duration of the band’s life. The two had met years earlier, when the Beatles were partying in Birmingham with Laine and his band the Diplomats. “Truth be told, I needed a John,” McCartney admits within the e-book. The primary Wings album, “Wild Life,” recorded in a barn on McCartney’s Scotland farm, was critically savaged, however listening to it now, it retains a sure homespun appeal, the amiable slumming of a grasp musician tinkering with numerous approaches as a result of he can and since it’s enjoyable. A brief tour of universities across the U.Okay. additional contributed to the low-key vibe that McCartney was intent on sustaining; he was ready for the suitable time to pounce on the American market, particularly, and reclaim his mantle because the King of Pop.
1973’s “Band on the Run” can be the album that cracked it broad open once more for McCartney, however he was nonetheless in a rambling temper, this time wanting to attempt one in all EMI’s studios in Lagos, Nigeria. “It wasn’t the sort of paradise we thought it would be,” McCartney is quoted within the e-book, “but it didn’t matter, because we were basically spending a lot of time in the studio.” As soon as in Africa, Paul, Linda and Denny Laine have been mugged, their tapes stolen. One other night time, they have been company of the grasp afrobeat musician Fela Kuti, who invited the three to his Afrika Shrine membership for an indelible efficiency: “It hit me so hard,” says Paul. “It was like boom, and I’ve never heard anything as good, ever, before or since.”
McCartney II recording classes, Decrease Gate Farm, Sussex, 1979.
(Linda McCartney / © 1979 Paul McCartney beneath unique licence to MPL Archive)
“Band on the Run” turned a global smash and McCartney as soon as once more discovered himself enjoying arenas and stadiums with one more iteration of Wings. It’s also at this level that the story of Wings settles right into a extra of an “album-tour-album” narrative, save for a harrowing drug bust for pot in Japan on the eve of a Wings tour in January 1980, when McCartney spent 9 days in jail. “I had all this really good grass, excellent stuff,” explains McCartney, who had cavalierly packed it in his suitcase. As soon as in jail he needed to “share a bath with a bloke who was in for murder,” organizing “singsongs with other prisoners” till his legal professionals organized for his launch. The bust would presage the dissolution of Wings; McCartney would launch a solo album, “McCartney II,” in Could.
Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney, Denny Seiwell and Denny Laine. Promotional picture shoot for “Wild Life,” 1971.
(Barry Lategan / © 1971 MPL Communications)
How you are feeling in regards to the albums that Wings made after 1975’s glorious “Venus and Mars” will maybe have an effect on your judgment of the again half of “Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run.” However even a charitable fan may have a tough time making a powerful declare for the albums that adopted 1975’s “Venus and Mars,” which incorporates “London Town,” “At the Speed of Sound” and “Back to the Egg.” The e-book’s finest stuff is to be discovered at the beginning, when the celebrity was making his first child steps towards renewed relevance, after which discovered it.
Weingarten is the creator of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”
