The Beatles’ story was well documented from the beginning. Hunter Davies wrote the first official band biography in 1968. After John Lennon’s death, remembering the biggest band in the world became an industry. This took place in the nineties with the one that has been reissued these days “Beatle’s Anthology” their climax. Paul McCartney then told his post-Beatles story five years later with his documentary Wingspan. However, it was more of a homage to his wife Linda, who died in 1998, and told more about family and country life than – as the title suggested – about his 70s band Wings.
And since McCartney was never one to reveal much about himself, it all sounded very idyllic; He didn’t talk about the drama and tension involved in this story. “Wingspan” wasn’t suitable as a second act.
The post-Beatles depression
It was the British music journalist Tom Doyle who, in his 2013 book “Man On The Run. Paul McCartney in the 70s”, revealed how deep the hole McCartney fell into after the end of the Beatles and forced him to confess to crises and depression. Since 2022, the British-American author duo Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair have been meticulously dedicating themselves to McCartney’s solo years in the multi-volume project “The McCartney Legacy”. In the volumes published so far, each around 750 pages long, which cover the 1970s, they document the tensions within the Wings and McCartney’s – let’s say – feudalistic understanding of band life, which is probably due to his insecurity on the one hand and his perfectionism on the other.
Of course, there is nothing to be read about power and ego games in the new official oral history of the Wings, “Wings. The Story of a Band on the Run”, compiled by US historian Ted Widmer from current and historical interviews. The former band members (almost) only have good things to say. Sean Ono Lennon, who speaks as well as Mary and Stella McCartney, is also more forgiving than his father ever was. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating book. Because it tells how you can continue living after fame and how you sometimes have to look longer for the beginning, which is literally inherent in every end.
Insight into McCartney’s personality
But above all because this version of the story gives an insight into McCartney’s personality, the habit – or better: strategy – of not letting the negative things get to him. This is probably closely related to the death of his mother Mary. He was 14 when she died. As a midwife, she had been the family’s main provider; her husband, Jim, worked for a modest salary in the cotton trade. When Paul learned of his mother’s death, the first thing he said in shock was, “How are we going to make ends meet without her money?” He didn’t let the loss get to him, just tried to continue functioning, showed no weakness, took refuge in music.
“I drowned in a sea of legal and personal disputes that drained all my energy and I had to rearrange my entire life from scratch,” he writes in the prologue of “Wings. The Story of a Band On The Run” about the time of the Beatles’ breakup. “Would I ever be able to put this incredible decade behind me and move forward? I asked myself. Would I be able to deal with the crises that seemed to arise every day?” He then talks about his newfound freedom, how he and his young family fled to a dilapidated farm in Scotland that he had originally bought for tax reasons, how he built tables, re-cemented the floor, sheared sheep, and wrote songs. Carry on.
Do you want to be in a band?
That McCartney was believed to be dead was the best thing that could be said about his post-Beatles reputation. Even the power-pop masterpiece “Ram,” which he released with Linda in 1971 and which is now beyond reproach, was torn apart by critics at the time. Springsteen’s later manager John Landau called it “monumentally irrelevant” in Rolling Stone.
He probably didn’t want to be alone in the line of fire any longer and sought cover. And when he saw Johnny Cash merge with his backing trio The Tennessee Three on TV, he realized what he had to do: “I turned to Linda and said, ‘We could do that too. Do you want to be in a band?’ And she said, ‘Yes.'”
With ex-Moody Blues guitarist Denny Laine and session drummer Denny Seiwell, who had already played on Ram, they began a new adventure on their farm in Scotland in the summer of 1971 under spartan conditions – the Beatles’ funds had been frozen due to all sorts of disputes. “That summer in Scotland was the coldest summer I have ever experienced anywhere,” recalls Seiwell. “You had to sleep with a hot water bottle between your legs. Two rooms and a kitchen with a cement floor. Is that how a rock star lives?”
Back to zero
Well – before the fame, yes. One has to think of the Beatles’ days in Hamburg, when they lived next to the toilets in the Bambi cinema. This, McCartney probably thought, is how the story of a band that is hungry for success must begin. The first album, the unfinished and charming “Wild Life”, was created in a few days and, similar to Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait, was an attempt to take himself off the pedestal. Ram was the album of an ex-Beatle, Wild Life was the debut of a new band. The first tour took us through university halls in a double-decker bus; tickets cost 50 cents.
From here the climb could begin. The first hit came with My Love, recognition with the theme song to the Bond film “Live And Let Die”. Then – the Wings were now just a trio – the masterpiece “Band On The Run” followed, and the Wings, with a new line-up with the young guitarist Jimmy McCulloch and drummer Joe English, became one of the biggest live acts of the decade. The triple live album “Wings Over America” showed everyone that McCartney had emancipated himself from his past in just a few years. “We had done it. We had done what we set out to do,” he says. “In 1976, we toured the biggest concert halls in America, huge stadiums; people loved it, and we put on a show.”
Escape in the wrong direction
Then the air was gone. Concentration waned. English and McCulloch said goodbye and the Wings had to change shape again. “I think we’ve been very lucky with the cast on Wings up to that point,” explains McCartney. “That was always right. But with the last line-up I thought: This is okay, just maybe not quite as good as the others… In the eyes of the world, ‘Back to the Egg’ was the latest album from the band that had released ‘My Love’, ‘Listen to What the Man Said’ and ‘Silly Love Songs’. But to us it felt like the band’s first album.”
It almost seems as if McCartney was less frightened by the prospect of seven years of hard labor in a Japanese prison, which threatened him when he packed a large bag of weed he had purchased in New York in his suitcase before traveling to Tokyo in January 1980, than the upcoming tour of Japan with the under-rehearsed Wings. “I was standing next to him when the bag of marijuana came out,” says guitarist Laurence Juber, recounting what happened at Narita Airport in Tokyo. “Linda and the children had already gone through and Paul was behind them. The customs officer felt a jacket in the suitcase and suddenly has a question mark on his face. He reaches in and pulls out a bag of weed – Paul has turned white as a cheese.”
Drug attorney Lee “Scratch” Perry
According to McCartney, he was extremely embarrassed and immediately confessed. The route then took him not to the Nippon Budokan, where the Wings were supposed to start their tour, but to the Tokyo Narcotics Detention Center. As Widmer reports in “Wings. The Story of a Band on the Run”, Lee “Scratch” Perry wrote a personal letter to the Japanese Minister of Justice in which he offered his expertise and explained that in his opinion the amount of marijuana seized was not worth mentioning – and that the holy herb also had the ability to “generate positive feelings”.
But it was probably the more sober arguments of McCartney’s brother-in-law and lawyer John Eastman that ultimately led to his release.
We will probably never read the diary that McCartney kept during his nine days in prison and had printed for family and friends under the title “Japanese Jailbird”. But his descriptions in “Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run” are among the book’s great revelations.
He couldn’t see his family and had to share a bathtub with a murderer, “but I had seen a lot of films about prisoners of war and knew that you have to keep your spirits up somehow.” He did this by trying to communicate with his fellow inmates. Which wasn’t so easy with a Japanese vocabulary of two words – konnichiwa and arigato. “So I shouted brand names to the guys next door,” McCartney said. “There were four of them in there. I said, ‘Toyota!’ Then they replied: ‘Toyota, Toyota!’ and I heard them laugh. Then they shouted: ‘Rolls-Royce!’ And I: ‘Rolls-Royce!’ Very good. At the end we have such a crazy “Yamaha!” Yamaha! “Oh, Yamaha, yeah!” song started.”
Paul McCartney was about to form a new band. If we ever get out of here…
The book
“Wings. The Story of a Band on the Run” was published in the German translation by Connie Lösch by CH Beck and costs 44 euros.
The film
In addition to the book, there will also be a film about McCartney’s first post-Beatles decade. Morgan Neville’s “Man On The Run” will be released on Amazon Prime at the end of February.