Of all people, Paul McCartney, the most musically accomplished Beatle, initially had the greatest difficulty in making a new musical start after the band ended. He was in love with the idea of the Fab Four, didn’t want to let go and couldn’t let go, and at the same time he was the one who sealed the separation with his lawsuit against the hated manager Allen Klein and his former bandmates. He fell into deep depression, holed up with his family in a dilapidated cottage in Scotland and, like the other great genius of pop – Brian Wilson – spent his days in bed. But at some point the creative engine that had kept the Beatles going in recent years started up again.
However, the critics saw McCartney as the culprit who had dealt the death knell to the biggest band in the world and didn’t take kindly to his solo efforts. “McCartney” was courageous, “Ram” was brilliant and the first rough work with his newly founded band Wings, “Wild Life”, was quite charming. But each of these albums sold less than its predecessor. Lennon, Harrison and, briefly, even Starr seemed to surpass the man commercially for big melodies and mellifluous ballads.
Then McCartney pulled the emergency brake and stopped his emancipatory experiments in order to meet public expectations of the carefree, light-footed, romantic Beatle Paul and to prove to himself that he was still capable of it. He cut the second Wings album, “Red Rose Speedway,” which was originally planned as a double album, down to a concise LP and sent the song “My Love” as the vanguard.
Success proved him right. Shortly afterwards, the bombastic James Bond song “Live And Let Die”, produced by George Martin, finally reconciled him with the critics. McCartney seemed to be back on track, the Wings had established themselves.
Doubts about the African adventure
The next album was supposed to be a big hit. McCartney wanted to record it in Lagos, Nigeria – “lying on the beach during the day, making a little music in the evening”. One of his typical naive hippie ideas – military dictatorship, cholera epidemic and the West African monsoon did not occur to him. Guitarist Henry McCullough and drummer Denny Seiwell, both of whom had been looking for a reason to leave for a long time because McCartney was keeping them extremely tight financially, took the dangerous trip as an opportunity to leave the band.
And so on August 8, 1973, only McCartney, his wife Linda, the faithful Denny Laine and sound engineer Geoff Emerick met at London Gatwick Airport. Gradually they began to have doubts about their African adventure. This probably intensified when McCartney was asked in the cockpit by the helpless pilot whether he could perhaps see the runway somewhere down there in the foggy jungle.
It was found, but the path to the masterpiece remained bumpy. The studio in Lagos was very spartan and initially did not meet the Beatle’s standards, and the McCartneys were victims of an armed attack in which they escaped with their lives, but the demo tapes with their new songs could not save them. And so they had to reconstruct the songs from memory.
Especially in the new version of “Band On The Run” the shock and paranoia after the attack are reflected in the lines “Well, the night was falling as the desert world began to settle down/ In the town they’re searching for us “everywhere, but we never will be found” leave their mark. The McCartneys tried to combat their fear of further attacks with weed. Not a good idea, as anyone who has ever accompanied a chronic stoner in the wild knows. Paul collapsed after a panic attack, probably caused by excessive marijuana consumption, and ended up in the hospital.
Visit to the imperialists
But just because someone is paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t being persecuted. Fela Kuti launched a small hunt against the Wings and publicly accused them of exploiting African music for commercial interests – 13 years before Paul Simon’s “Graceland”. The Afro-Beat star, politicized through his stay in the USA and his contacts with the Black Power movement, even sought direct confrontation and confronted the alleged British imperialists in the studio. McCartney was able to calm him down by playing him his recordings – they didn’t sound particularly African. Ginger Baker also came to visit, albeit on a peaceful mission, was enthusiastic about McCartney’s drumming and invited the Wings to his studio in Ikeja, Nigeria.
When the McCartneys, Laine and Emerick returned to London at the end of September 1973, they had gained many experiences and a classic album. Released on December 5th in the US and December 7th in the UK, Band On The Run would become the first post-Beatles McCartney work that critics and buyers alike could agree on. Presumably because it was reminiscent of previous great achievements without simply reproducing the old formulas for success. Today this is called reinvention. For McCartney, it was just everyday life. He didn’t know it any differently from the Beatles – with every album the cards were reshuffled.
The title song and “Picasso’s Last Words (Drink To Me),” which McCartney composed in Jamaica on the set of Franklin J. Schaffer’s “Papillon” to prove to Dustin Hoffman that he could write a song about any subject on the fly, made in Their symphonic structure continues where the Beatles had once left off on “Abbey Road”. “Jet” was the extremely convincing Wings answer to glam rock, the Lennon pastiche “Let Me Roll It” was generally interpreted as a peace offering to their former friend.
“Bluebird,” “Mrs. Vanderbilt” and “Mamunia” sounded pleasantly exotic to the non-African, without violating the boundaries set by Fela Kuti, and “Nineteen-Hundred And Eighty-Five” closed the album majestically. This is how big and important a Beatle had been since “Sgt. “Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” no longer sounded. And the cover of “Band On The Run” – the gang on the run, with the prominent faces of James Coburn and Christopher Lee – seemed to subtly allude to this masterpiece.
For the second time a band had run away from him, for the second time he was on the verge of giving up everything, but in the end there was triumph. With “Band On The Run,” McCartney managed to escape the shadow of the Beatles and exorcise the ghosts of the past in a crazy act of voodoo. Soon there would be wingsmania in the USA.