The Beatles learned how to be The Beatles together. From 1963 to 1970, the four members of the band experienced a completely new kind of fame, while leaning on each other to survive. After the breakup, they faced another unprecedented challenge: how to be former Beatles. This had to be solved alone.
The heaviest burden of experience fell on the band's main composers, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who were also dealing with the emotional shock of their bitter personal split. Both leaned on their wives. While John and Yoko Ono pursued political campaigns and avant-garde art projects, Paul and Linda McCartney fled to their crumbling farm in Scotland with their children, where Paul licked his wounds, sheared sheep, and worked on new songs. Paul insisted that Linda become his new musical partner, despite her inexperience. As he later said: "The whole thing started because Paul had no one to play with. He needed a friend by his side most." The album he made with her, Ram, sold well but received brutal reviews, deepening his confidence crisis.
McCartney wanted to perform in front of an audience again, something he hadn't done since The Beatles stopped touring in 1966. But he couldn't do it alone, with the spotlight only on him. So he asked Linda to help him create a new band. This authorized, illustrated oral history tells the story of one of the most successful bands of the 1970s – and one of the oddest.
It is based on interviews (recorded for a new documentary about the band) with Paul and former band members, as well as archival material. Widmer does a great job of weaving this compelling narrative, which includes cultural context – for example, what was on the charts at the time – and lots of photos, many of which have never been seen before. The result is a portal to a more eclectic era of pop, a story of the tensions between fame and creativity, and a tale with elements of Spinal Tap and Waynes World.
The lineup of Wings changed over the decade around a core of Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney, and Denny Laine, a former Moody Blues member. The band did not soar effortlessly to great heights because of McCartney's fame. In fact, in his eagerness to reinvent himself after The Beatles, he waged a sort of guerilla campaign against his own fame. In 1972, he said: "A year ago I woke up in the morning and thought, I'm Paul McCartney. I'm a myth. And that scared the hell out of me." The first album by Wings, released in 1971, Wild Life, was almost intentionally half-baked and got another round.
Then McCartney launched one of the oddest episodes in the history of rock and pop. He packed the other members of Wings into an old van, along with his children and his sheepdog Mart, and they went on an impromptu tour of British universities. He would look at a map, identify the nearest university, find the student union, and ask the surprised student union secretary if they wanted a concert that evening.
For 50p, anyone who wanted could come and see Paul McCartney lead his new band through rock 'n' roll covers, new Wings songs, and Beatles songs without The Beatles. They stayed in grimy little hotels and bed-and-breakfasts, as if McCartney wanted to recreate the discomfort and grime of the Beatles' pre-fame touring days. He said: "If we do it this way, the old, square one, there will come a day when we will be square one hundred."
He also wanted Wings to make its mistakes without the crushing gaze of critics. He knew his wife would not be given a pass. Linda struggled to learn keyboard and vocal parts, duties she had reluctantly agreed to. Her raw but stirring vocal sound, which beautifully blended with Paul and Laine's voices, is now recognized as a crucial component of Wings' sound. At the time, she was mocked and derided for her ambition, a victim of the especially intense abuse reserved for Beatles' wives.
McCartney was a more eccentric artist than his reputation suggested. His new band chose its first two singles from a protest song (Give Ireland Back to the Irish) and a children's song (Mary Had a Little Lamb). He chose to record the band's third album in Lagos, forcing two band members to quit. But despite being attacked and having the session master tapes stolen, the band recorded the album there, Band on the Run, becoming the band's most critically acclaimed and successful: Band on the Run.
By the middle of the decade, Wings had reached square one hundred. In the cultural memory, they are inevitably overshadowed by The Beatles, masking how popular they really were. Wings had more US number ones than anyone except the Bee Gees. The Wings Over the World stadium tour of 1975-76 was huge, making the band one of the most lucrative live acts of the 70s. We can now appreciate how many of their songs are, to use the technical term, bangers: Band on the Run, Jet, Let'Em In, Live and Let Die, to name a few.
Wings Over the World was the zenith. After that, it all gradually declined, both commercially and musically, and the whole enterprise ended in 1980 with McCartney's attempt to smuggle a large bag of marijuana into Japan, which landed him in jail and forced him to cancel the tour. It was messy, but Wings was never clean. It had three different lead guitarists and four different drummers, and was always unbalanced by the overwhelming fame and talent of its lead singer. Under McCartney's rebellious, impulsive, constantly generative leadership, it combined the imperial grandeur of rock with a crafty homeliness and a certain numb lack of გულწრფელობა. Wings was always meant to be a spin-off of the Beatles' world – but what a spin-off it was!
