Paul McCartney will always be best known as a member of The Beatles, but true fans know he had a lengthy career with his second band, Wings, after the Fab Four split in 1970.
Wings’ formation and ultimate demise is documented in the new book Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run, which hit shelves on Tuesday, November 4. While McCartney, now 83, is credited as the author, the book, edited by Ted Widmer, is an oral history that includes interviews from members of Wings as well as McCartney’s family.
While the first Wings album dropped in 1971, he released two albums in 1970 that can be considered precursors to the band: his first solo album, McCartney, and Ram, which he recorded with his then-wife, Linda McCartney. (Linda died of breast cancer in 1998 at age 56.)
“Wings sort of felt like we’d achieved the impossible,” Paul explained in the new book. “I got my second lucky break. At the start, it felt like everyone was saying, ‘You can’t do that!’ And for a while I thought maybe they were right. But I wanted to carry on writing and playing music. Wings was my best shot at that.”
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Wings went on to release seven studio albums before the band played their final gig in December 1979. While Paul continued performing as a solo artist, releasing many more albums in the years since, he still incorporates Wings songs into his sets.
Keep scrolling for the biggest revelations from Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run.
Playing Matchmaker for John and Yoko
After The Beatles broke up, Paul wasn’t always on good terms with his childhood friend and former bandmate John Lennon. At one point, though, he did help Lennon through a rough patch in his relationship with Yoko Ono in March 1974. While the couple had been separated, Ono had come to visit Paul and Linda in London. She told the McCartneys that she would reconcile with Lennon if he worked for it.
Paul subsequently traveled to Los Angeles, where Lennon was working with Harry Nilsson, and convinced him to repair things with Ono.
“I sat him down and said, ‘I feel like a matchmaker here, but Yoko still loves you. Do you still love her?’” Paul recalled. “And his guard came down and [he] said, ‘Yes. But I don’t know what to do.’ So I said, ‘Well, Yoko came to see us in London. So, we’ve talked to her and she does still love you, but you’re going to have to work your arse off to win her back.’ … John did just that, and not long after, Sean was born.”
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Suing the Beatles
When Paul announced his first solo album in April 1970, he said in a press release that he had no plans to work with The Beatles again. In December of that year, he sued his bandmates — Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — as well as their manager Allen Klein to formally dissolve their partnership.
“To this day, it’s one of most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make: Could I really sue The Beatles? These were my childhood friends,” he said in the book. “It really was terrible for your soul, because you’re doing all this stuff that you would never do in a million years. But you’ve got to in order to gain your freedom.”
Why He Never Met Bob Marley
Paul, a huge fan of reggae, said he “nearly” met the genre’s most famous pioneer — but passed on the chance for an ironic reason. “He was playing in London, and to tell you the truth, I was going to see him, but I got high beforehand,” the Grammy winner revealed. “I got paranoid and thought, ‘No, I can’t meet him.’ Just one of those things. Can you believe that marijuana kept me from meeting Bob Marley?”
Robbed in Nigeria
While Wings recorded their third album, Band on the Run, in Lagos, Nigeria, Paul and Linda were mugged at knifepoint while they were walking home one evening. The thieves took their recording equipment as well as the tapes of their demos, meaning they had to redo much of their work.
“Our joke was that we thought they probably erased and recorded something ‘good’ over them,” Paul quipped. “But you know, you have to let stuff go in life.”
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The Statue Saga
When it came time to prepare a Wings greatest hits album in 1978, Paul came up with the idea of photographing a statue he’d recently purchased for the cover. He convinced his team to take the 70-pound statue to the Alps by helicopter and photograph it on the top of the Rothorn, which is near the more-famous Matterhorn. After the photo shoot was finished, a mountain guide warned the team that a storm was coming in, necessitating an evacuation. Everyone got out safely, but once Paul saw the finished product, he realized he could have achieved his goal in a much easier (and safer) way.
“And then he turned around to me and he said, ‘You know what, man? We could have taken the statue and put it in a studio and just painted a backdrop of mountains,’” recalled designer Aubrey “Po” Powell.
A Near-Reunion for The Beatles
After years of rumors that The Beatles would reunite, three of them did — for one night only in 1979. Paul, Harrison and Starr briefly played together at a party for Eric Clapton and his then-wife, Pattie Boyd (who’d previously been married to Harrison).
“It didn’t feel strange at all,” Paul recalled. “It was all pretty straightforward. We were having a bit of a booze-up and a laugh together and we were with each other again. It felt pretty normal. It was only the next day, when everyone was making a huge fuss about it, that I realized that our playing together was halfway important to anyone else.”
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9 Days in Jail
In January 1980, Wings was gearing up for a tour of Japan, but the tour was canceled after Paul was arrested for marijuana possession. He ultimately spent nine days in jail but could have faced up to seven years of hard labor. While the arrest ultimately led to the end of Wings, Paul admitted that he was already hesitant about the tour before his legal trouble.
“It’s almost like I got myself busted to get out of it,” he said. “I really don’t know, to this day. I also think: ‘Did someone put that stuff in there? To bust me?’ I don’t know. It’s very psychodrama.”
On the next page, however, Paul said he brought the weed himself because he couldn’t access it easily in Japan — and “this stuff was too good to flush down the toilet.”
The musician recalled the hail being “pretty rough” but said he organized sing-alongs with the other inmates and “tried to make the best of it” by befriending his fellow prisoners. “I was happy to leave, but I’d made a couple of friends in there so the parting was a little sad,” he said of his exit. “As I walked free, I was shaking hands with these prisoners through the letter boxes of their cells.”
