Pushkin. Hi everyone, it's Paul Molldoin. Before we get to this episode, I wanted to let you know that you can binge all twelve episodes of McCartney A Life and Lyrics right now, add free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Find Pushkin Plus on the McCartney A Life and Lyrics Show, pedge in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm slash Plus.
I mean, Wings was just the result of me asking my spot, am I going to stop now that the Beatles stopped? I mean, it's so wonderful, so successful. Do I now stop and kind of look for something else to do? But I thought, no, I like music too much, so the whatever the something else is will be music. So I was witting inter Us, did you find starting a band?
And she said yeah, Well, she paused.
She wasn't that quick, So yeah, I just thought, well, we'll just start something that feels good and we'll build it up like the Beatles did on the trouble being, we'd have to make our mistakes in public this time around.
And Paul will done for a while.
Now.
I've been fortunate to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of the era and will.
You look at me? I'm going up to it. I'm actually a performer.
That is Sir Paul McCartney. We work together on a book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred and fifty of his songs, and we recorded many hours of our conversations.
It was like going back to an old snapshot album looking back on work I hadn't ever analyzed.
This is McCartney, a life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir, and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic figures in popular music. In this episode, Band on the Run, a single from Wing's third studio album, Band on the Run, is McCartney's quintessential narrative songwriting in action. Split into two parts. The first section of the song follows a band of outlaws languishing in prison, stuck Insidey's.
Fa siends inside Forever.
Again, right a boy.
That time, there were a lot of people who were pretending to be desperados, pretending to be gangsters.
Outlaws was a word that came up a lot. Desperados came up a lot. The thing is, you know, with the plot situation, we were outside the law in a very mild way. Right, So then we knew we were doing this, So it spawned a lot of people talking about themselves as desperados.
Despera, why don't you come to you know, sands.
You've been out bad fances for so long now.
In nineteen seventy three, the same year as Band on the Run, the Eagles released Desperado.
Yeaprod.
Ah, you may get you.
You're paining your.
Dear grading.
So outlaws were certainly in fashion at the time. HARKing back to the long standing tradition of the American Western.
Reminds me of like Portch Castody and The Sundance Kid.
Yess's harder Now you gotta plan more, You gotta prepare.
More guns and knives either bick.
And I'm imagining it because of this, the sparadery thing. I'm imagining this in America. No, no, not yet, not to me and hard get the rules straightened down.
Rules and a knife fight no rules.
As in many scenes from popular westerns like Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, the song sets up a band of outlaws in a scene of captivity, dreaming about what they would do were they to escape.
Give I ever get out?
Not giving it all.
The way to rest charity.
Bind today.
If I ever.
Get out of it, if we ever get out.
On the run, what does that mean?
What does that mean? A bound of people who escaped from a person or you could take it. That's abound on a tour. So you know we are abound on the run. And if you're playing singing it, you're getting a double meaning. So everyone's looking for us, but we're on the run and they're never gonna catch us. Will the rain exploded with a mighty crash.
As we really to the sun.
There the first one set to the second one thereaving.
On the run, Bad Run.
The rain exploded with a mighty cross. We followed to the song and the first one said to the second one. There, I hope you're having fun. So you know that's the prison break and.
A jailer man and sailor Sam searching everyone all the bad on the run.
Band on the run.
The song is focused on a band of fighting laws, breaking out of jail and gallivanting through the desert. However, it was the other type of band that was more familiar to McCartney.
It's not a.
Band on the run from Beetball down, is it? I mean wings was the next step after the readers. If I was going to continue, then.
How was I going to do it?
Well?
How did the Beatles do it? Well? They were just four little guys from Liverpool to No Ship and then they figured it out and they worked out of it. They did ten thousand hours and then suddenly they were big and famous. So I thought, well, you're either try and get yourself a super group, which what happened is a group of blind faith sure, which was ginger and
certain people are that Zeppelin. It was kind of a little bit that, you know, it was the hand sect, hand picked famous table, or you just started getting a bus and ask a couple of nights to come along, you know, and you don't fuss about it too much. That's what we decided to do.
WILLI underdakeod you heavy side, you know.
Joba bell A dreaming in a village square, ring down around, long run.
Around Like any good desperado. McCartney had to enlist his accomplices, seeking out the best people for the job rather than those with the most notoriety. With Linda by his side on this adventure, he began to put together the new.
Band Everybody Wants to Be in a band.
That part of it, I don't mean to know it's true. It's a nice idea of nothing else.
McCartney knew he wanted Denny Lane on guitar and backup vocals. Denny Layne had been a core member of the Moody Blues in the mid sixties. They had made it big with their hit single Go Now Since She.
Gotta Go.
You, So I knew Danny.
We toured with the Moodies, so anyway, I got on with him. So he's the first person I asked. Not Linda was the first question, then Jenny, and then I came to New York autitioned people for Ram and Jenny Sargle showed up out of that. So that was it kind of thing, you know. Henry McCollough was just somebody our roadies knew quite less. I'ven't come along see, And it was the next move after the Beatles. The only philosophy behind it was to not do Beatles songs, just
to create something completely new. So there hadn't been a girl in the Beatles. The Beatles had known each other all their lives, so it was all the opposite. This is just a different way of doing it.
Really was falling as the desert world began to set in the town of searchin for us everywhere because we were not wild.
Run.
Once the members of Wings fail into place, the group became a literal band on the run. Throughout the early nineteen seventies, they traveled all over England on an impromptu concert tour, learning the ropes of performance as the Beatles once did in Hamburg.
And you know, because the theory was to just plan as you went along, I was quite chaostic in the beginning. We would shove up at student juniors and say can we do a gig? You knew they had a hole and they had people, so we were doing that. We charged fifty p on the door and the guy would come out with a big bag of fifty ps. Showed up the night before, talked to a very amused students union leader who didn't believe me until they came out of the vamp. Well you got a whold can we
play a lunch time? Yeah? And then it was just advertised to show we'll comment or music in the whole wild and then people showed up. I paid fifty P. Well there's a big bag of coins, which I just always wanted to be a Peter Sellers movie. One for You, Two for Me, and everyone just took a handful of coins and we went around Britain. We had eleven songs, so we had to repeat some of them, and some of the gigs must have been quite bad, you know, because we didn't really know what we're doing.
It's an amusing image, this former Beatle showing up to play in a college cafeteria trying to hone the sound of his new musical group. Despite McCartney being a seasoned professional, the band still needed practice time, a.
Lot of limbering. Yeah, I mean well. And I had a song called Wildlife rough earliest album when Linda had the intro on keyboard, don't doom, Doom, Doom, Jim Jing, don't sequence the chords. I mean, I said, there you Newcastle, it's Newcastle City Hall. I s a song now, this song called called Wildlife. Wildlife, want to want to through nothing. I look over and Lender's just frozen. I want to see things. She has heart of the country. So I go over. Now the crowd kind of wondering whether this
is just a bit of theater. When I go over and call the cords, Oh, sh you know, so, I mean, actually, if this happeared a sketch, it would be quite funny. So I go over, well, I can't remember the Bloody Cords, don't you what? Luckily seeing either, and she suddenly remembered, so she pushed me to one side and we started. But those are the kind of chaotic moments were you know, we nearly just didn't remember songs, or we'd played quite badly, or we play stuff the audience didn't want to hear.
We kind of got away with it, but well, what did you?
There was a great deal of pressure on McCartney's new band as the media made comparisons to the group that had dissolved a few years earlier. McCartney himself wondered whether Wings would be able to measure up.
A lot of this is just happening in my own mind. It's not what anyone's telling me. I'm automatically thinking, well, the Beatles were great, so Wings is not going to be as great. Mike from all along was after the Beatles, who's going to be as good as them? You know?
Of course, and I.
Kind of knew it couldn't happen, but I thought, well, yeah, but we can be not as good as the Beatles, but we can be something else.
That must have been hard in some way to feel that from the outset.
Yeah it was, but as I said, you know, I was to continue. I had to tough it out.
But I mean I had reserves of courage from the Beatles having pennies thrown at them. Sure at Stroud Village Hall, you know, so we'd had that, we'd had that bullshit. So here it was again. The hardest thing I think was with Linda in the group, who was a complete amateur. And I said, well, so was George when he joined the group. So was I, so was John, so was Rinko.
You taught her keyboards, and so I showed her a few things on keyboard, and then she learned herself, and she had a couple of lessons and stuff, and it turned out that her strength wasn't necessarily the keyboard thing, although she handled the job. It was more as a spirit.
She was a great sort of cheerleader. She would get crowds going.
She did a lot of that, you know, so clap your hands kind of thing, and in those days there weren't many women in groups, so she was sort of a pioneer in that aspect and listening back to the record, she was damn good singer, even though she was amateur, and people were looking for anything to damn her.
But we got through it.
But it's going to think, well, of course, I mean, the terrible fact is that human beings have a tendency, you know, to whine about something, to find something.
I think we're very insecure as a race. As an animal, I've often sort of seen so, like rabbits and things in the garden or in the field.
I think they live a life of terror. Total they're looking over the shoulders all the time, and I think so are we. I'm not sure we're that different in our way. We're looking over our shoulders, and that engenders a not so generous spirit, dream a really square.
I mean, it's always good to slack someone off, or to see someone get slagged off. I think it's it's another instinct that makes us feel not so bad. I think it's a big instinct in us, and I think that it's because we're insecure. So the more secure you get, the more generous you can become, and.
Say said everyone on the.
Run.
By nineteen seventy three, Wings was finding its groove, but McCartney had yet to win back music critics since the breakup of the Beatles. This third studio album, Band on the Run, would be wings chance to establish themselves and McCartney's chance to prove he still a long career in front of him. When it came time to record, McCartney was hoping to be inspired by a change of scenery.
This was recorded in Legos.
M h doesn't rule. I knew EMI had studios all over the world, but I didn't know where they were, so I asked for a list and they were in China, Rio, France. You know Legos.
Well, that sounds interesting.
I love African music, speaking African music being there, but we're not doing African music, but still being in the land the African music come from. It will have some sort of nice and lunch.
As much as McCartney imagined Legos would be a good backdrop for the life of musical Desperados, not all members of the band felt the same. The night before they were set to start recording, drummer Denny Sywell and guitarist Henry McCulloch rang up McCartney to tell him they wouldn't be coming.
I was like furious at first. It's like, what, you're not coming to make next album? Well, that's not that's not very bad luck. And I'm that kind of person. I won't go, Okay, God, I'm going to rethink this. If I'm going somewhere, then I'm going I've noticed that about me. I'd like to stick to the planet. So
then I actually deal with this in my mind. So I just thought, well, screw you under to make this the best Ruffle I've made to date since leaving the Beatles before Welcome, and got Denny guitar, got Linda both us, Denny vocals, me vocals. I'll drun right. I've drawn a lot anywhere. It was crazy. The circumstances were just wild. I didn't get anybody else might have given up because the studio was only half built and we had to figure it all out. But I had Danny Lyndon myself.
I had Jeff Emeric, who who's the Peatle's engineer.
Late one night, as Paul and Linda were walking in an area of time they had been told to avoid, some men hopped out of a car and mugged them at knife point. They stole a couple of Linda's cameras, some unfinished lyrics and the demo tips for the upcoming album.
We've been walked what we did to listen because we were just for others, so we just were walking later now where we've been told not to walk.
So in terms of reconstructing and you have to go back to if not Square won something akin to it.
We remember them well enough. I'm sure I had the lyrics somewhat. We always think because your native was like five Legos calls were so they will have re recorded over them some decent music African or just chucked them away as robbish.
The band's trip to Legos, what with the half inished studio and the unexpected mugging, wasn't quite what McCartney had imagined. When Paul and Linda returned to England, they found a letter at their home from the e m I chairman warning them not to go to Legos because of a cholera outbreak. The letter had arrived after they had left.
Yeah, looking back on extends like that, you block out all the worst stuff and you remember all the cooso.
Despite the recording conditions, Band on the Run was a runaway success upon the release of the album, Wings became more secure not just as a follow up band to the Beatles, but as a significant musical group in their own right. The song band on the Run was one of Wings's first hits, topping the charts at numbber one in America and number three in the UK.
I was talking to a journalist once about Sergeant Pepper going on about it as if he must admire it, and he said, we'll tell you the truth. He said, it was a band on the run for me. It's more my generation on the run was his Sergeant Pepper, right, So I certainly realized, oh yeah. And that has proved to be a very interesting fact over the years that there are some people who actually like what I did
with Wings better than the Beatles. There are some people whose first thing they ever heard was you know, a band on the run or jet or something that we did.
With Wings, and I think for them that means a lot.
They have a special affection for that.
His success of Wings was a testament to McCartney's entrepreneurial spirit, as well as his willingness to deviate from rules and expectations.
You better run, you're worrying.
It sounds a lot of argue, I think that you're willating to.
Well to borrow a phrase from yet sort of more naked.
You know you didn't have to do that, right, you really did know. It also says I'm mad, but that just right. I could think of other ways to do it, but I didn't like them, and so the only other rules not do it. Okay, I'll do this way because I like it. It's probably a good way because we will learn, we will develop. By the time we're ready, will be pretty good, and we'll have had some success with the records here there and ever. So it was only seventy sixth when we finally had Band on Us,
a big record. We then toured properly as Wings.
That time.
Band on the Run the title track from Wings nineteen seventy three album in the next episode.
Thanks sALS Salt Word, Maxwell's Silver Hammer, a cheerful song about a serial killer inspired by an obscure French avant garde play.
McCartney. A Life in Lyrics is a co production between iHeartMedia, NPL and Pushkin Industries.