Paul McCartney is finally opening up one of the most fascinating chapters of his life. Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run is the new book on McCartney in the 1970s — how he started over and found his own voice after the demise of the Beatles. Rolling Stone has an exclusive excerpt of Paul reading from the audiobook, including his witty imitation of Mick Jagger.
“For so many decades,” McCartney recalls in the excerpt, “I tried to pack away these stories about how I felt when the Beatles collapsed and what happened in that period just as we were launching Wings.”
When the Beatles fell apart in early 1970, McCartney was lost and confused, with no idea how to move forward. So he started up a whole new band, with his wife Linda. It sounded like a crazy idea. As he says, “When Linda joined Wings, eyebrows were raised, and not only in the press, Mick Jagger adding, ‘Wot’s he got his old lady in the band for?’”
The Wings book is a massive oral history edited by Ted Widmer, from new interviews by filmmaker Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom). It accompanies Neville’s upcoming documentary Man on the Run, which recently debuted at the Telluride Film Festival. The book has 150 photographs, with Paul’s handwritten lyrics and diary entries, along with commentary from Linda McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, George Martin, Sean Ono Lennon, Jann Wenner, Yoko Ono, Mick Jagger, and all the members of Wings.
The book follows the story from McCartney’s 1969 solo debut and the 1971 classic Ram. But instead of going for superstar sessions, or high-profile solo shows, he recruits a new band and starts over from scratch, based from his Scottish farm, hustling the way his old band used to in the early days. They drive around to universities and play tiny shows for surprised students, with that experimental spirit. “The fact was that we could just try things and just do them,” McCartney recalls. “If it worked, great. If it didn’t, just go to another idea.”
But Wings blew up into one of the Seventies’ biggest arena-rock groups, making classics like Band on the Run and Venus and Mars. The band is also dropping a definitive triple-vinyl anthology set, personally selected by McCartney. It has the hits you’d expect, like “Jet,” “Hi, Hi, Hi,” “Band on the Run,” “Live and Let Die,” and “Let Me Roll It.” But it’s also full of deep cuts (“Deliver Your Children,” “I’ve Had Enough,” “Some People Never Know”) and fan-fave oddities like “She’s My Baby” and “Call Me Back Again.”
The band ended in 1980, after an episode McCartney has rarely discussed in depth before—his nine-day stay in a Japanese prison, after a drug bust at the Tokyo airport. For years, he was reluctant to reclaim this period. “But suddenly, Wings has found its moment again,” he recalls. “I remember doing an interview with a young guy, I think it was with Rolling Stone, and I was talking about Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles. And he said, ‘Well, yeah, I get that, but that’s not really my period.’ He said, ‘I’m more interested in Wings and Band on the Run.’ I thought, here we go. We have a generational shift at work.”
Wings comes at a typically busy time for McCartney. He’s currently on his long-running Got Back tour, playing his marathon shows in the U.S. and Canada, wrapping up on November 25 in Chicago. Later this month, The Beatles’ beloved Anthology doc is returning in a long-awaited new version — restored, expanded, and remastered, with a new episode streaming on Disney + beginning November 26.
