By the time The Beatles called it a day, it felt like Paul McCartney could do anything if he wanted to.
Despite being labelled as the villain of the band for a while after formally announcing that they had no plans for releasing any new music, it’s not like anyone was worried that one of the greatest melody writers of all time would suddenly start coming up empty when he did have his bandmates by his side. But even if he had the name recognition as a solo artist, it was bound to be a lot more difficult getting people on board with Wings.
It was already a bit of a gamble to hear what John Lennon was doing with the Plastic Ono Band and the countless other strange affairs he was getting up to with Yoko Ono, but by the time that Macca brought in Denny Laine to join his new outfit, there weren’t that many people cheering him on for having a new band that seemingly replaced the old one. If you think about it, though, it actually makes perfect sense for him to branch out a little more.
After all, it’s not like his solo career was getting off the ground too quickly. He was making some of the most forward-thinking records of his career, but judging by the fact that nobody actually bothered to give RAM the respect it deserved back in the day, maybe it was the right call for him to get a new band and practically start from scratch with Linda behind him on keyboards.
But when listening to Wild Life, don’t go in expecting Sgt Pepper. It’s a fun time across its eight tracks, but since this was the same guy who came up with half the ideas on Abbey Road, hearing him make what’s essentially a garage rock record felt like a step backwards. He was a sonic wizard, and now it sounded like he was actively trying to relearn everything that he had built up over years in the industry.
If you’ve left your entire band behind, though, you’d probably want to start back at zero again as well. There was no reason to believe that McCartney couldn’t knock it out of the park if he had a supergroup behind him, but looking at the many supergroups that had started to pop up towards the end of the 1960s, McCartney knew that he didn’t want to be thrust into stardom like that all over again.
Looking at a band like Blind Faith, for example, McCartney said that there was no chance that he would have ever considered working on that kind of project, saying, “Do you just try and get a bunch of great musicians around you-which is probably the most logical thing to do — and just pick up where you left off? that was the option, to do a Blind Faith. But I didn’t fancy that, and I thought that to get a real band and to get a new direction, you’ve got to start at the bottom, square one.”
Although McCartney has eventually warmed up to the idea of working with other legends in recent years when collaborating with everyone from Stevie Wonder to Ringo Starr to the remaining members of Nirvana, it’s not exactly shocking why he wanted to pivot out of that at the moment. Whereas Lennon seemed to deliberately dismantle his legacy by going into political rock and roll, what McCartney was doing had to go back to the most rudimentary style of playing that he had learned back at the Cavern Club.
A lot of people may have been disappointed in that kind of approach, but looking at the kind of band Wings ultimately became, it was a lot better for Macca to go the slow-and-steady route. They weren’t going to make an instant classic with tracks like ‘Bip Bop’ or anything, but if they hadn’t spent time working out their internal chemistry we may not have seen what they did on Band on the Run.
