FEATURE:
Nineteen Hundred and Seventy Three
Looking Ahead to the Fiftieth Anniversary of Paul McCartney and Wings’ Band on the Run
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EVEN though…
IN THIS PHOTO: Wings - Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney, Jimmy McCulloch, Denny Laine and Geoff Britton - in 1974/PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Putland/Getty Images
you can get Paul McCartney and Wings’ Band on the Run on vinyl, I wonder whether there is going to be a fiftieth anniversary release. Maybe it is still a bit early to tell, though I have seen some discussions on Reddit and other platform wondering what is going to happen. Reaching number one in the U.S. and U.K., Band on the Run arrived later in a year that saw the band release Red Rose Speedway. That album was acclaimed, though it did have a few weaker tracks. Band on the Run is, in my view, the greatest album from Paul McCartney and Wings. It is them at their very peak. Although sales were modest initially, its commercial performance was boosted by two huge singles: Jet and Band on the Run. It became the top-selling studio album of 1974 in the United Kingdom and Australia, in addition to reviving and augmenting McCartney's critical standing. Few would have seen or predicted anything like Band on the Run would come from Paul McCartney in 1973! Not as revered by critics as he was in The Beatles, it was a moment when many doubted his commercial power and songwriting brilliance. He had nothing to prove. Alongside Denny Laine and Linda McCartney, this reduced band produced something remarkable on 5th December, 1973. I really love this album! It was in my house growing up. I remember the tracks from childhood. Maybe Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five is the track that took my longest to come round to – but it is now one of my favourites from Band on the Run. The epic title track, Jet, Mrs Vanderbilt and Let Me Roll It are Paul and Linda McCartney at their songwriting peak.
I am going to bring in a couple of features and reviews so we can get a better understanding of Band on the Run in terms of its background and impact. Best Classic Bands wrote about Band on the Run in 2017. They discussed the lead-up to recording the album. Now a trio, Wings had a task on their hands creating an album that would keep them relevant and together:
“The monumental troubles that plagued McCartney and Wings during the making of Band on the Run could easily serve as fodder for a Hollywood film epic. The difficulties originated with McCartney’s desire to work in an exotic environment, far off the beaten path. His record company, EMI, had an international presence, with recording facilities based in Bombay, Rio de Janeiro, Peking and the Nigerian city of Lagos. Enchanted by visions of sunning on the beach by day and recording by night, McCartney opted for the African locale, nestled on that continent’s west coast.
Booking studio time in Lagos for September, the former Beatle first gathered his fellow Wings bandmates together for some rehearsal work in Scotland. Tensions ensued, and just one week prior to departure, guitarist Henry McCullough and drummer Denny Seiwell resigned from the group. Wings was suddenly down to just three members: McCartney, his wife Linda and guitarist Denny Laine. Undeterred, McCartney opted to forge ahead with the original recording plans.
“That was like a bombshell,” the former Beatle later told Clash Music, recalling the defections. “It was like, ‘Ah, OK. Try and hold your nerve, try and keep it together.’ At that moment [I thought], ‘I’ll show you. I will make the best album I’ve ever made now.’”
Arriving in Lagos, the trio discovered that the EMI studio was in serious disrepair. Microphones had been stashed away in a cupboard, the mixing board was faulty and acoustic baffles used for sound separation were nowhere to be found. Heroically, engineer Geoff Emerick pulled together the necessary equipment to push ahead.
Soon enough, a daily routine was established. Weekday mornings were spent swimming at a local country club, while afternoons saw the band making the hour-long drive to the recording facility, where work often lasted until the wee hours of the morning. Weekends were reserved for rest and recreation, in keeping with McCartney’s reasons for choosing to record in Lagos in the first place.
Throughout the sessions, McCartney, Linda and Laine remained galvanized and motivated by the defections of Seiwell and McCullough. McCartney himself assumed most of the lead guitar and drumming duties, reprising the roles he had often taken on his previous solo albums. Notwithstanding the technical difficulties, recording was moving along relatively smoothly until one evening when the McCartneys decided to take a leisurely stroll. Seemingly out of nowhere, a car shot up beside them, five men jumped out and, at knifepoint, McCartney was forced to relinquish all valuables in his possession. Among the items taken were cassettes of demo recordings of potential material for the new album.
“It was all the stuff we did,” McCartney later recalled. “The tapes [contained] the original demo of ‘Band on the Run.’ If [the thieves] had known, they could have held onto them and made themselves a little fortune. But they didn’t know, and we reckoned they would probably record over them”.
I am going to get to some reviews soon. I would advise anyone with an interest in Paul McCartney and Wings and Band on the Run to do a bit of reading and research. It is a really interesting time for a band who would release their excellent fourth studio album, Venus and Mars, in 1975. I think that Band on the Run is in the top-five Paul McCartney albums – that includes Wings and his solo work. Udiscovermusic.com told the story behind Band on the Run for their feature in December 2022:
“Band On The Run entered the US chart just before Christmas 1973, and was propelled not just by approving reviews, but by the huge success of the “Jet” single. Then came the release – by popular demand, as the press advertising said – of the title track. With its five-minute duration and tempo changes, it was perhaps an unlikely contender to be a 45. But radio stations lapped it up, and so did consumers. The single topped the Hot 100 and sold a million copies in America alone.
Seven months to make No.1
You might assume that the 1973 release was an immediate UK chart-topper. Released on December 5, not only did it enter at a very modest No.45 just before Christmas, it didn’t reach the summit until its 32nd week, in July 1974. Then Band On The Run made up for lost time with a seven-week run before it ceded the No.1 berth to the Mike Oldfield album Hergest Ridge.
The Wings LP enjoyed another ten weeks in the UK Top 10, and went on to complete an extraordinary unbroken run of almost two years on the British charts. It remained there until November 1975.
Two years on the US charts
The album’s US chart debut was at a relatively lowly No.33, but it continued to build during the opening months of 1974. On April 13, with the title song newly unveiled as a single, Band On The Run took over from John Denver’s Greatest Hits as America’s favorite album. It spent four non-consecutive weeks at the summit, and went on to amass more than two years – 116 weeks – on the bestsellers, by far the longest run of any post-Beatles McCartney recording.
“Paul’s Grooves Will Grab You,” said the New York Times’ headline for Loraine Alterman’s review. “Obviously Band On The Run is a carefully produced album,” she wrote. “Yet McCartney has managed to make the complexities of multi-track recording sound as natural and fresh as tomorrow.” Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau admired the lyrical sharpness of the album. Paul’s “distinctive British sensibility now touches on things without belaboring them,” he noted”.
Prior to getting to two reviews, I will collect together some reviews from Wikipedia. It was clear that you could never doubt or write off Band on the Run. You could never doubt Paul McCartney’s ability as a songwriter to come up with something, alongside Linda, that is world-class! Critics were overly-doubtful and dismissive when Wings had a bump or two. Maybe it was fair to assume Wings would not deliver something quite as good as Band on the Run. They were still capable of genius. They proved it here:
“Upon release, Band on the Run received mostly favourable reviews. Author Robert Rodriguez writes that, after the disappointment of McCartney's previous work since the Beatles, "It was exactly the record fans and critics had long hoped he would make …"
In a combined review for Starr's concurrently released Ringo album, Charles Shaar Murray of the NME wrote: "The ex-Beatle least likely to re-establish his credibility and lead the field has pulled it off with a positive master-stroke of an album entitled Band On The Run." In addition to praising McCartney for using synthesizer "like an instrument, and not like an electric whoopee cushion", Shaar Murray concluded: "Band On The Run is a great album. If anybody ever puts down McCartney in your presence, bust him in the snoot and play him this. He will thank you for it afterwards."
Writing in The New York Times, Loraine Alterman considered the album to be "bursting with a great deal of compelling music even if the lyrics at times make as much sense as that cover photo" and admired the "fascinating range of sounds" offered in the title track, as well as the "lovely, romantic aura" of "Bluebird". While noting the importance of studio production on the overall effect, Alterman wrote: "McCartney has managed to make the complexities of multi-track recording sound as natural and fresh as tomorrow." Jon Landau of Rolling Stone described the album as "with the possible exception of John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band, the finest record yet released by any of the four musicians who were once called the Beatles". Rolling Stone named Band on the Run one of the Best Albums of the Year for 1973”.
Rolling Stone reviewed Paul McCartney and Wings’ Band on the Run in 1974. In fact, Jon Landau was given the assignment of putting into words the impact and importance of this phenomenal album. One that is ranked alongside the all-time best:
“EVERYONE EVENTUALLY WINDS up writing about themselves — the problem is finding the best way to go about it. To write about oneself literally, in the first person, presumes a more interesting personal life and philosophy than most rock lyricists possess. John Lennon was good for one great album based on musical direct address, Plastic Ono Band. Ten years from now he may have accumulated enough personal data on which to base another as provocative. In the meantime, he has cut himself off from all the other ways in which lyrics can be used — most importantly, to create imaginative worlds in which characters, ideas, fantasies and illusions are invented and appreciated apart from our interest in the artist’s private life, per se.
The best rock lyricists have always used words in just those ways. They have been defining and redefining myths and icons, symbols that can stand for both their private feelings and those that transcend their personal point of view and speak to the audience’s collective consciousness. Among the more obvious recent examples, culled from American artists: Dylan’s interpretations of John Wesley Hardin and Billy the Kid; the Eagles’ underrated parable of a rock band as an aging group of obsolete outlaws, Desperado, and Steve Miller’s attempts to unify new and old myths through the creation of personas like the Gangster of Love and the Space Cowboy.
The Band, the most self-conscious American band, have transformed everything they’ve touched into a permanent image of the past as it was supposed to have been, which is as good a definition of mythologizing as rock requires. On one album they appear as survivors of a forgotten era and culture (The Band) and on another define their and our rock & roll past (Moondog Matinee).
Moondog Matinee freezes in time our image of a scuffling North American bar band in the early Sixties. The Who, England’s most self-conscious band, have released Quadrophenia, which in turn freezes in time our image of the mid-Sixties Mod sensibility. Their album will become a definitive reference point for interpreting the recent rock experience as we necessarily come to rely more on interpretations of the past than on our ever-changing memories of it. Quadrophenia is both autobiography and mythology, the one dimension continually enhancing the impact of the other.
The Beatles assumed a sustained fictitious identity only once, on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. By making themselves over as the disciples of Billy Shears, just another vaudeville revue, they could perform material that might have been rejected coming from the Beatles qua Beatles — songs like “When I’m 64,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” and the title cut.
Of the four former Beatles, John Lennon and George Harrison have gone on to write exclusively in the first person, their lyrics, both good and bad, never more or less than simple statements of their ideas and feelings. Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney have moved in the other direction, expressing themselves no less personally but through more inventive means. Starr has released an album whose subject is the myth of his own stardom, an extension of one of Sgt. Pepper‘s themes. (Producer Richard Perry has also been preoccupied with notions of stardom dating back to his Fats Is Back, an album with a theme and album cover that, like Ringo’s, centers around stars.)”.
I will finish with a review from AllMusic. They had their say about a true masterpiece. I know people will write about it closer to the fiftieth anniversary. Among the distinct and hugely varied and decades-long discography of Paul McCartney, his third studio album with Wings is among his absolute best and most enduring:
“Band on the Run is generally considered to be Paul McCartney's strongest solo effort. The album was also his most commercially successful, selling well and spawning two hit singles, the multi-part pop suite of the title track and the roaring rocker "Jet." On these cuts and elsewhere, McCartney's penchant for sophisticated, nuanced arrangements and irrepressibly catchy melodic hooks is up to the caliber he displayed in the Beatles, far surpassing the first two Wings releases, Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway. The focus found in Band on the Run may have to do with the circumstances of its creation: two former members quit the band prior to recording, leaving McCartney, wife Linda, and guitarist Denny Laine to complete the album alone (with Paul writing, producing, and playing most of the instruments himself). The album has the majestic, orchestral sweep of McCartney's Abbey Road-era ambition, with a wide range of style-dabbling, from the swaying, acoustic jazz-pop of "Bluebird" and the appealing, straightforward rock of "Helen Wheels" to the wiry blues of "Let Me Roll It" and the swaying, one-off pub sing-along "Picasso's Last Words (Drink to Me)." Though it lacks the emotional resonance of contemporaneous releases by John Lennon and George Harrison, McCartney's infallible instinct for popcraft overflows on this excellent release”.
I hope that there are lots of articles and new interest in Paul McCartney and Wings’ Band on the Run ahead of 5th December. I am not sure whether there is any new anniversary release coming. I would love to hear an expanded edition or a new vinyl pressing in a variety of colours. It would introduce the album to new fans and a younger generation. Not only one of the best albums of 1973, Band on the Run is one of the finest albums ever. From the opening riff of Band on the Run to the closing notes of Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five, the Paul and Linda McCartney-penned album (Denny Laine wrote No Words with Paul McCartney) well and truly is…
IN a league of its own.