Band on the Run turned 50 at the end of last year, and a new expanded edition—its fourth—celebrates the anniversary. As the proliferation of reissues over the years suggests, it’s Paul McCartney’s most consequential post-Beatles record, if not necessarily his best: the album that revived his critical fortunes and established him as a powerhouse outside his former band.
McCartney’s career was hardly languishing when Band on the Run appeared at the end of 1973. Earlier that year, Red Rose Speedway became his second album to reach No. 1 in the U.S., with the dreamy ballad “My Love” topping the Billboard charts and his James Bond theme “Live and Let Die” coming close. Yet his critical reputation was at a nadir, lacking the countercultural cachet of either John Lennon or George Harrison, ex-bandmates whose early-’70s successes hit the sweet spot where the underground and mainstream met. Cast as the primary culprit in the Beatles’ demise, McCartney was portrayed as a careerist control freak who specialized in featherweight pop.
But following the Fab Four’s breakup, McCartney hardly had a master plan. Newly married to the former Linda Eastman, he moved to a farm in Scotland and then revived an idea he had for the Beatles in their waning days: to get back out and play rock’n’roll as part of a group. As he recently told Mojo, he realized his path forward was “to get a band that isn’t massively famous, to not worry if we don’t know what we’re doing because we would form our character by learning along the way.”
An essential part of that fledgling band was Linda McCartney, who previously hadn’t played music. Paul recalled, “I wasn’t motivated by having a fabulous group. I was motivated by not wanting to leave my wife behind. We had only just married. What was I going to do, run off on the road? The Beatles weren’t very good when they started out either.” He had the pick of prime studio players, recruiting New York drummer Denny Seiwell after he played on Ram, the 1971 album credited to Paul and Linda McCartney, but he found his true lieutenant in Denny Laine, a guitarist who sang lead on the Moody Blues’ breakthrough hit, “Go Now,” in 1964 but spent the subsequent decade struggling to maintain a living as a working musician.
Laine shared a history with McCartney and also recognized his subordinate role. He later said, “Let’s be honest—[McCartney] wanted to be in a band in a sense, but he would still have the final call.” McCartney overshadowed the rest of Wings to the extent that their records were essentially treated as Paul’s creation: Jon Landau’s Rolling Stone rave of Band on the Run didn’t mention Denny Laine’s name once.
By the time Wings recorded Band on the Run, they had whittled down from a quintet to a trio. McCartney alienated Seiwell and guitarist Hugh McCullough; the two musicians chafed at their paltry weekly retainers—a pay system devised to mimic what the Beatles had in their prime—and their boss’ exacting vision. When McCartney’s constraints and eccentricities began to grate, they chose to bolt—right on the eve of Wings heading to EMI’s outpost in Lagos, Nigeria.
Having their choice of EMI studios throughout the world, the McCartneys chose Lagos believing it’d be a working vacation: “We thought, Great… lie on the beach all day, doing nothing, breeze into the studios and record,” recalled Paul. “It didn’t turn out like that.” That’s an understatement. Upon their arrival in Nigeria, Wings and Geoff Emerick—an engineer who had worked with McCartney since Revolver—discovered that EMI had drastically oversold their studio’s capabilities. Forget competing with Abbey Road; it barely had functional microphones. Wings rallied, but the setbacks were many. Fela Kuti visited the studio twice, convinced that McCartney intended to appropriate his music; the two reached an uneasy understanding after Kuti realized there wasn’t a trace of African music in McCartney’s new songs. Cream drummer Ginger Baker, who had recently adopted Lagos as his home, was also irked by the presence of the McCartneys, but for pettier reasons: He wanted them to use his (admittedly superior) studio, not EMI’s. McCartney placated him by cutting “Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me)” at Baker’s ARC Studio. Then there was the matter of the McCartneys’ mugging. Instructed not to wander about at night, the hippies figured they’d be fine, but one night, walking back to their villa after working at the studio, the pair were accosted in the street. Among the valuables the thieves obtained were a clutch of demo tapes, forcing McCartney to immediately cut a set of new demos from memory, just so he wouldn’t lose these nascent tunes forever.
That series of re-recordings could be a key to why Band on the Run is tighter than most McCartney records: Forced to revise from memory, McCartney effectively gave his songs a second draft. He saved the creative spontaneity for the recording, working well with Linda, Laine, and Emerick; he later recalled, “It was quite a joy being so slimmed down after the other two members of the band decided they didn’t want to come out."
Band on the Run lacks the detours and loose ends common to McCartney records without sacrificing his quirks; they’re there, simply used as flair. At a mere nine or 10 tracks—the American version, which is the one included on this 50th-anniversary edition shoehorned the glam-inflected hit “Helen Wheels” onto the second side—it doesn’t ramble, nor does it wander into foreign territory. The songs can be broken down into three familiar McCartney categories: There are sweet acoustic reflections and rampaging rockers, plus snazzy showstoppers that blend these two sounds. McCartney pulls out a couple of tricks he pioneered with the Beatles, threading song snippets into a mini-suite à la Abbey Road and closing the album with a reiteration of musical themes in a fashion that echoes Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. There’s a crucial difference between those records and Band on the Run: Although Tony Visconti’s walloping orchestral arrangements on the perennial hits “Band on the Run” and “Jet”—written in just three days—create the illusion of a studio tour de force, the album actually captures the sound of a small combo being inventive with the meager tools at hand.
To that end, the “Underdubbed” version included here—a rough mix created by Geoff Emerick after everybody returned home, previously buried somewhere in McCartney’s archives—has instructive value. Initially, the absences are glaring, particularly on the tracks sweetened by Visconti. Without the orchestrations, “Band on the Run” and “Jet” can seem incomplete; indeed, “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five” contains no lead vocals whatsoever. It’s not a finished product but a working mix, one that nevertheless captures how Wings interacted as a band. Stripped of the gloss, Band on the Run’s quieter moments seem to be a natural heir to the ramshackle rustic strumming of Wild Life. It also becomes apparent how much texture Linda’s analog synthesizer adds to the songs, generating rumbling propulsion on “Jet” and adding a creeping sense of foreboding on “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five.” Laine acts as empathetic support, weaving his guitar with Paul’s and seamlessly intermingling his harmonies with the McCartneys’. When he trades lead lines on the lovely “No Words"—an effervescent evocation of mid-’60s guitar jangle that’s his first co-writing credit on a Wings record—there seems to be no distance between himself and his married partners. He’s not an interloper, he’s part of the crew.
In a sense, this is what McCartney yearned for since the waning days of the Beatles: to get back to the early days, when being in a band carried a sense of adventure. His phenomenal fame created an inherent power imbalance when he started Wings, but by Band on the Run, he had a pair of players who knew and accepted his idiosyncrasies. He didn’t have supporting musicians, he had a group with a distinct character, one that was captured on record during an extraordinarily difficult set of circumstances. Paul McCartney is surely the driving spirit behind Band on the Run—it distills his gifts as well as any album could—but the peculiarly warm, loving camaraderie of Wings is the reason it’s endured over the decades.
