He Seeks Wings Emergence From Wings Chrysalis
By Jon Bream
The Minneapolis Star
June 8, 1976
His eyes look the same-- big, brown, and expressive. His handsome, boyish face has grown fleshier, but his chin remains firm. His short, cropped hair is Beatle bang length on top and long in back. He is wearing a well-worn Hawaiian print shirt and blue jeans. Around his neck is a choker with ivory wings.
Paul McCartney is a Wing, not a Beatle. It's Friday night, 15 minutes earlier, his group, Wings, finished a triumphant two-and-1/4-hour concert. McCartney is sitting on a couch in a dressing room at the St. Paul Civic Center Arena, smoking a cigarette.
For McCartney, it is a greater burden to be a former Beatle than it was to be a Beatle. He says, "A lot of people think that whatever happens can never be as good as the Beatles was. It's the kind of thing that's difficult to think about generally. Now I think it's there, and I'll go along with the people to a certain extent, but when it really gets to me, I finally remind them that I'm not in the Beatles anymore. You can't keep assuming I am, because then you're then living the myth, not me."
McCartney is cordial, polite, and attentive. His brow furrows when he makes a point. He displays touches of the kind of silly humor seen in the Beatles movie Help and A Hard Day's Night. Since the Beatles dissolved in 1970, McCartney, the group's cute romantic melodist, has enjoyed the most commercially and critically successful career of the four Beatles.
John Lennon, the dark poet, formed the ad hoc Plastic Ono Band before going solo, singing politically oriented songs, and in the last couple of years, he has spent more time in court with various legal predicaments than with music.
George Harrison, the shy mystic, has continued on his introspective ways in his solo career. His U.S. concert tour in 1974 was largely a disaster. Ringo Starr, the Good Timer, has had limited success recording novelty songs.
Only McCartney seriously pursued work in the context of a new band. Wings first appeared in 1971 on Wildfire, [sic] the third of seven albums McCartney has recorded since the Beatles broke up.
Wings frequently has changed personnel, except for McCartney and his wife, Linda Eastman McCartney, whom he married in 1969 and encouraged to pursue a musical career. McCartney has been preparing for his return to the States. In 1972 and 1973, Wings performed in Europe. In 1975, the band toured Great Britain, and earlier this year, it played in Australia [sic] and Europe.
"We had to gear it up for America," McCartney says. "American people don't seem to think of their country as big. It is the biggest place to tour on earth. We just did Europe with about 1/3 of this equipment."
The current Wings tour marks McCartney's first U.S. performance since the Beatles' last concert in 1966 in San Francisco. The two-month tour will play 34 concerts before 600,000 persons and gross $5 million.
McCartney is determined that Wings be recognized as a band on its own merits, not as ex-Beatle McCartney's new backup band. The tour's billed as Wings Over America. On its record, the band is now identified as 'Wings', no longer 'Paul McCartney and Wings.'
The singer-songwriter bassist has assembled a capable band that has more impact on stage than on record. In concert, the well-oiled pop recording group rocks in the good time spirit of Elton John.
McCartney has a formidable sideman and New York drummer Joe English, British guitarist Jimmy McCulloch, formerly of Thunderclap Newman and Stone the Crows, and Denny Laine, co-founder of the Moody Blues, who also plays bass and keyboards on stage. Linda McCartney sings adequate schoolgirl harmonies and plays minimal keyboard fills. Her presence as a cheerleader for both the audience and the band seems to outweigh her musical contributions. McCartney is a personable, friendly, enthusiastic band leader on stage. He is a first-class showman who employs a tasteful array of stage effects, including laser, strobe lights, stage fog, bubbles, film, and smoke bombs. He has put together a top-flight show featuring Wings songs, Paul Simon's "Richard Cory" and five Beatles songs, including his classic "Yesterday."
McCartney is plugging for Wings "because I'm in it. I have to want anything I'm in to be good."
The last three of the five Wings albums, Band on the Run, Venus and Mars, and At the Speed of Sound, each have sold more than 1 million copies. At the concerts, concessionaries hawk Wings T-shirts, posters, and souvenir programs. A crew is filming the tour for a possible movie, yet McCartney emphatically does not want Wingsmania in the 70s to become the phenomenon that Beatlemania was in the 60s. "I'm sure it won't, and I hope it doesn't, and it really shouldn't, because I think we've moved ahead. It's a new time. The symptoms of these years are different, and the audiences are different. I wouldn't want to recreate the old audience and get it back to the '60s. That's been and gone. It was great. You don't really want to be back there. I don't, I don't think most people do like this sort of advancement."
McCartney acknowledges that the Beatles were catalysts, partly responsible for the advancement of culture in the '60s. He feels it was unintentional, though. "I only came into it to make music," he says, "I don't think about it thematically, I just think about writing songs, writing tunes, writing music, getting into stuff I like. I have no control over how people take my songs."
For instance, McCartney explains his purpose behind "Helter Skelter", a Beatles song he wrote that inspired the hideous crimes of the Charles Manson family. "I was writing sort of a down blues, and I wanted to get into a funky screaming thing as just sort of a release, but Manson took it very differently. I certainly didn't mean any of the things he says I meant, but I say (he raises his voice) tt has nothing to do with me, man!
McCartney's goal for his life and career are simple: "just to feel that what I'm doing is right. I like to be happy," he says, "to satisfy my own personal standards."
Since the Beatles' disbandment, McCartney, 33, has become a family man. His three daughters, Heather, 13, by Linda's first marriage, Mary, six, and Stella, four, are accompanying him and Linda on the tour. Critics have charged that all of McCartney's post-Beatles albums, except for the brilliant Band on the Run in 1974, have fallen victim to his marital bliss. Each of his first four albums had a strong single, but the albums are unmemorable. His singles, including non-album cuts like "Live and Let Die" and "Junior's Farm", have sold well consistently.
One critic recently asserted that the pretty sweet balladeer harbors an ambivalence towards the culture to help deliver. "I don't agree," McCartney responds. "People spout off and think they've got the gist of it, and I don't pretend anyone's got the gist of it.
"I like what happened and believe in what went on in the 6'0s, and still want to see wars come to an end. I want to see the kind of wrong things in life changed, but I don't necessarily want to see it change the way some other people do. So we differ."
He is aware that to some people he's a hero and a legend, but McCartney feels no obligation because of that. "There is the hero side. It exists in the papers at arm's length. It's nothing I really get into. I don't want to have to behave like a hero all the time, cause I also know myself as a person, that's the real thing, so he contented.
McCartney sings in his current hit, "Silly Love Songs:" "Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs, and what's wrong with that? I'd like to know, because here I go again...."
On record, it's an infectious discotheque romp. In concert, "Silly Love Songs" becomes an exuberant rocker showcasing the superb melodist's exceptional gift for arranging. "It's just sort of an up song for love. I just write them, don't ask me to explain them." Today it's Silly Love Songs for McCartney. Tomorrow, there's another Wings album, some more Wings tours, and more unfounded rumors of a Beatles reunion.
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