Wings Covers America (San Diego 1976)

 

Wings Cover America

By Jim Guthrie

Daily-Times Advocate

June 27, 1976

    There he was all alone on the stage singing "Yesterday", and there I was in the last row with 14,000 people between us, trying to get the binoculars away from my wife. I'd had the binoculars when he started the song; they had basically been in my possession from the beginning of Paul McCartney's concert at the San Diego Sports Arena, which isn't exactly true. It wasn't just Paul McCartney's concert, it was one stop in the Wings Over America tour, and it was significant.

     The group was addressed in the billing, which indicated a certain symbolism and understanding by one of pop music's most eminent superstars of the idioms' integral relationship between the individual and those around him. McCartney's name alone would have been enough to guarantee the tour's success, but by itself it wouldn't have reflected what, in purely musical terms, the tour was all about. Where the man was now musically.

     There's a place in pop music for the solo performer, and time could be taken here to list a dozen or so names, any one of which, when placed upon a marquee, would be enough to sell out any auditorium in the country as fast as Wings sold out the Sports Arena. But after a while, every new Carole King or John Denver song sounds too much like the old ones, etc. etc.

     The reigning solo performer at present is Elton John, but he really isn't a soloist in a variety of senses. His music needs Bernie Taupin's lyrics, and that just isn't old Elton up there in those funny glasses, banging away at the piano. There are some very talented musicians backing him up.

     To be continually innovative and appealing, pop music requires an interplay of ideas. It has to be a cooperative effort to be truly great. Sure, Elvis was the single most important influence in pop music, but he was a style, an instrument through which the music of others flowed. He needed those others, just as they certainly needed him. And a guy named Dylan has been pretty important in pop music, too. But if he hadn't augmented himself with The Band, it's doubtful he could have gained superstar status as a performer. 

    The most important group in pop music has been the Beatles, but its members were human, and musically the Beatles broke up because John, Paul, George, and Ringo wanted to say their own musical things. They wanted to become Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr on their own terms, and they did for a couple of albums, a couple of years, but then what they were saying on their own wasn't all that important, or even all that entertaining. It became significant for its curiosity value, but tended to be disappointing musically. 

    McCartney, however, relearned the importance of interplay and cooperative effort, and so here it was six years after the breakup, and here was Paul, basically the lead singer in a new group, filling hall after hall, night after night, with both a single and an album number one on the charts. Of course, McCartney is more than a lead singer, and that is why I was trying to get the binoculars back. Through them, I had followed the trajectory of frisbees before the lights went out, and the four horn players mounted the stage in their glow-in-the-dark Wings T-shirts, followed by the five members of Wings themselves, illuminated by that shaft of shocking red spotlight. 

    I'd inspected the crowd carefully, noting a large part of it was made up of people as old as I was, and thus as old as McCartney. I searched in vain for braless teeny boppers boogying carefree in the aisles. While there was a younger element in attendance, I spied them looking curiously at my age group through the doorway of the crowded bar in the lobby, as we fortified ourselves with beer, scotch, and brandy before climbing to our seats. a burly guard informed us we were required to finish our drinks at the bar. We weren't allowed to take them out. Obviously, those kids staring in at us with those funny cigarettes in their hands needed to be protected from the likes of us.

     I had been afraid of having to deal with a bunch of pimply-faced weirdos trying to steal my seat. I had even prepared a speech about the fact that I had more of a right than they had to be there, because in part McCartney was, after all, of my generation, and why didn't they buzz off and come back when Pink Floyd was in town?

     But there wasn't any hassle. Everybody got along just fine, and the only tension between the generations occurred when a pre-teenage girl in the row in front of me looked at me funny while I tapped my feet during "Lady Madonna". We wound up smiling at each other, and later I noticed we were both clapping in time to "Band on the Run."

     But now he was singing "Yesterday", perhaps the watershed song in pop music. The song that made the kind of music that produced it respectable and listened to by all segments of the public. After "Yesterday", pop music became a sociological influence, not just a category. And although he had more to do with "Yesterday" than anyone else, the song isn't known as just a McCartney song; it's a Beatles song, and I'm sure he wouldn't have it any other way. 

    Still, one night stands out in my memory when a musician friend of mine was playing "Yesterday"on his flute. He stopped and said, "You know, McCartney is a musical genius," and then he went back to proving it, so I regretted that I had given the binoculars to my wife. I guess I wanted to be able to say what she did when he finished the song. "I've always wanted to see him sing that, and now I can say that I have." But at least I could hear him in the 18th row of section 20 C, and I was glad I was there. 

    However, "Yesterday" wasn't the high point of the concert.  Hearing it was nice enough, but somehow only in a nostalgic way. What made the concert memorable was the new McCartney sound. The sound of five musicians playing together as Wings.

     Wings is still developing as a group, and it may never reach the Beatles' status or preeminence. Probably no group ever will, but I can't wait for its next tour. By that time, I'm sure the Sports Arena won't be nearly big enough to hold all the people of all ages waiting. Wings will be closer to getting it all together then, and the people in the back row will need higher powered binoculars.