Fifty years in the past, Paul McCartney was basking within the glow of his new album’s reception. This week in 1974, Band on the Run was ending a seven-week streak on the high of the U.Okay. charts after dominating American airwaves all through the summer season—it had landed Billboard’s high album spot three separate instances. Hailed by critics as a masterpiece, McCartney’s fifth solo album would promote greater than 8 million copies and rank as one of many decade’s greatest sellers. Band on the Run was an unqualified success. It additionally marked one of many best comebacks in rock historical past.
Earlier than the album’s launch, McCartney’s again was towards the wall. His late spouse, Linda, as soon as described her husband’s mindset going into the recording classes as a bleak make-or-break mission: “Both I hand over and minimize my throat or get my magic again.”
It’s arduous to fathom McCartney, a megastar who has charted extra No. 1 songs than another artist and who nonetheless packs the world’s largest live performance venues six many years after the roar of Beatlemania receded, discovering himself misplaced within the musical wilderness. However within the years following the Beatles’ breakup, in 1970, the group’s de facto chief instantly appeared mortal, spending the subsequent few years affected by sagging album gross sales, the scorn of critics, and the open hostility of his former bandmates.
From the 2013 subject: 1963: The 12 months the Beatles discovered their voice
McCartney struggled with melancholy, alcohol, unrealistic expectations, and ugly assaults from ex-Beatles united by unending lawsuits, collective jealousies, and pent-up resentments towards the person who’d carried the group creatively by their ultimate years.
Probably the most painful broadsides got here from John Lennon, the songwriting accomplice whom Paul had met as a young person in Liverpool and who helped McCartney launch a musical revolution that reworked Western tradition. After the band’s breakup, Lennon centered his reserves of rage on a slender purpose: dismantling the Beatles’ delusion. Though nobody linked to the group was spared, probably the most venomous assaults had been saved for McCartney. In a Rolling Stoneinterview with its writer, Jann Wenner, Lennon dismissed McCartney’s first solo album as “garbage”; in contrast him to Engelbert Humperdinck; stated that the one goal of the Let It Be film mission was for McCartney to “exhibit,” and that watching the film had made him “really feel sick”; claimed that his fellow bandmates had gotten “fed up being sidemen for Paul”; and accused McCartney of main the group “spherical in circles” and inflicting its “disintegration.” Lennon even carried his single-minded mission into the studio, the place he mocked McCartney as a sq. whose finest days had been behind him.
“A fairly face might final a 12 months or two / However fairly quickly they’ll see what you are able to do,” Lennon sneered in his 1971 music “How Do You Sleep?”
Music critics enamored of the avant-garde type of Lennon and his spouse, the artist Yoko Ono, and horrified by McCartney’s bourgeois embrace of home bliss, adopted Lennon’s lead and piled on. When McCartney launched his first solo album, McCartney, in April 1970, Wenner reportedly instructed his music editor, Greil Marcus, to order a rewrite of Rolling Stone’s optimistic evaluate and alter it into successful piece that dismissed the file as “distinctly second fee” and a piece of “tawdry propaganda.” Remedy of the previous Beatle’s subsequent album was worse, with the journal’s Jon Landau brandingRam “the nadir within the decomposition of Sixties rock” and dismissing the music as “so extremely inconsequential and so monumentally irrelevant” that it was not even value hating. When the identical albumwas reissued in 2012, many years faraway from the Lennon-McCartney feud, Ram garnered almost common acclaim. Pitchforkrhapsodized that McCartney’s album had executed nothing lower than invent a brand new strategy to pop music, AllMusicdeclared that “on reflection it appears like nothing a lot as the primary indie album,” and even Rolling Stone grudgingly positioned it on its “500 Best Albums of All Time” listing.
However a era earlier, McCartney wouldn’t have had the good thing about hindsight. The Beatles biographer Nicholas Schaffner neatly summarized McCartney’s sullied repute with the music press, which outlined the repute of rock acts within the early Nineteen Seventies: “Paul was considered as a traitor to the counterculture who break up up the Beatles and bought his soul to bubblegum.” Schaffner famous that the anti-McCartney hysteria grew to become so ridiculous that Beatles bootlegs started portraying McCartney as a bloated pig, whereas protests had been staged outdoors his in-laws’ New York house. Rolling Stone and others within the rock world mocked McCartney’s theme music for the James Bond movie Dwell and Let Die, as Schaffner put it, “in tones so snide that you’d have thought Paul had been caught taking part in golf with Spiro Agnew.”
By no means thoughts that the music would soar to the highest of the music charts together with a set of different hits throughout these “wilderness years,” akin to “Perhaps I’m Amazed,” “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” “One other Day,” and “My Love.” These songs would have safely secured the legacy of another artist for many years to return. However not McCartney. The photographs fired by music critics and former bandmates hit their meant goal.
“I attempted actually arduous,” McCartney lamented of his early post-Beatles work. “I actually hoped individuals would have preferred it.” Lennon’s assaults deepened McCartney’s disaster of confidence, and McCartney later admitted that he had been devastated by his criticisms. “I sat down and pored over each little paragraph, each sentence. On the time I assumed, ‘It’s me. That’s simply what I’m like. He’s captured me so effectively. I’m a turd.’”
McCartney wished a clear break from his latest previous and commenced looking for an unique location the place he might discover inspiration by “absorbing the environment and taking within the local weather.” After a cursory evaluate of each recording studio that his label EMI operated internationally, Paul narrowed his selections to Rio de Janeiro and Lagos, Nigeria. McCartney selected Africa—and that’s when his actual issues started.
As his plans had been coming collectively, his band, Wings, was falling aside. His guitarist abruptly give up, and his drummer introduced the evening earlier than the band’s departure that he wouldn’t be touring with them. That left Wings with solely three members: McCartney, the guitarist Denny Laine, and Linda, who later admitted that she’d nonetheless been “studying to play piano and keyboards.” An enraged McCartney was decided to show his anger into inventive gasoline and return from Lagos with an album so nice that his former bandmates would ceaselessly remorse their determination to desert ship. However inside days, it may need been McCartney who quietly regretted his determination to get on that flight to Africa.
McCartney later remembered anticipating to seek out “blue skies and inexperienced jungles.” He was shocked to find “inner-city Lagos, with useless individuals mendacity by the highway, and brown clay spitting up at you pushed by monsoons. It was fairly furry.” As a substitute of the post-oil-boom metropolis Lagos has change into, Paul and Linda had landed in a city stuffed with “mud huts, a few BOAC buildings, a pool you needed to stick a lot of chlorine in, all very dodgy.” The EMI studio lacked vocal cubicles and even fundamental recording tools.
Probably the most critical drama occurred outdoors the studio partitions. He and Linda had been attacked by a gang of thieves, who stole their demo tapes and the notes that had been meant to information the making of their album. The following day, studio arms instructed them that they had been fortunate to have escaped with their lives. The strain was bearing down on McCartney, who collapsed one evening and was rushed to the hospital, as he later recounted to Paul De Noyer:
“Linda thought I’d died. I might hardly breathe. It was scary: You’re going to the hospital at the back of a taxi, by this hub of the town of Lagos, and it’s an evening: Oh fucking hell, I’m dying.’”
However McCartney, Linda, and Laine made it again to London, and so they put the ending touches on their album at AIR Studios, co-founded by the Beatles’ former producer, George Martin. McCartney crammed in on drums, Laine supplied tasteful guitar work and vocals, and Linda performed lots of the band’s most memorable keyboard traces. By the point Tony Visconti was including his orchestral rating to the 9 tracks, everybody inside earshot of the studio knew that McCartney was again.
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Band on the Run was launched on November 30, 1973. McCartney’s earlier two albums had struggled commercially, and his masterpiece at first bought solely modestly. It could take 5 months for Band on the Run to hit No. 1 within the U.S.; it wouldn’t attain the highest of the U.Okay. charts for one more three months. However when it did, it could keep at No. 1 for the subsequent seven weeks. It could additionally change into his best-selling solo album.
Rolling Stone’s Landau was compelled to carry out an abrupt about-face, and to comply with his earlier sneering opinions with the admission that McCartney had simply produced “the best file but launched by any of the 4 musicians who had been as soon as referred to as the Beatles.” In his January 1974 evaluate, Landau hailed McCartney’s work as “uniting the parable of the rock star and the outlaw, the unique legendary determine on the run.”
Fifty years later, Sir Paul McCartney stays on the run, spending this fall performing a string of sold-out reveals throughout Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Peru. He’ll finish 2024 with concert events in Manchester and London. Though he has little left to show, McCartney appears to be a person on a mission, nonetheless exhibiting the obsessive pursuit of musical perfection that drove the opposite Beatles loopy whereas additionally driving them to the highest of the charts.
That drive fueled McCartney to supply his masterpiece towards all odds, simply because it formed the historical past of common music. Ringo Starr just lately stated that he has at all times credited McCartney for having a piece ethic that pushed Lennon and the opposite band members into the studio. “I’ve at all times thanked him for being that man,” he stated, “as a result of with out him, we’d have put out three albums and vanished.”
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