Dynasty Wings: Hear the Second Act Behind the Songs.

The Reset

1969–71

Start in April 1970. Paul McCartney's first solo album was about to come out. Press copies went out with a written question-and-answer sheet. In it, he made clear he was not working with the Beatles. The world read it as the end of the band.

That album, called simply McCartney, was recorded largely at home. Paul played almost every instrument himself. It was small and unpolished, and that was part of the point.

Around the same time, Paul and Linda spent long stretches at High Park, a farm he had bought in 1966 on the Kintyre peninsula, in the west of Scotland. It was remote and plain. The farm comes back again and again in this story.

In 1971 came RAM, credited to Paul and Linda together. It was recorded in New York with hired players. One of them was a drummer named Denny Seiwell. Remember his name.

Now, this next part is our reading, and it is only that. The documented part is simple. The old band ended, and the next records were smaller and closer to home. What Paul felt during that time is his to tell, and the book is where he tells it. But the pattern is a familiar human one. When the thing that defined you ends, the first move is often to go small, go home, and work with your hands.

If you want to hear this act, start with Maybe I'm Amazed, from the first solo album. Then play a track from RAM. Listen for how close and homemade they sound.

In your copy, this is Part One, covering 1969 to 1971.

Build the Band

1971–73

In 1971, Paul and Linda formed Wings. Denny Laine joined on guitar and vocals. He had been a founding member of the Moody Blues. Denny Seiwell came in on drums. In January 1972, the guitarist Henry McCullough joined too.

Their first album, Wild Life, came out at the end of 1971.

Then they did something no former Beatle needed to do. In February 1972 they set off around British universities, often unannounced. They would turn up and ask if they could play that night.

That summer, they toured Europe in a brightly painted double-decker bus.

It was not all charming. Their 1972 single, Give Ireland Back to the Irish, was banned from broadcast by the BBC. Linda drew criticism too. She was learning keyboards in public, and some writers questioned why she was in the band at all.

Now, this next part is our reading. This is the stretch where many readers stall, and for understandable reasons. Nothing is settled yet. The lineup shifts, the reviews are mixed, and the stakes feel unclear. But this is also where the real work happens. A band is not announced into being. It is practiced into being, in rooms where hardly anyone is watching.

In 1973 came the album Red Rose Speedway, and Paul wrote the theme song for the James Bond film Live and Let Die. Momentum was building. Then, in August 1973, just before a trip to record in Nigeria, Henry McCullough and Denny Seiwell both left.

To hear this act, play Live and Let Die next to anything from Wild Life. One is a rough first try. The other is a band learning it can go big.

This is Part Two in your copy, from Wild Life through Red Rose Speedway.

The Proof

1973–75

What was left was three people. Paul, Linda, and Denny Laine. In August 1973 they flew to Lagos, Nigeria, to record at a studio run by EMI.

The conditions were hard. One evening, Paul and Linda were robbed at knifepoint. The thieves took a bag that held lyrics and demo tapes for the new songs.

They kept going. Paul played drums and much of the lead guitar himself. The engineer Geoff Emerick recorded the sessions. More work followed back in London.

The album was Band on the Run. It came out in December 1973. It went to number one in both America and Britain. It won Grammy Awards. It is still the record most people reach for when they talk about Wings.

Then the band grew again. The young Scottish guitarist Jimmy McCulloch joined in 1974. Drummer Joe English joined in 1975. Their next album, Venus and Mars, was finished in New Orleans, and it topped the charts too.

Now, this next part is our reading. This is the hinge of the whole book. Notice what produced the breakthrough. Not a full band. Not good conditions. Not a clean plan. A smaller team, a stolen head start, and a decision to finish anyway. Proof rarely arrives the way we schedule it. It tends to arrive after the plan has already broken.

To hear this act, play the title song, Band on the Run, from start to finish. It moves through several sections, almost like a short film. Then play Jet.

Part Three in your copy holds this stretch, from Band on the Run to Venus and Mars.

The Cost and the Legacy

1975–81 and after

Success made Wings very large. They toured the world from 1975 into 1976. In June 1976, more than sixty-seven thousand people saw them at the Kingdome in Seattle.

On the album Wings at the Speed of Sound, every member sang lead on at least one song. It was an answer to critics who said Wings was only ever Paul.

In 1977, Mull of Kintyre, named for the headland near the farm, became the first single in Britain to sell more than two million copies.

But the cost was showing. Jimmy McCulloch and Joe English left in 1977, and the band was a trio again for London Town. New members joined for Back to the Egg, released in 1979. That September, Jimmy McCulloch died. He was twenty-six.

In January 1980, Paul was arrested at the airport in Tokyo for carrying marijuana. He spent nine days in jail, and the Japan tour was cancelled. That December, John Lennon was killed in New York. In April 1981, Denny Laine left, and Wings came to an end.

To hear this act, play Silly Love Songs, then Mull of Kintyre. One belongs to the stadium. The other belongs to the farm.

What Remains

Linda McCartney died in 1998. Denny Laine died in 2023. The book arrives after both of them, built from the voices still here and from the archive of the ones who are not.

Now, this next part is our reading. Wings did not replace the Beatles, and it never needed to. It showed that a second act can be real without erasing the first. It was built in public, doubted in public, and finished in public. What remains is not only the songs. It is a working picture of starting over with the people beside you.

The Voices

Who is speaking

Start with a question that sounds simple. Whose book is this? The cover lists Paul McCartney as the author. But the book was edited by Ted Widmer, a historian, and it is built from many voices. Paul's is the central one, but it is one among many. In an oral history, the editor's work is mostly invisible. He chooses which memories to place next to each other, and in what order. When two accounts sit side by side and do not quite agree, that is usually a choice, not an accident.

So as you read, you are hearing Paul, and you are hearing the people around him, arranged by a historian. Hold all three in mind. The person speaking. The people being spoken about. And the hand that set them in order.

Now, to the band itself. Begin with the person easiest to overlook, because she was behind the camera for so long. Linda McCartney was born Linda Eastman, in Scarsdale, New York, in 1941. Before she ever played a note in public, she was a working photographer. In the mid-sixties she photographed musicians in New York, and she became a regular at the Fillmore East. In May 1968, her photograph of Eric Clapton ran on the cover of Rolling Stone. She was the first woman to have a photograph on that cover.

That matters for the book in a quiet way. Linda spent the Wings years both inside the band and looking at it through a lens. The cover of Venus and Mars, two snooker balls on a black background, is her photograph. When you hear her voice in the oral history, remember that she was often also the one holding the camera.

She wrote, too. In 1972 Wings recorded a song of hers called Seaside Woman, with Linda singing lead. It was not released until 1977, and then under a made-up band name, Suzy and the Red Stripes.

Next, Denny Laine. His real name was Brian Hines. He was born in Birmingham in 1944, and took his stage name from the singer Frankie Laine. As a teenager he fronted a band called the Diplomats. Then he joined the Moody Blues and sang lead on their hit Go Now. He left that band in 1966, years before Wings.

Laine is the voice to follow in this book, because he is the only member besides Paul and Linda who is there for the whole run. He wrote and sang songs of his own for Wings. Time to Hide. Again and Again and Again. Deliver Your Children. He co-wrote Mull of Kintyre with Paul. And on tour, Wings regularly played Go Now, his old Moody Blues hit, so the band carried a piece of his first career on stage with them.

Denny Seiwell was the American in the founding lineup. He grew up in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, and played in a Navy band before working as a session drummer in New York. Before Wings, he had drummed on records by jazz trombonists, by John Denver, and on Billy Joel's first album. After Wings, he settled in Los Angeles and kept working in film and television music. He later produced a fiftieth-anniversary tribute to RAM.

Henry McCullough came from Portstewart, in Northern Ireland. He came up through the Irish showband circuit, and then the London rock scene of the late sixties. He played with Joe Cocker's Grease Band, and that meant he played Woodstock. One more odd fact you may enjoy. A spoken line of his, recalling a night when he had been drinking, ends up at the close of Pink Floyd's Money, on The Dark Side of the Moon. In Wings, his guitar is on Hi, Hi, Hi, on Live and Let Die, and on My Love, where he played the solo.

Now, this next part is our reading. Notice how different these first members were. A photographer from New York. A Birmingham singer who had already had a hit. A Navy-trained session drummer. An Irish guitarist who had played Woodstock. Wings was not a band of people who grew up together. It was a band assembled from very different working lives. That helps explain why the early years feel so unsettled in the book. These people were not just learning songs. They were learning each other.

Then there is the second wave, after Lagos. Jimmy McCulloch was from Dumbarton, in Scotland. He was astonishingly young when he started. While still a teenager he joined Thunderclap Newman, whose song Something in the Air went to number one in Britain. By the time he joined Wings in 1974, he had already played with John Mayall and with Stone the Crows. His first recording with Wings was Junior's Farm. He also wrote and sang two Wings songs, Medicine Jar and Wino Junko.

Public accounts are frank that alcohol caused problems for him during those years. Before the American tour of 1976, he broke a finger in a Paris hotel, and the start of the tour was pushed back while it healed. The book has the people who were there. Let them tell that part.

Geoff Britton was the drummer between Lagos and Joe English. He was a Londoner, and his time in Wings was short. He joined in May 1974 and was gone by early 1975. Accounts of the Venus and Mars sessions describe clashes between him and Jimmy McCulloch, and he played on only a few of that album's tracks.

Joe English was born in Rochester, New York, in 1949. He was playing in a band based in Macon, Georgia, when he answered an advertisement for a drummer, auditioned, and got the job. There is a small, lovely story about him on Wings at the Speed of Sound. During a playback, Paul heard Joe singing along to a song called Must Do Something About It, and gave him the lead vocal. In 1977, during the London Town sessions, he went home to Georgia. Later he became a Christian musician and led his own band.

The last lineup brought two more Londoners. Laurence Juber was a trained guitarist who had studied music and worked as a session player, including on a James Bond score. Steve Holley was a session drummer who had just played on an Elton John single. He met Denny Laine by chance in a pub, and that meeting led to an invitation to join. Both came in for Back to the Egg, and both stayed until the end.

And there are voices who never joined the band, but were in the room. Geoff Emerick, the engineer, had started at EMI at sixteen. On only his second working day, he watched the Beatles record Love Me Do. By twenty, he was engineering their records. He went to Lagos with Wings, and he kept working with Paul for decades.

Now, this next part is our reading. Count the drummers and guitarists, and a pattern appears. The rhythm section and the lead guitar kept changing. The singing core did not. Paul, Linda, and Denny Laine were the three voices you can hear in the harmonies from the first album to the last. If the book ever feels crowded, hold onto that. The faces at the back of the stage changed. The three voices at the front stayed.

What to notice in the book: as each person enters, listen for how they describe their first meeting with the band. Those first impressions are some of the most revealing material in an oral history, because they show what each person expected before anyone knew how it would turn out.

The Places

Where it was made

Wings made music in some very unusual rooms. Following the places is one of the best ways to keep your bearings in the book.

Begin in Scotland. Side A told you about the farm. What it did not tell you is that Scotland was also a workplace. In July 1971, before their first album, Wings rehearsed at Paul's small Scottish studio, which he called Rude Studio. And in 1978, Back to the Egg began at a larger studio on the family's farm near Campbeltown, called Spirit of Ranachan. So Scotland was not only a retreat. It was a place to work, from the first rehearsal to the last album.

Now London. The first album, Wild Life, was made at EMI's studios in the summer of 1971, very quickly. The backing tracks took three days. Five of the eight songs were reportedly first takes. To avoid the press, the band booked the sessions under a false name, Sam Browne.

Red Rose Speedway was the opposite. It moved through a long list of London studios, and two in New York. At the start, the band brought in the engineer and producer Glyn Johns. It did not last. Johns left after a few weeks of sessions, frustrated with the slow pace. When you reach this part of the book, notice how much of the story is about rooms, and who was in charge of them.

And there were the rooms on the road. Side A told you about the university tour of 1972. One detail worth adding is what they did not play. On those early dates, Wings played no Beatles songs at all. They were there to be heard as a new band.

London gave the band its outdoor rooms too. The cover photograph for Wild Life was taken by a creek at Osterley Park, in west London, in the autumn of 1971. Two years later, the famous convict photograph for Band on the Run was taken in the same park. So the first cover and the breakthrough cover share a setting.

Then Lagos. You know the outline from Side A. Here are the details that make the rooms real. The studio was EMI's, on Wharf Road, in a district called Apapa. Published accounts describe it as under-equipped, with a faulty mixing desk and a single eight-track tape machine. The band lived in rented houses near the airport, in Ikeja, about an hour from the studio.

Lagos also brought a confrontation. The great Nigerian musician Fela Kuti publicly accused Wings of coming to exploit African music. He came to the studio to confront Paul. According to the published accounts, Paul played him the songs they were making, to show that they did not borrow from local music.

The drummer Ginger Baker had his own studio in Lagos, called ARC. Wings recorded one song there, Picasso's Last Words. Baker shook a tin can full of gravel on the track.

And there is a coda that is almost too neat. When the McCartneys got home, a letter was waiting from EMI. It was dated before they left. It warned them not to go to Lagos, because of a cholera outbreak.

Now, this next part is our reading. Side A called Lagos the hinge of the story. The rooms tell you why. This was not a studio that made things easy. It was a room with one tape machine, an hour from home, in a city where the band were outsiders. Whatever the album became, it became it there, with very little. Keep that picture in mind when you hear how polished the finished record sounds. A lot of that polish was added later, in London. The bones were laid in Apapa.

From there, the band started travelling to make records, almost as a method. In the summer of 1974, the new lineup went to Nashville. They stayed on a farm in Tennessee owned by the songwriter Curly Putman. That farm gave its name to the song Junior's Farm. They recorded it at a Nashville studio called Soundshop.

The big tour of 1975 and 1976 had its own set of rooms, and some of them were enormous. The American leg was the first time Paul had played North America in ten years, since the Beatles' last American tour in 1966. Several shows were filmed, in Seattle, New York, and Los Angeles, and that footage became the concert film Rockshow. At one of the Los Angeles shows, Ringo Starr came onstage and handed Paul a bunch of flowers.

Some rooms were closed to them. A planned tour of Japan in 1975 was cancelled by the Japanese authorities, because of an earlier drug arrest in Sweden in 1972. And after the Tokyo arrest you heard about on Side A, Wings' music was immediately banned from Japanese television and radio.

The next album, Venus and Mars, started at EMI in London late in 1974, and moved to Sea-Saint Studios in New Orleans in early 1975. Sea-Saint was co-owned by the New Orleans musician Allen Toussaint. He played piano on one of the album's songs, Rock Show.

In 1977, Wings did something stranger still. They recorded on a yacht. It was called Fair Carol, moored in the Virgin Islands. Eight songs that ended up on London Town were recorded aboard, some of them on the upper deck. The working title for the album was Water Wings.

And then a castle. In September 1978, for Back to the Egg, the band recorded at Lympne Castle, in Kent. They set up in the great hall. Steve Holley's drums went into the fireplace. Paul and Laurence Juber recorded acoustic guitars in a stairwell. One song was recorded outside, on a balcony.

That same year, at Abbey Road, Paul gathered a large group of musicians for a single session. The group included members of the Who, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd. They called it the Rockestra. Its theme won a Grammy. And when Abbey Road's main studio was not available, Paul had a replica of it built, in the basement of his London office.

Now, this next part is our reading. Look at the list. A farm studio. A borrowed name at EMI. One tape machine in Lagos. A Tennessee farm. A New Orleans studio. A yacht. A castle. Again and again, Wings took the work to a new place. We will not claim to know why each choice was made. The book lets the people involved explain it. But the effect is clear on the records. Each place left a fingerprint. You can hear the boat, and the hall, and the heat.

What to notice in the book: every time the band moves, ask what the room was like. Was it comfortable? Who chose it? Who was left out of the trip? The oral history is at its most vivid when people describe where they were standing.

The Records

Beneath the hits

Now let us listen. Side A gave you the songs everyone knows. This act is for the songs underneath them, the ones that show you who was actually in the band.

We begin with Wild Life, the first album. Most people skip it. Do not skip a track called Mumbo. It began as an unrehearsed jam. The engineer started recording, Paul called out for him to take it, and he made the words up on the spot. It is rough, and it is the sound of a brand-new band finding out what it is. On the same album, listen for Dear Friend, a slow, sad piano song. And listen for the three-part harmonies of Paul, Linda, and Denny. Those harmonies became one of the band's trademarks.

From the Red Rose Speedway period, play the single version of Hi, Hi, Hi, and then the song on its other side, C Moon. The BBC would not play Hi, Hi, Hi, so radio played C Moon instead. Then play My Love, and listen closely to the guitar solo. Henry McCullough improvised it, with an orchestra in the room. Paul later praised it warmly.

Now the album from Lagos. You have heard the title song and Jet. Go past them. Play Let Me Roll It. It was written at the farm in Scotland. It is slow and heavy, built on a guitar riff and tape echo. Then play Bluebird, which is soft and acoustic, with saxophone added in London. Then play Mrs. Vandebilt, with its chanting hey-ho sections, which some writers have compared to work songs. Play Picasso's Last Words, the song made at Ginger Baker's studio, which folds pieces of other songs from the album into itself. And finish the album the way it finishes, with Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five. It is a piano rocker that builds and builds, with an orchestra by the end.

Look at the cover while you listen, if you can. It shows the trio with six well-known people from British and American public life, dressed as escaped convicts, caught in a searchlight. Among them were the actors James Coburn and Christopher Lee, and the boxer John Conteh. The photographer was Clive Arrowsmith. The shoot was at Osterley Park, in west London. The band's name did not even appear on the front. In America, the record company added a sticker.

Next, the second-wave band. Play Junior's Farm, the song from Tennessee. It was Jimmy McCulloch's first recording with Wings, and you can hear him take the solo. Then from Venus and Mars, play Medicine Jar, which Jimmy wrote and sang. Play Letting Go, which is slow and heavy. And play Rock Show, with Allen Toussaint on piano. Listen to how that album runs its songs together, one into the next.

From Wings at the Speed of Sound, play the songs other members sang. Denny Laine's Time to Hide. Linda's Cook of the House. Joe English's Must Do Something About It. And play Beware My Love, which Paul sang with Linda. It is a hard-driving song, and a good answer to anyone who thinks Wings only made gentle music.

From London Town, play With a Little Luck. It was one of the songs recorded on the yacht. And play Deliver Your Children, which Denny Laine sang.

From Back to the Egg, play Getting Closer, and then Rockestra Theme, with that huge crowd of players. Then, if you want something quieter, play the pairing Winter Rose and Love Awake. A twenty-six-piece brass band, the Black Dyke Mills Band, was brought in to play on it.

And one more, for Linda. Seaside Woman. Her song, her voice.

And one curiosity, for the patient listener. In 1974, during the Nashville stay, Paul and the band recorded a song called Walking in the Park with Eloise. It had been written years earlier by Paul's father, James McCartney. It was released under the name the Country Hams, and the Nashville guitarist Chet Atkins and pianist Floyd Cramer played on it. It is a small, affectionate thing, and it tells you something about how family ran through this band.

Now, this next part is our reading. Listen to these songs as a set, and Wings starts to sound different from its reputation. The hits can make Wings sound like one person's band. The deeper tracks do not. Here are songs written and sung by Denny, by Jimmy, by Linda, by Joe. Here is a solo improvised by Henry. Here are harmonies that needed three voices. The band was always billed around Paul, and he was its center. But underneath, there was more of a band here than the hits let you hear.

A practical note. You do not need to play all of this in one sitting. Pick one album at a time, and play its songs while you read the matching part of the book. The music and the oral history were made to sit side by side.

The Argument

Then and now

Every story about Wings carries an argument inside it. Was this a real band, or Paul McCartney with hired help? Was it a worthy second act, or a lesser one? The book enters that argument. So it helps to know the shape of it.

In its own time, Wings was often judged harshly. Critics responded coldly to Wild Life. One well-known guide to the Beatles' records, published in the mid-seventies, dismissed it as rushed and over-publicized. Red Rose Speedway was widely seen as a disappointment too. And critics, fans, and fellow musicians ridiculed Linda's place in the band.

Band on the Run changed the tone. On release, it was widely called Paul's best work since the Beatles. Rolling Stone named it one of the best albums of 1973. Even so, praise was not universal. Some well-known critics had reservations then, and one prominent critic graded it lower years later.

Later records were judged unevenly again. Back to the Egg, the last album, drew negative reviews and sold less well than the albums before it.

There was an argument inside the band, too. Published accounts of the 1973 departures say that both Henry McCullough and Denny Seiwell objected to the band's musical direction, and to Linda's place in it. McCullough also objected to how his guitar playing was being directed. Seiwell felt aggrieved about pay, and about being treated as a sideman, without a formal financial arrangement. Those are their reported reasons. The book lets the people involved speak to them directly, and you may find the accounts do not all line up.

That inner argument is worth keeping in view. The question outside the band was whether Wings was a real band. The question inside was often what kind of band it was going to be, and who got a say.

Meanwhile, the public kept buying. Every one of the band's twenty-three singles reached the American top forty. Six went to number one in America. Five Wings albums in a row topped the American chart. And the band's world tour in 1975 and 1976 played sixty-six shows to around a million people.

Over the years, the critical picture has shifted, at least for the best of it. Band on the Run has been placed on major lists of the greatest albums. It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2013. In 2024, a review of its fiftieth-anniversary edition called it Paul's most consequential record after the Beatles.

The book itself arrives in the middle of that long argument. One review, in Salon, called it a powerful rejoinder to Wings' critics, including those in the seventies who hoped the experiment would fail. The Los Angeles Times review found its strongest material near the beginning, as the band first finds its footing.

Now, this next part is our reading. Notice that the argument about Wings was never really about sales. Wings sold. The argument was about permission. Was a former Beatle allowed to start again, small, with his wife on keyboards and a band that was still learning? A lot of the early criticism reads, today, like a refusal to grant that permission. The book does not need to win that argument with words. It wins it by giving the people in the band room to speak.

How to Read It

A few suggestions for reading the book with all of this in mind.

First, read it in small sessions. An oral history is many short testimonies stitched together. It rewards an hour at a time far more than a weekend marathon.

Second, when two people remember the same moment differently, do not rush to decide who is right. In an oral history, disagreement is part of the evidence. It shows you where the memories were tender, or where the stakes were high.

Third, keep track of who is speaking about whom. When a band member talks about Linda, or about Paul, or about the people who left, you are hearing a relationship, not just a fact.

And fourth, keep the music close. When a chapter mentions a song, stop and play it. Many of the book's best moments only fully land when you can hear what is being described.

Now, this next part is our reading of what remains. A band is often remembered as its biggest name. This book, and these deeper songs, make a gentler case. Wings was a set of working lives that crossed for a while. A photographer who learned to play. A singer who had already had his hit. Young players, session players, an engineer who had seen it all before. Each of them gave the band something, and each of them is part of why it lasted as long as it did.