Think of the oral history Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run as a companion to Many Years from Now, the authorized biography by Barry Miles that argued that Paul McCartney pushed the Beatles forward during their peak period of creativity. His responsibility for the artistic direction of Wings, the band he led after the Beatles breakup, never has been in question: on their earliest albums, they were billed as “Paul McCartney & Wings,” a conflation that continued in their afterlife, when compilations cheerfully blended McCartney solo hits with smashes by Wings.

Along with its accompanying album, naturally titled Wings, as well as the imminent Morgan Neville documentary Man on the Run, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run—billed to McCartney, with historian Ted Widmer bearing an editing credit on the cover—attempts to correct the historical record by drawing distinct boundaries between McCartney’s solo endeavors and Wings, arguing the importance and influence of the band as a band. That’s a bit tricky, considering how the history of Wings is messy. Wings lifted McCartney out of the misery that consumed him during the dying days of the Beatles. The realities of running a rock band set in after Wings conquered the world, leaving McCartney adrift once again.

Between those two periods of funk, each instigated by the dissolution of a band—neatly bookended by the McCartney and McCartney II albums, solo albums recorded at home exactly a decade apart—McCartney shook off the spectre of the Beatles by indulging in all the fantasies the Fab Four prevented him from executing in full. With Wings, he was finally able to play noisy rock’n’roll on small stages, the very thing he suggested to the Beatles during the Get Back sessions. He packed his new group into a converted double-decker bus, sunning themselves in the upper deck as they roamed through English countryside in a voyage that mirrored Magical Mystery Tour. He turned his group into road warriors, turning his pack of amateurs, professionals, and misfits into one of the biggest bands on earth whose popularity peaked right after the Beatles partnership was officially dissolved in January 1975.

Later in 1975, Wings released Venus and Mars, the album that carried them through the Wings Over the World tour,