{"id":198515,"date":"2025-09-04T03:25:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T03:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/198515\/"},"modified":"2025-09-04T03:25:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T03:25:10","slug":"doc-catalogs-paul-mccartneys-wings-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/198515\/","title":{"rendered":"Doc Catalogs Paul McCartney’s Wings Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIs the cause of Wings<\/a> something that really needs to be \u2026 evangelized? Apparently so. When \u201cMan on the Run,\u201d a documentary about Paul McCartney<\/a>\u2019s 1970s Wings period, had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival over the weekend, you could hear patrons talking about what a revelation it was that he generated so much good music in the wake of the Beatles<\/a>\u2019 breakup, as if he hadn\u2019t remained one of the biggest artists in the world throughout the subsequent decade. So maybe there\u2019s some desire for further vindication that has driven McCartney to write a book about those years (coming out in the fall) as well as executive produce this Morgan Neville<\/a>-directed doc (hitting select theaters and then Prime Video next year).<\/p>\n

\n\tMaybe everyone who sold McCartney\u2019s post-Beatles period short previously has their reasons for putting blinders on, even in the face of that inescapable a juggernaut. \u201cI was a John guy,\u201d said one enthusiastic, 70-plus festivalgoer, as if that were a completely reasonable explanation for a 50-year immunity to the charms of \u201cJet\u201d and \u201cLet Me Roll It.\u201d Or perhaps it just takes the creep of old age to agree with the wisdom of the sages, that it isn\u2019t silly \u2026 love isn\u2019t silly \u2026 love isn\u2019t silly at all.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMan on the Run\u201d is a heck of a lot of fun to watch, if you aren\u2019t still so married to your worn copy of \u201cPlastic Ono Band\u201d that you can\u2019t acknowledge the obvious: If there had been no 1960s (imagine no Beatles, it\u2019s easy if you try), McCartney would still have to be acknowledged as one of the premier craftsmen of 20th-century pop, even if it\u2019d just been \u201cMaybe I\u2019m Amazed\u201d as his foot on the starting block. With that already as a given for many of us, Neville\u2019s movie serves as a splendid jukebox, offering rapid-fire clips that bowl you over anew with just how rapidly McCartney\u2019s own synapses were firing on ingenious hit after hit.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat it isn\u2019t, though, is revelatory. If there are fresh things to be revealed about McCartney (and his revolving door of band members) in the 1970s, they are presumably being saved for the autumn book (\u201cWings: The Story of a Band on the Run\u201d), where nuance in the story may have more of a shot in 576 pages than it does in the slam-bang 115 minutes of this movie. Neville\u2019s film is probably aimed most at the fair-weather oldsters who have fairly cursory memories of McCartney\u2019s 1970s work, and\/or the young people who haven\u2019t yet encountered it in the first place, than to hardcore Beatlemaniacs hoping this would be a prime opportunity to open the door and let us (further) in.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe unrelenting pace might be easier to take if the audience got the satisfaction of actually having McCartney on camera for his interviews. \u201cMan on the Run\u201d is part of a growing epidemic of showbiz documentaries in which interviews take place only in voiceover, and not getting to see the star sit down for a chat is deeply felt, given how much the audience might be looking forward to face time with one of entertainment\u2019s most avuncular personalities. The wealth of archival delights is undeniable, but not at the expense of feeling like we might be getting a series of phone calls from McCartney instead of welcomed in for a real visit.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe power of McCartney\u2019s face is evident right at the start, when he is retreating to the countryside in the immediate wake of the Fabs\u2019 breakup and burying that 27-year-old baby face of his behind a beard. After one woodsy, mostly acoustic album under his own name (1970\u2019s \u201cMcCartney\u201d) and one more heavily produced one billed as a duo with Linda (\u201cRam,\u201d still his peak to some fans), he has the urge to be part of a band again, albeit a band where no one will chafe too much at his auteur tendencies. The personnel changes begin almost immediately, and Wings is down to a trio \u2014 with Denny Laine as the eternally useful third wheel \u2014 by the time of the \u201cBand on the Run\u201d record, one of the signature rock albums of the 1970s. <\/p>\n

\n\tOne thing that hardcore fans still disagree on is a very basic question: Was forming Wings (or forming the many successive versions of Wings) even a good idea for McCartney coming out of the Beatles, or an unnecessary one that happened to have some spectacular results? You could make a solid argument either way. \u201cMan on the Run\u201d does at least fleetingly address the conflicting impulses that lead an obvious control freak to surround himself with a coterie of fellow travelers, without ever bringing on anyone who would count as even a hundredth of a Lennon in terms of creative input. Yet if McCartney had some kind of belief that crediting (if hardly compensating) his band members as equals lit a fire under him, and if he got records as great as \u201c1985\u201d and \u201cWith a Little Luck\u201d out of it \u2014 along with some terrific, vigorous touring \u2014 does it matter if no one much objects when he quietly abandons the experiment at the end of the \u201870s?<\/p>\n

\n\tWings was a band where the center could hold, but not much else could. Credit McCartney for letting his former bandmates\u2019 voices also be heard in \u201cMan on the Run,\u201d and not always in a completely complimentary fashion. The fact is that McCartney had a fantastic sense for picking up amazing players. McCartney\u2019s career continued unabated when Wings fell apart, with the doc showing clips from his solely billed \u201cComing Up\u201d video, even as the band members say they didn\u2019t know he was going DIY again. The star does have a decent enough explanation for that here, saying that while he was spending some time in a Japanese jail for a marijuana bust that circumvented what would have been the final Wings tour, he had time to wonder if that status quo really needed to continue.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe other end point for the movie is the death of John Lennon. McCartney\u2019s well-known \u201cDrag, isn\u2019t it?\u201d response to that was seen as unduly casual, but Sean Ono Lennon is brought in as an expert witness (in voiceover, of course) to defend McCartney being in shock at the time. And it\u2019s lovely that Neville brought in someone so qualified to basically exonerate him for something that should never have become an issue. (Children of the principals offer some of the best perspective here, as Mary McCartney pops into the soundtrack to speak the movie\u2019s most sage words about the legacy of her mother, Linda.) <\/p>\n

\n\tBut by the end, in its rush, the movie still hasn\u2019t quite come up with a point of view on whether McCartney really got over his bust-up with Lennon with a little help from his Wings friends, or whether forming a band was ultimately incidental to overcoming any lingering separation anxiety. Neville didn\u2019t necessarily think that was his quandary to solve, and we\u2019ll see whether McCartney himself tries to crack it in the forthcoming book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Is the cause of Wings something that really needs to be \u2026 evangelized? Apparently so. When \u201cMan on…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":198516,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,104191,53,53324,978,67,132,68,14378],"class_list":{"0":"post-198515","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-morgan-neville","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-paul-mccartney","12":"tag-the-beatles","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us","16":"tag-wings"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115143897020996336","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198515\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}