Though critics in the ’70s often put down Wings, R&B and indie musicians have come to embrace Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles band. Most famously, Erykah Badu sampled Wings’s Arrow Through Me on her 2010 song Gone Baby, Don't Be Long. More recently, Mariah Carey covered the band’s My Love on her new album.
Now, McCartney is reissuing a box set and biography dedicated to Wings, as well as still touring on his own.
Today on Commotion, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud speaks with The Record Store Day podcaster Paul Myers about the resurgence of Wings and how younger fans are rewriting McCartney’s legacy.
Elamin: I think it’s worth talking about how it all began. Paul forms Wings with his wife Linda, they become incredibly successful, they sell millions of records. And yet they still get a bit of a rough ride with critics in the ’70s, they remain the butt of jokes for a fair bit of time after…. What do you think made Wings such an easy target?
Paul: The fact that they weren’t The Beatles, for one thing. When McCartney first came out with doing solo records and being Wings, there was like, “Oh, come on. You’re not really going to try this again. There’s no way lightning can strike twice.” And he just kept going, he kept making records that were critically panned, but the public was buying them…. The critics couldn’t kill him, the critics couldn’t stop Wings from being a huge band on a major label, even though they really wanted to. There was constant snickering every time they had a top 10 record, there was like, “How dare he!”
Elamin: “He’s still here and they’re not The Beatles!”
Paul: “We said he was bad. Why do people like him still?”
Elamin: What do you think Linda added to the band that made them a unique thing that was entirely so separate from anything that The Beatles tried to construct?
Paul: Well to answer that, I do have to address the sexism of the times. Because the fact that Paul had asked his untrained [wife] — let’s be honest, everyone knew she wasn’t professional as a musician. She was a great photographer and definitely an equal part of their family household, she helped him in so many ways. Maybe I’m Amazed would not have been written without her being that person for Paul. And that is one of the greatest testaments to any person that’s supported another person.
So when she started being on stage, there was definitely a lot of pushback that “he’s always got the wife up there with him — who’s that?” At the same time, she actually did bring something to it. If you listen to those records closely — not to pull the I’m-a-musician-and-I-listen-to-things thing — her voice blends with Paul in a way that George, John and Paul never did. And there was something about her American voice too that added a little bit of an international flavour that it wasn’t so much a Liverpool sound anymore. And I think that there was an element of the two of them together that created a nucleus [for] all these other rotating cast of Wings members, except Denny Laine, who stayed pretty much throughout all of it.
I think their sound was also a little more arena-rock friendly than The Beatles had been, they were adjusting to the ’70s. Songs like Band on the Run and Jet were not Beatles songs at all; in fact, they had more in common with boogie rock of the ’70s.
Elamin: What do you think it is about Wings and this particular moment in Paul McCartney music that makes it so ripe for a re-appraisal?
Paul: There’s two things here, of course. One is that The Beatles were rammed down everyone’s throat, so people from every generation after them — and I feel sorry because I was a Beatles fan from the get-go, I’m old enough to say that…. The next couple of generations had to be told, “The Beatles are great!” And then they eventually discovered that they are great. But they never were told that about Wings.
Arrow Through Me is nuts! But the groove is great. McCartney’s bass — he was starting to play with a Rickenbacker bass in the ’70s, not the old Höfner — and it really does make a difference on those records. So when you’re sampling a bassline that’s played with a pick and it’s got a certain kind of kick to it, of course Erykah Badu’s people are going to get to that. It’s a great little backbeat.