Paul McCartney Said the Hardest Part of Building up Wings Was That Their Mistakes Weren’t Private
Paul McCartney struggled to get Wings off the ground following his tremendous success with The Beatles in the 1960s. However, the hardest part of building up his second band was that their mistakes weren’t private like the Fab Four’s were back when they started.
Paul McCartney said Wings was an experiment to see whether ‘success could be followed’ after The Beatles
In The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, Paul wrote that Wings was an experiment to see whether “life after The Beatles” existed and that “success could be followed.”
“It was the result of asking myself, ‘Am I going to stop now?’ The Beatles were so wonderful and all-encompassing, so successful,” Paul wrote. “Now, should I stop and look for something else to do? But I thought, ‘No. I like music too much, so whatever the something else is, it will be music.'”
Watching Johnny Cash on TV one night in 1971 inspired Paul to form another band. He and his wife Linda thought it’d be a fun adventure. Early on, he realized, “We can’t be as good as The Beatles, but we can be something else.”
However, he knew it was always going to be difficult. “I was carrying baggage in many people’s minds,” Paul wrote. After releasing some solo work, Paul wanted to get back to the camaraderie of a band. He decided to “start something that felt good and try to build it up like The Beatles had.”
Paul, on the hardest part of getting Wings off the ground
Once Paul formed Wings, he realized that the only trouble was that they’d have to make their mistakes in public. Paul had never experienced that. With The Beatles, it had all been in private because there was “no one much in the clubs of Hamburg to hear us mess up,” he wrote.
In the early 1970s, after deciding to form Wings, Paul was already a bonafide rock star. When they started playing their earliest gigs, they weren’t that good. This was happening about a year after The Beatles split too. Fans wanted the Fab Four back and watched each of them with bated breath, hoping they’d reunite.
When fans heard Paul and Wings perform, they received the shock of their lives. Wings didn’t just make mistakes; they didn’t play any Beatles songs.
Paul wanted a clean break from The Beatles
In The Lyrics, Paul said performing with Wings was “a slog at first” because they didn’t have any songs, and Paul didn’t want to play anything by The Beatles. “I wanted to have a clean break,” Paul wrote.
When hopeful big-name promoters asked if he’d play “Yesterday,” Paul didn’t budge. He held firm. “That was what we had to fight against,” Paul wrote. “It’s just who I am; I am loath to duplicate anything or anyone, so I wanted Wings to be successful in its own right. From the beginning, then, it was obvious that we had to be resigned to the fact it would take time.”
So, Paul and Wings waited patiently for the day when fans didn’t view them as a joke. They were persistent in the fight to make a name for themselves and even played gigs at student centers for 50p.
“We weren’t a very good band at the beginning, a bit rough around the edges,” Paul said. “It was a little gig here and a little gig there, turning up at universities and asking to play the student union that night with nothing to play that people knew.”
Then in a few years, Paul and Wings had hits like “Band on the Run” and “Silly Love Songs.” Suddenly, those songs were enough “to actually be known for that rather than The Beatles.” All of their hard work paid off.
What Paul did to get Wings off the ground says much about his character. Few rock stars at the time would’ve been willing to knock themselves down a couple of pegs and start their careers entirely over from scratch. Paul showed the world what he was made of coming out of The Beatles.
