Album Review: Paul McCartney & Wings – Band on the Run

Paul McCartney & Wings – Band on the Run

April 16, 2019

ALBUM REVIEW

OVERALL (OUT OF 10): 5

 

Has the true source of all the acclaim for Band on the Run over the years been merely a sense of relief that in late 1973 Paul McCartney had at last released an album that wasn’t embarrassing? Has this sense of relief perhaps snowballed with time into what has become the generally accepted idea that it is a brilliant album of Beatles-level genius? Is Band on the Run so beloved simply because it has no “Bip Bop” moments, no “Kreen-Akrore” style cringers, no “Loup (1st Indian on the Moon)” head scratchers?  Is it remembered as a fantastic album merely because it was a McCartney album with no serious missteps for a change? Is it a great album, or merely one with nothing too awful on it?

In attempting to explain all the love the album receives, I really think we have to look at the context that surrounds the genesis of its legend. The world was completely besotted with the Beatles in the Sixties, and rightly so. They obliterated all kinds of musical barriers and showed the world what rock music could be. I’m not nearly articulate enough to describe how amazing and wonderful they were, so I won’t even try. Expectations would inevitably be high for the ex-Beatles upon the band’s demise. Fans wanted their music to be great like it had been when the group was together.

But what was the world like for Beatles fans in 1973? The four lads from Liverpool all had a little trouble finding their individual grooves after the Beatles’ dissolution. George’s All Things Must Pass was a monster, a towering, magnificent album chock full of great songs. Right out of the gate the Quiet Beatle made the greatest solo Beatle album ever – which was a problem, because inevitably nothing that followed could ever compare. George’s follow-up, Living in the Material World, didn’t come until more than two and a half years later, and while not a bad album, was a considerable let down from the previous one. Fan estimation of George Harrison as a solo artist was much different in 1973 than it had been in 1970. John, on the other hand, initially befuddled most fans with Plastic Ono Band, an album that didn’t catch on with the record buying public, but never fails to get rapturous reviews (and will one day be the subject of a far less than rapturous review on this site). He recovered in the eyes of fans with the inexplicably overrated Imagine, then completely blew his artistic credibility with Sometime in New York City, and failed to rally with the middling Mind Games. Ringo, of course, never counted anyway, although his 1973 Ringo, while no masterpiece, was a far better album than anyone had a right to expect from him. And Paul – well, initially Paul underwhelmed with McCartney, was completely underappreciated at the time with Ram (which is only now seen for the classic it is), pulled his own version of a Sometime in New York City with Wild Life, and early in 1973 released the best-selling but critically detested Red Rose Speedway.

Being a true fan of the Beatles in 1973 was a little disorienting – these four guys who could do no wrong before were suddenly a very mixed bag indeed. And here’s the thing about true fans – true fans never give up hope, true fans are always looking for redemption for their fallen heroes, true fans are willing to overlook a lot, and true fans will be more generous than they should be with their praise. And no band ever had more true fans than the Beatles did. By 1973 Beatles fans were ready for a masterpiece from their idols, and they weren’t going to be too picky about how masterpiecey it really was. This was the world that Band on the Run was born unto in December 1973, a mere eight months after Red Rose Speedway.

But you know, two other things happened in 1973 that I think played a major role in forming the legend of Band on the Run just before its release. One was that two months after the release of Red Rose Speedway, the single “Live and Let Die”was released. And it was brilliant – an exhilarating, catchy, innovative, multi-part thrill ride covering a wide swath of varied territory in its mere three minutes and twelve seconds. It reflected the musical adventurism and excitement of the Beatles better than any song from an ex-Beatle had in years. For the first time, Paul had both a commercial and a critical triumph, and I really think it primed both critics and fans alike to think his next album would be a work of genius. In the minds of all concerned, Macca was finally back. But I think the world has completely overlooked the impact of another event that set the stage for the ascendancy of Band on the Run, and I think its influence has gone completely unappreciated.

In April 1973 EMI pulled off what can only be described as a financial coup with the release of the “Red” and “Blue” albums. There had never been a Beatles greatest hits album, and after a couple of years of vain hope, by 1973 it had become all too apparent to the suits at EMI that their most profitable act ever wasn’t getting back together, so it was high time for a retrospective. Naturally, a single album would never suffice for the greatest hits of The Beatles, and while two double albums would have been overkill for any other band, by year’s end the 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 albums had sold 1.2 million and 1.3 million units respectively in the U.S. alone. It is difficult to overstate the degree to which these releases rekindled interest in the Beatles – it wasn’t Bealtemania all over again, but here were two flawless albums of amazing songs that served as a potent reminder of all that The Beatles had given the world. There has never been and never will be two collections of songs as perfect, powerful, majestic, or untoppable – they are the ultimate desert island records. Surprisingly, the track selection was complied by none other than Allen Klein, the only worthwhile thing he ever did in his crass, nasty, odious, self-absorbed miserable little life. Anyway, when I first heard the “Blue” album at the age of eleven, I was hooked for life. There is a magic to those two compilations that will remain forever unrivaled in the world of rock. And they stoked the longing for great new “Beatles” music in a way that hadn’t been done in a long time.

It was in this milieu of years of modest ex-Beatle successes but mostly disappointments, renewed public interest due to the “Red” and “Blue” albums, and a brief burst of McCartney “Live and Let Die” brilliance that Band on the Run was unleashed on the world. I think the public was primed and ready to embrace a new Beatles masterpiece, and I don’t think fans were in any mood to quibble about how great it really was. Here’s the bottom line – Band on the Run didn’t have to be that great to acquire its legendary status, at the time fans were eager to bestow that status on anything that merely wasn’t too awful. Had Band on the Run been released in 1971 and Ram in December 1973, I think their commonly accepted places in rankings of McCartney albums would be switched, and it would be Ram that is considered the crowning achievement of McCartney’s solo career. Band on the Run merely had the good fortune to be released at the right time, and all it really had to do was not suck as bad as Wild Life. Add in the fact it was recorded in Nigeria under difficult circumstances after two members of Wings quit, and it becomes an inspiring story of triumph over adversity, and people are suckers for that kind of thing.

I can already see many of you bristling, McCartneyphiles have notoriously thin skin (completely understandable when your hero is a flawed genius), but I think the context described above is more responsible for the classic status of Band on the Run than the actual merits of the album itself.   Now breathe, it’s OK if I don’t like your favorite McCartney album, no need to get your nose out of joint.  But I mean really, what makes it that much better than Ram? The lyrics? They’re hideous. “And the jailer man/And Sailor Sam/Were searching everyone”. “And the county judge/Who held a grudge-uh-uh-ug-udge/Will search forevermore/ For the band on the run”. “Jet was your father as bold as the sergeant major?/How come he told you that you were hardly old enough yet/And Jet I thought the major was a lady suffragette” (David Bowie sure made the word “suffragette” fashionable in the early 70s, he even had Paul McCartney using it. But “Suffragette City” is by far the better song). “When your pile is on the wane/You don’t complain of robbery”. “I can’t tell you how I feel/My heart is like a wheel/Let me roll it to you”. And that’s just Side One. It is definitely not the lyrics that lead this album to be considered a classic. The critical and commercial success of the album, however, was all the reinforcement McCartney needed to take the same lazy approach to lyric writing for the next five decades. He now saw what he was doing lyrically as a winning formula, and ever since has evidenced a lack of concern that lyrics make any sense or tell any kind of coherent story. The success of the album unfortunately was seen of an endorsement of lazy lyricism. Any old words will do in a McCartney song.

But if not the lyrics, are the messages of the songs themselves engaging, intriguing, and inspiring? Well… not really. “Band in the Run” is a pop song in three acts – in the first the band is “stuck inside these four walls” for some undisclosed infraction of the law and never seeing no one nice again like their mommies, then saying if they ever get out they’ll give everything to charity (ever notice how this section doesn’t really rock all that much? It’s kind of lethargic, it sounds like the musical equivalent of trying to walk underwater). Then we have a great musical build up with horns and guitars and much sturm und drang, and then the rain explodes with a mighty crash, the band falls into the sun, one tells another he hopes he’s having fun, and the band is off on the run. Kind of. Like the one that preceded it, this section also drags, as though the band that is trying to run is pulling a lot of weight behind it or something. The strummed acoustic guitars lack energy, the lead guitar fills are missing any real spark, and the whole thing just kind of lumbers forward for the next few minutes. If this is how the band runs, it really wouldn’t take them too long to get caught. Only McCartney’s vocal holds any real energy – almost like he’s trying to encourage everything else in the song to get up and get moving. I know a lot of you love the song, but I’m sorry, to my ears it is too slow, too sluggish, a song about a band running ought to move a lot faster. A great vocal alone does not a great song make. It’s like the song is trying to be another “Live and Let Die”, but falls kind of flat.

“Jet” suffers much the same problem. The shouted “Jet!!!” and smooth “ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh”s in the chorus give the song some energy, but for the most part the verses drag. The Moog sounds kind of cool, but doesn’t really propel the song forward like it needs to be propelled (although I do like the Moog solo in the middle). The song struggles to get any momentum, and the slower tempo of the “And Jet, I thought the only lonely place was on the moon” section breaks the flow and doesn’t help things any in terms of energy. And what the hell is up with the sax solo at the end? It just comes out of nowhere and gives an easy listening AM ending to a song that was desperately trying to be a rocker. I’ve always thought that was a big mistake in the arrangement of the song. “Jet” is too slow, too ponderous, and too nonsensical to be the great rocker it aspires to be, but that doesn’t keep McCartney from placing it early in all of his live shows, even though his “Jet!!!”s now lack the power and force they once had, and Brian Ray’s “ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh”s are usually pretty off-key (yeah I know they don’t sound bad on the official releases, but if you don’t believe me look up some undoctored versions on YouTube, if you think your ears can handle it).

So Band on the Run opens with a couple of songs that are regarded as classics, but on closer inspection I really don’t think they are the classics they’re cracked up to be. “Bluebird” is considerably more modest, and as a modest song it works for me. It’s a trifle lyrically and instrumentally, but it’s kind of pleasant, and I’ve always loved it for no good reason in particular. I mean, it isn’t spectacular or anything, but there’s nothing wrong with it, and it has a soothing, mellow vibe that doesn’t bore me like “Mamunia”, the other mellow song on the album that is way too mellow for its own good. Have you ever been walking with a small child who refuses to keep up and keeps shuffling its feet and dawdling in the most aggravating manner? That’s how I feel about “Mamunia” – pick up the pace already, we’re never going to get anywhere at this rate. It would help if the lyrics weren’t pointless and boring, or if anybody knew what the hell “Mamunia”even is (is it a country where it rains all the time? A distant planet in a galaxy far, far away where all the music is tedious and dull? A new form of sleeping pill? Is it Nigerian for “Boredom”?). I’ve always hated “Mamunia”, a slow dirge of a song lacking any sense of purpose other than filling up four minutes and fifty-one seconds of the album.

“Ho, hey ho. Ho, hey ho.” Not nearly as catchy as McCartney seems to have thought it was. Doesn’t take much endless repetition of the phrase before I am “Ho, hey ho”’ed out and I don’t want to hear it anymore. But I have to give “Mrs. Vandebilt” some credit, the chorus takes the song in an interesting new direction, and the lead break in the middle is pretty thrilling. But with its hopelessly vague lyrics and overabundance of “Ho, hey ho”s, there isn’t much to this piece of fluff, and in no way does it merit consideration as a classic. Nor does “Let Me Roll It” – much was made upon its release of its similarities to Lennon’s style of music in the early Seventies, and Paul does do a decent job of aping John’s vocal approach, going so far as a small primal scream near the end. At the time it was seen as a gentle response to “How Do You Sleep?”, and as an attempt to mimic a Lennon song it is fairly successful – but that doesn’t make it a good song. For one, the guitar riff is kind of ugly, and what little interest it might have held gets lost on about its 110th repetition. There’s a long section in the middle where the riff gets repeated over and over that sounds to me like a section that was intended for a lead guitar solo, but McCartney couldn’t think of one so he just left it with that damn fugly riff repeating over and over without anything to distract you from it. The song gets tedious real fast, and the concert version on Wings Over America shows how desperately it needed some lead guitar to liven it up.

Side Two is slow coming out of the gate with “Mamunia”, but (and I know how controversial this will be) I think “No Words” is the best song on the album. Always have. The melody is fantastic, there are no “Sailor Sams” anywhere in the lyrics, there’s a great guitar riff in the chorus, the harmonies are outstanding – this one’s a real winner in my book. It is marred somewhat by the lead guitar at the end – the transition is kind of jarring, and the lead guitar work isn’t anything special. That’s another big flaw of the whole album, you know, the lead guitar parts aren’t all that great. Paul did some of the best guitar solos in The Beatles, “Taxman”, “Good Morning, Good Morning”, etc., but neither he nor Denny Laine were in touch with their inner Jimi Hendrix while the album was being recorded. I find the lead guitar on the album – where there is any – pretty unremarkable.

In fact, the next song illustrates this pretty well. “Helen Wheels” begins with a somewhat awkward guitar riff that repeats at the end of all the choruses, and the lead guitar fills that punctuate some of the verses are fairly dull. The rhythm guitar chugs along like an auto on the “M6 south down to Liverpool”, which I guess it’s supposed to sound like, but it isn’t a great rhythm part either. The only moment in the whole song that really gets my attention is the “Helen Helen – Hell on wheels” in the chorus, which I must admit is pretty great, but nothing else in the song really grabs me. “Sailor Sam” makes another appearance, I don’t know who the guy was but Paul sure talked about him a lot on the album. Lyrically this one isn’t any better than any other song on the album, and if you’re driving “Hell on wheels” why are you saying “slow down driver”? What kind of rock song says “slow down”? Rock is all about “pedal to the metal, baby, faster faster faster”. And the “and they never gonna take her away” at the end of each chorus doesn’t really fit with the rest of it, it feels kind of out of place, just kind of awkwardly barging in, followed by that lame electric guitar riff and then a Moog buzz fading off into silence. Yeah, not a great song, I wish I could pull the “Helen Helen – Hell on wheels” bit out and put it in a better song.

Part of the lore of Band on the Run is that Paul composed “Picasso’s Last Words” on the spot at the urging of an amazed Dustin Hoffman who had remarked that the artist’s final words would make a great song. But is it really so impressive? Lyrically, it’s merely Picasso’s actual last words with the “grand old painter died last night” and “three o’ clock in the morning” bits tacked on. There’s nothing to the lyrics. The melody is pretty good, but it’s really mostly just variations on the same couple of “drink to me” bars through the whole thing. I’m not sure that melody is really good enough to support almost six minutes of the same melody recast in different moods and styles, from slick MOR pop to drunken revelry. I guess there’s that boring clarinet part you hear a couple of times, but that’s nothing special, and he does toss in a snatch of “Jet” for good measure. I mean, think about it, Paul could have taken the melody in all kinds of different directions, but he chose to mostly just repeat the “drink to me” melody through the whole song dressed up in different styles. Props for the variety in musical textures across the song I guess, but it could have been far more impressive if he had put more melody in the thing instead of just repeating the same one over and over. And then it ends with more of those damn “Ho, hey ho”s. Personally, I think the version on Wings Over America got it right – “grand old painter”, “drink to me”, “three o’ clock in the morning”, “drink to me”, brief clarinet section, and then segue into a different song. There isn’t enough to the song to do more than that without stretching it far beyond what that “drink to me” melody will support all by its lonesome.

Is “Nineteen-hundred and Eighty-Five” musically exciting? Well, yeah, particularly at the end, the song ends strong, no question. The horns and Moog and McCartney whoop-whooping all build to a veritable thunderstorm of sound, with that cool jazzy flute dancing around through it all, the end of the song is great. The end of “Nineteen-hundred and Eighty-Five“ shows you the kind of musical excitement McCartney can create, and there should have been a lot more of that on the album where instead we got boring “Mamunia” and “ho, hey ho”s and “let’s see how many different ways we can sing ‘drink to me’”. But even that strong ending is marred by the pointless “Band on the Run” reprise that’s just kind of a pathetic attempt to give the album a concept album feel without making the effort or having the discipline to have the album cohere much thematically. It’s just a lazy attempt make it feel like the songs on the album all fit together. But credit where credit is due, while lyrically this final song is typical bland McCartney fare, the music on this song is great, and we should have heard a lot more of this kind of thing through the whole album.

I think Band on the Run is a good album. Just a good album.  Not particularly groundbreaking, engaging, creative, or striking. Just kind of good. Certainly not great, it has far too many flaws for that, although it has flashes of brilliance and glimpses of greatness, they are brief, over far too soon, and there are really only just enough of them to remind you what Paul was capable of. There’s nothing really embarrassing on the album, other than maybe “Mamunia”, and even that isn’t too terrible. But too many of the performances feel like they are moving in slow motion, there isn’t much spark to much of the playing, lead guitar is often absent and feels kind of absent even when it isn’t, lyrically it’s hopelessly weak, trite, and uninspired, individually most of the songs don’t really stand up well to close scrutiny, and frankly it just doesn’t have the feel of a masterpiece. The overall effect doesn’t really leave me wowed. People love to go on about how John Lennon said “Band on the Run is a great album” in a 1975 Rolling Stone interview, but I mean, come on, should we really place that much credence in Lennon’s artistic judgment in 1975? In the same interview he said he’d be great producing Elvis, and I’m pretty sure that would have been a massive train wreck. You could never believe half of what came out of John Lennon’s mouth anyway. So, no, Lennon calling it a great album does not a great album make. But given the general atmosphere of Beatledom in late 1973, Band on the Run didn’t have to be great to be well regarded by Beatles fans across the globe, and compared to the many mediocrities that followed, it would seem legendary in comparison. In my estimation, it’s not because Band on the Run was a towering masterpiece that it cast a long shadow – it was because the light just happened hit it just right at the time to cast that shadow.  In my estimation, that’s really all there is to the legend of Band on the Run.

 

“2.0 out of 5 stars

The King Of Vapid!
July 26, 2002
Format: Audio CD
`Band On the Run’ may be the best single that Wings ever produced, it is everything that Wings was, radio friendly, poppy and meaningless. I’ll admit that I liked Wings when I was twelve. At twelve, the bizarre stream of consciousness lyrics of a song like `Jet’ seemed to imply poetic depth, of course a year later I realized that it was just doggerel. That is what McCartney offers to the world, vapid pleasant sounding emptiness, junk food for the ear. For all the meaning of lyrics, he might as well scat.” – The Orange Duke

 

“Amazon reviews are generally petty lame, but every once in a while someone hits the nail on the head.  ‘Junk food for the ear’ – that may be the most apt description of Paul McCartney’s solo output I have ever read.” – Brutally Honest Rock Album Reviews