An engrossing oral history of a band that came to define a generation Wings: The Story of a
Band on the Run tells the madcap story of Paul McCartney and his newly formed band from their
humble beginnings in the early 1970s to their dissolution barely a decade later. Drawn from
over 500 000 words of interviews with McCartney family and band members and other key
participants Wings recounts-now with a half-century's wisdom-the musical odyssey taken by a
man searching for his identity in the aftermath of The Beatles' breakup. Soon joined by his
wife - American photographer Linda McCartney - on keyboard and vocals drummer Denny Seiwell
and guitarist Denny Laine McCartney sowed the seeds for a new band that would later provide
the soundtrack of the decade. Organized chronologically around McCartney RAM and nine Wings
albums the narrative begins when a twenty-seven-year-old superstar rumored to be dead fled
with his new wife to a remote sheep farm in Scotland amid a sea of legal and personal rows.
Despite the harsh conditions the Scottish setting gave McCartney time to create and it was
here where this new band emerged. Wings then follows the group as they play unannounced shows
at university halls tour in a sheared-off double-decker bus with their children survive a
robbery on the streets of Nigeria and eventually perform blockbuster stadium shows on their
world tour all while producing some of the most enduring music of the time. With extraordinary
recollections collected by Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville and edited into a
genre-defining oral history by Ted Widmer Wings transports the reader as if on a magic carpet
to the grit and glamour of the 1970s. Pushing creative forms to produce a new history even a
Wings bible the book refracts a bygone era in a totally new light. Introduced with a personal
heartfelt foreword by McCartney the volume contains 150 black-and-white and color photographs
many previously unseen as well as timelines a gigography and a full discography. Wings: The
Story of a Band on the Run emerges as a work of soaring originality that presents a new art
form all its own.
