Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run (Paperback or Softback)

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“We made what seemed like an impossible dream come true.” ―Paul McCartney

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. And now featuring a brand-new interview with McCartney and Neville, the book refracts a bygone era in a totally new light. Introduced with a personal, heartfelt foreword by McCartney, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run has emerged as a work of soaring originality that presents a new art form all its own.

Born in Liverpool in 1942, Paul McCartney was raised in the city and educated at the Liverpool Institute. Since writing his first song at fourteen, McCartney has dreamed and dared to be different. He lives in England.

Ted Widmer is a historian, writer, librarian, and musician who writes about American history in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and other venues. He has taught at Harvard, Brown, and Washington College. In 2022 he was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.