By Rob Sheffield - Rolling Stone
“Whenever I hear someone damning Paul McCartney,” a voice says early in Man on the Run, “I tend to agree with them.” The person saying this? Paul McCartney. It’s a perfect way to dive into the story of Wings. Man on the Run is director Morgan Neville’s delightful new documentary on one of the strangest chapters in the Macca story: Wings, the weird 1970s band he started after the Beatles fell apart. For years, this was a taboo subject he basically tried to write out of his narrative — the most-mocked, least-respected corner of his career, the case of the Beatle who broke bad.
But now McCartney’s finally ready to reclaim the Wings legacy: “We don’t ‘work’ music,” he explains in the doc. “We play it. I’m a playaholic!”
All through Man on the Run, the question keeps coming up: Why exactly is Paul doing this the hard way? Why is he bothering to start a new band, with a bunch of hippie malcontents who keep complaining at his control-freak ways? (Didn’t they, like, ask around?) Why isn’t he just playing the Beatles hits? There’s a great anecdote when Paul visits Nashville in the summer of 1974 and tells guitarist Jerry Reed that Wings are going back out on the road. Reed says, “If I was Paul McCartney, I’d buy the road.”
When the Fabs broke up, the whole world wanted Paul to carry on being a Beatle. He was the only one who wanted something different. But he needed to find his voice, on his own. So he retreated to his Scottish farm with his new wife, Linda Eastman. He formed Wings with her and a few unknowns, playing low-stakes amateur gigs. He’d load the band into the van, show up at some random university, then ask the startled students if he could play tonight. For years, he refused to sing any of his Beatles classics. None of it seemed to make any sense.
But he took some wise advice from Linda, who told him, “Let’s just go get lost.” So that’s exactly what they did. Two of them. Plus the backup guys, who were as confused as anyone about why the hell they were here. He kept making moves guaranteed to piss people off — like his 1972 single, crooning the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” This didn’t go over well with anyone, least of all the rest of Wings. “Mary had a little fucking lamb?” one of the band splutters in the doc. “Are you nuts?” 
The biggest Wings controversy at the time: the fact that Paul brought his wife into the band. “I’m not here because I’m the greatest keyboard player,” Linda says in one scene. “I’m here because we love each other.” For John and Paul to break up the Beatles and form new bands with their wives, whose musical expertise ranged from “acquired taste” to “you gotta be kidding,” that was one of their revolutionary innovations — yet one that nobody respected at the time. Fans derided Linda and Yoko all through the 1970s, in ugly ways that bordered on misogyny and often crossed right over. Both women were years ahead of their time — Mother Superiors who jumped the gun.
John roasted Paul about it in his attack “How Do You Sleep?” (“Jump when your mama tell you anything” — you’re one to talk, dude.) Mick Jagger sniffed that he’d never let his old lady in the band, a line that really got under Paul’s skin. But he saw Linda as an artist — one of the music world’s most successful and respected photographers. Paul took pride in snagging such an accomplished partner — see that great moment in Get Back when he introduces her to one of the cameramen, and boasts, “Linda’s a cameraman.” John and Paul got an ego boost over their wives’ independent preexisting artistic careers — something these men did not have in common with any other male rock stars of their generation, to say the damn least.
During Wings’ lifetime, Band on the Run was universally regarded as their masterpiece, while Ram was considered on the aesthetic level of Martha coughing up a hairball. It took 40 years for the music world to collectively decide that Ram was an art-rock masterpiece, to the point where it’s now twice as famous as Band on the Run. (Me, I’m a Venus and Mars man. “Love in Song,” baby.)
Paul made so many shocking decisions in his twenties that nobody else in his boots would have made. The biggest one, of course: Linda. He was only 26, a rich and dashing young rock star with groupies galore and his whole life ahead of him, when he fell madly in love with Linda and decided she was the one. He converted to monogamy overnight, with no second thoughts, even though he’d never been faithful to anyone in his life except John. The Seventies were the heyday of rock-star pleasure-dome excess — an era Paul had helped create — yet he spent the decade on the farm raising their kids. They remained inseparable until her death from cancer in 1998. The first night they ever spent apart was when he went to jail in Japan, in 1980, after getting busted with cannabis at the Tokyo airport.
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