Crediting Wings to Paul alone, however, is faintly ludicrous, since there are so many more commentators in this book. Yes, Paul's quotes, which were mostly culled from footage from the long awaited/still-not-widely-released documentary Man on the Run, appear most frequently. But there are also a slew of comments from Wings bandmates Linda McCartney, Denny Laine, Denny Seiwell, Joe English, Henry McCullough, and others who've passed through the group's high-turnover ranks and those who knew them. Whoever is already a bit familiar with these musicians will know that many of them are no longer with us, so their quotes come from previously published sources, although these sources are never credited. In any event, Wings is more of an editor's book than an author's, although Ted Widmer composed enough fresh material to orient the reader as they journey along with Wings that he really deserved an author's credit as well.
Getting a wide variety of perspectives on a career such as Wings' is necessary because Wings was not The Beatles. Critics and fans alike rightfully lauded The Beatles' body of work as perhaps the closest to flawless in the history of pop. Yet the band also had some strong internal critics in the persons of John Lennon and George Harrison. Wings, however, had some pretty serious critical ups and downs, and Paul McCartney has never been known to bring the most ruthless critical perspective to his own work. Had Wings really been his sole work, the history might have seemed sunnier than it actually was. He even has a tendency to downplay how vicious the critics were. Not that Paul can't get dark, as his recollection of his time in a Japanese jail affirms.
Still Wings becomes a more accurate history of Wings by actually including snippets of Wings' bad reviews, even the really nasty ones, and by including commentators willing to reveal how much those reviews affected Paul. Denny Seiwell even claims that Paul and Linda sent one of their daughter's bowel movements to a critic who panned a concert he couldn't even be bothered to attend.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Wings that I learned from Wings was how much Paul's second band was like starting over from scratch. After a decade in the biggest act in the world, he had to put together a new group of musicians, who had to pay their dues and hone their chops with road work, and rebuild a body of new material, since he wasn't yet entertaining the idea of playing old Beatles songs. During their early shows, Wings often played the same songs two or three times just to fatten their sets to a reasonable length.
Getting their act together was also challenging because not everyone in Wings was a seasoned pro. Although she was enthusiastic to be in a band, Linda McCartney didn't know how to play an instrument when Wings started and often suffered serious performance anxiety before getting on stage. That's not unusual for a new musician, but because her husband was Paul McCartney and could wheel into any town, pop in at a university, and immediately score a gig playing to a large crowd, she had to hone her own craft in front of audiences much bigger than most novices face. So it's good to get her personal remembrances of those harrowing moments, which we wouldn't have gotten if the credit on the dust jacket was accurate. And she eventually did come into her own, especially a a key voice in the group's harmonies, and she receives all due credit for her contributions.
There's also a lot of information about how the band came to be, their records, their personal interactions, their experiences on the road and in the studio, and everything else you could expect from a good musical oral history. If the storytelling still seems to sit a bit on the sunny side, it's because everyone in the group seemed to really love Paul McCartney and his music. And that guy was up against so many odds throughout his life with Wings that you really are rooting for him, which also seems a bit ludicrous because Wings was so fabulously commercially successful and he was in the friggin' Beatles, for chrissakes. That's another sign of a good oral history, because there's plenty of drama in its pages. I hope Ted Widmar gets the credit he deserves for it.
