Capitol 11593
Producer: Paul McCartney
Track listing: Venus and Mars / Rock Show / Jet / Let Me Roll It / Spirits of Ancient Egypt / Medicine Jar / Maybe I’m Amazed / Call Me Back Again / Lady Madonna / The Long and Winding Road / Live and Let Die / Picasso’s Last Words / Richard Cory / Bluebird / I’ve Just Seen a Face / Blackbird / Yesterday / You Gave Me Answer / Magneto and Titanium Man / Go Now / My Love / Listen to What the Man Said / Letting Go / Band on the Run / Hi, Hi, Hi / Soily
January 22, 1977
1 week
With the 1976 Wings Over America tour, Paul McCartney was trying to come to terms with his past and break away from it. The tour — part of 13-month, 10-country trek — marked McCartney’s first American concert appearance in a decade. It also featured McCartney performing several Beatles songs never previously performed onstage.
“They’re great tunes … I just decided in the end, this isn’t such a big deal. I’d do them,” McCartney said in Chet Flippo’s Yesterday: The Unauthorized Biography of Paul McCartney. To document the occasion, McCartney opted to record every show on the tour, the best of which turned up on the three-record Wings Over America.
Even if McCartney was including Beatles material in his set, part of his motivation for hitting the road with Wings was to debunk some of the magic surrounding his former group. “The whole idea behind Wings is to get a touring band so that we are just a band,” McCartney told Ben Fong-Torres in Rolling Stone, “instead of the whole Beatles myth.”
By the time Wings hit the road, that band was a well-polished machine. “With the Beatles,” McCartney told Rolling Stone, “we might rehearse for three days. We’ve spent months rehearsing with Wings.”
Included in the band’s live set were such Wings hits as “Live and Let Die,” “My Love,” “Listen to What the Man Said,” “Band on the Run,” and “Silly Love Songs.” But the real news was the inclusion of such Beatles classics as “Lady Madonna,” “The Long and Winding Road,” “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “Blackbird,” and “Yesterday.” If performing the songs live with Wings didn’t make enough of a statement, McCartney took the additional step of reversing the songs’ songwriting credits on the album to read “P. McCartney-J. Lennon,” rather than the traditional “Lennon-McCartney.”
Wings also threw in some outside material and unfamiliar songs, including a cover of Paul Simon’s “Richard Cory,” the Moody Blues’ “Go Now,” which Wings guitarist Denny Laine had sung when he was a member of that band, and the McCartney original “Soily,” which made its album debut on Wings Over America.
In its fifth week on the chart, Wings Over America soared to the top, becoming the fifth consecutive and final Wings chart-topper. The band went on to record two more studio albums — 1978’s London Town (which made number two) and 1979’s Back to the Egg — before McCartney officially went the solo route again.
“It’s very difficult for me to assess Wings because they came after the Beatles,” McCartney told his fan newsletter Club Sandwich. “So, to me, there was always a feeling of let-down because the Beatles had been so big that anything I did had to compare directly with them … I would have felt much better about Wings if it had just happened on its own, either before the Beatles or with a decent interval afterwards. But it happened straight after the Beatles, which was unfortunate. I know why, though — I needed to continue in music. I didn’t want to retire or do anything else.”
THE TOP FIVE
Week of January 22, 1977
1. Wings Over America, Wings
2. Hotel California, Eagles
3. Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder
4. Boston, Boston
5. The Best of the Doobies, Doobie Brothers