When The Beatles finally called it quits, all eyes were on what the members might do next. For Paul McCartney, the road ahead of him was split into several different paths he could take. The music world was truly his oyster as one of the most respected and beloved artists around. He could have done anything. So when he decided to start a new journey with Wings, he wanted to do it right rather than follow the lead set by another troupe.
At the end of The Beatles, it seemed that all the members were desperate to get out. John Lennon had already stormed out, while George Harrison, who had previously quit before, quite literally ran to sign the papers, making their split official. Even McCartney, who seems in the Let It Be and Get Back documentaries to be the one trying to keep things together, was finally ready to throw in the towel and move on. It wasn’t just a personal matter of falling out. It had become musical, too, as all four musicians grew in different ways, stretching into different arenas and now wanting full creative control.
At first, that was clear when they all launched solo projects. McCartney released his debut solo album, McCartney, in 1970, and everyone expected him to stay on that path. Now, outside of the group dynamic, he’d no longer have to deal with band politics or other people’s considerations. Anyone would have thought that that would be what he’d want after all this time, to finally stand out on his own as an artist under his own name.
But for McCartney, the answer to what he wanted wasn’t quite so clear. “For me, it was like, ‘What do you do — how do you follow The Beatles?’” he remembered while talking to Billboard. “Do you just try and get a bunch of great musicians around you-which is probably the most logical thing to do — and just pick up where you left off?”
This had been done before. “That was the option, to do a Blind Faith,” McCartney said, referencing the 1969 supergroup, made up of Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Ric Grech. Right as Clapton and Baker’s band Cream and Winwood’s group Traffic had called it quits, the musicians gathered in a kind of team effort to keep their careers going. They wrote their own songs, but when they performed live, the setlist was also just a thrown-together collection of hits from their former band. It felt like a way for them to move on without ever really moving on. It was like taking a step forward by announcing a new project but not letting go of the past.
While McCartney was deciding what he wanted to do, he knew exactly what he didn’t want to do: that. “I didn’t fancy that,” he said. Instead, he decided to fully start from scratch and build something new. He wanted a new band, but a real one, not just a mishmash group to drag on the past.
“I thought that to get a real band and to get a new direction, you’ve got to start at the bottom, square one — start there,” he said. “So we got a band like The Beatles had formed, which was really just a couple of friends, and in this case, one of them was my new wife.”
He even took it a step further. With his name and reputation, McCartney could have launched Wings with the biggest of fanfare and immediately started playing huge sell-out shows and diving right into the deep end. But that’s not how bands begin, so he stripped that back to basics, too. They set off on a tour of universities in 1972 as a wildly lowkey affair for one of the most famous musicians on earth. But McCartney was dedicated to a total rebuild from the ground up, including the tiny rooms first gigs are made of. He remembered, “It was just a poky little affair because new bands are. You don’t have to answer to anyone. So we just took off in a van and did this real crazy little thing.”
“We were always in the shadow of The Beatles. That was the big difficulty with Wings,” he said of the group. But McCartney would rather restart with something completely new instead of copying Blind Faith with one foot in the future and the other in the past.
