Among music’s most documented artists, the one thing most surprising about the life and still-moving career of Paul McCartney is how little has been documented, analytically or playfully (beyond scorn), about Wings—his second most famous band. “How could I ever do anything as good as The Beatles?” asks McCartney in the new documentary film Paul McCartney: Man on the Run in consideration of moving forward from longtime friends with whom he built a movement and a writing partner with whom he crafted a new way in which to compose pop music, as well as a new sound to go with it.
Responding to unanswerable (and often uncomfortable) questions and unearthing gold in a mountainous terrain of rock, sand, and silt—all while maintaining humanity—is documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville’s specialty. Stoic comic saints and troubled culinary legends without easy answers is from where Neville derived his best work via profiles of Steven Martin and Anthony Bourdain. And Neville’s Oscar-winning 20 Feet From Stardom? The need for something so simple—a movie looking at the dynamic female vocalists behind the legends of rock and roll—was sheer perfection in its execution.
So, then, the story of how McCartney dropped out of the most important band of all time in order to go rudderlessly lo-fi solo, then work up an entirely new group based pretty much on his reliance on his wife (acclaimed photographer and not-really-keyboardist Linda McCartney) before adding a one-time Moody Blues member (Denny Laine) and a handful of glorified session musicians—all with a different sound than The Beatles—is in good hands under the careful stewardship of Neville. Because a story of silly love songs, Rockestras, dope busts, and beyond tells itself.
There’s not too deep of a discussion of the elephant in the room: that Linda was no real singer or player, and caught lots of hell for it from the press at large (“I’m not here because I’m the greatest keyboard player,” says Linda at one point in the doc, “I’m here because we love each other”). There was a lot about Wings that bugged people—how a lot of the songs McCartney wrote were twee, how most often it essentially was his solo project (save for the few times Linda and Denny Laine took the mic). Neville plays these moments out in order to present the McCartneys’ deeply loving, reciprocal relationship. He loved his wife and wanted to hang out with her. Besides, it was Linda who gave Paul the sage advice, “Let’s just get lost.” As someone who was expected to carry on as The Cute One from The Fab Four into adulthood, such wise words were revolutionary. I don’t know who came up with Wings doing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” for one of their early singles, but don’t blame Linda.
Nor is there any chat about that often soft-as-powdered-sugar songcraft that McCartney used for Wings, which got hard and chargingly political in the band’s debut single, “Give Ireland Back to the Irish,” written in response to the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre. This is surprising only because of the “Mary Had a Little Lamb” stuff: Why doesn’t Paul stand up for the fact that so often—as on the clever, cagey pop of “Band on the Run”; the inspired, inventive rockouts of “Back to the Egg”; and, of course, the entirety of the brilliant Venus and Mars LP—he was working beyond the good and the great of The Beatles catalog? That he did make strong songcraft strides beyond the Lennon-McCartney partnership?
And though it does rightly show Lennon as the highly politicized countercultural yin to McCartney’s domesticated, blissed-out, sweater-vest-wearing yang, there’s no answer given to the question of why Paul was so coldly blasé during the famous interview he gave after John’s assassination. Perhaps Neville’s filmic non-answer to that non-response is the perfect way to handle the now-45-year-old question: For how is one supposed to act when one’s lifelong brother gets murdered in cold blood a world away? I just lost two great friends this week, and I haven’t shed a tear, yet I’m not unemotional—I’m fucking bereft. Besides, their post-Beatles breakup was a weird one, filled with Paul’s tiny digs and John’s more famous one in what is possibly pop’s first diss track, “How Do You Sleep?”
Along with grainy, never-before-viewed home-filmed footage, rare concert glimpses, and foreign interview clips—all portraying an era where no mullet was unwelcome, no heels too clunkily high, and no satin jacket/pants ensemble unattempted—a host of Linda’s photography gets great airing via Man on the Run. She had an enviable career as an artful documentarian before Paul—she never sought to be a muse, and never lost her flair for the visually accurate and innovative when it came to photography. That Neville and the doc’s executive producer, Paul, show off her stuff is a testament to the latter’s respect, love, and dedication to her craft. And the newer interviews with McCartneys Mary, Stella, and Paul, along with many humorously grousing, still-living Wings members pissed that they didn’t get more of a chance to express themselves, are all solidly informative and occasionally unintentionally humorous.
Either way, Man on the Run is more given over to the topic of Wings, and that’s a plus. And how do you not love a documentary where its central protagonist becomes its quaintly funny antagonist just by uttering these words: “Whenever I hear someone damning Paul McCartney, I tend to agree with them”?
