Episode 53 – Beatles ’71 pt7

Emboldened by the slow-burn success of RAM, and anxious to prove himself in life beyond The Beatles, Paul McCartney was at last ready to reveal to the world the ambitious new project he had been working on for months. Enter: WINGS. In the years since The Beatles left live performance behind, John, George and Ringo had each found themselves back in the spotlight for concerts in one form or another, but curiously the Beatle who loved playing before an audience the most had shied away from taking the stage the longest. Those days were now over, as Paul McCartney’s new band prepared to take flight on the back of a brand new album: Wild Life. This was a rough-edged, garage-rock-ey band effort that was perhaps more akin to the Get Back project than its more polished predecessor - with jam tracks like the unruly Mumbo and wandering organ crooning on its eponymous Wild Life. Like nearly all of McCartney’s initial solo endeavors, Wings was off to a shaky start with this LP, failing to crack the top 10 in his native England and spawning no single-worthy tracks to help buoy sales. But Paul wasn’t the only former Beatle struggling with a launch in the fall of ‘71 - when George Harrison appeared on the Dick Cavett show to promote the Apple film Raga, America learned of the struggle to release the long-awaited Concert for Bangladesh soundtrack album, stemming from a sales dispute with Apple’s American distributor Capitol Records. The struggles of solo flight would continue into the winter, but prove to be the growing pains of four artists who were discovering just what it meant to pave their own path forward...