Band On The Run

It's mid-1973 and in Beatle-land the tables are turning. Just the year before, John Lennon has bombed badly with the appalling double album Sometime In New York City with only a quarter of a million shelling out for his Radical Red sloganeering tabloid, generating only about 10% of Imagine's sales (small enough for EMI to argue that it didn't properly constitute a "Beatle" album when manager Allen Klein
was renegotiating the Fab Four's contracts).

Then in May, McCartney releases the schmaltzy Red Rose Speedway, which garners decent reviews, produced a global hit single My Love and the news is that the Wings tour of the UK is going down a storm. Though McCartney isn't performing any Beatle tracks, he's very definitely back and sounding good!

Around the middle of the year, George Harrison releases the heavy-duty Krishna album Living In The Material World that gets mostly panned for being as preachy as the orange-robed Hare Krishna "booksellers" irritating people all over the Western world...but nevertheless, produces another global hit single, the earnest Give Me Love and reasonably healthy album sales.

Then news comes out that Lennon has split from Yoko and is hanging out in LA and will be contributing to a Ringo all-star album that all The Beatles would play on.

Will Ringo's album be the olive branch to reconcile the Fab Four?

The world waits for its Christmas release...up against none other that Paul McCartney, who's rush-releasing an album that he's recorded in Lagos, Nigeria, with touch-ups & mixing in London, Band On The Run...and John Lennon, who's releasing his own album, Mind Games.

History showed that Lennon's album was workmanlike, though hardly inspirational. Ringo's album was surprisingly strong...but everybody realised that his next album would be a problem (and it was)...and Paul's album was f***ing sensational.

O.K., the lyrics were frequently inane...but Band On The Run was an embarrassment of pop-music riches. The critics loved it, the fans loved it...and John and George must have been turning green!

There are little touches of Sgt. Pepper and Penny Lane in the title track, a suite with several sections that creates a basic concept of a band...on the run, being searched for, for evermore. Why? Well, it's never quite explained but that's McCartney.

Next is Jet, with some crunching pop, with some Pepper-like references to a Sergeant Major that sounds nice and Paul Beatle-ish and proved a major hit single around the world. I still don't know what it's about, though.

I could go on like this for the whole review but heck, you know the album, so I'll keep it brief:

Bluebird...schmaltz that sounds nice but is nowhere as evocative as his own Blackbird
Mrs. Vanderbilt...loopy faux-jungle beat and nonsensical homespun truth lyrics "...When you bus has left its stop, you better drop your hurrying...Leave me alone Mrs. Vandebilt..."
Let Me Roll It...Paul's pastiche of John's Plastic Ono Band period with some cheesy organ and parody-Primal Scream wails
Mamunia...Deceptively simple, smart and effective song in which Creationism meets Self-help Therapy via a rain = growth analogy i.e. there's got to be some bad with the good but even the bad can be good..."...So the next time you see rain, don't complain, it rains for you, you've never felt the rain until you felt it running down your back..."
No Words...McCartney pap that just sounds nice...but actually works as a pretty good filler
Picasso's Last Words...created for UK talk-show host Michael Parkinson to show that Beatle-Paul could write a song about anything, in this case, the death of Pablo Picasso. Some loathe Picasso's Last Words but I really like it, perhaps because it's pretty close to my thoughts on Mortality. "...Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can't drink any more..." with some dream-like recurrence of the album's musical themes in the second half of the song which do a lot towards making Band On The Run seem a balanced piece of work
Nineteen Hundred And Eight Five probably constituted a rocker in the early 70s to end the album but actually it's just a well-paced jog with a cool vocal that builds to a great fade-out. Like on Picasso, the cheeky reprise of the title track at the end again brings the album a whole-ness and continuity it doesn't really deserve

It's my contention that Band On The Run actually destroyed any hope of The Beatles getting back on equal terms. With McCartney back to his best, The Beatles would be Paul's band, even more so than in the late 1960s...and the others couldn't cope with that.

Frankly, I don't blame them. Over the 70's & 80s, McCartney's collaborators (e.g. Henry McCulloch, Denny Laine, Eric Stewart etc.) frequently claimed to have frequently been treated shabbily by the Fab one and despite his public image, McCartney's reputation lingers as sometimes petty and mean. That the other Beatles didn't want to buy into that was fairly understandable.

However, Beatle conjecture aside, if you train your brain not to listen to the words, Band On The Run is still a joy, great for driving to, the highest solo achievement of a man determined to say nothing of any value to anyone at anytime.

Paul McCartney, I drink to you, I drink to your health.

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