“I stayed in bed thinking I was dying”: the album that Paul McCartney collapsed trying to make
The entire process of making an album is never easy from back to front. Most people are happy enough to get one or two songs that sound halfway decent onto the track listing, and that means either padding out the rest of the album or trying to stitch together something that resembles a hit in the background. But Paul McCartney never knows how to half-ass anything when it comes to his music, and when he was making some of his greatest records, he would stay in the studio until his body gave out on him.
Then again, that only comes when he has the motivation to get everything done. It was going to take a lot for him to even get out of bed after The Beatles broke up, but once he found the passion for music again on McCartney, he knew that he could make something that was a lot more streamlined even if there wasn’t as many perfect production touches that his old band had during their prime.
While it took a long time for people to warm up to albums like RAM, it was a different story when Wings first formed. The Plastic Ono Band may have been greeted with open arms on a few occasions, but listening back to Macca’s new group on Wild Life, critics were not taken to his new group at all, even viewing the album as one of his worst for how ramshackle everything sounded.
Since Red Rose Speedway didn’t fare much better outside of songs like ‘My Love’, Band on the Run was supposed to be when things started to turn around. Even if half the band quit in protest when McCartney decided to record the whole thing in Nigeria, he, Denny Laine, and Linda were determined to make the album that would prove everyone wrong, despite recording in a studio barely standing upright when they got there.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, McCartney was mugged at knifepoint halfway through the sessions and had his demos confiscated, which meant that he had to rely on his memory to figure out how all the songs went and play everything over again. Having to play multiple instruments, sing, and avoid potential bodily harm would have been enough for someone to think the album was cursed, but McCartney himself almost couldn’t make it through the sessions without falling over.
Halfway through the sessions, Macca had a bronchial spasm that put him out of commission for several days, saying, “It seemed stuffy in the studio, so I went outside for a breath of fresh air. I began to feel really terrible and had a pain across the right side of my chest, and I collapsed. I could not breathe, and I fainted. Linda thought I had died. The doctor seemed to treat it pretty lightly and said it could be bronchial because I had been smoking too much. But this was me in hell. I stayed in bed for a few days, thinking I was dying. It was one of the most frightening periods in my life.”
The entire process of making the album feels like hell on Earth, hearing about it, but you’d hardly think that listening to the record. For all of the headaches that went into everything, McCartney is practically smiling through the pain on these songs, turning everything he touches into gold on tracks like ‘Jet’ and ‘Picasso’s Last Words’, and even finding some time to pay tribute to John Lennon on the tune ‘Let Me Roll It’.
But given how much went into making this record, McCartney learned firsthand that sometimes artists need to bleed a little bit before they make their classics. There had been no need for it to have been drastic enough for him to wind up in hospital, but Band on the Run remains one of his biggest “phoenix from the ashes” moments.
