What did John Lennon really think of Paul McCartney and Wings?
For a band that preached peace and love, it felt like The Beatles weren’t allowed to be happy towards the end of their tenure.
They had spent years together, and when they decided to splinter, it felt like an all-out war half the time, but that didn’t mean John Lennon couldn’t acknowledge when his old mates did something fantastic.
When the band first broke apart, it was clear that Lennon needed some time to himself. The last few years had done a number on his psyche, and while having to go through all of the business dealings that Allen Klein ultimately put them through, Plastic Ono Band was a great way to let out all of his aggression. Most fans were glad to see him in a better emotional place at the end of everything, but hearing him say “I don’t believe in Beatles” and “The dream is over” wasn’t going to make the pain of the breakup any better.
Hell, not even the most optimistic member of the group could claim to be all happy. For as much as Paul McCartney feels like the musical embodiment of a ray of sunshine half the time, hearing his first album is like watching someone lose their passion. There’s a lot of great stuff on there, but you could tell that Macca was not in the best headspace and was doing everything within his power to crawl his way back into life as a musician.
If he wanted to make something new, he would need to have a band behind him, and while Wings got off to a rocky start, albums like Band on the Run were able to prove every single critic wrong. The ‘Cute One’ was dangerously close to being considered the musical casualty of the group, but there’s no reasonable way to listen to a song like ‘Jet’ or ‘Let Me Roll It’ and think that the band was all fluff.
While George Harrison could be a bit cutthroat in his assessment of Wings as the discount version of The Beatles, Lennon did have a few kind words for his old mate’s band, saying, “Band on the Run is a great album. Wings is almost as conceptual a group as Plastic Ono Band. Plastic Ono was a conceptual group, meaning whoever was playing was the band. And Wings keeps changing all the time. It’s conceptual. I mean, they’re backup men for Paul. It doesn’t matter who’s playing. You can call them Wings, but it’s Paul McCartney music. And it’s good stuff.”
And considering how Lennon typically reacted to Macca’s music, this was a nice change of pace. After all the dust had settled on their business dealings, Lennon wasn’t exactly itching to go back into the studio with the rest of the Fabs for any reason, but he understood that anyone listening to Wings was going to get something good. They might have needed to go through pop hits like ‘Listen to What the Man Said’, but it was worth it to get the gritty stuff like ‘Letting Go’ later.
Wings could be a lot more democratic than what Lennon was talking about. Yes, there was one famous person in the group and there was no doubt that everyone was focused on the bass player, but listening back to the band’s best records, there are a handful of moments where McCartney could be more diplomatic, like having Jimmy McCulloch deliver the bluesy ‘Medicine Jar’ or his collaborations with Denny Laine all across their output on tracks like ‘No Words’ or ‘Spirits of Ancient Egypt’.
The comparisons between Wings and Plastic Ono Band showed that both Lennon and McCartney still had the same approaches to music that they used to. They were simply in two different stages of development, and while it took them a while to get on the same page again, who knows, they could maybe even have collaborated on a couple of more great tunes had Lennon not been killed.
