How Paul McCartney Ran to the Top

Fifty years ago, Paul McCartney was basking in the glow of his new album’s reception. This week in 1974, Band on the Run was ending a seven-week streak at the top of the U.K. charts after dominating American airwaves throughout the summer—it had landed Billboard’s top album spot three separate times. Hailed by critics as a masterpiece, McCartney’s fifth solo album would sell more than 8 million copies and rank as one of the decade’s biggest sellers. Band on the Run was an unqualified success. It also marked one of the greatest comebacks in rock history.

Before the album’s release, McCartney’s back was against the wall. His late wife, Linda, once described her husband’s mindset going into the recording sessions as a bleak make-or-break mission: “Either I give up and cut my throat or get my magic back.”

It’s hard to fathom McCartney, a megastar who has charted more No. 1 songs than any other artist and who still packs the world’s largest concert venues six decades after the roar of Beatlemania receded, finding himself lost in the musical wilderness. But in the years following the Beatles’ breakup, in 1970, the group’s de facto leader suddenly seemed mortal, spending the next few years suffering from sagging album sales, the scorn of critics, and the open hostility of his former bandmates.

[From the 2013 issue: 1963: The year the Beatles found their voice]

McCartney struggled with depression, alcohol, unrealistic expectations, and ugly attacks from ex-Beatles united by never-ending lawsuits, collective jealousies, and pent-up resentments against the man who’d carried the group creatively through their final years.

The most painful broadsides came from John Lennon, the songwriting partner whom Paul had met as a teenager in Liverpool and who helped McCartney launch a musical revolution that transformed Western culture. After the band’s breakup, Lennon focused his reserves of rage on a narrow goal: dismantling the Beatles’ myth. Although no one connected to the group was spared, the most venomous attacks were saved for McCartney. In a Rolling Stone interview with its publisher, Jann Wenner, Lennon dismissed McCartney’s first solo album as “rubbish”; compared him to Engelbert Humperdinck; said that the only purpose of the Let It Be movie project was for McCartney to “show off,” and that watching the movie had made him “feel sick”; claimed that his fellow bandmates had gotten “fed up being sidemen for Paul”; and accused McCartney of leading the group “round in circles” and causing its “disintegration.” Lennon even carried his single-minded mission into the studio, where he mocked McCartney as a square whose best days were behind him.

“A pretty face may last a year or two / But pretty soon they’ll see what you can do,” Lennon sneered in his 1971 song “How Do You Sleep?”

Music critics enamored of the avant-garde style of Lennon and his wife, the artist Yoko Ono, and horrified by McCartney’s bourgeois embrace of domestic bliss, followed Lennon’s lead and piled on. When McCartney released his first solo album, McCartney, in April 1970, Wenner reportedly told his music editor, Greil Marcus, to order a rewrite of Rolling Stone’s positive review and change it into a hit piece that dismissed the record as “distinctly second rate” and a work of “tawdry propaganda.” Treatment of the former Beatle’s next album was worse, with the magazine’s Jon Landau branding Ram “the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock” and dismissing the music as “so incredibly inconsequential and so monumentally irrelevant” that it was not even worth hating. When the same album was reissued in 2012, decades removed from the Lennon-McCartney feud, Ram garnered nearly universal acclaim. Pitchfork rhapsodized that McCartney’s album had done nothing less than invent a new approach to pop music, AllMusic declared that “in retrospect it looks like nothing so much as the first indie album,” and even Rolling Stone grudgingly placed it on its “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list.

But a generation earlier, McCartney would not have had the benefit of hindsight. The Beatles biographer Nicholas Schaffner neatly summarized McCartney’s sullied reputation with the music press, which defined the reputation of rock acts in the early 1970s: “Paul was viewed as a traitor to the counterculture who split up the Beatles and sold his soul to bubblegum.” Schaffner noted that the anti-McCartney hysteria became so ridiculous that Beatles bootlegs began portraying McCartney as a bloated pig, while protests were staged outside his in-laws’ New York home. Rolling Stone and others in the rock world mocked McCartney’s theme song for the James Bond film Live and Let Die, as Schaffner put it, “in tones so snide that you would have thought Paul had been caught playing golf with Spiro Agnew.”

Never mind that the song would soar to the top of the music charts along with a collection of other hits during those “wilderness years,” such as “Maybe I’m Amazed,” “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” “Another Day,” and “My Love.” Those songs would have safely secured the legacy of any other artist for decades to come. But not McCartney. The shots fired by music critics and former bandmates hit their intended target.

“I tried really hard,” McCartney lamented of his early post-Beatles work. “I really hoped people would have liked it.” Lennon’s attacks deepened McCartney’s crisis of confidence, and McCartney later admitted that he had been devastated by his criticisms. “I sat down and pored over every little paragraph, every sentence. At the time I thought, ‘It’s me. That’s just what I’m like. He’s captured me so well. I’m a turd.’”

McCartney wanted a clean break from his recent past and began searching for an exotic location where he could find inspiration by “absorbing the atmosphere and taking in the climate.” After a cursory review of every recording studio that his label EMI operated across the world, Paul narrowed his choices to Rio de Janeiro and Lagos, Nigeria. McCartney chose Africa—and that is when his real problems began.

As his plans were coming together, his band, Wings, was falling apart. His guitarist abruptly quit, and his drummer announced the night before the band’s departure that he would not be traveling with them. That left Wings with only three members: McCartney, the guitarist Denny Laine, and Linda, who later admitted that she’d still been “learning to play piano and keyboards.” An enraged McCartney was determined to turn his anger into creative fuel and return from Lagos with an album so great that his former bandmates would forever regret their decision to abandon ship. But within days, it might have been McCartney who quietly regretted his decision to get on that flight to Africa.

McCartney later remembered expecting to find “blue skies and green jungles.” He was shocked to discover “inner-city Lagos, with dead people lying by the road, and brown clay spitting up at you driven by monsoons. It was pretty hairy.” Instead of the post-oil-boom city Lagos has become, Paul and Linda had landed in a town filled with “mud huts, a couple of BOAC buildings, a pool you had to stick lots of chlorine in, all very dodgy.” The EMI studio lacked vocal booths and even basic recording equipment.

The most serious drama occurred outside the studio walls. He and Linda were attacked by a gang of thieves, who stole their demo tapes and the notes that were intended to guide the making of their album. The next day, studio hands told them that they were lucky to have escaped with their lives. The pressure was bearing down on McCartney, who collapsed one night and was rushed to the hospital, as he later recounted to Paul De Noyer:

“Linda thought I’d died. I could hardly breathe. It was scary: You’re going to the hospital in the back of a taxi, through this hub of the city of Lagos, and it’s a night: Oh fucking hell, I’m dying.’”

But McCartney, Linda, and Laine made it back to London, and they put the finishing touches on their album at AIR Studios, co-founded by the Beatles’ former producer, George Martin. McCartney filled in on drums, Laine provided tasteful guitar work and vocals, and Linda played many of the band’s most memorable keyboard lines. By the time Tony Visconti was adding his orchestral score to the nine tracks, everyone within earshot of the studio knew that McCartney was back.

[Read: The delights of parsing the Beatles’ most nonsensical song]

Band on the Run was released on November 30, 1973. McCartney’s previous two albums had struggled commercially, and his masterpiece at first sold only modestly. It would take five months for Band on the Run to hit No. 1 in the U.S.; it wouldn’t reach the top of the U.K. charts for another three months. But when it did, it would stay at No. 1 for the next seven weeks. It would also become his best-selling solo album.

Rolling Stone’s Landau was forced to perform an abrupt about-face, and to follow his earlier sneering reviews with the admission that McCartney had just produced “the finest record yet released by any of the four musicians who were once called the Beatles.” In his January 1974 review, Landau hailed McCartney’s work as “uniting the myth of the rock star and the outlaw, the original legendary figure on the run.”

Fifty years later, Sir Paul McCartney remains on the run, spending this fall performing a string of sold-out shows across Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Peru. He will end 2024 with concerts in Manchester and London. Although he has little left to prove, McCartney seems to be a man on a mission, still exhibiting the obsessive pursuit of musical perfection that drove the other Beatles crazy while also driving them to the top of the charts.

That drive fueled McCartney to produce his masterpiece against all odds, just as it shaped the history of popular music. Ringo Starr recently said that he has always credited McCartney for having a work ethic that pushed Lennon and the other band members into the studio. “I’ve always thanked him for being that guy,” he said, “because without him, we would have put out three albums and vanished.”