WINGS

WILD LIFE

After issuing two solo records, James Paul McCartney decided that he wanted to be part of a band again. Getting back in front of an audience would require a solid supporting cast. Enlisting drummer Denny Seiwell, whose solid work on Ram impressed him, was a fine start. His choice to fill the keyboard slot in his new aggregation was shocking.

His wife Linda.

Had she been a seasoned pro, the rock world still would have been skeptical, though it really was an odd pick because she could barely play a note. He insisted that she should be part of the project, taught her a few basic chords and then there were three.

Casting an eye about for a guitarist, he hit upon the idea of having Denny Laine join him. After all, he had known Laine from his days with the Moody Blues (pre Justin Hayward), liked his voice and thought that they would work well together. According to Paul, the name for this new group came out of a stressful time as Linda was giving birth to their second child, Stella. Complications arose and it wasn't certain that the baby would survive. While praying for his wife and child, the image of angel's wings came to McCartney.

Wings quietly started rehearsing a freshly minted batch of tunes in July of '71.

Take it, Tony!

Puffing on some of Mother Nature's finest, having a few beers and knocking around a few oldies, they also jammed on a few new ideas as well. Paul made the executive decision to record some of their "first takes". That's always a good move if you want to sift through the tapes and pick out certain things that merit further development.

He probably shouldn't have released them for public consumption.

Before erupting into an extended laughing fit, consider listening to this from a different perspective. You're hearing a bootleg that mistakenly fell into a pile and was given the green light as an official release. No need to run back into a burning building to retrieve this, though if you do find it on vinyl for a buck, (as I did, way back) then you're set.

No expectations.

McCartney himself had to have realized that this was the byproduct of working up some ideas to break in the band. Nothing more. So you have some pointless fun ("Mumbo"), a song directed at toddlers ("Bip Bop"), the catchy pop tune ("Tomorrow") and a white, left-handed-cigarette-smoking-reggae-fied cover ("Love is Strange").

Ideas that have promise ("Wild Life", "Some People Never Know") run way too long on underdeveloped melodies with no transitions to make them more interesting. Had more time been invested with certain tracks (and backing vocals turned down in the mix) the results would have been marginally better.

Unsurprisingly, extreme critical backlash met "Wild Life" upon its release at the tail end of '71. Once half of an enormously influential song writing partnership, McCartney now seemed to have lost the plot.

"Dear Friend" would be the standout track on Wild Life. It is a small olive branch that he extended to Lennon in the wake of the very public pissing match that they were engaged in at that time.

Best viewed as some messy sketches from a writer trying to escape a long shadow and do things differently.