Having too much Paul McCartney is rarely considered a problem by any rock fan. Although Macca has been known for having more than a few moments where he lost the plot of where he was going, half of his solo material is worthy of being put next to the classics he made with The Beatles, having a great depth of rock and roll swagger and musical complexity to leave any listener delighted. Although things got off to a rocky start in his early days, there was a good chance that we could have heard McCartney’s first double album when Wings got off the ground.
As McCartney set about making his solo career, it wasn’t initially meant to be a band. For the first few months following The Beatles’ split, McCartney was known for spending time in his house sulking before his wife Linda convinced him to make an album of material. While McCartney and RAM would benefit from having a homespun feel, ‘The Cute Beatle’ knew he needed fresh blood to succeed.
After thinking of putting together a band, Linda would be one of McCartney’s first choices, thinking she could sing harmony and play piano. Eventually talking Denny Laine of The Moody Blues into playing alongside him, McCartney got the band’s name when Linda gave birth to their daughter, saying that it felt like an angel had come to them.
Rounding out the lineup with drummer Denny Seiwell, Wild Life captured the essence of the band playing off each other for the first time, with many of the songs originating from a bunch of jam sessions the band had been working with. McCartney had hit his creative stride, band morale was high, and the reviews were…absolutely terrible.
Thinking that McCartney was becoming a punchline of The Beatles, most of the reviews saw the bassist being lambasted for making songs without a point. To draw more attention to the band, the rechristened ‘Paul McCartney and Wings’ would go into their next album looking to make some hits on ‘Red Rose Speedway’.
Though the group eventually got their first major hit out of the deal with McCartney’s silky-smooth ‘My Love’, the initial plan was to assemble a double album of material. Instead of being dominated by McCartney’s tunes, the initial vision was a group effort, including Laine contributing different songs.
Although many of the songs leaned into the homespun feel of McCartney’s previous efforts on songs like ‘Mama’s Little Girl’ and ‘Country Dreamer’, what ended up on the final product feels too scattered to take seriously. Considering how many completed songs were left off the album, the fact that ‘Single Pigeon’ made it onto the final track listing with a runtime of a little over a minute is baffling.
There are also pieces of McCartney’s singles that could have made for an exciting double album experience if included in the final product. Even though Macca was making sure to keep up his singles streak, putting a song like ‘Hi Hi Hi’ or his then-recent movie soundtrack staple ‘Live and Let Die’ would have helped bring up the monotony of the album.
That’s not to say that Red Rose Speedway is a total wash. Deep cuts like ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’ and the rip-roaring medley that closes out the album are great slices of epic rock that give listeners a peek at what McCartney was working towards. Although many of the album tracks from this era would be folded into B-sides later on, one can only imagine what McCartney’s epic masterpiece could have been before the days of Band on the Run.
