Best Album of The Year by Rolling Stone in 1973
Band On The Run kept up the pace of Paul McCartney"s post-beatles career.
This is Paul"s fifth album, and third with Wings.
Wings is comprised of his wife Linda and guitarist/singer Denny Laine.
Those of you that are aware of BOTR know all of the mishaps and nightmares that went along with the release and production of this seminal recording.
*The Following Excerpt is from the booklet included in the 25th Anniversary Edition Of Band On The Run. By Mark Lewisohn.
*""Wings had latterly established a pattern of recording in London principally at the EMI studios at Abbey Road. Being an international company, however, EMI had studio operations in a number of countries; seeking somewhere new to work, by way of a change from Abbey Road, Paul asked EMI to let him know where Wings could record in the company"s own studios. The list included Bombay, Rio de Janeiro, and Lagos.
Paul envisaged lying on the beach of Lagos all day, doing nothing, and recording at night. But as he noted dryly later "it didn"t turn out like that". later "it didn"t turn out like that". The McCartney"s didn"t know that Nigeria was run by a gun-happy government, the result of a coup seven years earlier. They didn"t know that, while Nigeria was a member of the British Commonwealth, the first thing they"d see at the airport was men wielding machine guns, that lepers walked the streets, that even the capital city had open drainage, that few things functioned there-officially or unofficially- without generous palm-greasing. Perhaps they also didn"t know that they would be arriving in Nigeria towards the end of its rainy season, when the heat and humidity were at their most intolerable for westerners and the Lagos rain fell in monsoon-like torrents. They were almost certainly unaware that, before leaving England, they"d have to be given inoculation after inoculation to prevent the risk of catching cholera, typhoid, polio, and sundry other ghastlies." This was only one of Wings problems while recording BOTR (they also had the project"s demos stolen by armed bandits). Never the less this album is momentous in Paul McCartney"s career. If you like mostly any Beatles albums you"ll love this.
The album begins with the chart-topping title track. "Band on the Run" is a classic McCartney song within a song composition. It begins slowly but begins to pick up momentum the moment McCartney says "Well the rain exploded with a might crash".
The next song "Jet" doesn"t make much sense, but man, is it a cool song, and besides most rock doesn"t make sense. This album contains only ten songs and one would be capable of listening to it in one sitting, which is good and bad, when the album ends the listener feels satisfied but with that lingering feeling of incompleteness. That void is filled though with the second disc (there is a second disc only on the 25th Anniversary Edition) with voices of Linda McCartney, Paul, Dustin Hoffman (Dustin Hoffman encouraged Paul to write "Picasso"s Last Words -Drink to Me") and also some unreleased versions of some Band On the Run tracks. I give this album a five simply because of its impact.
