After the Beatles, Paul McCartney stored his Sgt. Pepper coat in the closet
Documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville dove in deep to create “Man on the Run,” a movie about Paul McCartney in the 1970s after the Beatles’ breakup. The film, which is playing at selected theaters locally, arrives on Prime Video on February 27th.
By the time he’d completed the film, the director had far more interview material than he could fit into two hours. McCartney’s company, MPL, decided to use that material as the basis for an oral history book, “Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run.”
Ted Widmer, a historian and former speechwriter in the Clinton White House, was leaving a McCartney concert in 2023 when he ran into a book editor he knew, Bob Weil, and they discussed their love of the Beatles.
Later, Widmer positively reviewed McCartney’s photo book, “1964: Eye of the Storm,” and it turned out that Weil had been the editor of that book and other recent McCartney publications. Widmer learned all this in early 2024 when Weil called and invited him to compile the oral history into a book. “I was excited,” Widmer said in a recent video interview. “We had to work really fast. We had a good team with Bob and a couple of people at MPL.”
The book begins with the breakup of the Beatles and covers the two pre-Wings albums, “McCartney” and “Ram,” as well as “McCartney II,” which was essentially McCartney’s escape hatch from Wings. The book credits McCartney’s wife Linda as a grounding force against the perils of superstardom, as well as a vital contributor to some of the biggest songs of the ‘70s. It is also filled with memorable anecdotes, and while some come from McCartney, many of the best come from band members like drummers Denny Seiwell and Joe English.
Seiwell recounts how he bought what he thought was Ringo’s Shea Stadium drum kit, only to have Ringo later tell him it was fake. Seiwell also recalls being amazed at the simple life that McCartney, the world’s biggest rock star, was living on his farm in Scotland, recalling that the house was so simple that in the cold weather – and he says even the summers were cold – he had to sleep with a hot water bottle between his legs.
English, meanwhile, had a different experience while staying at the McCartneys: when he went to hang his clothes in a closet, he saw his bandmate’s original Sgt. Pepper outfit hanging in there. English was as awestruck as any ordinary Beatles fan would be.
Source: Stuart Miller/ocregister.com
