Celebrating Sir Paul Top Ten: Band on the Run (#9)

Tweet

WHAT??? What’s this song doing so low on the top ten list? Simple: there are eight songs above it! And I’m crazy…but you knew that. Many of you would probably have this in the top three, which goes to show you just how difficult it is to rank the career of Paul McCartney or distill it down to 30 songs. Anyway, here’s today’s song. #9: Band on the Run (Paul & Wings) See you tomorrow. What do you need me to say? This was Paul’s third post-Beatles #1 hit in the US. It’s the epic opening of an epic album. Most people put this album at the top of the list of ALL former Beatles solo albums. Well, except the previously referenced Barry Robinson of the Classic Rock Albums YouTube channel, who had Ram at #1 (BOTR was #2). Paul and Linda went through the wringer in the making of this album: they wanted to record it in Nigeria, and they walked (flew, actually) into a hornet’s nest. The country was in disarray after a civil war, and it wasn’t safe. Paul and Linda found that out the hard way when they were robbed at knifepoint on the beach in Lagos one night. All of their valuables in their possession, along with the demos and lyrics for things they were going to record, disappeared into a bandit’s hand. (They didn’t have eBay back then, or the perpetrators would have marked themselves by selling it online.) Oh, and Paul was hospitalized there with a bronchial spasm. The phrase “band on the run,” believe it or not, came from George Harrison in 1969: Harrison used that term to refer to the Beatles in all of the legal meetings they were having toward the end of the band. The road was definitely hard, but the result was one of the best albums of the 1970s. Band on the Run Written by Paul and Linda McCartney From Band on the Run (Paul & Wings), 1973 The jailer man and sailor Sam: