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.”
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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.”
In ‘Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run,’ an oral history connected to Morgan Neville’s new documentary, we hear more stories about the Paul McCartney-led group. (Photo credit: Gene Nocon / Courtesy of MPL Communications Ltd)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.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Q. How did you put the book together?
They had the transcripts of the interviews that Morgan Neville had done for the movie, and that was a major source. Also, over the last 10 years or so, McCartney’s company, MPL, has been doing these gorgeous archival box sets. One day, ten of those arrived on my doorstep, and they went into great detail about every single Wings album. So suddenly, I had two major sources. I also started buying books about Wings. I knew with the documentary interviews, we had something that no one else did, so that was very satisfying.
MPL also had access to diaries Paul kept, and they would drop in a photograph of a page of his diary over Zoom, and they were very helpful.
Only a small percentage of the stories probably made it into Morgan’s documentary. Later, they revealed to me they didn’t want me to see the film while I was writing because they wanted the book to be its own thing.
Q. There are some instances when stories conflict or don’t align. How did you handle discrepancies?
The version I had probably comes from a Morgan Neville interview of Paul for the forthcoming documentary, so that becomes the highest-ranking source because the book is tied to the movie. But it’s true, there are some cases where there are slightly different versions of a story, and you’re not sure which one is the most reliable. If it got to a point where I didn’t know, I’d ask the folks at MPL what the best version of the story was.
Q. You mentioned they gave you freedom to tell the story as you saw fit without pressure. Was that true of your analysis of the albums too? Some might think you were being generous with your assessments of “Wild Life” and “London Town,” which you call a “significant artistic statement.”
I was reading from the archival box sets they overwhelmed me with, and so I got into the spirit of thinking of each one as a big push by Paul to make something new. I probably was a little reverential.
But I think I do like “Wild Life” more than you do – it’s an eclectic and eccentric band, a charming English band with soft songs and rockers.
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