The prog people were right! Turns out the greatest songs, the legendary songs, aren’t the simplest ones—simplicity is for losers! The greatest songs, and if anybody knew this Rush knew it, are the ones with sections! Multiple moving parts! Just look at the evidence. “Stairway to Heaven,” epic! “Hotel California,” stupendous! “MacArthur Park,” godly! And the same goes for “Layla,” “Free Bird,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” and forget I said “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” It’s a nightmare.
One of the very best, by which I mean it’s definitely in the top five in not the top three if not the very best, is Paul McCartney & Wings’ 1974 smasheroo “Band on the Run.” Why, it’s even better than Sir Paul’s “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” which stickler for detail that I am I refuse to include on my list because let’s face it, it’s two songs separated by a slash, as is“Venus & Mars/Rock Show” for that matter. And that’s cheating.
The number three is the number to remember when it comes to “Band on the Run.” The song has three parts. Only three musicians (Paul, Linda McCartney, and Dennie Laine) were involved in its making. “Band on the Run” was McCartney’s third chart-topping American single. On the other hand, the song only went to number three on the UK charts (what’s wrong with those people?).
The song’s creation coincided with (and was perhaps in part inspired by) the three non-Johns in the Beatles’ escape from manager Allen Klein. Only three people in the entire world think it’s not the greatest thing ever. And finally, I listen to it three times a day, every day, because it’s been proven to keep the bowels regular and improve mental health. Oh, and it will open your third eye, guaranteed.
Here’s something you may not know: the original demo for the song was stolen, at knifepoint, from the band in Lagos, Nigeria, where they were recording the album. Were three knives involved? History is vague on this point. In any event, McCartney had to recreate the song from memory.
Which raises the question: how good was his memory? McCartney is a renowned consumer of marijuana. Maybe the famous lost version was completely different. Maybe it had EIGHT parts! Maybe it only had one! Maybe the whole incident was a figment of Paul’s cannabis-distorted imagination! Because why didn’t the thieves hold the demo for ransom? Demand 5,000,000 nairas for its return? And front row tickets to the concert of the thieves’ choice? Paul himself suspects they just recorded over the demo. That’s comedy. If the thieves were Three Dog Night, on the other hand, it’s goddamn tragedy.
Cannabis certainly looms large in the song’s subconscious. Pot arrests had McCartney thinking prison. But what’s shocking about the song’s prison escape theme is that you’ll look long and hard to find it elsewhere. Songs about BEING in prison, sure, they’re a staple of the country and rock traditions, but escaping prison? I can only think of Thin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak.” And AC/DC’s “Jailbreak.” In popular music you go to prison and you stay in prison and that’s it. You don’t escape from prison. You may do the noble thing and die before they can put you in prison (see R. Dean Taylor’s immortal “Indiana Wants Me,” which comes with life-ending gunfire).
But it’s songs like “I Fought the Law,” J. Mellencamp’s “Authority Song,” and Black Flag’s “Police Story” that set the ground rules. You fight, you lose, it’s inevitable. Prison is the consequence. And there’s this tacit understanding that breaking out would be cheating somehow. A violation of the social contract or something. And maybe, at some level, this accounts for the song’s popularity. Paul and the band escape! And they’re going to get away with it! They’ll never be found! Paul says so himself right in the song!
“Band on Run” is a three-parter, but not all three parts are created equal. The version we all know and love has a 5:09 minute running time (in the US the song was unforgivably truncated to less than four minutes for radio play), but the first two parts (the first short, the second a bit longer) are significantly shorter combined than the final section, which is the part everybody can sing from memory for the simple reason that it’s anthemic as fuck.
Which isn’t to say (I wouldn’t dare say it) that all three parts aren’t absolutely essential. Of course they’re essential–the moments before the rain explodes with a mighty crash are the set-up, and without them you’d have a song, but you wouldn’t have an epic song, one of the greats, a song so spectacularly brilliant that I’m pretty sure the constellations dance to it when we aren’t looking.
What surprises me about “Band on the Run” is that I don’t think The Beatles ever wrote a song about imprisonment, because the Beatles themselves had become a kind of prison for its members, with the exception (I suspect) of Ringo. If fame is a prison, The Beatles were a Supermax prison, the most expensive cage ever built for four non-violent offenders. And it was a private-for-profit prison—people everywhere were lining their pockets, and so far as they were concerned the Fab Four would never go on parole. Lord knows John and Paul wanted to bust out, and wouldn’t have thought twice about using a file in a birthday cake.
The song opens on a quiet note, guitar figure set against wavering synthesizer. They go back and forth until Paul comes in, to be joined by the others a natty three-part harmony about being stuck inside the prison walls forever. The opening is Paul in soft pop mode, and it’s over in a flash (or one minute in eighteen seconds to be exact), the transition to part two being a slightly harder edged guitar with push and a touch of… might I say menace? Why not?
This goes on, instrumentally, the guitar joined by synthesizer (both criminal Paul and gun moll Linda played them on the song), for a brief while, before Paul goes into a lyrical daydream about what he’d do if he got out. Give all his money away! Live happily on a pint a day! You notice he doesn’t mention pot—it’s what landed him in the hoosegaw in the first place.
But he doesn’t really give up much time to think about it, because at the 2:05 mark we get one of the greatest transitions in rock—the guitars knock down the prison walls with some tremendous power chords, orchestrator Tony Visconti whips up a hurricane of sweeping strings that blow the walls of the prison down, and the whole thing takes the breath out of you. It’s stone cold brilliant.
And then, to top things off, McCartney comes in and shocks you with a pair of lines that totally knock you off your feet, in part because they make no sense: “Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash/As we fell into the sun.” Holy shit! What could they possibly mean? Is he talking about the sunlight of freedom? Was he higher than Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson put together when he wrote it? Who knows? All I know is I feel a thrill every time I hear those lines, and I’ve heard those lines literally hundreds of times. And he probably wrote them without thinking, and it almost certainly didn’t bother him a whit that they made zero sense. Because he knew they were perfect.
And what makes them even more perfect, sublimely perfect, is that they’re accompanied by what sounds like forty acoustic guitars all strumming this perfect melody that is the very sound of escape. I knew it as a kid (every kid is in a prison and dreams of nothing but busting out) and I still know it now. I can think of plenty of perfect guitar come-ins (Tom Petty’s “American Girl” comes to mind) but how many of them come sweeping out from NOWHERE in the middle of a song like that? It’s a pop miracle, and every time I hear it I know there’s a god who despite his myriad failures got at least ONE thing PERFECTLY right. Okay, two if you count the Raspberries’ “Overnight Sensation (Hit Record).”
And after that it’s smooth sailing, all strummed guitars and verses chock full of sub-Dylan characters like the jailer man and Sailor Sam and the undertaker and the county judge who held a grudge, all trying to track down our heroes while a bell rings “in the village square for the rabbits on the run.” Who the hell is Sailor Sam and why the hell should a sailor be searching for anyone?
It doesn’t matter, I doubt McCartney spent two minutes thinking about it, all that matters is that constant refrain of “band on the run,” which isn’t just easy to sing along with—you HAVE to sing along with it, it’s so deliriously compulsively perfectly harmonized and smooth you’re powerless. McCartney cited the Eagles as an influence, but the song that comes to mind is certainly not their two-parter no-escape classic “Hotel California” but “victory song” “Already Gone.” Let’s face it—detractors have been stabbing “Band on the Run” with their steely knives for decades now and they still can’t kill the beast. And they never will.
Anyone who thought rock couldn’t have a better year than 1973—which brought us such immortal tunes as Rick Derringer’s “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,” Sammy Johns’ “Chevy Van,” the Edgar Winter Group’s “Free Ride,” Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock,” Ringo Starr’s “Photograph” and so many others—was in for a surprise. Because “Band on the Run” made 1974 a better year all by its lonesome.
Paul McCartney has given the world so many great songs and so many absolutely shitty songs over the course of his brilliant but treacle-spotted career it’s hard to know what to make of him. He’s the best of artists, he’s the worst of artists. The word for “poison” in German is “gift.” That sums up McCartney perfectly. In the end of course, he’ll be remembered for the great ones. The best of them, in my mind, being “Hey Jude,” “Let It Be,” “Helter Skelter,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” and yes, “Band on the Run.” That’s august company. “Stairway to Heaven” and “Hotel California” are august company too. Rush’s “By-Tor and Snow Dog” is not august company. The prog folks may know the secret to greatness, but that doesn’t mean they ever figured out how to do it themselves.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
