Paul McCartney says Johnny Cash inspired him to form Wings: “It was a real act of faith”
Paul McCartney has credited Johnny Cash for inspiring him to form Wings.
McCartney told MOJO in a new interview that he turned to Cash for inspiration when he found himself at a crossroads once The Beatles were done.
“After the end of The Beatles I was faced with certain alternatives,” he says. “One was to give up music entirely and do God knows what. Another was to start a super-band with very famous people, Eric Clapton and so on. I didn’t like either so I thought: How did The Beatles start?”
“It was a bunch of mates who didn’t know what they were doing,” he continued. “That’s when I realised maybe there is a third alternative: to get a band that isn’t massively famous, to not worry if we don’t know what we’re doing because we would form our character by learning along the way. It was a real act of faith. It was crazy, actually.”
McCartney then said he watched Johnny Cash one night with his wife, Linda, and found his idea for a new band.
“We were in bed one night,” he said, “newly married, when Johnny Cash came on the telly with a new band he’d formed with Carl Perkins, a big hero of mine. There they were, playing with some country musicians I had never heard of, looking like they were having fun.”
“I thought: here’s Johnny, he’s back, he’s doing it. So I turned to Linda and said: Do you want to form a band? And she went: ‘Sure.’ That’s how our relationship was. Do you want to go and live on a farm in Scotland? ‘Why not?’”
Wings are set to release the 50th anniversary reissue of their seminal album, ‘Band On The Run’, including some new ‘underdub’ mixes on February 2. “This is ‘Band on the Run’ in a way you’ve never heard before,” said McCartney of the new mixes.
“When you are making a song and putting on additional parts, like an extra guitar, that’s an overdub. Well, this version of the album is the opposite, underdubbed.”
In other news, Paul McCartney paid tribute to Wings band member Denny Laine, who passed away aged aged 79 last December.
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Alex Rigotti
NME
