Paul McCartney and Wings’ Red Rose Speedway was supposed to be a double album, something indicative of a band at the peak of its powers. Instead, Wings disintegrated not long after its April 1973 release, as guitarist Henry McCullough and then drummer Denny Seiwell left.
It was as shocking as the resulting studio effort was uneven. Seiwell, already a rock-steady vet, had been with Paul McCartney since 1971’s Ram, creating a sturdy backbone for the early days of Wings that followed. The free-spirited McCullough had joined in time for the group’s biggest early successes, including the chart-topping “My Love” and the James Bond theme “Live and Let Die.”
When one domino fell, it seemed, they both did. McCartney, wife Linda McCartney and stalwart Denny Laine were left to move on with sessions in Lagos for what would become the multi-platinum Band on the Run.
“Henry is a very organic musician,” Denny Seiwell told us, in an exclusive Something Else! Sitdown. “One day, we were up in Scotland working on Band on the Run, rehearsing it, and Paul pushed him into the corner. The vibe was, we had become a band. Henry, though, he liked to play things differently every time. He had a little jazz in him. And Paul kind of pushed Henry into the corner about playing his part the same way, every time we played.”
Seiwell pointed to the now-legendary solo from “My Love” as an example. “I think Henry had just had enough of it, and he left. I had no plans on leaving, but at that point I felt like we had really gone to great lengths to become a band, and to go down to Lagos and record Band on the Run without Henry? It was just going to be a bunch of overdubs again like Ram. I tried talking to Paul into maybe postponing it for a month, and breaking in another guitar player, so we could be more organic about recording. He didn’t go for that.”
Heavily orchestrated, the Wings’ gold-selling “My Love” would also become heavily debated, to the point that it helped split a very productive edition of Wings in pieces. Henry McCullough fought for, and won, the chance to play the ballad’s searing guitar solo his way, but in the end everything else was lost.
“It was like playing a hand of cards, and having a royal flush,” McCullough said, in a separate Something Else! Sitdown, before his 2016 death. “Paul had this particular thing that he wanted me to play. That was the point of no return. I said: ‘I’m sorry; I can’t do this. I have to be left as the guitar player in the band. I want to have my own input, too.’ He says: ‘What are you going to do?’ I didn’t know. I simply said: ‘I’m going to change things.’”
McCullough ultimately nailed his “My Love” solo live in the studio: “I was half terrified, half excited. I just started playing, and that’s how it turned out – just as you hear it. That flabbergasted Paul, and there was just silence for a while. I thought: ‘Uh oh, I have to do it again.’ Paul came over and said: ‘Have you been rehearsing?’ [Laughs.] I liked to have that freedom. I wanted to put my cards on the table. He asked me in the band, but I didn’t want him to tell me what to play.”
Red Rose Speedway tends to reflect that turbulent, pressure-filled atmosphere. Paul McCartney’s continued struggles with the final tracklisting meant that songs from earlier sessions for Ram bobbed back to the surface (“Little Lamb Dragonfly” and “Get on the Right Thing”), while others were left to future live albums or b-sides (“Soily,” “Country Dreamer,” “Mama’s Little Girl”) or Wings solo records (Denny Laine’s “I Would Only Smile,” Linda McCartney’s “Seaside Woman”). Some were simply discarded.
As with Ram, which had only been credited to Paul and Linda, the album boasts a few Beatles-ish moments. The episodic “Get on the Right Thing” and 11-minute closing medley recall elements from the Abbey Road era, but they’re paired with songs with a only a shadow of that gumption. The addition of Wings’ stand-alone single “Live and Let Die” would have added some needed muscle. In the end, however, Red Rose Speedway ended up with a very appropriate feel: It was simply an unfocused mess.
“I never thought about it twice,” McCullough told us, ruminating on his departure from Wings. “We were supposed to go off to Lagos, and about a week before, I walked out. I regret that, the way that I did it, because it was probably the most unprofessional thing I’ve ever done in my life. That created a ripple, though, and Denny Seiwell walked out, too. … It just wasn’t going to work out for the rest of us in Wings – unless, of course, you had an apron on, if you know what I mean.”
McCullough would reunite with Joe Cocker, with whom he had appeared at Woodstock, then record an album for George Harrison’s Dark Horse label. He later worked with Donovan, Roy Harper, Eric Burdon and Ronnie Lane, while establishing a well-regarded, though sporadic solo career before being felled by a damaging 2012 heart attack from which he never really recovered.
For Denny Seiwell, the end with Paul McCartney remains bittersweet. He’d been there for Wings’ first stirrings, had seen it through its earliest triumphs, but couldn’t get past a financial situation that kept the other members from sharing equally in the band’s successes. Continuing legal issues with the breakup of the Beatles, he adds, kept everything in limbo.
“I was really pushing for an agreement; we were all working on a handshake,” Seiwell told us. “We had no contracts or anything like that, in those days. I don’t think we could have even had one that was legal, because of the Apple receivership and the court case that was going on at the moment. So I was there at the best, and the worst time, if you will.”
Seiwell collaborated with Art Garfunkel, the Band’s Rick Danko and others before returning to his early inspiration, jazz. He eventually rekindled a relationship with Paul McCartney, who turned Band on the Run into a career-defining moment with the trio-edition of Wings.
“It’s one of the few regrets that I have in my life – that I didn’t sit Paul down and say: ‘Hey, we gotta talk about this,'” Denny Seiwell admitted. “Today, we’re still great friends. We love each other; we talk all the time. I wish him the best. But it’s one of those moments that I wish I would have handled it differently. I never made music with anybody like Paul, and I had a very, very special thing.”
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Well, they may have been there for “the band’s biggest early successes”, but also for its biggest early failure: the supremely awful Wings “Wild Life” album. Let’s hear somebody explain THAT one.