Paul McCartney

What is there left to know about Paul McCartney in 2025? Actually, quite a bit. The octogenarian megastar is seemingly ever-present, popping up on social media feeds with his affable avuncularity, his relentlessly sunny, two thumbs up ‘tude. Yet despite the steady trickle of Beatles scholarship that continues to be published, including Ian Leslie’s insightful book, “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs,” earlier this year, McCartney is a cipher, a blank page. He has masterfully created the illusion of transparency, yet his life remains stubbornly opaque. Does the man ever lose his temper? Has he ever cheated on his taxes? If there is a chink in McCartney’s armor, we are still looking for it.

Denny Laine, Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney and Denny Seiwell in Osterley Park, London, in 1971.

(Barry Lategan / MPL Communications )

Yet according to this new book, an oral history of McCartney’s band Wings, there is still much to be excavated from what is the most examined life in pop music history, especially when it comes from the horse’s mouth. The book is ostensibly “authored” by McCartney even though it is an oral history that has been edited by Ted Widmer, an estimable historian and a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton. Widmer has also written third-person interstitial information to guide the reader through the story.

Stitching together interviews with McCartney, his wife Linda, erstwhile Beatles, and the various musicians and other key players who found themselves pulled into the Wings orbit across the nearly decadelong tenure of the band, “Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run” is a smooth, frictionless ride across the arc of McCartney’s ’70s career, when he continued to mint more hits, and secured a lock on a massive career that is presently in its 55th year.

Joe English, Jimmy McCulloch, Linda McCartney, Paul McCartney and Denny Laine in 1976.

(Clive Arrowsmith / MPL Communications)

Hard as it is to fathom, McCartney has had pangs of doubt concerning his art and career, never more so than in the immediate aftermath of the Beatles’ breakup in 1970, when he found himself at loose ends, unsure of how to follow up the most spectacular first act in show business history. In the immediate aftermath of that epochal event, McCartney retreated to a 183-acre sheep farm on the Kintyre Peninsula in Argyllshire, Scotland, with his wife Linda and their young family. According to the book, there was uncertainty about his ability to write songs that could stand alongside his Beatles work. Hence, his first solo offering, “McCartney,” was mostly tentative, half-baked notions for songs, interlaced with a few fully realized compositions like “Maybe I’m Amazed,” all recorded by McCartney in his home studio.

Home recording sessions for the McCartney album in London, 1970.

( Linda McCartney / © 1970 Paul McCartney under exclusive licence to MPL Archive LLP)

But the gentleman farmer couldn’t stay down on the farm for long. Eventually, the old impulse to be in a band and to perform became McCartney’s new imperative, but he would go about it in an entirely different way. No more camping out in Abbey Road studios, the Beatles’ favorite laboratory, hiring out string sections and horn sections, ruminating over tracks for as long as it took. McCartney would instead take an incremental DIY approach, starting modestly and progressing accordingly. Instead of meticulously recording tracks, records would be dashed off spontaneously. Bob Dylan became a kind of North Star for how to approach a record: “Bob Dylan had done an album in a week,” says McCartney in the book. “I thought, ‘That’s a good idea.’’’

Paul McCartney, Wings Over the World tour, Philadelphia, 1976.

(Robert Ellis / MPL Communications)

It was around this time that McCartney hired Denny Laine, who became (aside from wife Linda) the only full-time member of Wings for the duration of the band’s life. The two had met years earlier, when the Beatles were partying in Birmingham with Laine and his band the Diplomats. “Truth be told, I needed a John,” McCartney admits in the book. The first Wings album, “Wild Life,” recorded in a barn on McCartney’s Scotland farm, was critically savaged, but listening to it now, it retains a certain homespun charm, the amiable slumming of a master musician tinkering with various approaches because he can and because it’s fun. A short tour of universities around the U.K. further contributed to the low-key vibe that McCartney was intent on maintaining; he was waiting for the right time to pounce on the American market, specifically, and reclaim his mantle as the King of Pop.

1973’s “Band on the Run” would be the album that cracked it wide open again for McCartney, but he was still in a rambling mood, this time eager to try one of EMI’s studios in Lagos, Nigeria. “It wasn’t the sort of paradise we thought it would be,” McCartney is quoted in the book, “but it didn’t matter, because we were basically spending a lot of time in the studio.” Once in Africa, Paul, Linda and Denny Laine were mugged, their tapes stolen. Another night, they were guests of the master afrobeat musician Fela Kuti, who invited the three to his Afrika Shrine club for an indelible performance: “It hit me so hard,” says Paul. “It was like boom, and I’ve never heard anything as good, ever, before or since.”

McCartney II recording sessions, Lower Gate Farm, Sussex, 1979.

(Linda McCartney / © 1979 Paul McCartney under exclusive licence to MPL Archive)

“Band on the Run” became an international smash and McCartney once again found himself playing arenas and stadiums with yet another iteration of Wings. It is also at this point that the story of Wings settles into a more of an “album-tour-album” narrative, save for a harrowing drug bust for pot in Japan on the eve of a Wings tour in January 1980, when McCartney spent nine days in jail. “I had all this really good grass, excellent stuff,” explains McCartney, who had cavalierly packed it in his suitcase. Once in jail he had to “share a bath with a bloke who was in for murder,” organizing “singsongs with other prisoners” until his lawyers arranged for his release. The bust would presage the dissolution of Wings; McCartney would release a solo album, “McCartney II,” in May.

Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney, Denny Seiwell and Denny Laine. Promotional photo shoot for “Wild Life,” 1971.

(Barry Lategan / © 1971 MPL Communications)

How you feel about the albums that Wings made after 1975’s excellent “Venus and Mars” will perhaps affect your judgment of the back half of “Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run.” But even a charitable fan will have a hard time making a strong claim for the albums that followed 1975’s “Venus and Mars,” which includes “London Town,” “At the Speed of Sound” and “Back to the Egg.” The book’s best stuff is to be found at the start, when the superstar was making his first baby steps toward renewed relevance, and then found it.

Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”

SANTA BARBARA — “In this next song,” said Paul McCartney, “we’d like you to sing along.”

Oh, this was the one?

By an hour or so into his concert Friday night at the Santa Barbara Bowl — basically somebody’s backyard by the standards of the former Beatle — McCartney had already gotten the capacity crowd to join in on a bunch of all-timers including “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “Love Me Do,” “Jet,” “Getting Better,” “Lady Madonna,” “Let Me Roll It” and “Got to Get You Into My Life.”

But for Sir Paul, even (or especially) at age 83, there’s always a way to take an audience higher.

So as his keyboard player plunked out the song’s lovably lopsided lick, McCartney and his band cranked through a fast and jumpy rendition of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” that left nobody any choice but to hop up and holler about the sweet certainty of life’s going on.

Paul McCartney and his band.

(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)

A sellout pretty much as soon as it was announced, Friday’s show was a kind of warm-up gig ahead of the launch next week of the latest leg of McCartney’s Got Back world tour, which began criss-crossing the globe in 2022 and will resume Monday night in Palm Desert after a nine-month break.

On the road he’s playing arenas and stadiums, but this hillside amphitheater seats only 4,500 or so; to make the evening even more intimate, fans had to lock their phones in little pouches on the way into the venue. (The presence of several cameras swooping around on cranes suggested that McCartney was filming the concert for some unstated purpose.)

“That’s our wardrobe change of the evening,” he said at one point after taking off his jacket, and indeed this was a slightly trimmed-down version of the flashy multimedia production that he brought to SoFi Stadium three years ago. That night in 2022, he played three dozen tunes over two and a half hours; on Friday he did a dozen fewer — no “Maybe I’m Amazed,” no “Band on the Run” — in about an hour and 45 minutes.

The advantage of the smallness, of course, was that you could really hear what McCartney and his longtime backup band were doing up there: the folky campfire vocal harmonies in “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” the propulsive groove driving “Get Back,” the barely organized chaos of a downright raunchy “Helter Skelter.”

Then again, that assumes that tracking those details is why anybody turned up in Santa Barbara.

Though he dropped an album of new solo songs in 2020, McCartney has been pretty deep in nostalgia mode since the 2021 release of Peter Jackson’s widely adored “Get Back” docuseries. He’ll tend the machine this fall with a new book about his years with Wings and an expanded edition of the Beatles’ mid-’90s “Anthology” series; next year, a documentary about the Wings era is due from director Morgan Neville; in 2028, director Sam Mendes will unveil the four separate biopics he’s making about each Beatle, with Paul Mescal in the role of McCartney.

Paul McCartney takes the stage.

(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)

All that looking back can make it hard for even a devoted fan to take in the legend standing before them in the flesh; instead of overwriting memories with fresh information, the mind steeped in myth can train itself to do the opposite (especially when the owner of that mind has shelled out hundreds of bucks for a concert ticket).

Yet you have to hand it to McCartney, whose face bore a dusting of silvery stubble on Friday: As predetermined as this audience was to have a good time, he was tapped into the energy of a musician making minute-to-minute decisions.

He opened the show with a zesty take on the Beatles’ “Help!,” which experts on the internet say he hadn’t played in concert since 1990, then followed it up with one of his quirkiest solo tunes in the disco-punk “Coming Up,” which he juiced with a bit of Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” theme.

After a flirty “Love Me Do,” he asked the women in the crowd to “gimme a Beatles scream,” then nodded approvingly at the sound. “Imagine trying to play through that,” he added.

“Jet” had a nasty swagger and “I’ve Got a Feeling” a sexy strut; “Live and Let Die,” meanwhile, was just as trashy as you’d hope.

McCartney told moving if familiar stories about meeting Jimi Hendrix and about his mother coming to him in the dream that inspired “Let It Be”; he also told one I’d never heard about screwing up a performance of “Blackbird” — “Lot of changes,” he said of the song’s complicated guitar part — in front of Meryl Streep. Because his wife Nancy was in the house, he said, he played “My Valentine,” a weepy piano ballad anyone but Nancy probably would’ve gladly exchanged for “Junior’s Farm” or “Drive My Car.”

But then what was that choice if not a commitment to the circumstances of the moment?

Paul McCartney arrives at the Santa Barbara Bowl.

(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)

Billy Joel reassured fans about his health on Monday.

The 76-year-old musician had previously canceled all of his scheduled concerts after announcing in May that he was diagnosed with normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH). NPH occurs when excess cerebrospinal fluid accumulates in the brain’s ventricles, with patients experiencing cognitive decline, difficulty walking and urinary incontinence, according to the Alzheimer’s Assn.

Joel’s recent concert performances worsened his symptoms, leading to hearing, vision and balance problems, he shared in a May 23 statement. While on Bill Maher’s podcast, “Club Random,” the “Piano Man” crooner said he often feels like he’s on a boat, but otherwise, he’s doing just fine.

“I feel good,” Joel said, seated at a piano. “They keep referring to what I have as a brain disorder so it sounds a lot worse than what I’m feeling.”

Joel noted that the condition is idiopathic, meaning no one knows the cause.

“I thought it must be from drinking,” he said, adding that he doesn’t drink anymore. “I used to, like a fish.”

Joel finished his decade-long residency at Madison Square Garden in July 2024 after 104 monthly shows at the venue. His now-canceled tour included dates across the U.S. and performances with Stevie Nicks, Rod Stewart and Sting.

The first installment of Joel’s documentary, “Billy Joel: And So It Goes,” premiered Friday on HBO. The two-part series takes a deep dive into the pianist’s journey from a bullied kid in Long Island to a legendary hitmaker, and features appearances from Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Pink and Sting.

Part 1 “is notable in how it reframes the narrative around his relationship with his former wife and manager Elizabeth Weber, explaining how she was instrumental in guiding his career and helping him become a superstar — and how songs like ‘Big Shot’ and ‘Stiletto’ were inspired by the rocky times in their marriage,” wrote Times television editor Maira Garcia. “It’s a compelling and nuanced portrait of an imperfect person who created timeless music and whose influence continues to reverberate.”

Part 2 of “And So It Goes” premieres Friday on HBO and HBO Max.