From the S&S archives:
Paul McCartney and Wings, on tour in Munich

THERE WAS once a rich man who, dissatisfied with worldly success, searched the world seeking the True Meaning Of Life.

Finally, having determined that a certain lama living on a Himalayan foothill was in possession of the secret, he went to Tibet, found the lama and asked for the answer.

"Give all your wealth to the poor, wear a gunny sack and be a beggar for seven years, then come back," said the sage. The seeker did as he had been instructed, and after the long years as a mendicant, returned full of anticipation to the old man, who looked him straight in the eye and told him gravely:

"Life is a flower."

That's about the way it went with once-Beatle Paul McCartney who, with his band Wings, granted a brief press audience in Munich, after a concert there during their current world tour.

Jurg Marquard, editor of Pop, a European music magazine, had collected some photos of the Beatles taken in Germany when they were totally unknown, along with other memorabilia. Included was a copy of McCartney's German work permit from 1961, and a letter from McCartney to a German booker pleading for the chance to play again in that country.

There was also one of the Beatles' original German club contracts, specifying a pay scale of 40 marks per person per night (about $10 in those days).

It had all been assembled in a book, bound in leather and inscribed, and all the press people and other hangers-on who saw it the afternoon of the show at the Munich Hilton thought it a very nice gift.

When it was presented after the concert, there was the perfunctory "Thanks," and an "I'll look at it while I'm relaxing." And what had been a carefully assembled and rather unique gift shrank suddenly into just another invasion, like the sweater that someone threw up on the stage during the show, fated probably to be handed over to whoever it is that puts all these things in numbered bins to be forgotten.

As McCartney was leaving the press room for the limousine, up popped a bearded fellow who started to say, "I love you Paul. Even though I was not a press man, but I married a English woman from —"

That was all he got out — he had said enough to be evaluated as a Nowhere Man by a bodyguard-looking person and he was gently but firmly pushed aside.

"One last question, Paul," said someone with better credentials. "How did you like the book?"

"Linda's book?" replied McCartney (wife Linda will have a book of photos on the market shortly). But the question was about the gift.

"The book he just gave me? Wait'll you see Linda's book!" Paul grinned and floated away.

These reactions are the norm for the rich and famous; the guard at the dressing room door is a standard feature of the commercial entertainment world. And no doubt if he let everyone touch him who wanted to, Paul would have been picked clean to the bone by now.

But it's kind of a sad thrill, like pulling the whiskers off Macy's Santa, to see up close that Paul McCartney, who has given us some of the most significant music of our time, isn't really interested in talking seriously to anybody who has nothing more to offer than a feeling of shared vision. Macy's Santa was ultimately only real in the movies; Strawberry Fields are only the music playing in your head.

McCartney has acquired a reputation lately for giving cryptic and often caustic answers in interviews. He is trying very hard to shake off the Beatles, but the image he created for himself in the '60s sticks like a tar baby.

Even six years after the band went their separate ways, most reporters can't seem to help asking about reunion possibilities if they get the chance. There was a fellow there from AFN-Munich who — after burning up most of the 15 minutes we had with questions like "Will your next album be a concept album?" and "How do you get an idea?" — just had to ask the question, prefaced with "I know you don't want to answer — "

"We love this question," interrupted Linda McCartney ever so sweetly. "It's a new one!"

It wasn't a new one.

"I'll tell you the real reason," answered Paul. "It is that I'm in a group called Wings. And that's it — that's the answer."

As for concept albums (as the band relaxed after the show with Johnnie Walker & Coke): "We don't think in terms of concept albums, you know," said Paul, "because that's the kind of thing people talk about when you've made the album."

"That's a label that other people put on it," added Denny Laine, who co-writes much of the Wings' material with Paul.

Paul: "We just think we're gonna make the best music we can.

Denny and Linda in unison: "Tunes."

Paul: "We wanta make it better than anything that's been before. It's difficult, but that's what we try to do all the time. So we'll just see how good it is."

The next Wings album out in Europe will be Wings Over America, a live album recorded earlier on the tour and already out in the States.

Paul rejected any attempt to put his current music in a cubbyhole.

"In the early days they used to call everything Mersey Beat — that's a terrible beat. And then they started calling everything psycho rock, and then they get into this and they get into that. I think we do some hard stuff, some soft stuff; we just play our kind of music, its neither hard nor soft nor middle. It's just a variety of sounds.

"I think everyone contributes a lot, you know. If you take it one by one, Jimmy is the main guitar player — he contributes most of the kinda `hot licks.' Linda plays keyboards and sings, so she's contributing that way — I play bass, piano and lead sing, so I'm contributing. Denny sings a lot and writes with me quite a bit — we write together; and Joe's a hell of a drummer."

Then AFN (jumping in at the speed of sound) wanted to know whether the show, which has been basically the same throughout the tour, would be different in England.

"We may change a little bit for England," said Paul, "but we've taken this show that you saw tonight around the world, so we may not change it. We've only got three more dates to play, in England, so we may just finish out with this act, a little bit of changes maybe. But then that'll be the last time we play this, and then we'll change the whole thing completely and with a new album."

"And how do you come up with an idea for changing things completely?" asked AFN of Paul.

"Just like this (rearranges his body slightly) ... what you do, you sit down you ... you know, like Rodin's The Thinker. You just do that for a while. And after a while you go POP! (throws up his arms) — and you've got an idea!" Paul and Linda demonstrated in unison.

The interview was theatre without substance — for the benefit of Mr. Paul, you might say, paraphrasing the Sergeant Pepper album line about Mr. Kite.

The Munich show was part of a four-stop European tour that included gigs in Venice, Vienna and Zagreb.

Wings' Band on the Run album has just been released in Russia. McCartney, announcing that the audience in Zagreb was not grey, Western mythologies about the East notwithstanding, echoed the sentiments of other musicians who have played in Communist Europe — people are the same everywhere, at least when the music's playing.

The Venice concert, the first time a rock group has taken over St. Marks square for a live concert, was a benefit for the city, to stop decay, restore works of art and buildings and prevent the town from sinking.

The money (about $50,000) from the concert goes to city authorities who will decide how to spend it after talks with UNESCO (the United Nations' Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

"They told us that our concert would help keep the city going" said Paul in Venice. "So, we said fine, take the profits from the show and lift a building up. I hope it didn't cost us too much. But if you can't trust UNESCO, who can you trust?"

Tony Brainsby, press liaison for the group, said later that 15,000 tickets were sold in Venice but that another 15,000-20,000 people pushed down the barriers and got in free.

Although his name is conspicuously absent from the advertising, or at least printed no larger than the names of the rest of Wings, McCartney was in the spotlight onstage in Munich's futuristic Olympiahalle — literally, and for the sellout crowd.

They loved it all, but liked it best when Paul sang "Maybe I'm Amazed," "Lady Madonna," "Blackbird," and "Yesterday." Wings put on a well-rehearsed, tight '70s rock show, with strobes and bubbles and laser beams and all that, and the variety of material was reminiscent of the White Album (oops, almost said it again).

Wings is the show band the Beatles could have developed into if things had gone differently. The Beatles gave up on tours when they were continually drowned out by screamers in stadiums; they existed only on records and film — at least for those outside the inner circles — for years before the split.

The sounds on those albums and the smiling faces in Yellow Submarine are still as real as they ever were, and in a very real sense the Beatles are still together. They just haven't made any new records for a while. And probably won't.

Linda McCartney has been on the receiving end of a lot of rather nasty remarks in the music press. Either she gets depicted as a groupie who hit the jackpot and who should be graceful enough to stay out of sight, or as a mediocre musician who gets to play with the band because she's in the right place, but who-is probably a good person.

I couldn't help listening closely for mistakes.

The most glaring ones were minor, and committed not by Linda, but by Paul, whose voice seems to be charging somewhat — he missed a couple of the high notes.

If she's the world's greatest keyboard player it wasn't apparent on the stage in Munich, and neither is she the best rock singer in the world. But she did her bit and so did everyone else — and the band has a standard policy of only two encores no matter how much they scream for more. Wings is a rock band, not an exercise in technical complexities.

One very real objection to Linda for people who think the Beatles are not of the past is that her presence goes a long way toward dissolving that myth. She's an upfront reminder that things have changed, that Paul is somebody's daddy and somebody's husband and might actually prefer to live a distressingly conventional family life when he thinks no one is looking, Funky Paul rather than Pablo Fanques.

Besides the above-mentioned Beatle tunes, the show included "Jets," "Live and Let Die," "My Love," "Listen To What The Man said," the current hit single, "Let 'Em In," and more Wings tunes.

Joe English, the only American in the band, brought his grandfather with him from New York. "He's having a good time," said English, whose offstage spiciness belies his frantic drumming onstage.

McCartney also has a British-American horn section on the tour, to duplicate the sounds from the recording studio.

Denny Laine will have an album of Buddy Holly tunes out shortly and will be trying to pull a single hit from it; Jim McCulloch will be putting out a single soon as well. Both are real '70s rockers, evidenced in Laine by a song that was his own, a ballsy rocker that is very up-to-date and very un-Beatlish; yet he also sang the lead on an acoustic "Richard Cory," and it was very effective. McCulloch played the Lennon riffs on the old songs as well as Lennon did on the records.

Wings is a good rock band; they put on a good show. But the reasons for their box office success lie as much in the view of a Beatle that is offered as it does in the music of Wings. Seeing McCartney doing tunes live that the Beatles only did in the studio is well worth the price of admission.

No matter how hard he tries to pretend that the Beatles aren't important anymore and have nothing to do with the artistic and commercial prominence of Wings, McCartney is gonna carry that weight a long time.