Paul McCartney counted the song in, and nothing happened. In his own words from the book Wingspan, there was “nothing. Just silence.” He looked around, and Linda McCartney, standing at the electric piano, mouthed to him that she had forgotten the chords.
The song was “Wild Life,” the title track of the first Wings album. The place, by most accounts, was Leeds Town Hall in northern England, on February 16, 1972, in the middle of the very first tour Wings ever played. The audience started laughing, because they thought it was part of the act. Paul walked over to the keyboard to help her out and discovered he couldn’t remember the chords either. For a moment, by his account, there was real panic. Then Linda found them, the band came in, and the song went on with everybody’s heart pounding.
It Was Paul’s Idea, Not Hers
Before she married Paul in 1969, Linda Eastman made her name behind a camera, not a microphone. She had photographed Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix and The Doors, and in May 1968 her portrait of Eric Clapton made her the first woman to shoot a cover for Rolling Stone.
She was plain about how she ended up in a band. In a 1975 interview with Melody Maker, she said:
“It was his idea, it wasn’t like me saying: ‘Listen, I can do this…’ If he hadn’t said anything I wouldn’t have done it.”
She added that she had never tried to sing or play before, and that her parents’ attempt at piano lessons when she was young hadn’t stuck.
After the Beatles broke up, Paul McCartney wanted a real working band he could take on the road, and he wanted Linda in it. Decades later, in a 2016 BBC interview, he admitted the early Wings weren’t very good and that people were right when they said Linda couldn’t play keyboards. “But John couldn’t play guitar when we started,” he pointed out.
A Van, the Kids and the Dogs
The tour itself was Paul’s way of starting over from scratch. On February 8, 1972, Wings left London heading north with no dates booked. Along with Denny Laine, Henry McCullough and Denny Seiwell came a couple of roadies, an equipment truck, the dogs and the children.
The plan, such as it was, was to drive up to a university, ask whether the band could play, and set up wherever the students would have them. The first stop was the University of Nottingham on February 9, a lunchtime show, something Paul hadn’t done since his days at the Cavern Club. Ten more shows followed over the next two weeks, from York and Hull to Swansea and Oxford. Wings skipped the Beatles songs entirely.
None of it was glamorous. They didn’t book a place to stay until the day of each show, and they were thrown out of one hotel in Hull. Paul later remembered how he and Linda turned an opened drawer into a cot for baby Stella, lining it with blankets and sheets.
It was in the middle of all that, in front of more than a thousand people in Leeds, that Linda’s mind went blank.
How Linda Saw That Night
Paul usually tells the “Wild Life” story as a comedy. In a 2013 interview he called it “hilarious really,” and in Wingspan he described those first shows as a baptism of fire. One later newspaper account placed the forgotten chords in York, but most tellings, including Paul’s own, put it at the Leeds show.
Linda’s own account, printed in the Wings tour program later that year, was one short sentence:
“I made a mistake at the beginning of ‘Wild Life’ – forgot the chords. But I didn’t feel bad about it.”
She talked more openly about the nerves in 1975. During rehearsals, she said, she used to get “really, really nervous” whenever a solo part came up. Paul remembered telling her, “Everyone gets nerves, you know, particularly if you haven’t done it much.” She got over it, he said, the more confident she grew with the music.
The Ones Who Became Linda Fans
The press was far less kind than the students. In that same 1975 interview, Linda said the critics “really got in there,” and she put it bluntly: before she married Paul, she got along great with people, and then all of a sudden she was “this ogre.”
Paul McCartney saw something else happening in those little university halls. Some of the kids who came out, he later said, had never been especially into the Beatles. They “just became Linda fans,” and he said that was where all of that started.
By the summer of 1972, a rumor was going around that Linda was about to quit Wings. She shot it down in Record Mirror:
“Quit the band! I have only just joined. I love playing with Wings. It’s great playing to an audience. I never knew how good it was.”
Linda McCartney played in Wings until the band ended in 1981, then stayed on the stage beside Paul through his world tour in 1993. She died of breast cancer in April 1998, at 56.
Looking back in 2016, Paul summed up those shaky first months in a single line: “We knew Linda couldn’t play, but she learned, and looking back on it, I’m really glad we did it.”