The One Musician Brave Enough to Go Against Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney is practically a god among musicians. Any aspiring songwriter who found themselves standing near Macca would probably pass out from excitement or genuflect in reverence to the man who effortlessly birthed ‘Hey Jude’. But despite his legendary status, McCartney never claimed to be perfect. In fact, one musician in Wings dared to speak up when he thought Macca's guitar prowess wasn’t working out.

Throughout McCartney's career, the last thing anyone would want to do is tell him how to sing a certain line or how a guitar is supposed to be played. Out of The Beatles, he was always considered the resident perfectionist, and he was never afraid to speak his mind when he thought that a song wouldn’t work with a certain performance.

But somewhere along the line, McCartney started to embrace the idea of being a little bit more ramshackle than normal. Outside of the quirkiness of his debut, Wild Life might be seen as one of the most fractured albums of his entire career, featuring a barely-held-together version of Wings that shows up for the better part of a half hour for a bunch of loose jams and a few token structured tunes.

When Red Rose Speedway came out, though, McCartney had started to find his voice again. The group was still his baby, but the thought of them releasing a double record didn’t sit well with his label, leading to a lot of the best moments on the record being relegated to B-sides or being left on the cutting room floor.

Despite having to sit through tunes like ‘Loup (1st Indian on the Moon)’, McCartney did have one ace up his sleeve with ‘My Love’. The whole tune felt like a natural extension of the syrupy love songs that he was known for in the past, but taken on its own, some pieces were dangerously close to going into mushy ballad territory that made people queasy back in the day. That is, until Henry McCullough spoke up.

Wings was still dictated by McCartney with Denny Laine as a co-captain, but McCullough was the first one willing to take a chance when he motioned to include his own guitar solo on ‘My Love’, with McCartney recalling, “We knew exactly what we would be doing, and then just before the take Henry came over and whispered in my ear, ‘Do you mind if I try something different on the solo?’ I had to make one of those decisions – to stick with what we’d rehearsed or to run with his new idea. At the risk of messing the thing up, I went with his idea, and he pulled a great new solo out of left field. He really rose to the occasion.”

While the same McCartney-style solo from ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ is sorely missed here, there’s no other solo that could have taken McCullough's spot. There are a few pieces that tend to be a bit more bluesy, but for a song that has sweetness dripping out of its every pore, there needs to be some moment of levity where things actually start sounding a bit nastier.

Because that was always the key to what made The Beatles work so well. Each of them had a way of balancing the dark and light sides of their songwriting, and on this one track, McCullough provided the perfect foil to McCartney’s traditional song structure.