Paul McCartney Reveals How Johnny Cash Inspired Him To Start Wings

When The Beatles disbanded, Paul McCartney was at a loss on what to do next. During a new interview with MOJO, Macca revealed how Johnny Cash inspired him to start the next chapter in his career: form Wings.

“After the end of The Beatles I was faced with certain alternatives,” he recalled. “One was to give up music entirely and do God knows what. Another was to start a super-band with very famous people, Eric Clapton and so on. I didn’t like either so I thought: How did The Beatles start?”

“It was a bunch of mates who didn’t know what they were doing,” McCartney continued. “That’s when I realized maybe there is a third alternative: to get a band that isn’t massively famous, to not worry if we don’t know what we’re doing because we would form our character by learning along the way. It was a real act of faith. It was crazy, actually.”

It all came together when he and his wife Linda saw the country legend perform on television one fateful night. “We were in bed one night,” he said, “newly married, when Johnny Cash came on the telly with a new band he’d formed with Carl Perkins, a big hero of mine. There they were, playing with some country musicians I had never heard of, looking like they were having fun. I thought: here’s Johnny, he’s back, he’s doing it. So I turned to Linda and said: Do you want to form a band? And she went: ‘Sure.’ That’s how our relationship was. Do you want to go and live on a farm in Scotland? ‘Why not?’”

The McCartneys ended up cofounding Wings with Denny Laine. Paul shared a heartfelt tribute to his former bandmate when news of his passing broke last month.