Jet
“Jet” announces itself before it asks permission. The opening guitar figure is one of the most recognizable in McCartney’s catalog outside of anything he made with the Beatles. The song was recorded at EMI Nigeria Studios in Lagos in 1973 with a stripped-down lineup. Henry McCullough and Denny Seiwell had quit the band just before the trip. What remained was Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney and Denny Laine. McCartney later described the studio as basic, noting the band had to construct their own vocal booth on arrival. What came out of those sessions was not cautious. The song runs on a kind of forward momentum that sounds like confidence but was built in circumstances that required it.
McCartney wrote “Jet” on a hillside in Scotland. The farm had a pony named Jet and he took the name from there, hiking up a hill with a guitar and working the song out in the open air. He told GQ in 2018 that the words are probably about him and his father-in-law. Linda’s father, Lee Eastman, was a lawyer and the early days of marrying into that world gave McCartney the emotional material. He translated it into something harder to pin down than a love song. He said the Major in the lyrics is probably Eastman. The line about the suffragette reflects his sense that the father said one thing about women’s freedom and demonstrated another by resisting his daughter’s choice. McCartney rarely tells you what a song is about because the song is more interesting if he doesn’t.
Fifty-five years ago today, McCartney announced the lineup of his new, unnamed band to the press. The name Wings came six weeks later. “Jet” was released as a US single on January 28, 1974 and peaked at number seven on the Billboard Hot 100. It also reached number seven in the United Kingdom. The album it came from, Band on the Run, reached number one on both sides of the Atlantic. Wings went on to become the best-selling pop act of the 1970s. The band McCartney announced without a name fifty-five years ago today turned out to be one of the defining acts of the decade.