That bad, bad time, exacerbated by the lawsuit McCartney filed on December 31, 1970, after John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr appointed the mob-boss-like New York accountant Allen Klein as the Beatles’ manager, led to McCartney’s remarkable second act. He was in bed one night with his American wife, Linda, having escaped London for a remote three-bedroom farmhouse in Campbeltown, Scotland, when Johnny Cash came on the television, playing with some country musicians he had never heard of. “I thought, here’s Johnny, he’s doing it. So I turned to Linda and said, ‘Do you want to form a band?’ And she went, ‘Sure.’”
So begins the story of Man on the Run, Morgan Neville’s film about McCartney’s post-Beatles life. Neville is adept at tales of adversity — his 2013 documentary 20 Feet from Stardom follows the backing singers whose job it is to make the stars sound good — and the film is really a tale of going back to basics, from fixing up a tumbledown cottage in Scotland to starting a new band from scratch, not easy when you’re the most famous musician in the world. As Mick Jagger says: “I’m not very good at fixing roofs, so I can’t really relate. But he wanted to be grounded in an ordinary life because the Beatles were free of any grounding.”
