maybe I'm amazed ❤️‍🔥

LONDON TOWN

Gerry McGee: By the end of June, the band played thirty-four concerts in twentyone cities before more than 600,000 people. Tickets for the New York Madison Square Garden shows sold out in four hours, and 40,000 tickets for the Los Angeles Forum concerts sold out in three hours and fifteen minutes. Tickets sold out at some places within two hours. This was in the day when people actually stood in line to buy tickets, long before the era when the Internet and Ticketmaster enabled almost immediate sellouts. The 67,100 people who turned up at the Seattle Kingdome broke the record for the largest turnout for an indoor concert by a single act. The massiveness of the Kingdome required three days for the crew to build the concert’s set. Wings grossed $336,000 in Philadelphia, making that appearance one of the biggest box office receipts of 1976. In addition, the two-hour and fifteen-minute concert featured only Wings. Unlike most concerts by other artists, there was no opening act. The Wings Over America tour was covered more extensively than perhaps any other concert of the decade. The major television networks and major newspapers carried several accounts of the tour, and such was the magnitude of Wings Over America that the New York Times even ran a story on the concert ticket sales. The concerts attracted celebrities including Cher, who saw the show with Elton John, Jack Nicholson, Angelica Huston, Carole King, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and Neil Sedaka. Paul remembered Sedaka visiting the band backstage after a concert.

“He’s a very sort of sweetie guy,” Paul said. ‘He said to Linda, ‘Oh, I listened so hard. I listened to every single note you sang, honey, and there was not one note out of tune. You were great!’ She loved that.”

Danny Fields: By the time Wings were on their first American tour, in 1976, Linda had come a very long way from the frightened weeping amateur she'd been on the eve of the group's first European concerts. Ben Fong-Torres, one of Rolling Stone's most respected writers, was sent to cover the show in Detroit, and after referring several times to the slagging she'd been taking ('McCartney and his wife and band have weathered six years of criticism and misunderstanding . . .; Paul says he ignores criticism . . .; Linda has long been abused, written off. . .'), the writer approaches her ('she is, you can understand, very defensive') at a sound check and asks her about 'the criticism that has already built over her celebration of her place in the kitchen [as in the song "Cook of the House"]'. Linda replies: 'My answer is always, "Fuck off." . . . People don't have to buy it, don't have to listen to it. It's like having parents on your back, this criticizing.' Very telling - Linda has put the current situation into a context she can equate with her life before her marriage to Paul. 'You have criticism in school,' she continues. 'When you get out of school, you want to be free. This is a great band, and this is great fun, and that's all we care about.' Denny Laine offers: 'We're pretty good critics of ourselves. We don't need all these bums coming along and telling us, "Hey, man .. ." The writer's back is up. He accuses them of being insular, 'with no room for sounding boards and outside opinions'. Of course that's his position; he's a rock journalist and he expects to have input. He wants, as we have all done, to have the world think that performers tremble at the words of the critics and reporters, and indeed many do. But the artists believe, for some odd reason, that it is they who are making the music. It is a never-ending battle. 'We always know what's wrong,' Linda tells Ben. Spoken like a true musician. Defensive, yes, as he has pointed out earlier in the story. But she's now strong enough to defend herself and her band, in effect telling the critical community exactly how she feels about them, at long last: 'Fuck off.' Our heroine is now so much more confident than she had been when Paul first insisted that she become part of his new band. Even if she's not, she's acting that way. She's talking back to Rolling Stone; her first photograph used on a Rolling Stone cover, by the way, was of Eric Clapton.