Wings Over America is a live album by the band Wings, released
in December 1976 on MPL Communications (in the US, it was released by MPL
Communications and Capitol). In its initial release, it was a triple album and
included a poster of the band, which reached number 8 in the UK charts and
peaked at number 1 in the US. The cover was designed by Hipgnosis, and features
a painting of an airliner about to open its cabin door. The album was a collection of recordings
gathered from Wings' Wings Over America part of their
world tour. A re-master was released in May 2013.
Originally, Wings Over America was to be a
two-record set of highlight performances, but this was rethought due to the
success of a bootleg called Wings from the Wings, released as a triple record
set, on red, white, and blue vinyl, recorded on 23 June 1976 at The Forum, in
California. This caused McCartney to redo the official release as a
three-record set which was compiled from all recorded shows of the band's
America leg of their world tour that spring, of which, McCartney listened to
all of the tapes and selected 5 of the best performances of the whole 28-song
set list. McCartney chose and mixed the final set of recordings after 6 weeks
of listening during October–November 1976, after having spent September and
October repeatedly performing. Numerous songs, however, were taken from the 23
June 1976 show. "Soily" was recorded on 7 June 1976 at McNichols
Sports Arena in Denver. Some recordings, however, received studio overdubs.
Wings' drummer, Joe English, said that the "overdubs were necessary
because of people singing out of tune".
Wings Over America was another success for Wings, reaching
number 1 in the US in early 1977 (the last in a 5-album stretch of consecutive
number 1 albums for Wings) and number 8 in the UK. For the five Beatles songs
included, McCartney elected to reverse the songwriting credit to
McCartney–Lennon. Neither former-songwriting partner John Lennon nor his wife
Yoko Ono publicly "voiced a word of disapproval about it." The album
came out just a few months after the end of the tour, selling 4 million copies
in the US alone. With each disc of the album counted as one unit of sales, this
would make sales of 12 million discs. The album was the first triple album by a
group to reach number 1, and was a critical success. The album was repressed a
month later, in January 1977. "Maybe I'm Amazed" was released as a
single, on 4 February 1977, peaking at number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart
in the US, and at number 28 on the UK chart. There are two related items to the
album: the TV documentary Wings Over the World and the Seattle show that was
filmed and released as the film Rockshow. Both of which, however, were released
3 years and 4 years, respectively, after the album.
Wings Over America was issued as a double-compact disc in 1984
on Columbia. The album was first released in the UK on compact disc on 26 May
1987 by Parlophone. The album, along with McCartney's Ram and Tug of War
albums, was reissued in the US on compact disc on 18 January 1988. The album
was issued by EMI two more times on CD, in 1989 and on 19 February 1990. A 1999 reissue of the album by Toshiba-EMI in
Japan reinstated the three-disc format from the original LP issue, and is the only
edition of the album to do this. Up to this point, the Japanese CD edition was
the only one that was re-mastered. On 14 April 2008, the album was released as
a digital download on both iTunes and Amazon. It was removed for some time off of
digital music sites in 2010 and 2011, but as of August 2011 it is available for
sale on iTunes. The album was reissued on 27 May 2013 as part of the Paul
McCartney Archive Collection. Rockshow was also reissued, this time on DVD and
Blu-ray, with its audio remixed into 5.1, on 10 June 2013.
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