Books Review: Guitar With Wings by Laurence Juber
Guitar With Wings makes clear that Laurence Juber, during a sideman stint that lasted some three years, learned things large and small from Paul McCartney. He spends this sumptuous photo book celebrating the good (adeeply underrated album, a hit single, the chance to work alongside a childhood hero) and forgiving the bad (the silly love songs, the silly drug bust that essentially ended Wings, McCartney’s even sillier assertion that George Martin broke them up).
It seems Juber, a member of Wings from 1978-81, always had a keen sense of what this opportunity meant — absorbing everything he could from McCartney, but also from his other bandmates and from McCartney’s photographer wife. Guitar With Wings, in many ways, wouldn’t have been possible but for Linda’s passion for shooting pictures. Juber caught the bug, too. Meanwhile, the McCartneys relationship proved inspirational, as well. “The couple-consciousness of Paul and Linda McCartney,” Juber says, “proved to be a template for my own romantic and creative relationship with my wife Hope.” In keeping, Guitar With Wings, due May 28, 2014 via Dalton Watson Fine Books, is about more than music, about more than Juber’s lone full-length contribution to the McCartney discography, 1979′s Back to the Egg. It’s about a young musician whose dreams suddenly came completely true, but one who brought a surprisingly mature perspective to the journey.
Source: Something Else Reviews
