Alexander’s was a legendary department store around here but I only ever went there once, as they were going out of business; I couldn’t have been more than 10 or 11. I dug through hundreds of albums in the record department but it was all picked over, with only stuff like Cher and Black Oak Arkansas left…and this: “Wild Life,” the so-so first album by Paul McCartney and Wings. How bad? When the best track on an album by arguably the best songwriter of the rock era is a cover of someone else’s song (“Love Is Strange”), that’s saying something. My meager $2 spent didn’t go to waste—decades later, I was fortunate enough to have half the band autograph it for me, although it was the two Dennys (Denny Laine and Denny Seiwell) and not the two McCartneys!
