If a man would air a plane, would a lady suffer a jet?
The title track to Band on the Run is Paul McCartney's most gangsta moment. Who else could hit Number One with a prison-break epic starring the Jailer Man and Sailor Sam? - Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone, 2010.
Jon Landau, Rolling Stone, 1/31/74:
Up until now, the critical assumption has been that McCartney's lyrics mean little if anything, that he is a mere stylist, playing games with words and sounds. And it is of course possible that the words on Band on the Run don't mean (or weren't intended to mean) as much as I think they do. But I'll take a chance, and say that Band on the Run is an album about the search for freedom and the flight from restrictions on his and Linda's personal happiness. It is about the pursuit of freedom from his past as a Beatle, freedom from the consequences of the drug busts that have kept him from the United States and forced him into thinking of himself as an outlaw (witness the album cover, as well as the title). It is also about two people becoming what they want to be, trying to decide what they want to do, and asking to be accepted for what they are now rather than what they were then.
If the listener were to ignore the music and the skill with which McCartney has developed his theme, the entire enterprise might seem banal. But he holds the record together through the continual intimation that he enjoys the search for freedom more than he might enjoy freedom himself. In the best tradition of outlaw mythology, he makes being on the run sound so damned exciting.
... On Band on the Run, there are two separate searches going on: McCartney's for himself and the listener's for McCartney. The title song begins soberly, its narrator in jail, his music depressed. Both he and the album explode at the moment of his escape, the newfound exhilaration suggesting that there could have been no such pleasure without the preceding pain and that while McCartney prefers the former to the latter, he has learned how to cope with both.
From the moment of escape, everything on the album eventually evokes the notion of flight. "Jet," a superb piece of music with an obscure lyric about the McCartneys' dog, suggests an overwhelming desire not only to get away but to get away to someone. It ends up a love song, a tribute to both a person and a state of mind, propelled forward by a grand performance.
... Perhaps McCartney can face death with humor [on "Picasso's Last Words (Drink to Me)"] because, as the hilarious rock & roll of "1985" suggests, he plans to stick around for some time. It would have been easy to end Band on the Run with the cut's happy projection of the future, but McCartney doesn't take the easy way out this time around. At the exciting conclusion of "1985," he segues into a short reprise of the title cut, a move suggesting once again that he isn't really sure that he wants to give up the search and the fight. They have become ends in themselves, part of his life, part of the mythology he has built up around himself, part of the fantasy he helped to create about the life of rock stars.
5 months ago2 
[Landau] The album's abrupt and surprising ending suggests that the McCartneys are afraid they may find what they are looking for only to discover that it, too, fails to satisfy them. Thus they end with only one commitment: to remain a band on the run. That decision has resulted in (with the possible exception of John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band) the finest record yet released by any of the four musicians who were once called the Beatles.
LOL I'll never forget this song! I was in the house when my husband came running in from his car, and said, "I just heard this song that sounds like Paul McCartney? And it ended with Band On The Run? " I said it is McCartney, and that awesome song you just heard is Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five. The look on his face was priceless! :) :) Thanks for everything Paul! ♥♥♥