A few days after Weinraub’s story, the New York Times published a defense of Weinstein — and a derisive attack on Hollywood — from the venerable Vincent Canby, who’s based in New York. “There’s still nothing quite as exhilarating as the spectacle of some of Hollywood’s toughest wheeler-dealers … [taking] umbrage at the shabby behavior of an upstart not yet in their club,” wrote Canby. Weinraub, one got the feeling, must have been smarting. And now New York-based chief Times film critic Janet Maslin, doing a Cannes wrap-up last Sunday, has fired yet another salvo. The story let Weinstein vent against what to his mind were Cannes’ myriad sins against him and his company. The story didn’t ever say exactly what Cannes had done to Miramax — one of the company’s films anchored the closing-night event — but it apparently had to do with not giving Weinstein enough prizes. The good old days when Miramax product like “Pulp Fiction” was taking home the Palme D’Or are long gone.

As a result, Maslin told us, Weinstein has “declared war” on Cannes. He “has long been galled by this event’s elitism and its predilection for dull, irrelevant films. ‘There’s something wrong with Cannes, and it needs to be fixed,’ he said angrily by telephone from the closing night party. ‘The luster of the festival is completely submerged. It’s losing its place in film history. It has the potential to be so much more than it is now, the potential to be so much more serious and less political. I’ve reached the frustration point, and I’m not scared to say so anymore.’”

It sounded like the lustrous Harvey was about to take his cell phone and go home. Indeed, wrote Maslin: “And if nothing changes? ‘Then I won’t come,’ Weinstein said.”

Quel fromage! Maslin, intoning the words “Harvey Weinstein” as reverentially as a star-struck flack at a Manhattan opening, didn’t bother to put Weinstein and his company into context for a lay reader. Nor did she bother to explain how the nefarious anti-Miramax conspiracy on the shores of the Riviera was carried out, whatever it was. And she didn’t ask anyone at the festival why they weren’t giving Harvey any prizes.

We’re sure a lot of the Cannes films were boring, but there are some greater ironies here. In the context of U.S. culture, many of Weinstein’s films inhabit the same vague artsy area that Cannes does, yet Weinstein has made millions by mainstreaming the art-film industry, packaging slightly higher than middlebrow fare to the multiplexes. His success was crowned last year with a best picture Oscar, the very image of mainstream, even vulgar, validation. Now he wants to keep his Cannes’ imprimatur, too. One suspects that a fairly independent-minded person like Maslin would have been more skeptical of his contradictory position, had not the film world’s odd geography temporarily blinded her. When you’re playing for the home team, sometimes a loss looks like a steal.

“Pete Townshend smashes his first guitar” is number 26; “The Who record ‘My Generation’” is at 35. The distinction isn’t clear. Also included is John Lennon’s death (32) — not what I would consider a great moment in rock — and which includes this sentence, “In a way that now seems prophetic, the news of Lennon’s shooting broke to much of America on ‘Monday Night Football.’” Are EW writers potheads? And isn’t the importance of Lennon’s meeting Yoko Ono (57) that it was the beginning of the end of the Beatles?

There are some extra-musical events, the PMRC hearings (44), for example, but a spotty account of key technology changes — a hugely important part of rock’s evolution — is shunted into corners away from the main list. Where’s the founding of Atlantic Records — or Sub Pop? The list is fine on hip hop and rap, worse on currently unhip heavy metal. “Stairway to Heaven” gets the big nod (20), whereas the real key to Led Zeppelin’s importance was, of course, Jimmy Page’s production of the second album — which included the epochal “Whole Lotta Love.” Also, ’90s metal — most importantly Metallica’s trés tough and vastly influential “Master of Puppets” — gets ignored.

EW’s dumb list made us realize something else: The greatest moments in rock are musical ones. Not just the best albums, but actual moments, different for everyone every day. For me, last week, it was Elliott Smith crowing, “I’m a color reporter” on that cool song “Bled White.” Yesterday, as I recall, it was “Walk Away Renee.” Tomorrow, I have a feeling, it might be the drums on “Go Your Own Way,” or the guitars on Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” Kurt Cobain’s singing on “Dumb,” the French horns on “A Natural Woman (You Make Me Feel Like)” … or, most likely, a song I’ve never heard before and never will again in quite the same way.

Nothing wrong with smoking a little dope, of course, but you can see the effect it had on his work. Bands like Pink Floyd worked with paradoxical focus to re-create the effects of drugs on the mind; McCartney, by contrast, merely proffered the work of a pothead, a much different thing.

Perhaps as a consequence, the 25th anniversary reissue of McCartney’s best and most successful solo work, “Band on the Run,” is less interesting than it otherwise might have been. Of the various touchstone pop-rock album events of the 1970s, “Band on the Run” has aged the worst. “Rumours” burns on in a pale romantic glow; “Dark Side of the Moon” still surprises sonically; the fourth Led Zeppelin album’s hard-rock production is still punishing. “Band on the Run” is certainly no “Frampton Comes Alive!” but it does seem to have been forgotten.

The new edition is a typically classy package from McCartney, who, for all his faults, has always given fans value for their money. The album comes in a hefty little box, with a text-heavy booklet, a weird little poster of Linda McCartney snapshots and an extra disc of interviews, outtakes and this or that live track. And it all comes at a normal, single-disc list price! (Consumers beware: I’ve already seen it for sale at $20 plus; shop around and you should be able to get it for $11 or $12. )

In 1974 it seemed as if Paul McCartney had been frittering away a rare stardom. “McCartney,” “Ram,” “Wild Life” — these are the album equivalents of home movies, and despite substantive sales, the work seemed frivolous. Did McCartney care? There’s no evidence of it. In a marijuana-inspired epiphany, he told Wings that for the follow-up to “Red Rose Speedway,” they’d be recording in Nigeria. Two members quit. In Lagos, the band discovered that EMI’s studio was years out of date. It was monsoon season. The group was robbed at knifepoint one night, and McCartney lost his demos for the album.

But the result — which, in the end, McCartney wrote, produced and performed almost entirely by himself — was a sensation. Hit singles (“Helen Wheels,” “Band on the Run,” “Jet”) kept the record on the charts for nearly a year; it was one of the bestselling albums of the era. “Band on the Run” stabilized McCartney’s output for virtually the rest of the decade, culminating with “Wings Over America,” the most remunerative rock tour ever at the time, and “Mull of Kintyre,” which, while unheard in the United States, became the bestselling single in British history. After having been a member of the biggest act of the 1960s, McCartney was, in the end, probably the world’s most successful artist in the 1970s as well.

Much of “Band on the Run” is still whimsy. “Bluebird” is a pallid “Blackbird” rerun. Various other tracks have novelty-esque hooks, but little else (“Mrs. Vanderbilt,” “Mamunia”). There’s a throwaway (“Picasso’s Last Words”) famously written after Dustin Hoffman challenged McCartney to write a song about anything the actor asked.

And yet “Band on the Run” still teems with creativity. It’s a true pop album in the very worst sense of the word; the songs mean nothing, but melody to melody, riff to riff, it dazzles. The arrangements and production, while not groundbreaking, are sumptuous. Cranked up loud, the roaring break in “Band on the Run” thrills. “Helen Wheels” spins on its heels. “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Four” rollicks itself out of the speakers with a crescendoed envoi for the album, and “Jet” — probably McCartney’s most unrelenting solo track — wraps the listener up in a meaningless and insular but undeniable whirl. (The album also includes “Let Me Roll It,” probably the most beautiful and most clever of the musical spitwads John Lennon and McCartney sent each other in their work during the 1970s. Here, as McCartney acknowledges on the interview disc, his vocals and the song’s snapped-out guitar line are reminiscent of Lennon’s “Cold Turkey.”)

But the record is somehow off-putting, and in retrospect, it’s easy to see why. The pothead’s idea of cleverness is only part of it. McCartney was in a position that, while not unique, could be truly appreciated only by a handful of people alive at the time — Lennon, Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley among them. While Lennon and Dylan raged against their lives, McCartney had a different approach: He just wanted to downsize himself. Sure, he had a star’s ego, but to his credit, he was uncomfortable with his position as cultural avatar.

In other words, more than anything else, McCartney wanted not to signify anything. Meaning was for the Lennons and Dylans; what he wanted was for his songs to sing. (Hence his almost perverse approach to lyric writing: “The jailer man/And sailor Sam …” “I thought the major/Was a lady suffragette.”) In his previous incarnation as a Beatle, precisely the opposite was true. But it was Paul McCartney’s rather monstrous fate to spend his later life trying to explain that his earlier one wasn’t what it seemed. The result, revived here, is a famous yet somehow sad work of unequaled pop prestidigitation, where the sound rings out so alluringly that you don’t quite notice that none of it really matters.