by Tom Doyle
Very quickly the pair began to rub one another up the wrong way. Laine says that Johns wasn’t willing to accommodate McCartney’s more experimental ideas, like ‘going into funny little rooms to get weird guitar noises’. The producer declared the music that Wings were making to be ‘shite’. Inevitably, this provoked a shouting match between Johns and McCartney. ‘Anything like that, I always stood five feet behind Paul,’ says McCullough. ‘That’s his territory, that’s his business. He was speaking on his own behalf, but he was letting us in on it and holding us together, like, “OK, boys, I’ll take care of this. You don’t want to get involved.”’
Four weeks in, Glyn Johns walked out of the sessions for Red Rose Speedway. ‘I think he felt we were too lackadaisical,’ says the guitarist. ‘He got quite angry about the whole thing.’
Whether right or wrong in his motives and manoeuvres, Paul’s next step would have almost everyone wondering if he’d entirely lost the plot. Back in January, on the farm in Scotland, mainly to entertain his middle daughter, Mary, he’d started tinkering around with a new composition that set the nursery rhyme ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’ to a new melody.
This lilting and inoffensive, if bizarre track was to become, in May, the second Wings single, bamboozling a large portion of the rock-buying public, who were then enjoying glammier or harder, hairier sounds. Still, as bewildering a record as it was, touted as ‘a song for spring to make people happy’, ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’ reached number 9 in the UK charts, purely on novelty value. Over in America, discerning US DJs simply ignored the track, flipping the single over and playing its New Orleans-flavoured B-side rocker ‘Little Woman Love’.
For Paul, this kind of children’s song was part of the strain of his writing that had produced ‘Yellow Submarine’, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ and ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, a bit of singalong fun that harked back to the old days and the music-halls. Public tastes had moved on, though, and such featherweight fare was considered utterly uncool. When the record was slated by critics, Paul quickly realised just how out of step he’d become, admitting, ‘I do things that aren’t necessarily very carefully thought out.’ He even blamed his star sign for giving him this trait: ‘Geminis are supposed to be changeable. I’m crazy. I’ve always been crazy from the minute I was born.’
At the same time as holding his hands up in defeat, McCartney tried to claw back some of his cool, claiming the daughter of The Who’s guitarist, Pete Townshend, had pestered her dad to buy the single for her. ‘I like to keep in with the five-year-olds,’ Paul remarked. Then, even more wrong-headedly, he tried to justify the song in ‘deeper’ terms, using the hippie-hangover parlance of the times – pointing out that the lamb follows Mary to school, but then, after having been thrown out by the teacher, hangs around like a devoted child.
‘To me, that’s a heavy trip, those lyrics,’ he mused, like the stoner who has just discovered an entire universe on his fingernail. ‘It’s very spiritual when someone hangs around because it’s loved. I’m sure no one ever thinks about those kind of things.’
To spotlight the incongruity, on 25 May Wings performed the fluff-light nursery rhyme on a Top of the Pops bill that included Elton John, offering the stirring, other-worldly ennui of ‘Rocket Man (I Think It’s Gonna Be A Long, Long Time)’, and the utterly of-the-moment T. Rex thundering their way through ‘Metal Guru’, one of the 45s that would define the era.
Capping it all, Wings’ next appearance was a slot on The Basil Brush Show, miming their way through a performance of ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’, spliced with cheap cartoon sequences illustrating the words, in a break from the antics of the starring fox puppet. On TV, the otherwise wine-slugging, weed-puffing band members sang along through sprayed-on grins. They all now admit they were slightly bemused by their new-found roles as children’s entertainers.
‘Listen, how do you think I felt?’ says Henry McCullough. ‘I was coming off the road after three years in America with Joe Cocker and I end up playing “Mary Had A Little Fucking Lamb”.’
‘We’re supposed to be a rock band,’ says Denny Seiwell. ‘I said, “What’s with all this shit?”’
Even the ever loyal Denny Laine, it seems, suffered a moment of doubt, admitting he was privately thinking, I didn’t sign up for this, Paul.
Looking back on ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’, Paul confesses that he’s slightly stumped himself as to why he made this unarguably odd record. ‘I can’t believe that now,’ he says. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’ Perhaps it highlights the fact that McCartney always acted impulsively and instinctively, and then did the heavy thinking later.
This whimsical, semi-detached part of McCartney’s character was quickly understood, however, by McCullough, who says that even if Paul is generally seen as being down-to-earth, then in some respects he’s quite the opposite – spacey and often somewhere else. ‘He does what he does,’ says the guitarist. ‘We were put into his bubble, basically.’
And so, by the summer of 1972, the members of Wings had every right to be confused: they didn’t know whether they were supposed to be angrily shaking their fists at the British government over their actions in Ireland or singing story-book lullabies for the under-tens. They were en route to somewhere, but sometimes the musicians must have wondered where exactly Paul was taking them.
It was always hard for you to lock in a line-up with Wings. As a band, you always seemed to be in a state of flux.
Yeah, exactly.
What would you put that down to?
Um. Musical differences.
5
Life in the Slow Lane
The bus was an open-topped Bristol Commercial Vehicles double-decker whose top speed was an unimpressively chugging 38mph. Yet, for Paul, this was the ideal vehicle to ferry Wings around for the duration of their first European tour.
There was method in this apparent madness: if his band and family were to spend the summer months motoring around the continent, he figured they might as well make it a pleasant experience. Rather than be stuck inside a van or coach, gasping for air in the breathless heat of July and August, they could all be lazily sunning themselves on the upper deck.
The notion recalled Magical Mystery Tour and, more directly, Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday. McCartney had the bus painted in a screaming, multi-hued psychedelic design that might have been hip five years previously but already looked out of date. Where the bus’s advertising strip had once been was now written the legend Wings Over Europe, atop a cartoon mural depicting verdant, sunlit mountain peaks against a duck-egg-blue sky.
On the back of the bus, the band members’ names were stencilled in a telling pecking order: Paul & Linda McCartney, Denny Laine, Henry McCullough, Denny Seiwell. On the front, back-dropped against a deeper shade of blue, a pair of white wings fanned out, framing the spinning destination indicator for which a new set of names had been printed: Châteauvallon, Juans-les-Pins, Arles and so on, to be rolled out as the tour trundled onwards.
Inside, the lower level had been carpeted and fitted with a galley kitchen at the rear. There were bunks for the kids, and four of the original seats remained behind the driver’s cockpit. The upper level, meanwhile, was basically a hippie crash space – albeit one with a play-pen – its floor strewn with fraying sofa cushions and enormous, puffy bean bags. ‘Bit of dope in the fridge,’ says Henry McCullough. ‘Magical. Like being part of a movie.’
The McCartneys really had become a touring family. Wherever the band were, so were the kids. During rehearsals in London at Manticore Studios, a converted cinema in Fulham owned by the notoriously unrestrained progressive rock trio Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Wings had pounded away on the stage while the kids, clearly quite used to this kind of thing, mucked around and enjoyed a picnic on carpets and mats in the empty auditorium. Paul and Linda would sometimes have to break from rehearsals to go and change Stella’s nappy.
There was never ever any question of the kids being left with nannies or sent
away to boarding school or summer camp while the band were on the road.
‘That’s right, and we even got slagged for that,’ Paul says now. ‘I remember somebody saying “Oh, they’re dragging their kids around the world”. And our answer for that would be to say “Yeah, look, the thing is, number one, we love ’em. Number two, what are we gonna do? We’re gonna be in Australia, and a nanny’s gonna ring up and say ‘Ooh, your kid’s got a fever of 105’.” Shit. We would wanna be there, so that was it.’
From here on in, tutors were to be employed wherever possible. ‘We’d get them to talk to the school first and find out what subjects they were gonna cover,’ he remembers. ‘We kind of kept up. The kids tell me now they didn’t really keep up. They did inevitably sort of fall behind a bit. But we had the freedom to do what we liked with our family and we were just careful to not have it sort of damage them.’ Attracting criticism for forcing their offspring to join the circus, Paul would shrug and laugh, saying, ‘It’s a geography lesson.’
‘Mary’s friends used to call her a hippie commune kid,’ he recalls. ‘But it was just kind of a question of mucking in. It was more like gypsies than anything else. This family was gonna move around.’ But this easy-going attitude wasn’t always prevalent. If one of the kids got ill, it would cause Paul and Linda to bicker. ‘It would be a strain on our relationship,’ Paul admits. ‘But at least we were doing what we wanted to do. Life causes arguments and there were plenty of reasons for that. I don’t think having the kids on tour was particularly stressful. I think just people living together can be stressful. Y’know, it was a great love affair, but nobody’s perfect.’
The first show of the European tour was booked for a deliberately out-of-the-way location – a 2,000-seat Roman amphitheatre at Châteauvallon, high in the pine-forested hills above Toulon on the south-eastern coast of France. Here, before the gig, on Sunday, 9 July 1972, Paul gave an informal press conference.
‘I’m starting all over again and working my way upwards,’ he accepted. ‘You don’t fight Cassius Clay on your first time out.’ He hinted at his recent crisis of confidence and the worry of being smothered by the weight of his reputation: ‘A year ago, I used to wake up in the morning and think, I’m a myth. I’m Paul McCartney. And it scared the hell out of me.’
Pre-echoing Lennon’s later declaration that Yoko had ‘showed me what it was to be Elvis Beatle and to be surrounded by sycophants’, Paul admitted that his time with Linda, particularly his ‘hermit’ period in Scotland, had similarly opened his eyes. ‘It wasn’t until she came along that I realised what was happening to me,’ he said. ‘She made me see I was surrounded by con men and leeches.’
This statement underlined just how much Paul now relied on Linda and explained why she was a constant presence by his side. Not that her role as her husband’s musical co-conspirator was getting any easier – a fact that she sometimes chose to hide from her partner. Before their show at Châteauvallon, Wings were apparently ‘scared shitless’, though none more so than Linda, who was so terrified that she cried on Denny Seiwell’s shoulder. ‘She was unhappy and frightened,’ says the drummer. ‘But she had a lot of chutzpah. She wasn’t much of a piano player or a singer, but, boy, she had the heart for it.’
‘I didn’t want to let Paul down,’ Linda reflected. ‘I didn’t want to let the band down. It was too much to hope that I’d be ignored, like I deserved.’
In the end, she coped, and the Châteauvallon show was a success. In the wake of the chaotic university tour, Wings were becoming a more polished operation. Where before the band would just rock up and play, there were now some production values. Paul sported a glittery black stage suit; there were backdrop films of scenes from Argyll – crashing waves, galloping horses – and climactic explosions of confetti as the band charged around the stage and Henry McCullough fell to his knees soloing.
If Wings were now beginning to resemble a credible rock band in step with the early 1970s, there was still daftness afoot. Throughout the tour, McCartney roped the band into making sideline appearances for a planned but unreleased film called The Bruce McMouse Show. Intended to be a mixture of animation and live action, interspersed with Wings performances, it was to feature the titular cartoon mouse and his family, who lived under the stage on which the band were performing. The group were even taught a choreographed music-hall dance routine, though it was clear that their hearts weren’t in it. McCullough admits he ‘never quite made the grade’ in this particular respect. Seiwell recalls the moment he had to stand in a crowded backstage room, speaking prepared lines to an imaginary mouse, as agonisingly embarrassing and ‘one of the hardest things I ever had to do in Wings’.
In other ways, in spite of their outward family image, Wings attracted much the same kind of attention as other rock bands. The European tour was the first time that predatory females began turning up backstage. Post-show in Zurich, the intimidating, omnivorous Anita Pallenberg made an appearance. Her considerable reputation preceding her, having already counted three members of The Rolling Stones – Brian Jones, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger – among her conquests, she apparently made a beeline for Denny Laine.
The guitarist, however, in a recent development, was already spoken for. In Juans-les-Pins, three dates into the tour, a strikingly pretty, almond-eyed brunette by the name of Joanne Patrie, a Boston-born model working the European catwalks, managed to manoeuvre her way into Wings’ dressing room. Jo Jo, as she preferred to be known, already had a rock-star-devouring past, having lost her virginity to Jimi Hendrix backstage at Woodstock, spent a ‘wild night’ with the booze-soaked, in-decline Jim Morrison and enjoyed a two-year on-off relationship with Rod Stewart.
Linda was instantly suspicious of Jo Jo, and, as it transpired, with good reason. As a seventeen-year-old Beatle fan, Patrie had written devotional fan letters to Paul, before turning up in Britain three years later with the express intention of meeting and marrying him. Following the Juans-les-Pins show, she had ended up seducing one of Wings’ roadies, securing herself a place on the crew’s tour bus, which drove in convoy with the band’s more colourful transporter. In the days that followed she made a play for Denny Laine, making flirty eye contact with the guitarist whenever the group’s open-topped bus pulled level with the roadies’ vehicle. Later, Laine walked in on Jo Jo taking a bath in her roadie beau’s room. Within days the two were an item and inseparable. It was at this point that Jo Jo stepped into the inner circle.
The McCartneys were less than happy about this development. A week into their relationship, Denny sat Jo Jo down and told her that Paul and Linda were ‘very uptight about you being around’. Linda, especially, was convinced that Jo Jo was simply using the guitarist to get close to Paul. Patrie began crying, having effectively suffered the rejection of her former pin-up. While the guitarist and the groupie’s affair was to prove far more enduring than these flaky beginnings promised, the future Jo Jo Laine’s relationship with the McCartneys was to remain painfully strained.
Meanwhile, the tour rumbled on. Sometimes, if the struggling double-decker clearly wasn’t making the distance, and it looked as if Wings were going to miss their stage time, an emergency convoy of vehicles would be dispatched from the venue to collect them. This, if anything, added to the general air of hilarity and joie de vivre within the band. Paul, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly playful with reporters. At a press conference in Paris, he introduced the band members one by one before turning to his wife with the words, ‘. . . and Yoko.’ Embarrassingly, though, and unthinkably for a returning Beatle making his first live appearances in France since 1965, the show in Lyon had to be cancelled due to poor ticket sales.
Unperturbed, the group booked studio time at EMI’s Pathé Marconi Studios in Paris, where they knocked out the Linda-fronted reggae-lite song ‘Seaside Woman’, written as the result of a playful challenge from her husband when ATV first accused her of not being a capable songwriter. It would be another five years before this sweet if
slight offering was released under the band name Suzy and the Red Stripes.
As the tour reached Sweden in the first week of August, the carefree mood began to darken. First of all, the press there began trashing the McCartneys, claiming that they’d been horrible to staff at various hotels when they’d complained about being forced to accept, as one report put it, ‘conventional Scandinavian single beds . . . their attitude seems to be, I want it, therefore it must happen’.
Out drinking one evening in a nightclub, things turned disturbingly nasty. A young man in a green jacket sidled up to Paul, calmly informing him that he had a revolver in his pocket and that he planned to kill him. Having coolly revealed this threat to McCartney, the youth swaggered over to the bar and stood there staring and grinning at the singer.
McCullough and Laine arrived not long afterwards. McCartney, clearly shaken, whispered to his bandmates, telling them what had just happened and gesturing towards the stranger. The guitarists, particularly the streetwise McCullough, who had begun his musical career as a showband player in the rough Northern Irish dancehalls of the early 1960s, quickly took control of the situation. Pulling a knife out of his boot, and with Laine in tow, he wandered over to the bar. The pair flanked the now flustered wannabe thug, who began to protest his innocence, claiming it had all been a misunderstood joke. Laine and McCullough quickly wrestled him to the floor and searched him, producing no weapon. As soon as they let him go, the youth scrambled to his feet and took off into the night.
In McCullough’s opinion, it was ‘one of those incidents that happens a thousand times on a Saturday night in any given city. I felt very protective of Paul because of his vulnerability . . . he needed a strong helping hand from whoever was around him.’