by Tom Doyle
Ominously, then, with Rock’N’Roll on hold, Lennon announced that he was to produce an album for Nilsson. Its title, Pussycats, was a jokey swipe at their unruly reputation. ‘We called it that to show we were nice guys,’ Nilsson said. ‘Everyone thinks we’re rough-house assholes.’
Quickly the Pussycats sessions took a turn for the disastrous, when it became clear to all that Nilsson’s formerly flute-like, three-and-a-half octave voice had been reduced to a ravaged croak through his hard living. In truth, Nilsson had ruptured his vocal cords and would frequently disappear from the recordings to lock himself away in the toilet, where, instead of warming up his voice or practising his scales as other singers might do, he was coughing up blood.
At the end of the first day’s recording on Pussycats at Burbank Studios on Thursday, 28 March 1974, a surprise visitor arrived in the shape of McCartney. The devastation that met his eyes shocked Paul. ‘That time in John’s life was very wild,’ he says.
The drink flowing, the musicians at the studio complex fell into a jam session. That night, for the first time since the tense sessions for Abbey Road, Paul and John played and sang together. ‘I’m afraid it was a rather heady session, shall we say,’ admits Paul. ‘I ended up getting on drums for some unknown reason. Then we just jammed. But I don’t think it was very good.’
It was terrible, as bootlegged tapes, later leaked under the name A Toot And A Snore In ’74, were to attest. The gathered musicians – Stevie Wonder, who had wandered in from a neighbouring studio, on electric piano, Jesse Ed Davis on guitar, Bobby Keys on sax, Nilsson on vocals, Linda on tentative organ and Pang on token tambourine – sounded woozy and unfocused at their best and utterly lost at their worst.
Lennon didn’t sound particularly drunk – apart from a slurred reference to past ‘jam sheshions’ – but was freestyling wildly. ‘I fell upon my arse,’ he trilled tunelessly. ‘And no one seemed to notice. I was wearing my mother’s bra. So I say never trust a bugger with your mother.’ There was much musical twiddling going on, but nobody seemed to be able to settle on a song.
‘Ah, gee, it’s been such a long time,’ John said, addressing Paul, before bizarrely adding: ‘When I look at Jack Lemmon, I’m in love again. I feel him coming all over me.’
Meanwhile, the disconnected riffing and soloing staggered on. The musicians were barely even listening to one another. ‘If somebody knows a song that we all know, then please take over,’ Lennon bellowed over the racket. ‘I’ve been screaming here for hours. It’s gotta be something done round about the ’50s or no later than ’63 or we ain’t gonna know it.’
Eventually, the drunken band slid into a slow funky jam of ‘Lucille’, Lennon shrieking maniacally and McCartney trying to echo him with a harmony. It was less the remeshing of two great musical minds and more the sound of a pair of drunks shouting at one another over a slightly above-average pub band.
‘Where’s all that drink they always have in this place?’ asked Lennon, sounding like he needed not one more drop. Then he vainly tried to get the group to tune up. ‘Someone give me an E,’ he said. ‘Or a snort.’
Jimmy Iovine, record producer turned Interscope Records boss, then an assistant studio engineer, was a witness to the scene. ‘Paul chose to play drums,’ he reckons, ‘because he was alert enough to say, “This is not how The Beatles are getting back together.” He was the one in the room who you could see got it.’
McCartney, uncharacteristically, was taking a back seat, pitching in with the odd vocal interjection. An impassioned Lennon tried singing ‘Stand By Me’ over a slurry of bum notes, before freaking out at the hapless engineer in the control room: ‘Just turn the fucking vocal mike up! McCartney’s doing the harmony on the drums, Stevie might get on it there if he’s got a mike.’ They started up again before Lennon lost it once more. ‘I can’t hear a fucking thing now!’ On their third attempt at ‘Stand By Me’, an angry Lennon gave up and just played guitar, as Paul scat-sang along and a gruff Nilsson joined in. Wonder, in typically fine voice, started to sing Sam Cooke’s ‘Cupid’ and ‘Chain Gang’. Paul offered a half-hearted take on old-time US chain-gang folk song ‘Take This Hammer’, an old Beatles jamming standby. The band, sounding knackered and clapped-out, finally fell apart.
Lennon offered Wonder a line of cocaine. ‘You wanna snort, Steve?’ he said. ‘A toot? It’s goin’ round.’
It was an inauspicious event, and, of course, those involved weren’t so drunk that they didn’t know it. Lennon later vaguely remembered of the blurry night, ‘there were fifty other people playing and they were all just watching me and Paul’.
Four days later, early on the Monday afternoon, Paul and Linda and the kids went to visit Lennon at the rented Santa Monica house. Like an overgrown teenager, John was still in bed. To pass the time, Paul sat down at a piano and tinkered around, even playing a medley of Beatles songs, to the lusty vocal accompaniment of Nilsson and Starr. Subconsciously, perhaps, he was awakening something in himself that had lain dormant for the four years since the demise of the group: the thought that he and John might write and perform together once more.
At one point Harry offered Paul a hit of angel dust. McCartney wasn’t familiar with the drug, notorious for producing wildly unpredictable effects, from syrupy-headed nodding-out downers to rage-filled hallucinatory delusions.
‘What is it?’ McCartney asked Nilsson.
‘It’s elephant tranquilliser,’ Harry replied.
‘Is it fun?’ wondered a doubtful Paul.
Nilsson paused and thought carefully about the question before replying, ‘No.’
‘Well, you know what, I won’t have any,’ said McCartney.
In many ways, this incident summed up the dangerous peer pressure that was fuelling the alcoholic and narcotic one-upmanship – the perceived wisdom being that taking anything was better than being straight.
Eventually, John got up. He seemed pleased to see Paul. ‘There was a very relaxed atmosphere,’ says Pang. ‘It wasn’t heavy. It was about them just being them.’
At one point, though, Paul gestured to John that he wanted to have a private word with him in another room. Before the McCartneys had left for LA, Yoko Ono had visited them in London, appearing to Paul’s eyes shrunken and clad in black like a mourning widow. She’d sadly informed Paul and Linda that John was in Los Angeles with Pang, the reality of the possible finality of their split sinking in.
Paul had asked her, ‘Do you still love him? Do you want to get back with him?’ Ono said she did. McCartney told her that he planned to visit Lennon while in California, saying, ‘I can take a message. What would I have to tell him?’ Ono laid out the conditions Lennon would have to meet if he was to return to her, which, given their unconventional relationship, were surprisingly old-fashioned. He’d have to move back to New York. They couldn’t live together again immediately. He’d have to woo her, send her flowers, start over again.
In the Santa Monica house, Lennon absorbed all of this information. Before the month was out, he was back in New York. By November, he’d complied with each and every one of Ono’s conditions. Only years later did Paul reveal the key role he’d had to play in the couple’s eventual reconciliation. That spring in Los Angeles, there had certainly been reunion in the air. It just wasn’t to be that of Lennon and McCartney.
As the afternoon slipped away in Santa Monica, the gathering sat by the pool, where a series of Polaroids was taken by Keith Moon’s personal assistant, Peter ‘Dougal’ Butler. Three of these pictures of John and Paul together survived – John in black peaked hat, pale blue denim shirt and darker flared jeans, Paul sporting a wispy mullet and fashionably bushy Zapata moustache, brown patterned shirt and summery white pedal-pushers. The pair are caught by the camera lounging around and shooting the breeze. Neither, of course, was to know that these casual, laidback shots were to be the last taken of Lennon and McCartney together.
It was a peaceful coda to a turbulent time. Not for nothing did Lennon nic
kname the Los Angeles of 1974 ‘Lost Arseholes’.
Underlining the general messiness of the LA rock community, three days later Paul and Linda went to visit Beach Boy Brian Wilson – at the time hellishly acid-burned, paranoid and a self-imposed prisoner in his Bel Air home. The McCartneys repeatedly knocked on his front door, waiting for over an hour. There was no response other than the sound of Wilson, hiding from them, softly crying.
When people look back at a lot of your 1970s singles, they’re seen as being light, compared to John’s stuff and even what George was doing. Does that get on your nerves?
Pfff. Yeah. A bit. But I have to admit, some of it was. I don’t give a toss. It was what it was. Yeah, some of my stuff was kinda lightweight, but a lot of it wasn’t. The background stuff wasn’t. There was enough good stuff to counter all of those accusations. But there’s a lot of dubious stuff in there.
Which records do you think were dubious?
I’m not damning myself!
8
Going South
It was time to put the band back together again. Even if it wasn’t the one that everyone really wanted him to put back together.
But if Paul was searching for more compliant musicians to help to establish a more stable second incarnation of Wings, he seemed to be looking in all the wrong places.
First, he turned to a diminutive Glaswegian, Jimmy McCulloch, who had been transplanted to London at the age of twelve, rendering his accent a disorientating, vowel-chewing mush of Cockney and west-coast Scottish. McCulloch was only four months past his twentieth birthday when he found himself in a Mercedes van with the McCartneys, heading to Pathé Marconi Studios in Paris to play on a re-recording of Linda’s ‘Seaside Woman’. Like kids on a school trip, they arsed around on the ferry before driving immediately to the studio, where they all stayed up until eight the following morning. Clearly able to hang, Jimmy was instantly welcomed into the ranks. ‘It was a great loon,’ said Paul.
McCulloch had been a prodigy looking for a musical home. In thrall to Tommy Steele, The Shadows and, of course, The Beatles, he’d picked up a guitar at the age of ten and instantly proved himself something of a boy wonder. A year later, in cahoots with his drummer brother Jack, he was playing Shadows numbers around the working men’s clubs of Glasgow. At thirteen, he formed One in a Million, who cut a failed single for CBS and opened for The Who in Scotland. This cocky, precocious wee individual caught the eye of Pete Townshend when he was helping an old friend, John ‘Speedy’ Keen, with his nascent group Thunderclap Newman.
Pete asked Jimmy to join the band, completing an odd trio of individuals: McCulloch with his liquid rock-guitar runs, Keen with his yearning hippie vocal and Andy Newman with his clumpy pub piano-playing. In the studio, with Townshend at the desk, his head deep in Tommy at the time, McCulloch watched The Who guitarist moulding and manipulating sounds on eight-track tape. Thunderclap Newman’s first single, and only hit, ‘Something In The Air’, released in May 1969 when Jimmy was just fifteen, went to number 1. Success didn’t throw Jimmy, but becoming a pin-up did. He wasn’t, he protested, into the ‘heavy pop angle’. He hated it when girl fans would crowd or crush him, or dangerously wield scissors in an attempt to cut off a lock of his hair.
When the constantly bickering Thunderclap Newman argued themselves into non-existence, McCulloch moved on to the heavy blues circuit. He experienced an accelerated apprenticeship in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers – called up on Thursday, onstage with them in Germany by Sunday. The bandleader threw spontaneous calls for solos in his direction and put Jimmy on the spot in front of a paying audience. He then joined tough Scottish soul rabble Stone the Crows, replacing guitarist Les Harvey, who in May 1972 at Swansea Top Rank had touched an ungrounded microphone with wet hands, zapping him with an electric shock that instantly killed him. The band struggled on with McCulloch for another year before their throaty, Janis Joplin-soundalike singer Maggie Bell walked out on them in Montreux in the summer of 1973.
Disenchanted, McCulloch treaded water for a time in forgettable, short-lived rockers Blue, whose members he found far too straight. ‘Not enough guts,’ he moaned. ‘I’d be all dressed up and ridiculous and they’d all walk on wearing jeans. From the start I was the odd one out. I just didn’t fit in.’
The problem was that Jimmy didn’t seem to fit in anywhere. When he drifted into McCartney’s orbit, McCulloch was thinking about going it alone and making a solo album. ‘I’m pretty lazy,’ he confessed. ‘I don’t mind admitting it. It takes a long time to get to know people. So I tend to stay put until something comes along.’
The connection to Wings was made through a mutual friend, roadie Ian Horne. McCulloch was invited by McCartney to hear a mix playback of the Band On The Run LP. Then, months after the Paris session, Paul called Jimmy again and asked him to contribute to McGear, the album he was producing for his brother Mike at Strawberry Studios in Stockport. ‘I agreed to give it a go,’ said McCulloch, before admitting that he’d been ‘slightly cautious because I’d heard people say he was difficult to work with’. During the sessions, when McCulloch was recording slide overdubs on the resonant, part-metal country-blues guitar known as a Dobro, an impressed Paul walked into the live room and on the spot asked Jimmy to join Wings full-time.
Jimmy was a bit starstruck. ‘It was like some kind of a dream,’ he mooned. ‘Paul was there chatting happily, and I just kept staring at him and thinking to myself, Christ, he used to be a Beatle. And here he is talking to me like I matter.’ Ultimately, though, even if he felt awed, McCulloch was far too hard-edged, Scottish and proud to be fazed by the prospect of playing with a Beatle. Jimmy had always been more into John and George anyway, as he perhaps rashly revealed to NME. ‘Paul as well,’ he quickly added. ‘I’ve always admired his voice.’
Before joining the band, McCulloch warned McCartney about his mood swings. Sober, Jimmy was a sweetheart. But once, as was his wont, he started tipping back the spirits and snorting or necking other intoxicants, he turned obnoxious. ‘There’s a Jekyll and Hyde within me,’ he admitted. He explained to his new boss that he ‘got a bit funny sometimes’.
‘I said, “Don’t we all, ducky?”’ Paul remembered, ‘and left it at that.’
Then there was the problem of finding a drummer. In the last week of April 1974, Wings held auditions at the Albery Theatre in the West End of London, hiring a band of session musos to accompany the candidates while Denny Laine and the McCartneys sat judging them in the stalls.
Among those queuing to try their luck was former Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell, yet to find a decent gig five years after the break-up of the band, and almost four since the death of its leader. Denny Laine remembers that on the day, Mitchell was ‘on a head trip . . . maybe he resented the fact that we’d asked him to audition and he wasn’t getting the star treatment’.
After lunch, up stepped Geoff Britton, a sturdy blond Londoner who was a member of the UK amateur karate team who had recently triumphed over their Japanese counterparts. Up to this point he had been grinding away on the pub circuit, most notably with greasy 1950s throwback rockers Wild Angels. At the Albery, Britton sat down and settled behind the kit, looking every millimetre the rocker in his leather jacket and worn band T-shirt, and began hammering away with sticks so thick that even the heavy-handed Ginger Baker had deemed them unusable.
Britton sailed through the audition, even when he had to slip into the tricksy shuffle of Duke Ellington’s ‘Caravan’, having served his time in cabaret summer seasons. ‘Right up my street,’ he gruffly noted. ‘I did the business.’ Paul liked his soulful, frills-free drumming, and a few days later, the Londoner got the call-back to try out with Wings themselves, being told he was on a shortlist of five.
‘So, suddenly I’d gone from no chance to 25 per cent chance,’ Britton told NME, his arithmetic temporarily failing him. ‘Anyway, had this audition, met the boys for the first time. Few days passed, another phone call. Scene is: come for the da
y, practise with them all, go for dinner. Now we’re down to two people. So I’m on trial, right? They are going to suss me out. Everybody is charming to me but nobody gives away a thing. Couple of days go by, and then Paul phones and tells me I’ve got the gig.’
Britton was thrilled, but there was a nagging worry in a corner of his mind. Wild Angels had recently been caught doing a runner from hotels in Glasgow – ‘jibbing’, the drummer called it – and, as a result, were due up in court. When McCartney called McCulloch and Britton to invite them on a Wings bonding trip to Nashville in June, the sweating, dithering drummer couldn’t confirm until, with some relief, the court verdict handed down was the uniquely Scottish one of ‘not proven’.
Wings were a five-piece once again, albeit a markedly disparate one, featuring a former Beatle, his musically naïve American wife, a devoted Brummie, an unhinged Glaswegian and a karate-daft, mouthy Cockney. Worse, it quickly became apparent that certain members of this new group really couldn’t stand certain other members.
‘He picked the wrong guys,’ Britton reckoned in the aftermath. ‘The chemistry was doomed.’
Paul’s idea was that the trip to Nashville would ‘break in’ the band. In the end, it very nearly broke up the band.
The new line-up of Wings, plus the McCartney family, flew into Tennessee on 14 June 1974. Even travelling under a cloak of relative secrecy, they were still greeted at the airport by a gang of 40 fans and assorted reporters. Asked about the new drummer, Paul said, ‘He has a black belt. I feel with those credentials he’ll be able to whip the band into shape.’
Their destination was a farm, set in 133 acres of land, in Lebanon, twenty-odd miles east of downtown Nashville. Its owner was songwriter Curly Putnam Jr, whose country hits included ‘Green, Green Grass Of Home’ and ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E.’. He had agreed to vacate his home for six weeks in return for the princely rent of $2,000 a week, while he and his wife enjoyed an extended vacation in Hawaii.