by Tom Doyle
Another, far more serious incident caused Paul’s anger to explode. In flight, inebriated members of the band and entourage would sometimes enter the cockpit and hang out and chat with the laid-back Texan pilots charged with handling the tour plane. On one occasion, trumpeter Steve Howard, holder of a pilot’s licence for smaller aircraft, was given a turn at the controls of the jet, acquitting himself admirably. Denny Laine, at the time perhaps worryingly reading a book entitled Anyone Can Fly, was also given a go in the pilot’s chair. After a few minutes, the real flight crew’s attentions having drifted, a call came through from air traffic control warning them that the Wings plane was cruising several thousand feet below its agreed altitude. According to Laine, ‘When you take anything off automatic pilot, it goes all over the place for a moment or two.’
Then, during another flight, one member of the miles-high party – reports differ as to the identity of the culprit – sent the plane into a dive, throwing everyone around the cabin. It was at this point that a furious McCartney discovered that drunken members of his group had been taking turns flying the plane, with his wife and children onboard, for some weeks. Never the most comfortable flyer, by all accounts, Paul blew his top. From here on in, everyone in the touring party was banned from the cockpit. ‘Which is fair enough,’ Howie Casey notes. ‘Even though I was pissed, I’d think, No, that’s silly.’
Upon realising that his meticulously plotted tour was veering dangerously off-course, Paul called everyone to a meeting and read them the riot act. ‘It was a question of, “We’ve got to keep this on the straight and narrow, we’ve got to keep this going”,’ says Robert Ellis. ‘Control was the point.’
These days, though, Paul remembers it differently. ‘That’s the legend,’ he says. ‘In actual fact, the pilots were on autopilot, and so they let you sit up there and wiggle the joystick a bit, ’cause it’s not operational. And when you’re pissed, you think you’re flying the plane. There’s no way I would let that really happen, y’know. You’re kidding me? But I wasn’t going to be the one to tell them they weren’t flying the plane.’
Whatever the truth, as relatively tame as Wings outwardly appeared in terms of 1970s rock groups, with their many and varied excesses, at times McCartney must have felt like he was trying to orchestrate chaos.
‘Everything I’ve done since the Beatles split has been leading up to this show,’ Paul told a reporter backstage at Madison Square Garden on 24 May, the start of a sold-out two-night stint at the prestigious, star-making New York venue.
Inside the arena, the mood of the crowd was rising towards hysteria. Word spread – fanned by a quote from McCartney refusing to rule out the possibility – that John Lennon was to make an appearance onstage. Fans crushed at the lip of the stage, while others in the bleachers mindlessly set off flares and fireworks. Arriving onstage, Wings walked tall, to be met with scenes reminiscent of the Beatlemania McCartney must surely have felt had been consigned to the past. Boys ripped off their shirts. Girls sobbed, overwhelmed. Launching into their set, the band rose to the occasion and, well oiled as they were on more than one level, easily surpassed expectations. Even if Lennon was a no-show, for now all talk of Beatles reunions was irrelevant.
On the second night, having insisted on a backstage press ban, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis showed up with her children, John and Caroline Kennedy, and hung out with the McCartneys in their dressing room, signifying just how far their star had risen. Following the modest early days of Wings, Paul found himself back in the full glare of the media spotlight. ‘Yeah, it was interesting,’ he says, ‘Because we started so small, it was like I wasn’t famous. But then, suddenly, all that fame came back. You were suddenly on prime-time news.’ A week later, Time magazine featured Paul on its cover, in a live shot of the singer rendered in fuchsia and wiggly daubs of blue and green, with the blaringly triumphant headline ‘McCartney Comes Back’. Even Linda’s confidence seemed to have hit an all-time high. Initially fearing she would be eviscerated by the American press, when asked by a Rolling Stone reporter if she had a message for her critics, she replied, ‘My answer is always, “Fuck off”.’
‘A fairly unequivocal answer,’ Paul laughs today.
Having through the years graduated up from university bars to theatres to arenas, Wings arrived as a stadium act on 10 June, selling out every last ticket of the 67,110 released for their show at the Seattle Kingdome. Sweetening the satisfaction, this trumped the record set by The Beatles at Shea Stadium by a comfortable 12,000. The Kingdome, opened only three months earlier, was so vast that it had its own internal micro-climate, which was controlled by temperature regulation. Even with the erection of two video screens above the stage, the gigantic venue seemed to dwarf Wings’ set-up.
After the soundcheck, Robert Ellis photographed the band standing in the upper tier at the back of the empty stadium. ‘It took us half an hour to get from the stage to where the picture was taken and back again,’ he says. The Seattle gig was filmed and eventually released as part of the 1980 film Rockshow, which revealed the Wings Over America tour in all its victory-lap glory.
‘There probably were nerves involved, which I’ve forgotten now,’ says Paul. ‘I tend to sort of block them out of memories. I’m sure we were a bit nervous, but by then we’d kind of got a lot of the kinks worked out of the show and felt really good about it. It was very exciting. I remember looking out at the lines of people snaking around the Kingdome. It was really cool to see that. The tour was a special tour, but something as huge as the Kingdome meant we were right back up to the level where I’d left off.’
Into its final furlong, the tour reached California as its participants found themselves close to burn-out. ‘The drugs were taking over,’ says Robert Ellis. ‘I had extreme difficulties keeping myself straight enough to do the work I had to do.’ In San Francisco, backstage, the increasingly feral Jo Jo Patrie stole a bunch of front-row complimentary tickets from the tour manager’s briefcase before disguising herself to go out to the front of the Cow Palace to sell them. She returned with enough cash to buy an ounce of cocaine, a sizeable amount. This lasted her, Laine and McCulloch for the rest of the tour. But while she didn’t dare snort the drug around Paul, who had dabbled with coke in the 1960s and stopped when it ‘got too fashionable’, Patrie claimed that on one occasion she offered some to Linda during a flight and the two women sneaked into the toilet for a toot.
Diverting to Arizona on 18 June for a show at Tucson’s Community Center, a surprise birthday party was thrown for Paul’s 34th, which saw him being serenaded by a mariachi band and, blindfolded, bashing a goat-shaped orange piñata with a stick. Then, at a trio of tour-closing shows at the LA Forum beginning three days after, Wings drew a star-stuffed audience that included Diana Ross, Cher, Elton John, Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman.
Outside the venue, a marching band led by someone in a chicken suit parped its way through a version of ‘Listen To What The Man Said’. Inside, at the end of a rollicking set, Ringo appeared onstage to present Paul with flowers, while pawing a guitar, as if prompting a spontaneous Beatles reunion. Backstage, the air surrounding McCartney and Starr, perhaps since they were being watched by a roomful of people, was one of slightly forced jollity.
‘Well, it wasn’t bad,’ Ringo said. ‘Eight out of ten.’
‘Let’s see you bloody get up and do it then,’ Paul responded in a comedic challenge, mugging nose-to-nose with his former bandmate.
Two nights later the McCartneys threw a party, costing a dizzying $75,000, at the estate that had belonged to silent-movie comedian Harold Lloyd in Benedict Canyon. ‘That was a blowout,’ says Paul. ‘We said afterwards, “That was an exercise in how to spend the entire profits of the tour.”’ Money was no longer an issue: in seven weeks, the Wings Over America jaunt had grossed $5 million, a mind-boggling amount for the time, and considerably more than anyone had estimated.
This uncharacteristic display of extravagance – more on the level of a society we
dding than a showbusiness party – served to attract the usual musical suspects, including the Eagles, The Jacksons and Bob Dylan, but also drew key figures from Hollywood including Henry Fonda, Tony Curtis, Roman Polanski, Steve McQueen and Warren Beatty. Guests were met at the gates of the estate and ferried to the house in a fleet of golf buggies. All partygoers were urged to wear white, since Paul and Linda had arranged for a troupe of Hawaiian artists to wander through the gathering, splashing and spraying people with paint. Everyone took to scribbling their signatures on one another’s T-shirts. There was a palm reader, appearances by the Los Angeles Ballet and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra, and even a Busby Berkeley-style waterborne routine performed by faux-starlets in the pool.
Everyone got into the swing, except for Bob Dylan, who by some accounts sat in a tree, musing, for much of the party. Leaving at the end of the evening, he was pursued by Robert Ellis, who had been instructed by McCartney to take shots of all of the guests. Ellis caught up with Dylan in a buggy and began snapping away until the singer peeled away from his friends and leapt on the photographer, demanding to know why he was taking pictures. ‘I was going, “I’m Paul’s official photographer”,’ Ellis recalls. ‘He says, “I don’t want my picture in no magazine.”’ Back up at the house, many of the revellers leaped into the pool. Those who wandered back down the hill to their parked cars found a single white rose on the dashboard, along with a note: ‘Thank you for coming, Paul and Linda.’
After The Beatles,’ Paul reasoned to one journalist in the aftermath, as he came down from the highs of the tour, ‘you would have thought it would have been pretty much impossible for me to follow that and to get anything else going. At least, I thought that. This tour has convinced us that we’re a group and I think it has convinced audiences too. This wasn’t just a one-time trip. This is going to be a working band. We’ll be back.’
Success seemed to have restored McCartney’s equilibrium, too. ‘He’s very much back to his old self again,’ said Linda, no doubt meaning the peacocking, funny, creative individual she’d first met nearly a decade earlier, before the years of self-crisis and doubt and grind.
It had perhaps also brought back some of his less appealing traits, though. In an interview with US TV presenter Geraldo Rivera on Good Night America, Paul came across as smug, evasive and piss-taking. At one point, when McCartney addressed him as ‘Freddie’, Rivera bravely reached over and gave his face a playful slap.
Back in Europe, inevitably, the comedown kicked in. Paul grew an ill-advised moustache that was less Sgt. Pepper, more second-hand car dealer, and Wings mopped up the last remaining dates in Austria, Yugoslavia, Italy and West Germany. In Vienna, the lighting techs bounced laser beams off ancient buildings to dazzling effect. In Zagreb, for the first time, the audience took over from Paul and sang ‘Yesterday’ on their own, deeply moving its composer. In St Mark’s Square in Venice, performing a benefit for Unesco to raise funds to help restore the decaying city, the group provoked mild controversy when it was revealed that – irony of ironies – their heavy equipment trucks had wrecked some centuries-old paving slabs.
At the end of a three-night October run at Wembley Empire Pool in London, EMI threw a party populated by B-list guests such as singer Kiki Dee, members of art-pop group 10cc and Old Grey Whistle Test host Bob Harris. At the end of the night, the guests grew boisterous and pelted one another with cream cakes.
It certainly wasn’t hanging around in the Californian sunshine with Henry Fonda and Steve McQueen as hummingbirds flitted in and out of the palm trees. A sense of anticlimax hung in the air, along with uncertainty about the future. Robert Ellis felt that ultimately it was ‘an uncomfortable tour. There were changes afoot. Paul was restless about everything.’ Despite the undeniable success of the US tour, the photographer says, ‘it was always a question of, What’s next? Which made it all a bit insecure. There was the sense of the end of an era about it.’
McCartney retreated to the cocoon of the studio, holing up at Abbey Road to sift through the 90 hours of live tapes from the US tour for the triple-vinyl Wings Over America album, due in December 1976. Acknowledging the significance of his touring achievement, Paul drove himself hard in the polishing and mixing of the record, becoming a touch obsessive and working fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, for a six-week period. ‘Well, it’s always intense mixing something when you’ve got so much stuff to go through,’ he points out. ‘But it was my baby, and I was very hands-on with it. It was a very personal project, ’cause I knew it had all gone well. I wanted people who hadn’t been to the concerts to hear what had gone on.’ Before the year was out, Linda fell pregnant again, putting an instant dampener on the notion of any future touring. The couple began to argue about Paul spending so much time in the studio.
Bizarrely, at the same time, spinning off from the sci-fi elements of Venus And Mars and reflecting their new-found US celebrity, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry approached Wings with a view to them playing themselves in his planned sci-fi musical, plotted around an invasion from outer space. As tempting as the offer seemed to the cosmically minded Paul, the project was never to make it past the planning stage, even with McCartney’s name attached, since Roddenberry was struggling in his career and unable to convince any of the television or film companies to supply the finance.
With time on his hands, Jimmy McCulloch had formed the tellingly named White Line along with his drummer brother Jack and his friend Dave Clarke. The trio released one single for EMI, the gutsy, harmonising pop rock of ‘Call My Name’, performed under a shower of silver balloons on ITV music show Supersonic, before the record’s pressing was mysteriously, according to the band members, halted by EMI.
Hanging around the record company’s London offices in Manchester Square one day, McCulloch and Clarke sloped off to a nearby pub, which they found themselves sharing with another recent signing to the label, the Sex Pistols. ‘Jim started gobbing off,’ says Clarke, ‘telling them how crap they were. So this fight started between Jim and I forget which one of them. Me and the bass player of the Sex Pistols [Glen Matlock] managed to drag them apart.’
Clarke says McCulloch had grown cocky during his tenure with McCartney: ‘Jim was young and headstrong and had everything that he wanted when he was in Wings, and it’s difficult to deal with. I think it went to his head a bit. He could be really charming. But when the drink took over big-time, it was awkward.’ It’s perhaps no coincidence that, at this point, rumours began to circulate that Eric Stewart, from the recently fractured 10cc, was being groomed to replace Jimmy in Wings.
Wings Over America was released in time for Christmas and, by January 1977, it was sitting at the top of the US chart, completing a remarkable straight run of American number 1 albums that had begun with Red Rose Speedway. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ says Paul. ‘I mean, you were always advised not to do double albums, and suddenly there we were doing a triple. That was pretty cool, I must admit.’
In spring, Paul took the opportunity to release a slightly strange project that had been in the can since 1971. Upon the completion of Ram six years earlier, McCartney had hired arranger Richard Hewson to put together an instrumental pop-orchestral version of the album, not a million miles away from the easy listening sounds of German bandleader James Last.
The album was finally released in April 1977, under the masquerading name of Percy ‘Thrills’ Thrillington, an alter ego McCartney had been cultivating for some time. Supposedly a posh society figure, born in Coventry Cathedral in 1939, the fictitious Thrillington back-story had him travelling to Louisiana to study music and to California to learn arranging and conducting, before returning to London to form his own orchestra and apparently becoming friends with McCartney, who helped him secure a record contract. In return, Thrillington had been inspired to pay homage to Ram.
To bolster the ruse, since the previous year Paul had been taking out ads in the personal columns of The Times and the Evening Standard, which found Percy Thrillington
announcing his visits to Geneva or Mustique, or excursions to the Torbay Relaxation Centre or the Badminton Horse Trials at Newbury. One would read ‘Percy Thrillington wishes to advise friends that he is feeling thoroughly invigorated by the crisp and brisk ski-ing conditions in Gstaad’. Another would make known the fact that ‘Percy Thrillington is delighted with the efforts of those concerned with The Yellowplush Gallery to humour his aesthetic needs’.
Letters from readers began to appear in the papers’ columns, seeking more information about the witty and mysterious Thrillington. Of course, the tongue-in-cheek tone of the missives suggested they were probably the work of a prankster. Then a revealing small ad was printed, noting that Mr Thrillington was to be ‘taking an extended holiday in South America following the rigours of launching his first record album’. In March 1977 the Evening Standard ran an investigative piece, under the headline ‘The Perambulations Of Percy Thrillington’, that knowingly followed the trail of clues back to McCartney’s PR Tony Brainsby. He denied that Thrillington had been created by Paul as a publicity stunt.
Upon release, the liner notes of the Thrillington album went one further, quoting an EMI press officer as apparently saying, ‘Percy Thrillington certainly isn’t Paul McCartney as some people seem to think’. In an attempt to throw off the scent, Paul and Linda, travelling around Ireland, found a young farmer in a field and asked him if he fancied doing a spot of paid modelling for them. The bemused youth – ‘someone no one could possibly trace’ according to the McCartneys – posed for them first in a sweater and then in an evening suit. But, says Paul, ‘he never quite looked Percy Thrillington enough’, and the session was shelved.
Hearing his songs given such straightforward, light-entertainment arrangements must have tickled McCartney, but, beyond being a bit of diverting fun for its creator, it was hard to see the exact point of Thrillington. It would be another twelve years before Paul would finally admit in a press conference that he was behind this daft hoax. ‘We kept it a secret for a long time, but now the world knows,’ he laughed.