by Tom Doyle
‘I’ll tell you one thing, man,’ Paul confided in him. ‘I’ll never fall out with anyone again in my life for that amount of time and face the possibility of them dying before I get a chance to square it with them.’
Later in the afternoon, he called Yoko in New York. McCartney remembers that Ono ‘was crying and cut-up and had no idea why anyone should want to do this.’ She told him how warmly John had often talked about him in private. ‘It was almost as if she sensed that I was wondering whether the relationship had snapped.’ Later, he would look back on his last conversation with Lennon and realise ‘we were still the best of mates’.
Leaving the studio at the end of the day, McCartney offered short responses to the questions of the journalists who had been standing all day on the pavement in Oxford Street. He said that he’d been in the studio ‘just listening to stuff. . . I just didn’t want to sit at home.’ One, inanely, asked why. ‘I just didn’t feel like it,’ Paul responded, obviously irritated. As he made to leave, his final comment to the reporters was: ‘It’s a drag, isn’t it?’
‘I probably should’ve said, “It’s the world’s most unholiest . . . worst-ever drag . . . in the universe”,’ he says now. ‘Y’know, that might have explained what I was thinking a bit better. But I just sort of said, “It’s a drag.” And that came out very flippant. It wasn’t flippant. And anyone who saw me on that day knows it wasn’t.’
The words would haunt McCartney for years. More than flippant, in the light of the deep shock and open grief that was spreading around the world, his lasting comment in reaction to the death of Lennon was seen as offhand, uncaring and even callous. When this brief but provocative statement began to filter out, Paul was instantly damned by the media. ‘I felt every inch for him,’ said George Martin. ‘He was unwise, but he was off his guard.’
Paul tried to put out the media fire by issuing his own statement: ‘I have hidden myself in my work today. But it keeps flashing into my mind. I feel shattered, angry and very sad.’ He acknowledged that John had often been rude about him in the press, but said that ‘I secretly admired him for it. There was no question that we weren’t friends. I really loved the guy.’ He concluded by saying that his late friend would be remembered in future years as an international statesman, whose ‘Give Peace A Chance’ had helped to hasten the end of the Vietnam war. ‘He often looked a loony to many people. He made enemies, but he was fantastic. He was a warm man who cared a lot.’
Later that night, back at home in Sussex, the McCartneys and the kids sat and, like the rest of the world, watched the news reports on TV. As music industry pundits began to turn up onscreen, offering their in-depth analysis, Paul began to feel his anger rising. ‘I thought it was well tasteless,’ he said. ‘Jesus Christ, ready with the answers, aren’t we? Aren’t we just ready with a summary?’ Ultimately, of course, he was enraged by the fact that these journalists were being relatively eloquent in their tributes to Lennon, when he had been awkward and inarticulate. ‘They were the ones who came off good because they said suitably meaningful things,’ he sadly points out. ‘I was the idiot who said, “It’s a drag.”’
He raged against the now identified killer, if impotently and still somehow inexpressibly: ‘I remember screaming that Mark Chapman was the jerk of all jerks. I felt so robbed and emotional. It was crazy. It was anger. It was fear. It was madness. It was the world coming to an end.’
Finally, behind closed doors, he allowed himself to break down. ‘I wept like a baby,’ he says. ‘It was a heavy personal blow.’
These days you pay tribute to both John and George in your live shows. What goes through your mind when you play those songs? Are you aware of the heightened emotion in the crowd?
You’re not as aware of it as the people in the audience are. But you’re aware of a feeling. The nice thing is it’s a common feeling, ’cause it’s you and them feeling it. Obviously when I do ‘Here Today’ or ‘Something’, I’m thinking of John or George. There’s an inherent emotion in those songs. The music just touches a raw nerve.
15
End of the Road
The day after the world learned of the death of John Lennon, there was a pheasant shoot in the forest near Blossom Wood Farm. Linda was forced to go outside, locate the hunters and have a quiet word that, in the circumstances, the sound of gunfire was the last thing the McCartneys wanted to hear.
Paul was in a fogged state of disbelief. The next time he left the farm, it was for the MPL Christmas lunch in London where, understandably, it was hard to rouse the festive spirit. ‘There was a lot of sadness there,’ says Laurence Juber. ‘It was overshadowed by not only the fact that Paul had lost his musical soulmate, but also there was a certain kind of threat to the fact that, if somebody could assassinate John, they could also do the same to Paul.’
The fear of being next was never far away. ‘Paul,’ said Linda, ‘was in so much pain’, and he found it hard to shake the dread that he or a member of the family might be targeted. It was an anxiety he shared, naturally, with the other two surviving Beatles. ‘That was a question that was whipping around the three of us,’ McCartney admitted. ‘Like, are you next?’
Inevitably, perhaps, there were bizarre threats coming in from unhinged individuals. There was one report that a stalker carrying a knife had been caught attempting to break on to the McCartneys’ estate. From here on in, Paul and the family were always accompanied by security guards. Laurence Juber dropped by AIR London in January 1981 to find the singer’s every move being shadowed by heavies. ‘Somebody had been making death threats in New York,’ he remembers. ‘It was scary.’
Linda explained to her friend, Danny Fields, that the family were forced to maintain a low profile, more for the sake of the children than anything else. ‘There were some nuts,’ she told him, ‘but we had to take them seriously. We have so much more security around us now. Our lives have really changed.’
As time wore on, however, Paul realised that – having never allowed his fame to hamper or hinder him in the past, in taking a determinedly ordinary approach to his everyday life – living behind a wall of security was not for him.
‘There are crazy people everywhere,’ he reasoned. ‘I was really worried for a few weeks afterwards. But I couldn’t really live like that. My attitude is to try and push it out of my mind.’
As planned, on 1 February 1981, the McCartneys flew to Montserrat to continue work on the next album, with Denny Laine, but notably without Laurence Juber and Steve Holley, indicating that Wings were once again reduced to their core trio, at least for studio purposes. Back at the helm was George Martin, the thinking being that the producer’s old-fashioned record-making values would ensure tighter quality control over the material. There had been moments of inspiration on Back To The Egg, while McCartney II had worked as a creatively liberating experience. But still, Paul rightly acknowledged that there had been something lacking in his most recent albums.
While the previous trips to far-flung destinations had allowed him a window of escape, in the light of Lennon’s murder there was to be no such relief on Montserrat. Constantly shadowing him on the island were the paparazzi, tailing him in cars and on scooters. It was the first time he’d experienced this kind of behaviour – to be expected perhaps in London, Paris or New York – in what was essentially a holiday setting, and it riled him. He tried to ram them with his hired Jeep, calling them ‘monsters’.
Over the coming weeks, a parade of invited musicians arrived at the Caribbean studio. A fortnight in, Ringo showed up with his new girlfriend and soon-to-be wife, actress Barbara Bach, adding his rolling drum parts to McCartney’s future single, the sunny ‘Take It Away’. Following him five days later was rockabilly musician Carl Perkins, a hero to the nascent Beatles, who traded lines with Paul in the skiffle swing of ‘Get It’. The American, like others before him, was impressed by the McCartneys’ apparent normality and familial closeness. ‘We tried the jet set, Carl, and it’s plastic,’ Paul told hi
m. Next flew in Stevie Wonder, to make a cameo appearance on the synthy funk of ‘What’s That You’re Doing’ and duet with McCartney on the race-blurring ‘Ebony And Ivory’. As time passed, it was clear that the record was becoming less a Wings album and more of a solo outing, exploring the burgeoning 1980s trend for major-name collaborations.
Not surprisingly, then, Denny Laine felt increasingly sidelined and undervalued. His dwindling creative influence aside, he was annoyed that once again Jo Jo hadn’t been allowed to come on the excursion. At the same time, he was stewing over his perceived lack of financial reward for his contribution to McCartney’s output over the previous ten years. He flew home, peeved and disillusioned.
When the sessions returned to AIR in London, one day early in March, Laine simply didn’t turn up. Trevor Jones and then John Hammel both placed calls to his house, with the guitarist refusing to come to the phone. Then Paul rang and spoke to Jo Jo, who told him, with no little satisfaction, that Denny had ‘asked me to give you and everyone else the message’ that he wasn’t coming back. After a decade of loyal service, Laine was quitting.
‘It was obvious we wouldn’t tour again,’ Denny said at the time, by way of explanation. ‘But touring is the purpose of being in the business as far as I’m concerned.’ Laine knew, of course, that essentially McCartney was making another solo album and Wings probably wouldn’t survive. In truth, he jumped before he was pushed.
‘It would’ve been Wings, plus all these other names,’ he said of the record that was to become Tug Of War. ‘But it became his album because I left and there was no Wings any more.’
In private, though, George Martin had been encouraging McCartney to drop the façade of the band and release the album under his own name. ‘The idea of working with Wings again . . . in truth, it would have just been limiting, I thought,’ said Paul. ‘And George agreed. I slightly blamed it on him a bit. Only a bit though.’
In the last week of April, the Associated Press agency got wind of the split and issued the following story.
‘Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney, who formed the group Wings after The Beatles split up in 1970, is now facing problems with his band. Denny Laine, the band’s drummer [sic] since it was formed in 1971, quit suddenly on Tuesday in a disagreement over McCartney’s decision to halt the group’s public appearances temporarily. The departure left only two members of the group, McCartney and his wife Linda. “There is no row,” said Laine’s manager Brian Adams. “But Denny likes to tour and Paul has decided that Wings will not make any tour plans for the future.”
‘Laine, 36, decided to quit the group during a recent recording session in the West Indies, where the next Wings album was made. McCartney halted public appearances because he had received several death threats since the murder in New York of fellow ex-Beatle John Lennon on Dec 8. A McCartney spokesman denied the report, adding that Wings would still exist.’
This official denial was merely a delaying tactic, of course. Steve Holley, having read of the break-up in the Evening Standard, phoned McCartney to ask him if it was true that the band was over.
‘Uh, yeah, I’ve been meaning to call you,’ Paul said.
‘It was just horrible the way it went out,’ says Holley. ‘Even though every fibre of my body was telling me that it was going to happen, it was awful.’
For Juber, there was a sense of missed opportunity. The guitarist feels that if the bust in Japan had never happened, then the group would have gone on to tour America successfully in the summer of 1980, establishing Back To The Egg as a major as opposed to minor album. ‘Then,’ he reasons, ‘Wings would have gone out with a bang, rather than a whimper.’
Denny, rehearsing with his new band at Rock City Studios in Shepperton, talked to the press to confirm that the schism had been created by McCartney’s refusal to tour. One prying reporter, exploiting the apparent fall-out, asked Laine if, as the gossip suggested, Paul was a difficult man to work with. ‘Well, I’ve had my moments,’ the guitarist offered, as if leaving much unsaid.
The key problem, as Laine saw it, was that McCartney was too famous to tour on a relatively normal level, without the accompanying hoopla his presence attracted. ‘Because of who he is,’ he says today, ‘that was one of the drawbacks really. I was ready to go out and do my own thing.’
In truth, it was only half the story. During this period, Laine was suffering from various problems in his personal life. At a Mayfair nightclub he was involved in a tussle with Jock McDonald, singer with punk band the Bollock Brothers, the matter resolved without charges being brought. Following that, he crashed his Ferrari into a fence. ‘I don’t seem to be having much luck lately,’ he noted at the time. Then, far more seriously, Jo Jo Laine suffered a drug overdose at the couple’s home in Laleham, Surrey, after her father – shot and paralysed two years before by her schizophrenic brother – died in America. She was rushed to hospital, where she made a full recovery.
The couple’s marriage had already been in trouble, exacerbated by Jo Jo being left behind in England while her husband was in the Caribbean. At the time, Laine blamed the McCartneys: ‘Paul and Linda’s refusal to allow Jo Jo on Montserrat went a long way to destroying my marriage.’ Upon Denny’s return from the Tug Of War sessions, Jo Jo confessed that she had been unfaithful to him with John Townley, a singer signed to EMI. ‘I’d always denied any affairs I’d had,’ she said, ‘but this one I was open about.’
The feud between McCartney and Laine was to go public, the former pointing out that the latter had quit the group, saying that he missed playing live, and yet hadn’t been on the road since leaving. ‘But that was my problem,’ says Denny. ‘It was hard for me to go out and play live after Wings, like it was hard for him to play live after The Beatles. It’s very difficult when you’ve been in a big band. I couldn’t go out doing Moody Blues material. You want to move forward.’
Only much later, in the face of ongoing accusations of his financial tightness, did McCartney address Laine’s money grumbles about his time in Wings, saying that there were receipts in the MPL office for over a million pounds paid to the guitarist down the years. ‘Now, you tell me a guy in any group who got that for the period we were together,’ Paul argued. ‘If you think I sound mean after that, I’ve got to disagree with you. I mean, these people like Denny Laine, “He didn’t pay us enough”. Well, what I think is, Yeah, well, I did. I know exactly what I paid him. It’s a million.’
From the perspective of one unnamed former Wings employee, Denny was paid more than the other group members to act as Paul’s second-in-command, keeping the band on an even keel, particularly when sailing through stormier waters: ‘He was the go-between. But he didn’t really share the McCartney family circle. Denny was his own man, and unfortunately Jo Jo didn’t see eye to eye with Linda.’
Later, living in Spain, Denny fell in with a couple of journalists who offered to write a biography of him. He says the pair absconded to London and filleted their interview transcripts for the juiciest details before selling them to The Sun without his knowledge or approval. The revelations were of the lurid and druggy variety – Paul and Linda spent over £1,000 a week on weed, smoking joints ‘the way ordinary people smoke cigarettes’; they smuggled dope through an airport in the hood of toddler James’s coat; Paul’s head was so clouded by the stuff that, due to chronic indecision, his albums took forever to make.
Worse, perhaps, Laine claimed that in all of his time with McCartney, he got no closer to knowing the real and ‘complex’ Paul. ‘Even though I’ve written countless songs with him and we’ve been stoned together hundreds of times,’ he was quoted as saying, ‘I still don’t feel I am very close to him. He is the best person I’ve met in all my life at hiding his feelings.’
In the wake of the apparent exposé, the McCartneys largely kept schtum, although Linda was to venture the opinion that ‘so much of it is rubbish. I thought Denny came off badly. I could see some girlfriend or an ex-chauffeur writing such rubbish, but a musician?’<
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Looking back today, Denny insists, ‘We never fell out. Nothing like that. But it certainly looked like we did.’
In the final reckoning, Wings had proved to be a long and difficult endeavour. ‘To me,’ Paul said, ‘there was always a feeling of letdown, because The Beatles had been so big that anything I did had to compare directly with them.’ Linda, controversially, given her own musical struggles, declared that none of the members of the group, across all of the line-ups, had ever been accomplished enough to work with an increasingly frustrated McCartney, who was forced to carry their weight. ‘They were good,’ she said, ‘but not great.’
The death of Lennon, meanwhile, had caused the remaining ex-Beatles to turn reflective about their relationships with one another. In a reunion of sorts, McCartney and Starr were to come together to play on Harrison’s playful Lennon reminiscence ‘All Those Years Ago’, the first time all three had appeared together on record in more than ten years. Parts of Tug Of War revealed more of Paul’s own feelings about John. The title track concerned itself with the push and pull of competitive relationships, while the highly emotional, ‘Yesterday’-echoing ‘Here Today’ was clearly directed at his lost friend.
One verse recalled an event in September 1964, during the first Beatles US tour, when their flight to Jacksonville, Florida, was diverted to Key West in order to avoid the destructive path of Hurricane Dora. Grounded, and with a rare evening off, Paul and John sat up all night and got drunk and bared their souls to one another, ending up in tears. McCartney said that while writing the ballad he imagined a cloud parting in the sky above his head and Lennon blowing a raspberry at him. ‘This is what the song is, y’know,’ he said. ‘I’m sort of saying, “Even though you blow that raspberry, I really did know you.”
‘Songwriting is like psychiatry,’ he went on, possibly disclosing more about his creative urge than he had ever done before. ‘You sit down and dredge up something that’s deep inside and bring it out front. And I just had to really say, “I love you, John.” I think being able to say things like that in songs can keep you sane.’