Fab

by Howard Sounes

  Clearly Paul and Linda were a couple heading for marriage. Passing a door in New York’s Chinatown Paul saw a sign advertising that Buddhist weddings were conducted within. ‘C’mon, let’s go and get married,’ he said. Linda declined, explaining that her failed marriage to Mel See was too recent for her to want to marry again in a hurry. This would seem to contradict stories told by the likes of Nat Weiss that Linda was set on marrying Paul from the start, and it has been used by Paul and Linda as such a defence. But perhaps she was just too canny to rush into a ‘Buddhist wedding’ of dubious legality; better to bide her time and do it properly. If Paul had asked her once to marry him, he would ask again. In any event, Paul and Linda were solid enough to take Heather with them when they returned to England at the end of October 1968.

  Adjusting to life in the UK did not prove easy for Linda’s daughter. Having suffered the break-up of her parents when she was a toddler, and had the disorientating experience of being taken to live in New York, where Mom had an ever-changing cast of boyfriends, Heather was now relocated to a foreign country where the people, contrary to the reputation the British enjoy for good manners, were beastly towards her. The big girls who stood outside Paul’s house were the worst, giving Heather and her Mommy filthy looks when they passed and writing words on the gate that Heather, thankfully, couldn’t read. Children her own age weren’t much nicer. Placed in Robinsfield Infants, a private school in St John’s Wood, Heather was picked on for being different, that is to say American. Nobody wanted to be her friend. Paul suggested Heather sit quietly reading a book, and kids would come over to her out of curiosity. She told Paul sadly that she’d tried that and it didn’t work. ‘I don’t think she made too many friends there,’ Paul has said. ‘She wasn’t desperate or anything, she was just a little sad because [she’s] very friendly.’

  At the same time, Heather’s new ‘Daddy’ received all this attention. ‘It was so extreme. A [six]-year-old can’t comprehend fame and I had no concept of Paul’s world,’ she would say in adult life. After the period when kids shunned Heather came a second phase when schoolmates took an interest in her because of who ‘Daddy’ was. ‘From a child’s point of view it was hard to understand.’ Indeed, being brought up in Paul’s shadow would blight Heather’s life, which proved a troubled one with a leitmotif of pathos. There was a good side to having Paul as Dad; Paul liked children and was a thoughtful, attentive, funny and energetic father-figure. He lived in a cool house, what appeared to an American child as a beautiful English doll’s house, for 7 Cavendish Avenue had that classic, symmetrical look. It was full of interesting things, with a large walled garden, and plenty of pets to play with. Heather was as soppy about animals as Mommy was. In addition, there was the farm in Scotland.

  Paul took Linda and Heather to Kintyre as soon as possible, and mother and daughter fell in love with the place. Different though it was from Arizona, here was another wild empty landscape in which Linda could ride for miles. Paul and Heather both took up horse-riding and rode with her, developing a good seat. Linda found the light conducive for taking photographs; while, perhaps best of all, she and Paul and Heather could be alone together away from the press, the fans and the other Beatles. Admittedly, the steading was in a poor condition. Paul liked High Park tumbledown. Linda persuaded him to make some elementary home improvements: they bought bits of furniture in Campbeltown; Paul made a sofa from old packing crates, naming it Sharp’s Express after wording stencilled on the side; they laid a new floor; and Linda ran up simple plaid curtains. The cottage was suddenly much more welcoming. After a long walk through the heather, or along nearby Westport Beach, there were long, deliciously quiet family evenings in front of the log fire. When Linda mentioned that she wanted to stop using the Pill, Paul agreed and she fell pregnant. Marriage was inevitable now, and Paul felt ready. One day Lin said, ‘You know, I could make you a great home.’ It was exactly what he wanted to hear.

  THE BEATLES’ WINTER OF DISCONTENT

  One of the important points to make about the Beatles’ mature period is that their albums were complete works of art, what Richard Wagner called Gesamtkunstwerk, music and lyrics complemented by visual presentation. Since Sgt. Pepper, Paul had come up with the essential concept for the album covers, working with first-class people to realise his ideas. Having employed Peter Blake and his wife Jann on Sgt. Pepper, Paul now turned to another significant British artist, Richard Hamilton, considered the founder of Pop Art, which he defined in 1957 as being popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous and big business. Which summed up album-cover design perfectly.

  Paul’s art dealer Robert Fraser brought Hamilton and the Beatles together, setting up a meeting at Savile Row. Inevitably Paul kept his visitor waiting, and as Hamilton sat watching the beautiful people flounce by he became bored and irritated. By the time he was admitted to Paul’s presence, Hamilton was really disgruntled. ‘So when he said that they wanted me to do the cover of this album they were working on, I said, “Why don’t you do it yourself?”’ Hamilton recalled to the author Michael Bracewell.

  ‘Come on, haven’t you got any ideas?’ Paul asked.

  ‘Well, my best idea is to leave a white cover,’ replied Hamilton. He hadn’t intended to do a white cover when he came to the meeting. The notion occurred to him on the spur of the moment, almost as a put-down to Paul in response to being kept waiting and all the nonsense he saw surrounding the Beatles. To Hamilton’s surprise, Paul agreed.

  As to an album title, the band had debated several names, including A Doll’s House, after Ibsen. Hamilton said that if they were going for simplicity they should call it The Beatles. Surprisingly, neither EMI nor Capitol had released an LP under that most elementary of titles, so The Beatles it was, and Hamilton set to work on his now-famous, absolutely simple, white gatefold sleeve, stamped with a blind impression of the title and initially a number. Like a limited edition art print, every copy of the album would in theory be numbered, the Beatles themselves getting numbers one to four. To give their fans something to look at, colour headshots of each band member would be slipped inside the sleeve together with a fold-out lyric sheet on the reverse of which was a collage poster. In response to a request from Hamilton, Paul collected snapshots from John, George, Ritchie and Linda - including a picture of Paul in his bath at Cavendish - then watched the artist assemble the items for the poster.

  The album was a nightmare as far as sales reps were concerned. Shoppers searching through the shop racks for the new Beatles LP would not see the band’s picture on the cover, nor could they easily make out the band name, while the idea of naming the Beatles’ ninth (regular UK) album The Beatles, as if it were their first, was absurd. The music was also challenging in places. George Martin was of the opinion that the boys should have distilled one album from the 30 songs they recorded, instead of releasing a double album, but for once he was surely wrong. The capaciousness of the White Album is one of its strengths, allowing the Beatles to demonstrate their range. If ‘Revolution 9’ wasn’t to your taste, there were plenty of other accessible and pretty tunes to listen to: the likes of ‘Back in the USSR’, ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Julia’. In any event, despite its arty look, double album price and difficult tracks, the White Album sold sensationally well, going to number one in the UK and US, becoming an album that is rediscovered generation after generation, one of their best-selling albums ever in the USA.34

  In some ways the often spiky and confrontational White Album seems more of a John album that a Paul record. Yet without Paul’s major contributions - the top three being ‘Back in the USSR’, ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Helter Skelter’ - it would not have become the classic it is. Paul clearly still possessed a Midas touch, with the Beatles and outside projects, such as when he helped the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.

  ‘Viv [Stanshall] was down the Speakeasy with Paul. I think they used to drop into the personas of country gents, sort of thing, “Another one, dear boy?
” “I don’t mind if I do”,’ recalls Bonzo member Neil Innes, explaining how Paul came to help the band record their one top ten hit. ‘Viv was saying, “We’ve got to do this bloody single, but the producer won’t give us time to do anything.” So Paul said, “Well, I’ll come and produce it.”’ The Bonzos were working at Chappell Studio in Bond Street on a song titled ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’, which Paul effortlessly transformed into Top of the Pops material in one session. ‘I’d like to go on record as saying the record would have been nothing like [as successful] without Paul’s touch,’ says Innes.

  Larry was sort of doing on the drums a-boom-chick, boom-chick, boom-chick , and Paul said, ‘Yeah, that’s all right, we’ll do it like that, but give it a boom-dat-boom boom bap with the boom-chick, boom-chick,’ which gave it a feel. Then he snatches up Viv’s ukulele and starts leaning into the microphone, Nashville-style, to fade it, live fade and fade out, rinky-dinky-dinky-dinky-dinky-dink, and the whole thing is taking off. And it’s totally down to Paul.

  As they were working, the wife of the band’s manager sidled up to Paul and asked, ‘What’s that you’ve got there - a poor man’s violin?’

  ‘No, it’s a rich man’s ukulele,’ McCartney rejoined, showing his quick wit.

  ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’, produced by Apollo C. Vermouth (contrarily, the Bonzos didn’t want to advertise the fact Paul had produced it), went to number five in the UK in November 1968. Paul’s brother Mike, and his mates in the Scaffold, were at number one at the time with another nonsense song, ‘Lily the Pink’. It was the Christmas number one.

  Before celebrating the holidays, Paul flew to Portugal with Linda and Heather to visit Hunter Davies, whose authorised Beatles biography had recently been published. Davies owned a holiday villa on the Algarve, where Paul and Linda and Heather stayed for ten days, during which time, despite some ‘frosty moments’ between them, as Davies observed, the couple decided to marry. Lin was after all carrying Paul’s child, which meant wedding bells where he came from, and once Paul had made up his mind he enjoyed the ritual of phoning Lee Eastman in New York to formally ask his permission, which the patriarch granted, having adjusted his view of Paul for the better in the short time he’d known him. His daughter’s marriage to the Beatle would become a business union between McCartney and Eastman & Eastman, which would advise and guide Paul to their lasting mutual benefit. As a result, Lee’s relationship with Linda was transformed. ‘She became the star of the family,’ says Philip Sprayregen.

  Despite Paul and Linda’s happy news, Christmas 1968 wore a grim aspect. On 15 December, the Beatles’ lawyer David Jacobs, who’d suffered a nervous breakdown in recent weeks, apparently caused by financial worries, hanged himself at his Sussex home. The death and inquest generated lurid publicity. Then the Hell’s Angels roared into town. George Harrison was to blame. Having met members of the San Francisco chapter of the biker gang in California, he had foolishly invited them to look in at Apple if they were passing through London, never thinking they would. Now came news that they were on their way. George sent a memo to staff. ‘They may look as though they are going to do you in,’ he wrote worryingly, ‘but are very straight and do good things, so don’t fear and up-tight them.’ Shortly thereafter two terrifying characters, Billy Tumbleweed and Frisco Pete, rumbled down Savile Row on their Harleys, having had the hogs flown to London at great expense (to the Beatles), and proceeded to occupy the band’s elegant townhouse for the holidays.

  The Angels were in time for the Apple Christmas party, a lavish affair arranged primarily for the benefit of Beatles’ children. The highlight was a luncheon featuring what was claimed to be the Largest Turkey in England. This monster took a very long time to cook, testing Frisco Pete’s patience. When the bird was finally borne into the dining room the famished Angel fell on it, tearing the carcass apart with his bare hands, appalling the Beatles people gathered. In years gone by, the Beatles had sent out fun Christmas records wishing their fans a Merry Crimbo (sic) and a Happy New Year. This year Mr and Mrs Christmas - as John and Yoko were at the Xmas party - had attempted to put out an avant-garde recording that incorporated the dying heartbeat of their baby, which John had recorded in the womb using a stethoscope just before Yoko miscarried in October.35 While all this madness was going on, a thief managed to slip into the building and strip the lead off the roof.

  The Beatles’ winter of discontent, as George Harrison described it, began in earnest two days into the new year when the band, plus Yoko and a recording team, assembled on a sound stage at Twickenham to realise Paul’s new grand projet. The Beatles were to ‘get back’ to their roots by rehearsing, then performing a new set of songs live on stage, possibly a Roman amphitheatre in Africa, which they hoped would be warm this time of the year, the process of rehearsing for and then giving the show filmed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg as a movie/TV special to promote the album. It was a typically high-concept McCartney idea, a good one, too, with great commercial potential, except the others weren’t keen.

  Assembling his production team, Paul called Glyn Johns, a freelance record producer who’d been working regularly with the Rolling Stones.

  It was quite amusing, actually. I remember very distinctly taking the call and him saying, ‘This is Paul McCartney,’ and I thought it was Mick Jagger taking the piss, talking to me in a Liverpudlian accent … I said something like, ‘Stop fucking about, what do you want?’ Because I worked with [Mick] all the time at the time. But it was Paul. So that was a bit embarrassing.

  Despite this awkward start, Johns was hired as recording engineer on the project, becoming the Beatles’ de facto producer, which leads to the pertinent question: Where was George Martin?

  Having fallen out to some extent with their producer during the making of the White Album the Beatles had decided they didn’t want George Martin working with them closely this time, Lennon telling Martin rudely that they didn’t want any of his ‘production shit’ on this new album. ‘We want this to be an honest album,’ he said, a slap in the face Martin took as gracefully as was possible. He dropped into the sessions, but did not produce as he had done previously, which surprised Glyn Johns. ‘I was shocked to find that George wasn’t there, and I was equally shocked to find they were asking me about ideas for arrangements, or whatever else, which I didn’t think I was there for at all,’ says Johns, who hadn’t been properly briefed by Paul - one of McCartney’s failings. He liked to wing it, and expected others to do the same.

  No one ever said, ‘Oh, George isn’t doing this, you are.’ The word ‘producer’ was never used. I found it a little bit awkward when George did come. George actually did take me to one side and very kindly said, you know, you’re not to worry; don’t be concerned or feel awkward about this. It’s perfectly all right. So he made me feel OK about it, which was very, very nice of him, because I did feel a bit sort of awkward.

  Apart from when they were in their own homes, or in hotel rooms, the most privacy the Beatles ever enjoyed was when they were working with George Martin at Abbey Road. Now they were expected to make music with a virtual stranger while being filmed by a large crew of other strangers on a charmless sound stage outside London, and it was all Paul’s idea. ‘You had the slight sense that Paul was the driver of the bus, but that some of the others might want to get off at the next stop,’ observes Michael Lindsay-Hogg diplomatically.

  Paul tends to be what we call these days ‘proactive’. He goes out and if something’s not working he tried to make it work, he’s a very forceful character, forceful and, in his own way, quite a dominating character to do with what he wants, [and] one of his great qualities is a kind of enthusiasm. He said, ‘Yeah, let’s do this. Let’s not do nothing. Let’s do something. Let’s do this.’

  It wasn’t long before the driven McCartney clashed with his less committed band mates. This happened most seriously with George Harrison when, on 10 January 1969, Paul tried to tell his friend how to play guitar on ‘Two of Us’, a song often interp
reted as being about Paul and John, but which McCartney says referred to him and Linda. After repeated attempts to get it right, Paul told George wearily: ‘We’ve just gone around like for an hour with nothin’ … the riffs …’

  ‘There’s no riffs,’ replied Harrison.

  ‘But it’s not together, so it’s not sounding together.’

  ‘So we go on playing until we …’

  ‘Or we can stop and say, “It’s not together …”’ Sounding like a school teacher addressing a recalcitrant child, the teacher Paul may have become if he’d followed the career his mother envisaged, McCartney told Harrison: ‘See, if we can get it simpler and then complicate it where it needs complication. But it’s complicated in the bit …’ George bristled, saying he was just playing the chords, and muttered about Paul being unreasonable. ‘You know I’m not saying that,’ Paul defended himself. ‘I’m trying to help, you know, but I always hear myself annoying you, and I’m trying to …’