Fab

by Howard Sounes

  ‘Don’t worry, John. Imagine is number one, and this will be number one, too. That’s all that matters.’43

  These comments were reported in Melody Maker the week Paul launched Wings with a party at the Empire Ballroom in London’s Leicester Square. Although security was tight, and many famous faces were among the guests, there was a relaxed, homely feel to the event that typified Wings, from the hand-made invitation cards to the McCartneys’ own party clothes. Paul showed up in a baggy tartan suit, like a Caledonian clown. Lin wore a maternity dress. Paul had cut a sharp figure during the Sixties, never more so than when he strode across the Abbey Road zebra crossing in a beautifully tailored Savile Row suit. Now he had mislaid his style compass. It would be years until he found it again. Not all Seventies fashion was bad, but it is fair to say that Paul McCartney dressed appallingly throughout that decade and much of the Eighties, wearing vulgar and ill-chosen clothes and sporting a trendy yet hideous mullet haircut.

  There was a conscious turning away from the Sixties in other areas of his life. Despite the size of the Wings launch party, none of the other Beatles attended, and there were hardly any old faces from Apple at the function. It was as if Paul wanted to forget his illustrious past. ‘This was a fresh start, clean slate,’ says Denny Seiwell, ‘and we did not discuss the Beatles. Every once in a great while he might make a reference to an old story or something, but very, very seldom.’

  The exception came when interviewers drew Paul on the ongoing legal fight over the break-up of the Beatles. ‘I just want the four of us to get together somewhere and sign a piece of paper saying it’s all over, and we want to divide the money four ways,’ Paul told Melody Maker that month. Paul’s personal assistant Shelley Turner, together with Laine and Seiwell, sat and listened uneasily as Paul went on about the Beatles break-up in what was meant to be a band interview. (‘He’s talking about money now. That’s one of his pet points. He’ll never stop,’ Turner told the reporter in a worried aside. ‘Please get him on to talking about Wings.’) Still, Paul had more to say on the rift, responding to John’s dig in ‘How Do You Sleep?’: ‘So what if I live with straights?’ he asked. ‘It doesn’t affect him. He says the only thing I did was “Yesterday” and he knows that’s wrong.’

  Mild though this and Paul’s other remarks were, Lennon retaliated with an open letter to Melody Maker, which had become a forum for the ex-Beatles to snipe at each other. ‘Dear Paul, Linda, et all [sic] the wee McCartneys,’ Lennon began, before resuming the old arguments about who owed what to whom, and challenging Paul’s version of events in his recent interview. He mocked his former friend mercilessly throughout, referring to ‘my obsessive old pal’, and saying Paul took ‘How Do You Sleep?’ way too literally. One of the bones of contention between the men was Maclen Music. Lennon wanted Paul to sell his share to the other three, but according to Lennon Paul had refused. ‘… two weeks ago,’ Lennon harangued his ex-friend,

  I asked you on the phone, ‘Please let’s meet without advisors etc., and decide what we want,’ and I especially emphasised ‘Maclen’ which is mainly your concern, but you refused - right? You said under no condition would you sell to us, and if we didn’t do what you wanted, you’d sue us again … If you’re not the aggressor (as you claim) who the hell took us to court and [shit] all over us in public?

  Paul chose not to respond publicly to these allegations.

  BACK ON STAGE

  The McCartneys went to the United States for Thanksgiving, leaving their pets - Eddie, Martha, a Dalmatian named Lucky and several cats - in the care of their housekeeper Rose Martin. The McCartney menagerie was a source of disquiet in Cavendish Avenue where, despite his fame and wealth, Paul was not altogether popular. Some neighbours snobbishly looked down on Paul as nouveau riche, considering the press and fans he attracted a damn nuisance. Then there was the time the McCartneys painted their listed house in bright colours, which led to complaints to the council, who made Paul change back to an authorised scheme; while one particular neighbour, Alice Griswold, an elderly woman whose wealth and class were established by the fact she ran a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce, seemed to have it in for the family. Mrs Griswold got it into her head that the McCartneys were neglecting their dogs, leaving them locked in the house while they were in America, and made a complaint to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). When the McCartneys returned home, Paul went over the road and had ‘a right row’ with Mrs G. He told her sharply he’d never harm his dogs; he and Lin were animal-mad, and Rosie had been in every day to make sure the animals were all right. The man from the RSPCA agreed. Lin remarked that, ‘Mrs Griswold gives me a pain in the you-know-what.’

  After Christmas, Paul hired an additional guitarist for Wings. Born in Northern Ireland in 1943, Henry McCullough had been a professional musician since the age of 17, playing notably with Joe Cocker’s Grease Band, and was an old friend of Denny Laine’s. ‘I wanted to bring more of a blues element into the band,’ explains Laine. ‘I didn’t want to be in a pop group, and Henry was the epitome of a blues player.’ So Henry joined Wings on the standard £70-a-week deal, rehearsing initially with the group in rooms off the Mall. It soon became clear that Henry didn’t quite fit into Wings, which was poppier than both he and Laine wished, with a distinct weakness in the keyboard department. Henry suggested to Paul that they hire a professional keyboardist to strengthen their sound. Paul admitted that his wife was ‘absolute rubbish’ on keyboards, but there was no prospect of replacing her. ‘Once that was accepted by meself and everybody else, that was it. Linda was 100 per cent a part of the band and that’s the way we worked,’ says Henry, who developed a respect for Mrs McCartney, as most Wings members did, not for her musical ability, but for her pluck and charm.

  On Sunday 30 January 1972, what became known as Bloody Sunday, news came from Northern Ireland that the British Army had opened fire on a Republican demonstration, killing 13 people: In the wake of this appalling incident, Paul did something that was for him very rare indeed: he wrote a protest song, not only condemning the shootings, which most people lamented, but calling for the British to get out of Ireland, which was more problematic because the Protestant Loyalist population feared they would be murdered by their Catholic neighbours if the British Army withdrew. In writing this song, Paul put himself on the side of the Republican movement and its terrorist group, the IRA, which was engaged in a murderous campaign against the British. Paul’s maternal grandfather had been Irish, which gave him a personal connection to Ireland, but one wonders if his decision to write a Republican marching song had more to do with wanting to match John Lennon, who projected a trendy image of political engagement these days and had written two songs of his own about Bloody Sunday, both of which shared the simplistic sentiment expressed by Paul in his self-describing ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’. It is also possible that Paul wanted to reach out to John again by aligning himself with one of his old friend’s pet causes. Certainly Paul tried hard to remake their friendship in the Seventies.

  A slow song, with incongruously jaunty hand-claps, ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ was released as a single in February 1972. It was the first major Wings project for Henry McCullough, an Ulster Protestant who says he didn’t discuss the song with Paul and had been on the road too long to feel personally connected to Irish politics. ‘I knew it would cause a little bit of a fuss,’ is as far as he will go, diplomatically. It is hard to believe Henry was truly indifferent to a song that commented directly on the delicate politics of his homeland, and he certainly looked uncomfortable when Paul invited a US television crew into Cavendish Avenue to film Wings rehearsing the number. Paul gave the Americans a short interview, in which he said he didn’t intend to become a political singer, but ‘on this one occasion I think the British government overstepped the mark and showed themselves to be more of a sort of oppressive regime than I ever believed them to be’.

  As the song was rush-released, Paul led his fledgling
band out on the road for the first time. On the morning of Tuesday 8 February 1972, an Avis truck and green van pulled up outside 7 Cavendish Avenue. The McCartneys, together with their children, the band and the family dogs, climbed aboard the van; roadies Trevor Jones and Ian Horn loaded the truck with equipment, and the two vehicles headed north on the M1, whither no one knew. Paul was realising the ambition he’d harboured in the latter years of the Beatles to go back on the road and play small provincial shows, but he’d taken the concept to the extreme, setting off without any theatres booked.

  After driving 130 miles north, Wings reached Nottingham University, where the roadies informed the students’ union that they had Paul McCartney outside. Could Wings put on a show? Strange though this now seems, British rock bands such as the Who and Led Zeppelin did play universities at this time, building up their fan base, but acts didn’t turn up at universities unannounced in the hope of a chance booking, and Paul McCartney’s status as an ex-Beatle elevated him above and beyond everyday rock musicians. Then, as now, McCartney was one of the most famous entertainers in the world, and the students didn’t believe he had come to play for them until they saw him for themselves sitting in the van with Lin and the kids, at which point the booking was made. The McCartneys went off to find a guest house, leaving their roadies to make the necessary arrangements. Fliers were posted around the campus advertising a surprise show the next day. The entrance fee would be just 40 new pence (61 cents).

  So it was that the following lunchtime Paul McCartney got back on stage in Nottingham University Hall to play for a live paying audience for the first time since Candlestick Park. In a clear return to the start of his professional career he opened with a Little Richard cover, ‘Lucille’, after which it was mostly unknown territory. For Paul wasn’t going to play any Beatles songs, and Wings were a new band without much of a repertoire. ‘We haven’t got too many numbers yet,’ McCartney told the students, much as he and John must have apologised to the patrons of the Indra when the jejune Beatles first went to Hamburg. ‘We’re just checking things out.’ The kids yelled that they didn’t mind. Even so Wings could only play four original songs, including ‘Wild Life’. The show was padded with Elvis covers, some jamming and more Little Richard, Paul closing with ‘Long Tall Sally’.

  Back in the van, Wings divvied up the takings, mostly in coins and one pound notes. ‘Paul would go, “Here we go, one for you, one for you, one for you …”’ recalls Seiwell, adding with some bitterness: ‘It was probably the most money I ever made touring with Paul and it was nothing, you know.’

  The next night they played Goodridge College in York, followed by a string of university towns including Hull, Newcastle and Leeds. At each show, Wings performed ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’, which usually went down well with the students, but was banned by the BBC from its radio network for being too political, with Paul roundly criticised in the normally pro-McCartney national press for taking a simplistic stance on Northern Ireland. In response, he took out an advertisement in the Sun newspaper urging the public to buy the record and make up their own mind. While many did purchase the single, the radio ban hindered sales, and ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ rose no higher than number 16 in the UK charts. When Wings passed through the university town of Lancaster, Linda aired her views on the issue for Melody Maker, saying: ‘Look, in Ireland the IRA was forced into existence by the fact that Britain took over the country more than 800 years ago, or whenever it was. Therefore if the British got out of Ireland there’d be no need for the IRA …’ In response, a reader from Ulster wrote to the paper asking, if the McCartneys were so committed to the province, why didn’t they come over and play in Ulster? Over the next few years Wings played all over the world, but they never gave a show in Northern Ireland. Perhaps Paul considered the province to be too dangerous.

  Linda’s musicianship proved as feeble as her political history. On one occasion, when Paul counted the band into ‘Wild Life’, he was met by silence from his left. Looking over, he saw his keyboardist wife mouthing back that she’d forgotten the chords! The audience didn’t care, and neither did Paul. He was having a ball, while the guys in the band learned to accept Linda as an enthusiastic amateur, appreciating the family vibe a husband and wife playing together engendered.

  Despite what Denny Laine hoped for, Wings was not ‘a rough and tumble rock/blues-type’ band. It was a Mom and Pop act. Backstage you were liable to find Mary and Heather McCartney drawing pictures while baby sister Stella (known as Stelly in the family) slept in a make-shift cot in a drawer. When Paul and Linda decided they needed a Wings fan club, they devised the jokey Wings Fun Club, seemingly pitched at children Heather’s age rather than adults. Most significantly, the band’s next single-despite the fact Paul was always talking about wanting to shake off his soft-centred image - was an arrangement of the children’s nursery rhyme ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, because Mary McCartney had a pet lamb in Kintyre. Wings put the record out in May, as big a contrast to ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ as could be imagined. Some commentators suggested it was meant sarcastically, as if Paul was telling the BBC: ‘You won’t play serious music, so we’ll give you nursery rhymes.’ But it was really about indulging the kids. Denny Laine felt very uncomfortable. ‘If it was going to be going in that direction, and no other direction, I would not have liked it at all.’ One can imagine how Laine felt when Paul had Wings mime to the song on the Basil Brush Show.

  Most rock stars would be too concerned with their image to contemplate singing a nursery rhyme on a kids’ TV show hosted by a fox glove puppet, but Paul had been so successful for so long that he seemed immured from such considerations. It was as if he believed the public would like him whatever he did, and if they didn’t, so what? He was rich enough to do as he pleased. It was in this spirit that the McCartneys indulged their interests, however whimsical or childish. Linda was soppy about animals and, under her influence, Paul became animal-mad too, the couple and their children looking upon the entire animal kingdom as if it were of a piece with The Wonderful World of Disney. Apart from working on the putative Rupert the Bear cartoon, and performing on the Basil Brush Show, the McCartneys now decided they should make an anthropomorphic Disney-type film about ‘a family of cartoon mice living underneath the stage when we were performing’, as Denny Seiwell recalls. Wings did some work on this at Elstree Film Studios, though the picture never saw the light of day. ‘There was a lot of that kind of stuff going on.’

  Being a parent had evidently changed Paul. Family life was now all important, and when he took Wings out on a European tour in the summer of 1972 there was a strong family feel to the enterprise. The band travelled in a brightly coloured double-decker bus, painted with the legend WINGS OVER EUROPE, the open top deck laid out with bean bags and mattresses for the McCartneys, their band and the kids to lounge about on. While the bus was no doubt huge fun for the wee McCartneys, it was a slow and inefficient way to navigate the continent. ‘It only went 35 mph, so people would go whizzing by us on the motorways and see this gang of hippies in this bus. It was quite nice, but it didn’t make a lot of sense,’ remembers Seiwell, who also recalls that Linda suffered a severe attack of stage fright prior to their first-night show at Châteauvallon, a cultural centre near Marseille in the South of France. ‘She was crying on my shoulder, she was scared.’ Audiences were so thrilled to see a Beatle they hardly paid any attention to Paul’s wife, and McCartney’s confidence carried the night, as it always would.

  The idea of this European tour was to play small venues in mostly out-of-the-way places to get the band some road experience before they attempted anything more ambitious. So the Wings double-decker trundled up through France into Germany, then into Switzerland where, fatefully, Denny Laine met Joanne ‘Jo Jo’ Patrie. Jo Jo was a vivacious American model turned groupie whom Linda McCartney suspected of having her true sights set on Paul, which turned out to be correct. ‘She was basically trying to go through me to get to Paul,
’ concedes Laine, who discovered Jo Jo had sent Paul love letters as a teenage Beatles fan. ‘I didn’t know this to start with. I found out later.’ Paul and Linda treated Denny’s new girlfriend disdainfully, which offended both Denny and Jo Jo as they grew closer together, becoming a regular couple, having children and ultimately getting married. ‘I find it insulting that Linda looked on Jo Jo as a groupie. Linda was one of the biggest groupies on the face of the Earth if you want to put labels on people,’ Denny said in an angry interview in the 1980s. ‘Jo Jo was a groupie-nobody is denying that. But what is a groupie? Just a chick that likes musicians.’ These days Laine sees things slightly differently. ‘They tried to get on with Jo Jo,’ he says of Paul and Lin, ‘but she was a lot of work. What can I say?’

  Almost all the adults on the Wings double-decker smoked grass, Paul having been an avid pot smoker since meeting Bob Dylan in 1964. For a long tour they needed a regular supply. Rather than risk taking drugs through customs, the band had dope posted to them from England. One parcel was addressed to Denny Seiwell care of the Gothenburg Park Hotel, where Wings arrived on 10 August to play a show at the nearby Scandinavian Hall. While the roadies set up their equipment, the McCartneys took a limousine to the hotel to collect Denny’s parcel, which contained five and a half ounces of prime marijuana. Unbeknownst to the McCartneys, the Swedish police had been alerted and were watching the drop. As the band came off stage that night, Paul, Linda and Denny Seiwell were seized by Swedish detectives. ‘It was just me at first-then I hear Paul and Linda … They were being brought in, too, screaming bloody murder,’ says Seiwell, who was arrested because his name was on the package; Paul and Linda were nicked because they picked it up. Also dragged down to the station was Paul’s secretary.

  The McCartneys initially denied the drugs were theirs, then admitted it, according to the police: ‘They said they had made arrangements to have drugs posted to them each day they played in different countries …’ Paul, Linda and Denny Seiwell were ordered to pay a fine/good behaviour bond totalling £1,000 ($1,530), and allowed to go on their way. ‘They said, “Tell your rock ’n’ roll friends not to bring marijuana into Sweden, because we’ll find it and they’ll be arrested,”’ says Seiwell. ‘It was lame. It was really no big deal. If I remember correctly we had some marijuana a day later!’ It was a big deal, though. The drug conviction meant Paul was now unable to take Wings to the United States and Japan, as he had planned. The Gothenburg bust also seemed to show the McCartneys to have an arrogant attitude towards the law, while there was really no need to get into this sort of trouble. Many rock stars use drugs routinely on tour, but do so with enough discretion to avoid arrest. Paul had blundered into this situation through his cack-handed arrangements, and would make similar mistakes again and again during the course of his career.