Fab

by Howard Sounes

  Another chronic problem with post-Beatles Paul was the way he paid his musicians. When the Wings Over Europe tour concluded in Berlin on 24 August 1972 his sidemen found themselves more or less broke. During the tour the band had been booked into the same luxury hotels as the McCartneys. Bed and breakfast was paid for, but room service and bar bills were not covered, and the boys ended up spending most of their wages on extras. ‘When the whole thing was over,’ complains Seiwell, who was increasingly concerned about the way the band was being treated, ‘it cost us money. Sold out every concert and when it was all over the band got paid nothing for 28 cities and two and a half months of a European tour. We got nothing. Because the expenses were so high.’ The money was only part of the problem. As bad was the superior attitude Paul and Lin showed on occasion. Seiwell again: There were times when we were a family. We really bonded as a family, the five of us, musically and socially with the wives and the kids. Everybody was a family. And then there were times when it was - this is really hard to say - but there were times when it just was about them, and we did not matter whatsoever.

  The McCartneys were back in London when news reached Cavendish Avenue that Paul was in trouble again with the police, this time in Scotland. In the aftermath of the Gothenburg bust, Detective Constable Norman McPhee of the Campbeltown police had found marijuana growing in a greenhouse at High Park Farm. The story given to the press was that DC McPhee had been on a routine crime prevention tour of the area when he spotted the plants, recognising the leaf shape he had been taught to look out for on a recent drug-awareness course. The truth was that the police had been tipped off, according to Paul’s Scottish lawyer Len Murray, meaning Paul wasn’t as popular in Kintyre as he thought he was. In any event, Paul was summoned to appear before the sheriff’s court in Campbeltown to face charges under the Misuse of Drugs Act. ‘And of course that was really quite serious. Growing cannabis was viewed a great deal more seriously in those days,’ says Murray, who organised Paul’s defence when the case came to court in the spring of 1973.

  Paul’s reaction to these busts remained one of defiance, so much so that Wings released what might loosely be termed their second protest song, ‘Hi, Hi, Hi’, only loosely because while it could be interpreted as a celebration of getting high on grass the song was also a paean to sexual intercourse. The man who had written so eloquently of blue suburban skies and the love you make being equal to the love you take was now singing of giving his baby his ‘sweet banana’ and doing it to her ‘like a rabbit’ all night long! Released at the end of the year as a single, with a reggae number, ‘C Moon’, on the flip side, this truly stupid song was promptly banned by the BBC for its sexual content. It reached number five in the UK charts, anyway, number ten in the USA. On the grounds of taste, it shouldn’t have been released at all. ‘What it was supposed to be getting at was a “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” kind of thing, trying to be sexual, but I thought it was a bit kind of lightweight,’ says Laine. ‘You know what, I think Paul’s always had a bit of a problem of wanting to be a little bit tougher than he is, and sometimes he’ll write a song to try and show that side of him.’

  The following spring Paul and Lin flew by private plane to RAF Machrihanish in Kintyre, where they met their lawyer Len Murray and John McCluskey QC, the advocate hired to represent them in court on drugs charges. For once, the McCartneys didn’t have their children with them and, freed from parental responsibility for the day, Linda had seemingly enjoyed a joint on the flight. ‘She was stoned out of her mind,’ notes an unimpressed Murray, ‘stoned out of her mind.’ A giggling Linda borrowed John McCluskey’s bowler hat and wore it throughout the day, as though laughing at the proceedings. Paul was in a more sober frame of mind, knowing the problems a drugs conviction could cause him. There was immediate good news, though. Before leaving the airport, Paul’s legal team explained to the star that they had persuaded the Prosecutor to drop two charges of possession, owing to a technical problem with the way the case had been brought, agreeing in return that Paul would plead guilty to the lesser charge of cultivation. This was good for Paul, who had been set to plead guilty to all three charges. The legal conference at an end, the lawyers drove Paul and Linda to Campbeltown’s court house, which was surrounded by journalists and cameramen. ‘We had to fight our way through, saying nothing,’ says Murray. ‘Linda enjoyed it all. She was obviously in her element having all this attention.’

  Inside the court, John McCluskey told the sheriff that his client had grown the marijuana plants at High Park from seeds sent to him by a fan. With his ‘genuine interest in horticulture’ Mr McCartney had planted and watered the seeds, though his horticultural interest didn’t extend to a knowledge of what it was he was growing. The matter was dealt with as a first offence (Paul’s spot of bother in Sweden couldn’t be used against him in a Scottish court). The sheriff fined Paul a nominal £100 ($153), at which point Linda tossed her hat in the air for joy. Outside the court, Paul told the press: ‘I still think cannabis should be legal for use among consenting adults. It is no more dangerous than drink.’ Linda was evidently still as high as kite as they got back in their plane. ‘I was quite impressed with the way he conducted himself throughout that morning,’ Len Murray says of McCartney. ‘He was quite respectful and conscious of the responsibility of it all, and the importance of it all … He certainly never gave the impression of not caring …’ The same could not be said about his wife.

  Paul and Linda were as one, however, Paul’s devotion to his wife expressed in Wings’ new single, ‘My Love’, recorded at AIR Studios, George Martin’s new facility above what had been Peter Robinson’s Oxford Street department store, overlooking Oxford Circus. Paul had come to AIR because he wanted to record with an orchestra, and George was the best man for that job. One of the most uxorious of Paul’s ‘I-love-you-Linda’ songs, ‘My Love’ was lifted by a stirring guitar solo by Henry McCullough, who, when it came to the recording date, bucked against Paul’s regimented way of making music-‘in blocks’, as he characterises McCartney’s method. ‘I was in there with a fifty-piece orchestra, just meself and guitar and I wanted to change the solo.’

  ‘What are you going to play?’ Paul asked his guitarist.

  ‘I have no idea,’ replied Henry, who wanted to extemporise.

  ‘Oh Jesus, Henry!’

  As the orchestra played, McCullough tore off the solo of his life. ‘It wasn’t a confrontation, [but] it had got to the point where I achingly wanted to be the guitar player in the band, instead of learning parts,’ says the guitarist, ‘and Paul, I think, found that way of working a little risky, which it is, but it hit the mark and it was left there.’ The song was released as Wings’ next single, becoming a number one hit in the USA. This success was followed by the new album, Red Rose Speedway, which Paul asked another old friend to produce.

  To try and create a collaborative atmosphere in Wings, Paul was experimenting with becoming just another member of the group, on a par with Lin, Laine, McCullough and Seiwell. ‘The first session he came into the control room and he said, “Now I don’t want you to think of me as Paul McCartney, I want you to think of me as the bass player in the band,”’ recalls Glyn Johns, grimacing as he tells the story. ‘Well, you can imagine how long that lasted! The minute I started talking to him like the bass player in the band it was, you know, “Who the bloody hell do you think you’re talking to?”’

  Following the Let It Be fiasco, Johns had gone on to become one of the foremost producers in rock, working successfully with Eric Clapton, the Eagles, Led Zeppelin and the Who. To his mind, Wings were not in the same league as these acts, couldn’t really be considered a band at all. ‘It’s called Wings, [but] it’s Paul McCartney. It doesn’t really make any difference who’s in the band. They are all very competent, professional musicians, but they’re not a band in my view - it’s Paul McCartney [with] a bunch of guys.’

  The essential problem to Glyn’s mind was that, despite the presence of Denny
Laine, Paul lacked a musical equal in Wings. ‘I think that while the Beatles existed Paul had John Lennon keeping a beady eye on him, and he wouldn’t let him get away with anything too syrupy, if you like. He’d take the piss out of him, he’d sit on him, he’d squash him,’ says Johns. Glyn had come to see Paul as an insecure person in some ways. ‘You’ve only got to look at his body language.’ Paul clearly needed people around him, like Linda, but Linda ‘just wasn’t a musician. Period.’ The result was that Wings smoked dope and jammed in the studio to little effect. Johns didn’t even bother to run tape. He sat in the control room and read the newspaper. One evening Laine and Seiwell remonstrated with him.

  They said, you know, ‘We’re not happy with you as a producer. You’re not taking any interest in what we are doing.’ I said, ‘When you do something that’s interesting, I’m there. But if you think because you are playing with Paul McCartney that everything you do is a gem of marvellous music, you’re wrong. It isn’t. It’s shite. And if you want to sit and play shite and get stoned for a few hours that’s your prerogative, but don’t expect me to record everything you’re doing, because frankly it’s a waste of tape and it’s a waste of my energy.’

  Paul joined the discussion, the band sitting in a semi-circle around the producer, who felt as though he was on trial. He didn’t appreciate it, or the sycophantic atmosphere around Paul (despite the conceit of Paul just being the bass player in Wings). ‘The fact is that they were all obviously really thrilled to be in a band with Paul McCartney … they all were up his bottom.’ So Johns quit Red Rose Speedway, describing the album Wings went on to make without him as ‘a load of rubbish’, which is harsh, but in a record review one couldn’t award it more than three out of five stars.

  More mediocrity followed when Paul agreed to take part in a music special for the television arm of Sir Lew Grade’s media empire. Grade, the owner of Northern Songs, had been suing Paul over registering his new songs to Paul and Linda McCartney, thereby depriving Grade of royalties he would receive if titles such as ‘Another Day’ were credited to Paul alone. To settle the dispute, Paul agreed that Wings would appear in a 55-minute television special for Grade’s Associated Television company (ATV). Broadcast on 10 May 1973, James Paul McCartney consisted of a series of musical performances by Wings and Paul, including Beatles songs such as ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Michelle’ (a sign of what a hard bargain Grade had driven). Many numbers were presented in the form of short, video-like films. For ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, Wings mimed along to a backing track while surrounded by a flock of sheep. The most interesting part of the show was footage of Paul hosting a family party in a Merseyside pub. Jim McCartney was present, a smartly dressed gent of 70; also, the aunts. Paul was evidently delighted when Ginny hoved into view, a stout old lady with a fag on the go. ‘All right, darling, how are you?’ Paul hailed his favourite aunt. ‘Get yourself parked, Ginny.’ The McCartneys then enjoyed a singsong, rattling through ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ and ‘You Are My Sunshine’ as the cigarette smoke thickened and the bar till rang.

  The other highlight of the ATV film was a performance of a dramatic new song titled ‘Live and Let Die’, which Paul had written for the new James Bond film of the same name, having read the Ian Fleming novel over a weekend. He cut the record with George Martin at AIR, Martin having written an arrangement for orchestra. Despite the fact that the producers didn’t like the song at first, thinking Paul had merely recorded a demo, ‘Live and Let Die’ was a perfect Bond theme, capturing all the excitement of the secret agent character; it was a top ten hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and became a mainstay of Paul’s stage show. It is in fact one of the best half-dozen songs of his post-Beatles career, not coincidentally because McCartney was working again with the old pro himself, George Martin, one of the few people in the music business whom he respected enough to be guided by. ‘Live and Let Die’ was also a very modern-sounding song, tailored for the bombastic, pyrotechnically enhanced stadium rock shows of the 1970s, which were just around the corner for Wings.

  17

  IN THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY

  HOME AGAIN

  Paul led Wings out on a UK tour in the spring of 1973, playing to their largest audiences yet, including a show at the Liverpool Empire on 18 May. Liverpool had declined since Beatlemania briefly revived the city’s profile. The docks closed in 1972, primarily due to competition from more modern ports, the waterways soon silting up and the warehouses falling into desuetude, exacerbating unemployment. At the same time, the city centre was radically modernised, with the demolition of St John’s Market, through which Paul had wandered many a time to and from Lime Street Station. In its place was erected a monolithic shopping plaza, car park and hotel complex, surmounted by a 450ft ventilation tower known as St John’s Beacon. At the top of this concrete tower was a modish revolving restaurant. This monstrosity now faced the visitor stepping forth from Lime Street Station, and if one went looking for Mathew Street another rude shock awaited.

  The Cavern had continued to operate into the early 1970s, with many good new acts gracing the stage, but the heyday of the Mersey Sound was gone, and nostalgic Beatles fans were not yet coming to Liverpool in great numbers to visit the places associated with the band, while the boys themselves were reluctant to dwell on their past lest it detract from what they were doing now. While he was in Liverpool in May, Paul didn’t even take the time to say farewell to the Cavern, which was about to be demolished to allow construction of an underground railway ventilation shaft. Liverpool Corporation could have saved the club, but Liverpool’s civic leaders lacked the foresight to see the importance of the Cavern in rock ’n’ roll tourism. Absurdly, the ventilation shaft was never actually needed. The last club night was 27 May 1973, shortly after which workmen bulldozed the buildings above ground, and destroyed the caverns below. ‘They should never have pulled it down. It was the most maniacal move possible,’ said Paul ten years later, when the magnitude of the vandalism had sunk in. ‘I think there was a bit of an attitude going around at the time which was, “Well, the Beatles left us. They hate Liverpool anyway.” We used to get an awful lot of that. If someone’s got to live somewhere else, it doesn’t mean he hates Liverpool.’

  On the contrary, Paul remained deeply attached to his home town, visiting Merseyside frequently to see his relatives and take nostalgic drives around his old haunts. When Jim McCartney found the stairs at Rembrandt too tiring, Paul bought the house from Dad and moved Jim, Angie and Ruth into a bungalow in nearby Gayton. Paul kept Rembrandt as his own Merseyside base, though most of his time was necessarily spent in London, his main residence being 7 Cavendish Avenue, with High Park the principal family getaway. What with Scotland being so far from London, it made sense to acquire a second weekend retreat nearer the capital, and this is what Paul did in June 1973.

  For some years Paul and Linda had been in the habit of driving out of London on impromptu mystery tours of the Home Counties, to get away from the pressures of their metropolitan life and enjoy the countryside. One such mystery tour took them 60 miles south of the capital to the village of Peasmarsh in East Sussex, not far from the historic town of Rye. Along Peasmarsh’s main road were arranged the village school, post office, the Flackley Ash Hotel, Jempson’s food store and a couple of pubs. The unmarked lanes that led off the A268 wound away through a green landscape of undulating farm- and woodland that had hardly changed in centuries. The primary sounds were still those of animals - bird song, the clip-clop of horses in the lanes, deer flitting through the trees, badgers rustling in the undergrowth - together with the grumble of farm machinery, the buzz of chainsaws and the distant popping of shotguns as farmers hunted for the pot. Tucked away in the woods off Starvecrow Lane, an eccentric circular house was for sale, built in the 1930s from oddments of older buildings. At the centre of this round house was a living room with a fireplace, off which radiated triangular rooms, with two bedrooms upstairs. A stream running through the wood led to a nearby waterfa
ll, hence the house’s name: Waterfall. The property was only accessible via a private, 300-yard track, and completely hidden by the trees. At the same time London was only an hour away by car, with a convenient aerodrome at nearby Lydd, which Paul had used in 1966 to hop over to France. In a break in Wings’ 1973 UK tour, the McCartneys bought Waterfall as a weekender, soon expanding their landholding by buying additional neighbouring tracts and farms, creating an extensive country estate that eventually became their main home.

  Waterfall cost £42,500 ($65,025) at a time when McCartney Productions was recording an annual loss of £110,742 ($169,435), but Paul’s company had assets of a quarter of a million pounds, in addition to the star’s personal fortune: that is to say the money he had tucked away in Coutts Bank and elsewhere; plus his property interests and his all-important stake in the Beatles. In fact Paul had so much money washing around that he was looking for investment opportunities. It was his father-in-law Lee Eastman who suggested Paul invest in song-publishing, which was one of Lee’s specialist areas.