Fab

by Howard Sounes

  Linda’s dad is a great business brain. He said originally, ‘If you are going to invest, do it in something you know. If you invest in building computers or something, you can lose a fortune. Wouldn’t you rather be in music? Stay in music.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’d much rather do that.’ So he asked me what kind of music I liked. And the first name I said was Buddy Holly.

  That spring the Eastmans bought the Nor Va Jak publishing company, in which were held US rights to Buddy Holly’s biggest hits, making Paul the proud owner of ‘Maybe Baby’, ‘Not Fade Away’ and ‘Peggy Sue’ among other classics. The Eastmans went on to acquire more song catalogues for Paul, building a substantial publishing business that provided the star with steady additional income, though the songs he most wanted to own, those he’d written with John Lennon, remained stubbornly beyond his reach, either because they weren’t for sale or, when they were, they were priced too high.

  Aside from publishing, cash and property, Paul owned a valuable and growing art collection, several luxury cars, including a Rolls Royce and a Lamborghini, and he gave Linda magnificent gifts, including an emerald and diamond necklace for her 30th birthday. The financial circumstances of the other members of Wings were in complete contrast to this lifestyle. Henry McCullough, Denny Laine and Denny Seiwell were all still being paid a paltry £70-a-week, with occasional bonuses (receiving £1,000 each [$1,530], for example, at the end of the recent UK tour). The musicians were all under the impression they would be cut in on the band royalties eventually. ‘That just never happened,’ says Seiwell,44 who had to get a bank loan when he wanted to buy a car, which was not the lifestyle the American envisaged when he and Monique came to the UK at Paul’s behest. ‘There was very, very little money that came down to the band. Yet we were working on a gentleman’s agreement that we would all be part-owners of [Wings].’ By the time the band convened at Paul’s Scottish estate to work on what became the next and most celebrated Wings album, Band on the Run, these financial complaints were starting to have a negative effect on morale, particularly on the spirits of Denny Seiwell and Henry McCullough.

  Paul had written some good new songs which he wanted to work up as demos in Kintyre before cutting the new album abroad. The idea was to get inspiration from a different setting and culture, as Denny Laine recalls, though Laine also believes there may have been a tax advantage to recording abroad. Paul had discovered that EMI operated recording studios in countries as far-flung as Brazil, China, India and Nigeria. It would be a different experience to make a record in Africa, so Paul booked Wings into the EMI facility in the Nigerian port city of Lagos for September 1973. In preparation for the trip, Wings worked on Paul’s new songs in the barn on Low Ranachan Farm, just over the hill from Paul and Linda’s High Park cottage, and part of McCartney’s enlarged Scottish estate. Denny Laine and his pregnant girlfriend Jo Jo Patrie were staying in another cottage on the estate.

  When Wings played at Low Ranachan, cows drifted over from neighbouring farms to listen; ‘they’d be craning their necks to this music,’ notes farmer Duncan McLean. Despite the charming rural setting there were fractious words in the barn. Money had become a critical issue with Seiwell and McCullough, while Paul seemed fed up with his musicians. ‘On occasions he would maybe go home early from rehearsals or something because maybe he was tired or something wasn’t working out,’ notes Henry McCullough, whose loose, improvisational style didn’t mesh with Paul’s systematic way of working. The men came to an impasse on 14 July when Paul told Henry once too often what he should play. Just as happened with George Harrison during Let It Be, this led to Paul’s guitarist walking out. Without saying anything to Paul, at the end of the day Henry put his guitar case in his car and drove home to London. He didn’t return. ‘I just had to move. If I hadn’t of moved at that time I think eventually I may have been sacked.’ Money was certainly part of the problem. ‘It’s all very well getting into a bloody Lear Jet and flying off to [Lagos], but at the end of the day when you get home you still have to [eat].’ When Paul came to the barn the next day to continue work, and was told by the others that Henry had gone, he continued as if nothing had happened, never discussing the matter with Seiwell or Laine, who defends Paul in this instance. ‘It’s not a matter of being told [by Paul] what to play,’ he says of Henry’s reason for quitting; ‘it’s just [Paul’s] personality. If you don’t come up with something, then he’ll suggest something, and he can be a bit overpowering like that. But at the same time if Henry had been a little bit more enthusiastic [then] maybe it would have been different.’

  The next day Denny Seiwell returned to his London home to prepare for the Africa trip. Denny Laine and Jo Jo were packing up ready for their own departure to the capital, where Jo Jo was expecting to give birth to their first child, when Jo Jo realised she was about to go into labour. The couple dropped everything and rushed to the local Kintyre hospital, where they had a son (who they named Laine, rather absurdly). Oblivious to this family drama Paul and Linda rode over the hill on horseback to find Denny and Jo Jo’s belongings strewn about outside their cottage, like the remnants of a gypsy encampment. ‘What the Hell’s going on with this mess?’ they asked the farm-hands angrily, as Laine later heard it, not knowing about Jo Jo’s emergency. The way Denny Seiwell heard the story second hand the McCartneys were totally unsupportive to Denny and Jo Jo during the birth of their son, not visiting the hospital or even sending flowers when they found out about the birth. Laine himself doesn’t remember this being an issue, but Seiwell got it into his head that Paul and Lin had let his friends down and, even though he may have had the facts wrong, he added this perception to a list of grievances.

  The band were due to fly to Lagos on 30 August. In the last few days before departure Seiwell talked to Paul on the phone about his concerns. Recalls the drummer:I said, ‘Listen, can’t we just postpone this trip and break in a new guitar player, so we can rehearse a new guitar player, teach him Henry’s parts, teach him the songs, so we can go into this project and play it as a band kind of live and then embellish it?’

  He said, ‘No, no, no, we’re just going to continue. EMI have set up the studio for us. We’ll do it like Ram. It’ll all be over-dubbed, but we’ll make it good.’ I thought, I don’t want to do that again. We had just spent all this time and effort becoming a real rock ’n’ roll band, and it was becoming very good. So between Henry leaving, the bad news of Denny and Jo Jo, no contract one more time, I just took it upon myself to say, ‘That’s it!’

  Seiwell quit.

  Paul was ‘very angry and very upset’. He swore at his drummer, then slammed down the phone.

  Linda called us back immediately and said, ‘How dare you inconvenience us?’ I replied, ‘I can’t even talk about the inconvenience. I’ve been inconvenienced for three years here. This just isn’t right!’ So that was it. There was no more. It was totally harsh, and then we didn’t speak for years.

  Paul had lost two band members in a matter of a few days, but he carried on regardless, flying to Lagos at the end of August to make the new record with Linda, Laine, and Paul’s favourite engineer, Geoff Emerick. Like Paul, Laine was able to shrug off the desertions. ‘It didn’t bother me. When you’ve been through what we’ve been through with different bands, and different members, you just get on with it. It’s not like, “Hey! It’s the end of the world.”’

  The actual recording sessions for Band on the Run were no less fraught than the build-up to the record. Paul discovered that Lagos was not a paradise resort where he and Linda could swing on hammocks under coconut trees, but a dirty, dangerous, disease-ridden city, stickily hot in the monsoon season. Villas had been hired to accommodate the McCartneys, Laine and Emerick, the latter alarmed to discover that his lodgings were alive with spiders, insects and lizards. The EMI studio was situated down the road in the port of Apapa, which had given its name to the SS Apapa, the ship Paul’s nefarious uncle Will Stapleton stole from in 1949, bringing disgrace on the family. Uncle Will had
come ashore at Apapa to spend some of his ill-gotten gains. Odd to think Paul was retracing his uncle’s steps so exactly.

  The EMI facility in Apapa turned out to be little more than a shed attached to a pressing plant. ‘When you opened [the back door] you saw a couple of dozen shirtless guys standing ankle deep in water pressing records in this small, steaming-hot room,’ Emerick remembered in his memoirs. The studio lacked basic equipment; Emerick had to hire a carpenter to knock up some acoustic screens before they could start. Then local Nigerian musicians made it known that they didn’t appreciate Paul coming to their country, believing the star was there to steal their music. The next thing Paul knew he was being mugged during an evening walk with Linda. As Lin screamed at the muggers not to hurt her husband, the men made off with his valuables, including the Band on the Run demo tapes.

  When a writer loses his manuscript and is obliged to write a work over again from memory, as sometimes happens, the writing often comes more cleanly the second time. This seems to have been the case with Band on the Run. Forced to remember his songs after muggers stole his demo tapes, Paul laid down a series of minor classics, playing the drums himself and dividing up the guitar parts with Laine. ‘[We] made the album as though we weren’t in a band, as though we were just two producers/musicians,’ recalls his band mate, emphasising that Paul still made no allusion to the loss of McCullough and Seiwell, preferring to keep his own counsel on this as on other matters. Laine always found Paul a self-contained man. ‘Paul’s personality is that he likes to be positive, he likes to be up - and there’s a strength there somehow - he doesn’t like to share his down-time with other people. He likes to cope with it himself in private.’ The strain of it all got to the star, though. Halfway through the work he collapsed in the Apapa studio. Linda screamed that Paul was having a heart attack. It turned out to be a panic attack.

  When Paul returned to London seven weeks later, he had the basis of the best studio album Wings ever made. Lyrically Band on the Run is slightly weak, as usual, but musically it has an energy and cohesive-ness lacking from McCartney, Ram, Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway. Apart from the fact that the underlying melodies were good, it seems that Paul’s desire to show Seiwell and McCullough he could do without them made him raise his game. Highlights included ‘Let Me Roll It’, an immensely exciting yet very simple song built around a hot guitar riff. The lyrics are of no consequence, other than to form the hub around which the musical wheel turns, yet the song works brilliantly, destined to become a staple of Paul’s live show. It must be galling, therefore, when Lennon fans observe that ‘Let Me Roll It’ sounds like a John rip-off. The title track ‘Band on the Run’, has a hokey but enjoyable desperado feel, also making one think of the band members who ran out on Wings; while other songs had diverse and often homely references. ‘Jet’ was the name of a black Labrador the McCartneys owned; ‘Helen Wheels’ was the family nickname for the Land Rover they used on Kintyre; ‘Mamunia’ was inspired by a recent holiday to the La Mamounia (sic) hotel in Morocco; while a Caribbean holiday gave Paul ‘Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me)’. The McCartneys were in Jamaica when they met Dustin Hoffman, who was in the islands filming Papillon. The actor challenged Paul to write an impromptu song based on a random magazine article, using a copy of Time. Pablo Picasso had just died, aged 91. In his Time obituary it was reported that the artist had been forbidden from drinking in his final days, telling his friends to drink for him. Paul made an instant song from the story.

  Denny Laine contributed one song to Band on the Run, ‘No Words’, which Paul helped him finish. Paul was eager for Laine to share the burden of writing, and Laine says they increasingly wrote together from this point on, as Paul had written with John, citing the example of ‘Getting Better’ from Sgt. Pepper.

  There’s a great line he says about John Lennon, you know, ‘I wrote “[I’ve] got to admit it’s getting better,” and John Lennon said, “It can’t get no worse.”’ There’s the two personalities coming out there. The cynical John Lennon line and then there’s the real positive, almost overly enthusiastic Paul line. That’s the way a lot of our lyrics went.

  Laine found working creatively with Paul a pleasure. ‘The thing about Paul is, being such a famous person as he was, such a recognisable guy, that it was difficult to be his equal if you like as far as the public was concerned, but in the studio we were pretty much on an equal par.’ Paul was also very fair with song credits and the split of publishing income.

  That autumn Paul went into AIR in London to add strings and horns to Band on the Run, hiring Howie Casey, whom he had known back in the days of Derry and the Seniors, to play sax on several tracks, most winningly on ‘Bluebird’. Paul then staged an elaborate Pepper-like photo shoot for the album, inviting a disparate bunch of celebrities to pose with him, Lin and Laine in a jail-break pose. The models included club singer Kenny Lynch, whom Paul had known in the 1960s, Liverpool boxer John Conteh, and the actors James Coburn and Christopher Lee. The resultant cover was fun to look at, while the music was good. Here at last was the old McCartney panache, proof that Paul hadn’t been lobotomised after leaving the Beatles, but had just lost focus. Band on the Run was a deserved number one album in the US and UK at the end of 1973, yielding several hit singles.

  A BEATLES RAPPROCHEMENT

  An element of routine creeps into most lives, especially when children are involved, and what might be termed the McCartney Year begins to evolve around the mid-1970s. The family (and Paul did most things with Lin and the kids) generally spent the working week in London, the kids in local schools and Paul in the studio much of the time. At the weekend they usually drove down to Waterfall, their new cottage in the Sussex woods. They went north in the school holidays, invariably visiting their relatives on Merseyside for Christmas and New Year, then spent a couple of weeks each summer in Kintyre in time for the annual agricultural show, properly named the June Show, but actually held in August when the weather was better, and consequently known as ‘the June Show in August’. Heather McCartney rode in the gymkhana while Paul and Linda had fun entering their livestock in competition. Paul would attend the judging, to see what rosettes they’d won, slipping away when the crowds arrived, though few locals bothered him. As noted, the McCartneys had made many friends on the peninsula, especially the Blacks at Tangy Farm, where Heather went riding with Lorna Black; and the Colvilles, whose property the McCartneys rode across to Westport Beach where Paul and Linda would often swim in defiance of the undertow and freezing Atlantic temperatures. When they looked out over the surf they could imagine Linda’s family in Long Island, on the other side of the ocean.

  Apart from their horses and ponies, the McCartneys shared their Scottish holiday home with a pack of hounds led by the Old English Sheepdog Martha (My Dear), who was still going strong, and including Lucky the Dalmatian, Jet the black Labrador and a Golden Lab named Poppy. A canine romance in Kintyre led to Martha having a litter of mongrel pups, one of whom Heather named Captain Midnight, her special pet. One day the McCartneys rushed into their vet’s surgery in town cradling one of these mongrel pups. The pooch had been kicked by a horse, breaking its leg. ‘At that time it was beyond our capabilities to do any pinning, so it was arranged that it would go up to Glasgow Veterinary Hospital by taxi,’ says the vet Alastair Cousin. The injured pup was chauffeur-driven to Glasgow, where it was treated, returning to Campbeltown again by taxi, a 280-mile round trip, by which time the McCartneys had gone home to London, so the dog was flown down to the capital to join them, at considerable additional expense. ‘Only somebody like Paul could and would do that sort of thing,’ notes the vet, who recalls another memorable occasion when he was called to High Park to tend a duck with a broken leg. That’s right - a duck. ‘It was crazy stuff, but that was what they did - they were a bit sentimental about their animals.’

  For some time now Paul had only been able to look out across the Atlantic towards the Americas, unable to visit because he’d been denied a US visa
due to his drug convictions. In the spring of 1974 this visa problem was solved and Paul and Linda began going to the States again. Paul immediately took the opportunity to call on John Lennon, who was himself stranded in America.

  After making the Imagine album in England, John and Yoko had moved to New York in 1971, living originally in the St Regis Hotel, then in a Greenwich Village apartment before moving into the Dakota, a grand old apartment building on Central Park West with fabulous views across the park, but a sinister aspect for anybody familiar with the horror movie Rosemary’s Baby, which Roman Polanski shot there. Because of John’s UK conviction for possession of marijuana, the US authorities wanted Lennon out of the country. John’s lawyers advised him to apply for US residency. While his application was in the pipeline, John was permitted to remain in the United States, but warned that he might not be let back in if he left the country, which meant he was marooned.

  A degree of staleness had crept into the Lennon marriage, and in the autumn of 1973 John had left Yoko for their assistant May Pang (who was a childhood friend of Linda McCartney’s; they were both fans of the Young Rascals). With Yoko’s blessing, John and May conducted a 14-month affair, a period John later referred to as his ‘lost weekend’ in recognition of the fact he was drinking heavily. His drinking companion was the dipsomaniac singer Harry Nilsson, with whom he was also working. By March 1974, Lennon and May Pang were living in Santa Monica, California, while John produced Nilsson’s album Pussy Cats at Burbank Studios. One night, the McCartneys called by to say hi.