Fab

by Howard Sounes

  Having lost Mum traumatically at a young age, Paul seemed unable to face the fact Dad was now going to die as well and carried on with his work as normal. Wings were about to embark on a European tour, starting in Copenhagen on Saturday 20 March 1976. Two days before the first show, Jim McCartney died at home at Gayton, aged 73, his demise attributed to pneumonia and heart failure, with bronchitis and arthritis underlying factors. Paul went ahead with a scheduled Wings press conference in London the next day, then flew to Copenhagen to open the tour on Saturday as if nothing had happened. He didn’t tell the band his father had died and, remarkably, he didn’t return home for the cremation at Landican Cemetery on the Wirral on Monday 22 March. Paul could easily have done so; Wings didn’t have a show that day, being between engagements in Denmark and Germany, so he could have hopped over by private plane. But Paul wasn’t at the cemetery, and he was in Berlin the next day when Jim’s ashes were scattered over the rose garden in front of the chapel. The spot, as with his mother’s grave, remains unmarked, which seems odd considering how very sentimental Paul is about his parents. It is possible he deliberately left these places unmarked to avoid fans finding them.

  Members of the Beatles had chosen not to attend funerals in the past, such as that of Brian Epstein, for fear their celebrity would attract a mob of press and fans and detract from the occasion, which was a fair point. But to deliberately miss one’s father’s funeral - especially when, as in this case, father and son had been so close - is strange. Mike McCartney has written in explanation that ‘Paul would never face that sort of thing’. Denny Laine says he only found out that Jim had died when he was on a French TV show with Paul and the teen idol David Cassidy later that month. When the interviewer asked Paul about his parents, he said simply they were both dead. Says Laine:I was physically shocked, on camera. David Cassidy said, ‘You should have seen your face when he said that.’ He didn’t tell me, and I wasn’t that close to his dad, but I knew him quite well. I suppose Paul felt, I’m not going to get into that. This is one thing you’ve got to remember about Paul: he’s a very, very private guy. He doesn’t like to be talking about his family, or anything to do with anything other than music, if he can possibly help it, in public. He doesn’t like to share certain things. He takes them on his own shoulders. And this may be part of his personality: he likes to stay positive, because if he gets negative he gets really negative, and he knows it, so he tries to rise above these things, and not have other people reminding him of too many negative things, or hurtful things, because of who he is. He has to be out there looking like he’s Paul McCartney, happy-go-lucky, and not bothering the world with his problems. You can understand that. [So] he probably thought, ‘Jesus, I can’t handle all that!’

  Nevertheless, Laine was surprised Paul didn’t return home for the funeral. ‘I’m sure in his position he could have just jumped on a private plane and done it, but maybe he just couldn’t face the emotional thing of it right in the middle of having to go out and do a gig the next night, and pretend that everything’s fine.’

  In the aftermath of Jim’s death, Paul’s relationship with Angie McCartney deteriorated. His stepmother went on holiday after the funeral, with what seemed to the ‘relies’ indecent haste. ‘She and Ruth had their suitcases packed going off on holiday to Spain, a plane to catch from Manchester Airport at half past nine, and the family hated her by then. God she’s upset everybody!’ remarks Mike Robbins, who’d introduced Angie to Jim. When Angie subsequently decided to go into theatrical management, and Ruth continued to pursue her show business dreams, there were further clashes with Paul, culminating in a blazing telephone row over money, according to an interview Angie gave the Sun newspaper. Ruth McCartney has alleged in a separate interview that Paul then stopped the £7,000-a-year pension ($10,710) that had formerly been paid by McCartney Productions Ltd47 to Jim. Increasingly hard up, mother and daughter moved out of their bungalow into a flat. A deep rift was opening up between Paul and his stepmother and stepsister.

  18

  THE GOOD LIFE

  LAST MEETINGS WITH JOHN

  Despite a shaky economy, optimism, even a sense of celebration, returned to the United States in 1976. The Vietnam War was over, Watergate had forced Richard Nixon from office, with a benign young farmer from Georgia promising a brighter future. Many people wanted to believe in Jimmy Carter in the nation’s bicentennial year. In the two centuries since the Declaration of Independence, US relations with Britain had improved considerably, of course, a few Britons becoming as popular in the USA as they were at home. Dickens, Chaplin and Churchill spring to mind. The Beatles were in that same august company, Paul’s status in the USA remaining sky high, even higher than at home, having achieved four number one singles and four number one albums in America since 1970. Interestingly, he was yet to score a single number one in Britain, where, despite the generally good press Paul enjoyed, critics and audiences were more circumspect about his songs, often considering them overly sentimental, even vacuous. In April 1976, Wings released a single that answered such criticism in audacious style. In ‘Silly Love Songs’ Paul made his case plain. He liked writing love songs. If people had a problem with that, it was tough. He would continue to write them. The strength of the melody made ‘Silly Love Songs’ Paul’s fifth US number one, holding the top spot for five weeks, but again it failed to reach the top of the British charts, and was in fact mocked at home.

  ‘Silly Love Songs’ heralded a new album, Wings at the Speed of Sound, which showcased songs sung not only by Paul, but also by his fellow band members including the third Wings drummer, Joe English, a big, bearded fellow with a surprisingly sweet voice. This was the strongest line-up of Wings yet, but many of the tracks on Wings at the Speed of Sound were mediocre. No amount of production could disguise the fact that Linda’s ‘Cook of the House’, a nod to her culinary skills, was a weak song which she sang badly. The best track, ‘Let ’em In’ was a very different proposition, a catchy tune with a good, semi-autobiographical lyric delivered in one of Paul’s most persuasive vocal performances: insinuatingly dreamy, a touch melancholy, a whisper of past magic. It was another US hit, helping drive Wings at the Speed of Sound to the top of the American album charts.

  Paul was in New York. Buoyed up by chart success, he and Linda dropped by the Dakota on the evening of Saturday 24 April 1976 to see the Lennons. John was home watching Saturday Night Live (SNL) and Paul sat and watched TV with him. So it was that the two ex-Beatles saw Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of SNL, and a personal friend of Paul’s from the Hamptons, jokingly offer to effect a Beatles reunion, something that was increasingly rumoured in the press, with wild stories going about as to how many millions such a gig would earn for the boys. Michaels announced that NBC could offer the Beatles the union rate of $3,000 for the performance of three songs. He held up a cheque, made out to the Beatles. ‘You divide it any way you want; if you want to give Ringo less, that’s up to you.’ John and Paul discussed going down to NBC there and then for a laff, but in the end it was too late.

  The next night Paul dropped by the Dakota again. This time he met a less positive reception. As is often the way with men who have known each other as boys, then drifted apart, picking up an old friendship can be difficult. The initial, part-instinctive, part-merely polite warmth of ‘Well, hello, how are you?’ is replaced by an irritation that somebody from the past has come blundering in on the present as if nothing has changed, whereas everything has. At least John seemed to feel that way. He may also have been a tad jealous of Wings’ success. John had read that Paul was now worth $25 million (£16.3m), and complained to Yoko that they’d never be as rich as that. Yoko made a deal with her husband. If he stayed and home and looked after Sean, she would manage and build their fortune. Yoko proved a successful business-woman, though it is doubtful she ever caught up with Paul.

  ‘That was a period when Paul just kept turning up at our door with a guitar. I would let him in,’ Lennon later said of
Paul’s 1976 visits to the Dakota, ‘but finally I said to him, “Please call before you come over. It’s not 1956, and turning up at the door isn’t the same any more. You know, just give me a ring.” That upset him, but I didn’t mean it badly.’

  John’s friend, the broadcaster and PR man Elliott Mintz, believes the friendship had simply run its course. Mintz recalls another night with John and Paul at the Dakota (he can’t remember the date) when the Beatles apparently had nothing more to say to each other:Think of yourself sitting in a theatre as audience, and the film stock that’s moving through the projector ran out, and instead of the lights coming on in the theatre and the curtains closing as they usually would, you just saw the white projection light on the screen, as if it had run out of film. It felt like that - they didn’t really have anything more to talk about.

  Had history been otherwise, though, Mintz believes that John and Paul would have seen more of each other in the years ahead. ‘Today they would be men pushing 70 years old. Would they be sitting around bickering and sending nasty emails to each other over some infraction of their relationship that was conceived [decades] earlier?’ he asks rhetorically. ‘I don’t think so.’ As it was, John and Paul never saw each other in the flesh again after these last Dakota visits.

  ROCK SHOW

  As John settled back into his quiet domestic life in New York, Paul began his Wings Over America tour in Fort Worth, Texas, on 3 May 1976. It was to be the most successful tour Wings ever gave. The first the audience saw of the star of the evening was when Paul stood spotlit on stage, in swirling dry ice, singing ‘Venus and Mars’, the lyrics of which begin with the narrator standing just so, waiting for his show to begin, red and green spotlights appearing on cue as McCartney sang. He segued from this introductory number into the faster ‘Rockshow’, also designed specifically for the arena stage.

  As the lights came up, Paul appeared clean-shaven and fresh-faced, his hair cut short in a fringe over his eyes, worn long at the back. He smiled broadly, with frequent glances at Linda, sitting prettily at her keyboards on a riser, the base of which changed colour during the show. Lin looked happy and relaxed, not the nervous wreck of early Wings tours. Denny Laine stood to Paul’s left, wielding a fashionable double-neck guitar; young Jimmy McCulloch stood beside Denny, agape with concentration as he peeled off his solos; behind them Joe English thrashed his drums like Animal in the Muppet Show. Alongside Joe stood four horn players, featuring Paul’s old friend Howie Casey on saxophone, the brass section adding punch to Wings’ sound. This was a long way from the university tour of 1972. It was a big, expensive, state-of-the-art rock show with a laser light display during ‘Live and Let Die’. Most importantly, Wings was now tight. ‘It was the first time we’d really spent enough time on the road to get really good as a band,’ says Laine. And the sound quality was good. The last time Paul played the States was with the Beatles, when their inadequately amplified sound was drowned out by fans. The technology of the rock show had improved sufficiently in the ten years since Candlestick Park to enable everybody in the Fort Worth arena to hear the nuances of Wings’ sound. The show could be loud, as in ‘Rockshow’ and ‘Live and Let Die’, but it also featured effective quiet moments such as Paul’s acoustic set, when he played ‘Bluebird’.

  Wings’ repertoire was impressive considering the band had been together less than five years. ‘Jet’, ‘Let Me Roll It’, ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, ‘Listen to What the Man Said’, ‘Let ’em In’ and ‘Band on the Run’ all worked well in concert, better than on record where one tended to notice the paucity of the lyrics. Live rock music is as much theatre as a listening experience and the songs delivered drama. The undoubted highlight of the show came, however, when Paul sat at the piano and played ‘Lady Madonna’, the first of four Beatles songs in the set, having moved on from his original position of ignoring his past. Paul only performed Beatles songs he had written alone, and just a handful - ‘Lady Madonna’, ‘The Long and Winding Road’, ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Yesterday’- but each held his audience spellbound.

  To transport Wings around the USA, McCartney hired a BAC 1-11 passenger jet, the Wings logo stuck to its fuselage, the interior transformed into an open-plan rock star lounge. There was a discotheque in the back for the McCartney children, who’d once again been taken out of school to be with their parents: 13-year-old Heather; Mary, almost seven; and four-year-old Stella. To cut back on travel as much as possible, and retain a semblance of normal family life, the McCartneys rented three regional homes for the tour: a house in New York for the East Coast leg; a home in Dallas for the Midwestern shows; and a third property in LA. When their jet landed, a limousine took the McCartneys to the relevant regional home. Driving to the Dallas house one day Linda spotted an appaloosa stallion (a type of horse distinguished by its spotted markings), stopped and bought it, having the animal shipped home to England. Lucky Spot became a beloved family pet.

  Although the McCartneys commuted to concerts from their rented homes, there were still long hours in the air with the band and its entourage. Among others, the tour party included the McCartneys’ Cockney housekeeper Rose Martin, who minded the kids when Paul and Lin were on stage; an ex-FBI man who looked out for potential assassins and kidnappers; and a new road manager, 27-year-old Londoner John Hammel, who’d previously worked for Humble Pie. The term ‘road manager’ is a vague one under which somebody like Hammel acts as driver, bodyguard and all-round gofer. Hammel proved so satisfactory in the role that he has stayed by Paul’s side ever since Wings Over America, his job description evolving into Personal Assistant.

  During the long intercontinental flights the horn players fell into an extended game of Ten Card Brag, betting nickels, partly because they were not well paid. After watching the game for a while, Paul sat in with the lads, borrowing his stake. The pot of money grew into a large pile of change. ‘Here you are, boys - four of a kind,’ Howie Casey announced one day, laying down his winning hand. ‘Thank you very much.’ As Howie gathered in his coins, McCartney went berserk, as if he’d been cheated out of a fortune, to the amusement of his sidemen. ‘I think it’s the winning. It’s not the money,’ says Howie, who notes that when he and others grumbled about the wages they were paid, Paul gave them a generous end-of-tour bonus. ‘He said, “Give them all $10,000 each [£6,535].” OK, that’s great. He did that sort of thing, but it would have been much better for all concerned if we’d have had a decent [salary in the first place].’

  Howie asked for and received a bottle of Scotch in the dressing room before each show. Yet there was a predominantly family vibe during Wings Over America, as there had been on the double-decker tour of Europe. To unwind after the show, Paul and Lin screened a movie, and they liked the band to watch the film with them. Then Paul and Lin went to their rented home, where Rosie had already put the kids to bed. There was an official ban on drugs backstage, also on groupies. That way Linda kept Paul away from temptation, though he showed no signs of straying. ‘I never saw [Paul with another woman] and I never sensed any of it,’ says Denny Laine, who knew Paul as well as anyone during the decade. Indeed, Denny hardly ever saw Paul without Linda. If Paul walked into a room, you could bet Lin would follow. ‘He wanted somebody he could rely on,’ says Denny, explaining the attraction Paul felt for his wife. ‘She came from money, too, so he could trust she wasn’t after his money, [and] they had kids. The kids went everywhere with them. This was a life he hadn’t had much of and really loved.’

  THE SUMMER OF 1976

  After returning home from this hugely successful US tour Paul decided to celebrate the life of one of his musical heroes, Buddy Holly, with a luncheon party on what would have been Buddy’s birthday, thus also celebrating his ownership of a slice of Buddy’s publishing. The party was held at the Orangery in London’s Kensington Gardens on 7 September 1976, attended by MPL staff, Wings members, and musicians from other bands including Queen and 10cc, whose co-founder Eric Stewart had known Paul since Cavern days and would soo
n come to play a significant part in Paul’s career.

  The lunch proved so enjoyable that Paul decided to celebrate Buddy’s life and music every September with Buddy Holly Week, featuring a lunch or party that Paul would attend, plus public events for fans - creating an additional fixture on the McCartney Calendar. The McCartney Year now invariably started with a family party in Liverpool, followed by a sunshine break in the Caribbean, with a two-week family holiday in Scotland in August, closely followed by another fortnight in East Hampton with the Eastmans, then back to London for Buddy Holly Week in September, followed by Hallowe’en and Thanksgiving, which the family tended to celebrate in London. Linda was largely responsible for introducing the American tradition of trick or treat to St John’s Wood and, before the McCartneys turned vegetarian, she cooked a scrumptious Thanksgiving turkey. Band members and friends were always grateful for an invitation to this annual feast, especially homesick Americans. In the days before cranberries were widely available in the UK, Linda cleverly made an ersatz cranberry sauce from English jam. At Christmas Paul hosted a jolly office party at MPL-one year hiring the actor Andrew Sachs to serve the drinks in character as Manuel from the TV show Fawlty Towers - before going back to Liverpool for New Year and starting over again. Recording and concerts were fitted in around this family-orientated calendar, and virtually everywhere Paul and Lin went the kids came, too. The McCartneys were a remarkably close family.

  A couple of weeks after the first Buddy Holly luncheon, Paul and Linda took Wings to Venice to play a charity concert and celebrate Lin’s 35th birthday with a family party (naturally the kids came), after which Paul didn’t play live for three years. While he loved performing, Linda only did so to please him, so this was a welcome break for her, and of course the McCartneys didn’t need the money. Wings Over America had filled the coffers; MPL turned over more than £3 million ($4.5m) in 1976-7, out of which Paul paid himself a chairman’s salary of £96,500 (or $147,645) at a time when national average earnings in the UK were less than £4,000 ($6,120), and the company still cleared a £1.1 m profit ($1.68). ‘In the last two years I have earned more money that I have ever earned in all the so-called boom years [of the Beatles] put together,’ the star revealed in a 1977 interview. ‘I was sick with companies. But Lee [Eastman] told me that if I got an office and a couple of good people to pay out of my own pocket I could own my own material.’ Lee’s advice had proved sound. Some Beatles-related income is included in these MPL figures, which are a matter of public record, but the main royalty stream from the Beatles’ back catalogue does not appear in the registered company accounts, meaning that Paul had substantial additional earnings accruing elsewhere. The full picture of his personal wealth would emerge many years later, as we shall see.