Fab

by Howard Sounes

  Denny Laine and Steve Holley flew to Japan from London, arriving at Narita Airport ahead of the McCartneys on Wednesday 16 January 1980, travelling first class on TWA. The band members had all been furnished with multiple-use, first-class tickets good for any TWA flight anywhere in the world for 12 months. Recalls Steve Holley:I remember Denny saying, ‘This happened before and probably what will happen is if the Japanese tour goes well he’ll say something like, “Take a vacation anywhere you want for a couple of weeks and we’ll regroup for rehearsals in Australia.” or whatever, which will hopefully turn into another world tour.’ So in the back of my mind I’m thinking I’m embarking on the beginning of a journey of a lifetime.

  Holley and Laine were processed through immigration before the McCartneys arrived, the officials taking five hours to deal with Laine because of his drug history. Then they went and waited on the tour bus for Paul.

  When Paul’s flight landed at Narita Airport, his party was also processed slowly through customs and immigration. ‘There was a lot of time spent with bureaucrats dealing with paperwork,’ remembers Laurence Juber, who was standing next to Paul as they walked through the customs hall. The McCartneys had a lot of luggage and a customs man was opening bags seemingly at random, ‘not pulling everything out,’ says Juber.

  But he opened one of the suitcases and patted something, and then he got a quizzical look on his face, and he reached inside and pulled out a bag of marijuana. At that point Paul kind of turns white, and alarms started going off, and people came out from behind hidden doors and escorted him back, and me too. Because I was with him. And Linda and the kids as well. They took him off into a room and started questioning him.

  In among Paul’s shirts the customs official had found a clear plastic bag containing just under eight ounces of marijuana, worth about £1,000 ($1,530). Having made this discovery the Japanese went through all the luggage again, even taking musical instruments apart in case there were more drugs hidden inside. There weren’t. Laurence, Linda and the kids were allowed to leave.

  Tired of waiting for Paul, Laine and Holley had gone ahead to the Okura, where they checked into their rooms expecting to meet Paul, Lin and Laurence later in the hotel restaurant. Steve took a nap, woken by the bedside telephone. It was Linda calling to say that Paul had been arrested at the airport for possession.

  I thought she was joking. I said, ‘Yeah, good one. I’ll see you down in the restaurant,’ and my wife and I went downstairs. As soon as the elevator doors opened on the main floor, and the press greeted us with a million flashbulbs, I realised that something had happened.

  As almost the whole world now knew, Paul had been taken in handcuffs from Narita Airport to Kojimachi Police Station, where he was locked in a cell for the second time in his life (his first experience behind bars being in Hamburg in 1960 after the Bambi Kino fire). And of course it wasn’t the first time he’d been fingered for drugs. It was, though, the most serious. Paul’s tour managers hired an English-speaking Japanese lawyer and contacted Eastman & Eastman in New York. Lee Eastman threw a fit. ‘When Paul got busted in Tokyo for pot - I was around - my father was furious. Furious! He went nuts. He was ballistic,’ recalls Philip Sprayregen, who explains that his stepfather’s rage was partly due to his fear that the bust would jeopardise Paul’s chance of a knighthood. ‘He said, “My God, my daughter could have been a [lady], and he blew it!” He was very upset because he thought his daughter would be Lady Linda [sic].’50 John Eastman was despatched to Tokyo to try and rescue his brother-in-law. Less reassuringly, Kenneth Lambert, a deranged American, tried to set off from Miami Airport on a self-appointed mission of mercy. When he started waving a gun about at Miami, demanding to be flown to Paul’s side, Lambert was shot dead by cops. Meanwhile, Paul went to sleep in his Tokyo cell with his back against the wall, fearing he might be raped.

  Things always look brighter in the morning, and so it was in the land of the rising sun when Paul woke to news that he had a visitor. McCartney was shown into an interview room, partitioned by a glass screen, on the other side of which stood the reassuringly urbane figure of Britain’s consul to Japan, Donald Warren-Knott, whose embassy was located next door. The Warren-Knotts had been getting ready for bed the previous evening when they received a courtesy call from the police to inform them that a distinguished British citizen, Mr Pori Macatnee, as the Japanese tend to pronounce his name, had been taken into custody. The consul was told that marijuana had been found in amongst Mr Macatnee’s shirts, and he’d admitted the drugs were his, saying they’d been packed accidentally. Now the star and the consul met. ‘He sat down, I sat down, and we began to talk - to my pleasant surprise he was very relaxed,’ says Warren-Knott, who’d feared that such a celebrity might try and demand special treatment, which would have been a mistake.

  Nothing of the sort. He took it quite calmly. Yes, OK, he knew the packet had been found. Yes, it was his. And it shouldn’t have been there. I didn’t press too closely, because it’s not my business to enquire into those sort of details. I suspect - personal view - that a package was slipped in while they were packing. I don’t know whether he fully intended to use it while he was in Japan. If he did, he’d be very foolish, given the circumstances of his previous arrests.

  Paul said the Japanese were treating him well, and he was reassured to hear that his family were safe at the hotel, with his brother-in-law on his way from the States. He would wait to see what happened. Paul had one request. ‘He said he was a vegetarian and he would be grateful if we could give any help in making sure that he did get a reasonably vegetarian diet, including fruit.’ Apples, oranges, pears, and bananas would all be acceptable. The consul said he would ask the guards.

  It was clear that the tour couldn’t go ahead. The shows were cancelled and Wings’ equipment was shipped back to the UK. The musicians were told to go home, or anywhere they liked on their round-the-world tickets. Despite the prospect of a free holiday, and the fact that they were all paid what they would have got had the Japanese shows gone ahead, the band members were upset. Says Denny Laine, who flew to France:I wasn’t cross with him, but I was disappointed, I must say. It meant now we wouldn’t be able to go to Japan and tour, we wouldn’t be able to go a lot of places and tour, because once you get busted it’s hard to get visas and stuff, so it was all that kind of thing. It was a let-down.

  Laine later discovered that Paul was angry with him for leaving Tokyo. ‘He was a bit upset because we left early, but we were told by his office to leave, because security people were watching us all the time.’

  There was much debate within the tour party as to how and why Paul had got himself in this mess. Steve Holley wondered, as others have, whether Paul meant to get busted: ‘He may not have wanted to go and do that tour in the first place … [that’s] my guess.’ Although Paul had shown signs of weariness with Wings, this surely cannot be true. Paul enjoyed performing and was, in any case, somebody who could be relied upon to fulfil his commitments. Denny Laine dismisses as ‘ridiculous’ the notion Paul would get arrested deliberately. Howie Casey believes that Paul may have taken the rap for Linda, who’d been careless before with drugs. Some reports stated the marijuana was found in Lin’s make-up bag, but the British consul recalls being told the drugs were with Paul’s shirts. Later came the absurd conspiracy theory that Yoko Ono spitefully tipped off her contacts in Tokyo that the McCartneys had drugs with them, because Paul and Linda intended to use what she and John considered their hotel suite. Perhaps the most likely explanation is that Paul had taken a chance. ‘I believe it was just something he thought he could get away with,’ says Laine.

  There was consternation in the penthouse suite of the Okura Hotel when Linda McCartney was informed that, if tried and found guilty of possession, her husband could face a prison sentence. She and the kids were virtual prisoners themselves, unable to go downstairs for fear of the press, scared to turn on the TV in case they saw distressing coverage of the case. The children were upset. ‘
The only one unaware of the situation was little Dee Dee,’ Linda said, using the family name for toddler James McCartney, and even Dee Dee kept asking where Daddy was.

  Over at Kojimachi, Daddy was getting used to prison life. He was obliged to sleep on the floor on a thin mattress, Japanese-style; rising at six a.m. with other prisoners, sitting cross-legged while he was interrogated; given half an hour to exercise and - until his fruit was delivered - eating a bowl of rice for supper. Sitting on the floor, watched by Japanese men in uniform, Paul felt like a character in a POW movie. He picked pieces of plaster off the wall and used the flakes to tally his days inside, almost starting to enjoy the experience. By the specks of plaster on the floor Paul calculated that his incarceration had exceeded a week. He was starting to smell. The police said he could have a bath, in private if he wished. Paul chose instead to bathe with his fellow detainees, a tough-looking crew whom he charmed by leading them in a bath-time sing-along, including a rendition of ‘Yellow Submarine’. Donald Warren-Knott popped in regularly to ask if Paul was OK, also asking the guards if they had been able to supply Mr McCartney’s vegetarian diet, with apples and oranges and so on. Yes, they nodded. And bananas? The mention of bananas was met by silence. ‘My questions had been embarrassing. I couldn’t think why. This was a very Japanese response to embarrassing questions. A sort of shutter comes down while they try to work out just what they are going to say, but they are obviously embarrassed. So why bananas?’ It turned out that regulations forbade detainees from having bananas. ‘It seems remarkably silly, but I was told that a man might peel his banana, throw the skin on the floor and a prison officer might slip and fall!’ When the consul relayed this information to Paul, he roared with laughter. ‘He promised that he wouldn’t demand bananas. They were perfectly free never to give him a banana.’

  When Linda was given permission to see her husband for half an hour, she took him a welcome cheese sandwich. Although they tried to joke about the situation, this was the longest period Paul and Lin had ever been apart; virtually the only time they had slept apart in their 10-year marriage, and it was not certain what the outcome of this situation would be. The offence was serious. After John Eastman arrived in town and started talking with the local lawyer and the presiding magistrate, it became clear that the Japanese didn’t want a trial any more than Paul did. The authorities were primarily concerned that the local promoters, and the Japanese people who’d bought tickets for Wings’ concerts, wouldn’t be out of pocket. Refunds were swiftly arranged. ‘With that little financial problem out of the way, they wanted to get rid of him as quickly as possible,’ comments Donald Warren-Knott, who sat in on the legal conferences.

  I think they all realised very shortly, on the basis of their advice from the Japanese lawyer, and the presiding magistrate and so on, that provided there was a full confession and a full admittance of guilt the [Japanese] would like to get rid of Mr McCartney and the Wings group, [and] please don’t come back again [for] seven years. I think they wanted to tidy it up, as was feasible under Japanese law.

  So it was that after nine nights in a Tokyo cell Paul was taken under escort to the airport and put on a flight to Amsterdam, reunited with his family in the airliner’s cabin, and thereby deported from Japan. The McCartneys disembarked in Holland, where Paul spoke briefly to the press, still arguing that marijuana should be decriminalised. ‘I have been in jail for ten days, but I didn’t go crazy because I wasn’t able to have marijuana. I can take it or leave it.’ Paul and his family were then flown by private plane to Lydd Airport in England, finally driven down the familiar country lanes to their house in the Sussex woods. Seldom had Paul felt so glad to be home as he did when he stepped inside his own front door and found himself surrounded by his things again, greeted by their dogs, the horses whinnying hello from the nearby stables. It was the end of a draining, expensive and embarrassing experience, one that had damaged Paul’s image. Blip Parker, headmaster of the Liverpool Institute, made public his personal regret that Paul had let his fans down, so soon after treating the schoolboys to a show: ‘It is hard enough nowadays trying to keep youngsters away from drugs without having people they look up to involved in something like this,’ Parker told the Daily Telegraph. Paul’s young cousins also looked at Uncle Paul askance. ‘You take drugs, don’t you?’ one asked, the next time Paul was on Merseyside. Paul found himself struggling to explain.

  ‘IT’S A DRAG’

  Because of the phenomenal international success of the Beatles, and the success Paul had continued to enjoy since the fab four split up, together with the way he conducted himself, for the most part, Paul McCartney had come to hold a special position in British public life. In an era when rock stars were typically excessive and often vulgar in their behaviour, Paul McCartney MBE was an intelligent, polite, civilised family man, whose devotion to Linda and their children was plain to see. He was a phenomenal earner for Great Britain, a cultural ambassador, and figurehead for the nation’s recording industry. Lee Eastman was right in foreseeing that his son-in-law would one day be knighted. Ultimately, Paul might even be granted a peerage in recognition of the status he enjoyed. Yet McCartney had also got himself into a remarkable amount of trouble.

  Twice Macca had been banged up in a police cell, twice deported from a foreign land. He had been refused visas, been convicted of drug possession in a UK court, fined for drugs in Sweden, and narrowly escaped a prison sentence in Japan. Taken together, this was a record that put Paul in the rackety company of such bad boys of rock as Keith Richards. The Bambi Kino incident aside, Paul’s basic problem was that he liked to smoke grass and was too pig-headed to moderate his behaviour. The Japanese bust didn’t change him. He came out of the experience with the same cocky attitude. He never explained, let alone apologised to his band members for the inconvenience he had caused them in Japan, showing the lads instead a prison diary he wrote and had privately printed. Japanese Jailbird by Paul McCartney didn’t reveal a man chastened. ‘There wasn’t a great deal of soul-searching involved,’ says Laurence Juber, who read the little book. ‘It was more of a narrative of his experience in jail.’ And a couple of months later, when Paul’s new solo album appeared in the shops, he appeared to make fun of the Japanese. The cover of McCartney II featured a grainy image of Paul by Linda in the style of a prison mug shot, while inside the album were photos of Paul pulling faces in impersonation of Japanese officials, with an instrumental track titled ‘Frozen Jap’.

  These puerile details aside, McCartney II was an improvement on recent Wings albums. Paul sounded contemporary again on synthesiser-based songs such as ‘Coming Up’ and ‘Temporary Secretary’, a witty, sexy number about asking Mr Marks for a secretary to sit on his knee (at a time when Alfred Marks was a well-known temping agency). ‘On the Way’ had an attractive wistfulness, while a lovely melody underpinned ‘Waterfall’, the lyrics of which appear to refer to the family home of that name in Sussex. The song can be read as Paul’s advice to his children not to play in the waterfall at the head of the deep-cut stream in the forest, across which the young McCartneys had no doubt tried to leap. The warning in the song about not getting into strangers’ cars seems to express another parental fear, that of the kids being kidnapped. Other good songs included ‘Bogey Music’, written for a proposed film of Raymond Briggs’s children’s book, Fungus the Bogeyman. A generally strong album, with less filler than one had become used to, McCartney II was a deserved UK number one.

  It wasn’t of course a Wings album, and Wings was now all but defunct. Denny Laine badly needed income to pay his back taxes. Unable to tour with Wings, he went out on the road that summer with Steve Holley. This small tour did little to alleviate Denny’s problems. It looked like he would have to start living abroad as a tax exile. Paul, whose own financial affairs had been run with exemplary efficiency since he left the Beatles, had no such problems, and stayed in London, working with George Martin on ‘We All Stand Together’ and other songs intended for the long-plan
ned Rupert the Bear movie. Paul had commissioned a succession of artists to create drawings for this picture over the past few years, but none had yet captured the snug family life depicted by Alfred Bestall in the Rupert stories Paul had grown up with, and remembered with particular fondness from the Rupert annuals published at Christmas. Bestall’s ursine characters were the image of a contented, traditional British family of the day, ‘mother baking, always rolling out something, father always reading the newspaper,’ as Paul described the world of Rupert, relating the bear’s family to the McCartney idyll at Forthlin Road before Mum died. ‘It’s a fantasy from the past. Very secure and cosy, which I think is nice.’ The film project only began to take shape when Paul met animator Geoff Dunbar, who shared his vision for a Rupert film. ‘I remember he asked me to write one paragraph of how I saw Rupert, and I said, “Well, it should stay in the 1940s, you shouldn’t change it, every endeavour should be made to keep it sacrosanct to Alfred Bestall’s world,”’ says Dunbar, who thereby became Paul’s collaborator on this and other animation projects.