Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (44 page)

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 waterfall, 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.

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.