Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (45 page)

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.

Considering all John had said about Paul over the past few years, the meeting was surprisingly cordial, the ex-Beatles feeling comfortable enough in each other’s presence to jam together. The time was right for a
rapprochement
. John and Paul’s contract with Northern Songs had expired, allowing them to benefit from their new songs via their respective publishing companies; both had enjoyed solo success; and John had come round to the view that Paul had been right about Allen Klein. In fact, all the Beatles had turned their backs on Klein and were now suing him. The boys had also agreed sensibly that their faithful retainer, Neil Aspinall, should head up Apple Corps, which he ran successfully until his retirement in 2007. Furthermore, John, Paul and George had contributed individually to Ritchie’s recent
Ringo
album, Paul giving his friend the hit, ‘You’re Sixteen’. In short, they were almost back to being mates. The day after the studio visit, the McCartneys paid a house call on John in Santa Monica, and this also went well. Before he left, Paul gave John some brotherly advice. He told him Yoko missed him and, if he felt the same, he should try and win her back, which is what Lennon did.

Making full use of his new visa, Paul decided to take the family and Wings to Tennessee for a working holiday. It was musical associations that drew Paul to the Nashville area, the family’s love of horse-riding leading the McCartneys to rent a ranch from songwriter Claude ‘Curly’ Putman Jr. Success with the tune ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’ had enabled Putman to buy a 130-acre property outside Nashville, which the McCartneys rented for six weeks, arriving with a newly configured version of Wings. Denny Laine was still in the band, but there was a new British drummer, Geoff Britton, and a new lead guitarist, a diminutive 20-year-old Glaswegian named Jimmy McCulloch, who’d already experienced success with Thunderclap Newman. Talented but highly strung, Jimmy had a tendency to become obstreperous when drunk. ‘He had a London accent, normally,’ recalls Howie Casey, who worked regularly with Wings at this time. ‘Soon as he had a drink he became Scottish.
I’ll see you
. It was all that.’

The Putmans went on holiday to Hawaii, leaving their ranch to Paul, who enjoyed playing at being a cowboy. He and Linda rode horses most days, while Paul also enjoyed riding a trail bike belonging to Curly’s son, Troy. They had a barbecue for Paul’s 32nd birthday, and invited Roy Orbison over for supper, rekindling an old friendship. Paul rehearsed Wings in the garage next to the ranch house and recorded with the band in a Nashville studio, laying down ‘Walking in the Park with Eloise’, a dance tune created by Paul’s dad, later released under the
nom de plume
of the ‘Country Hams’.
⁴⁵
Wings also recorded ‘Junior’s Farm’, inspired by their stay on the ranch, and this became a top ten hit in the USA.

Paul enjoyed riding Troy Putman’s motorbike so much he bought a bike of the same sort for himself and, at the end of his Nashville vacation, put it on a trailer and hauled it up to New York, where the McCartneys called in on Linda’s family. The visit was so successful that a new element was added to the McCartney Year. Each summer Paul and Lin would bring the kids to spend a couple of weeks with the Eastmans on Lily Pond Lane, East Hampton, where Lee and John Eastman both maintained summer homes. The McCartneys usually stayed with John and his wife Jody, partly so that their children could play together.

VENUS AND MARS

One of the early signs of a second, nostalgic wave of interest in the Beatles came in 1974 with the staging of
John, Paul, George, Ringo … & Bert
at the Liverpool Everyman. The author was Willy Russell, a local playwright who’d developed a love of the Beatles while watching them on stage at the Cavern as a schoolboy. The premise of his play was that a former member of the Quarry Men, an invented character named Bert, attends a Wings show and is prompted to reflect upon the history of the Beatles, which is told with music in flashback. The play benefited from a superb cast, including Trevor Eve as McCartney, and transferred successfully to London.

When excerpts from
John, Paul, George, Ringo … & Bert
were broadcast on BBC television around Christmas 1974, Paul was infuriated because the sequence he watched seemed to portray him as the one who broke up the band. ‘[The BBC] substantially showed the scene in which there’s the ultimate spat between John and Paul, and the scene was very specifically written to take account of the fact that-as history now acknowledges - the first person to announce he was leaving the Beatles was John Lennon,’ explains Russell, ‘but the way they edited the scene it pandered to the perception, as is still now the case, that Paul McCartney was responsible for the break-up of the Beatles … apparently Paul saw this and was incensed.’ As a result, McCartney blocked an attempt to produce a movie of
John, Paul, George, Ringo and … & Bert
. The success of the musical, though, and the interest in making it into a movie, showed how potent the Beatles story remained; while Paul’s strong reaction to the play demonstrated how deeply he felt about the way his part in history was represented, something that would become a veritable obsession. The affair also led to a meeting between McCartney and Russell, whom Paul would call on when he decided to make a film himself.