Paul McCartney (67 page)

To protect Paul’s visa, and thinking the cops might go easier on an American citizen, Linda claimed sole responsibility for the stash. She was taken in and booked for possession, with a further charge of ‘contributing to the delinquency of a minor’ because Heather, Mary and Stella had been in the car at the time.

Paul drove the girls back to their hotel, then hurried to the police station to find Linda’s bail had been set at $500. Though he’d long since given up his royal/Beatle habit of carrying no money, there was still only $200 in his wallet. Luckily, his old Apple factotum, Peter Brown, was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel and rushed over to make good the deficit. The LAPD proving more tolerant than Campbeltown Constabulary, both charges against Linda were later dropped.

The album wrapped with a party aboard the great Cunard liner Queen Mary, now retired from transatlantic service and moored at Long Beach as a tourist attraction and hotel. Three hundred and fifty guests, including Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and Cher, watched performances by Paul’s new New Orleans friends, Lee Dorsey, Ernie K-Doe, Professor Longhair and the Meters.

John and Yoko had returned to New York by then, but George turned up with his new partner, Olivia Arias. It was his first public appearance with Paul for almost four years, and in no time another Beatles reunion rumour went flashing around the world.

Venus and Mars was released in May, with a cover on which a red and a gold orb hung in an indigo void like a couple of soft-boiled billiard balls. An accompanying TV ad showed the band skylarking around a billiard table, watched by Linda in a curly blonde wig. When the ball she potted failed to reach its pocket, Paul inflated his cheeks and blew it in for her.

The music press was generally underwhelmed, none more so than Rolling Stone which, 18 months earlier, had hailed Band on the Run as his solo breakthrough and Linda’s musical emancipation. Reviewer Paul Nelson drew the kind of disparaging parallels with John and Yoko’s Plastic Ono Band that Paul hoped to have left far behind. ‘The ghost of [John’s] sincerity not only haunts but accentuates the cool calculation of the McCartney project,’ Nelson wrote, ‘and a jarring primal scream or two might make me feel less enraged by Paul and Linda’s chic, unconvincing and blatant bid to be enshrined as pop music’s Romeo and Juliet.’

The punters did not agree: Venus and Mars reached number one in Britain and America, was quickly certified gold and would go on to sell ten million. Just as Band on the Run had shown no trace of Nigeria, so Venus and Mars showed none of New Orleans, Mardi Gras, the French Quarter, shrimp gumbo or Tennessee Williams. Allen Toussaint’s contribution was all but buried. From the bravura opening title track and its segue into ‘Rockshow’, everything was customised for the Glam Rock stage. The printed lyrics contained a lapse from Paul’s usual punctiliousness; Venus and Mars were said to be ‘alright tonight’. The Liverpool Institute schoolboy of yore, with his dad’s dictionary behind him, would never have been guilty of such a slip.

The album’s runaway hit single was ‘Listen to What the Man Said’, a buoyant love song with an almost gospel tinge (i.e. ‘the Man Upstairs’) that went to number one in America but only six in ungodly Britain. Rock authors Roy Carr and Tony Tyler later cited it as an example of how ‘artful and sensitive production [could] elevate what had originally been a piece of inconsequential whimsy into what can only be called High Pop’.

In Britain, the main target of critical ire was a track where Paul’s desire to be young and Glam-Rocky seemed to go out of the window. As the finale to side two, Wings played the theme music to Crossroads, the famously cheap but hugely popular early-evening soap broadcast four times a week by Associated Television. The fact that ATV had made off with the copyrights to all his Beatles songs made this identification with cardboard sets, wooden acting and wonky screen-graphics all the more mystifying. It seemed yet another symptom of the craving for universal acceptance that pushed Wings into areas like ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ and their recent commercial for Mother’s Pride sliced bread, for which he’d written a special 60-second song.

Paul responded that it was simply a joke, although one not without relevance since the preceding track, ‘Treat Her Gently’, about lonely old people, must apply to a large section of Crossroads’ 15 million audience. Joke or not, it played over the soap’s closing credits, heightening one ludicrous cliffhanger over another, until the show was taken off the air in the mid-1980s.

Actually, Crossroads wasn’t such a bad metaphor for Paul and Wings in the summer of 1975. ‘We’d come from very small beginnings, after the hugeness of the Beatles,’ he would later reflect. ‘We’d wanted to start something up, just to continue playing music. Then we’d wanted it to be something cool that was us, that allowed us to be free and experiment. Then we’d wanted to practise and get a really good group. So we’d finally done all those things. Now, here we were poised to take it out and show off a bit.’

So, after Wings Over Kintyre, Wings Over Universities, Wings Over Britain and Wings Over Europe, there was to be Wings Over the World, a year-long tour beginning in September with the UK and Australia, continuing through 1976 with Europe, North America, then Europe again, a total of 66 shows winding up at London’s Empire Pool arena in October. The guitarist Jerry Reed, whom Paul had got to know in Nashville, expressed astonishment that he still felt a need to go on the road: ‘Man, if I was Paul McCartney, I’d buy the road.’

The itinerary was also to have included Japan. But early in November, as Paul was starting its Australian leg in Melbourne, the Japanese government refused him entry because of his Scottish drug conviction three years earlier. Though he’d already received a visa from the Japanese Consulate in London, it had been rescinded on direct instructions from the country’s Minister of Justice.

Paul protested that neither Australia nor America had sought to exclude him on those grounds, but the Minister remained immovable. Instead, his Japanese fans had to make do with a TV documentary of Wings’ Melbourne show and a filmed greeting from him, Linda and the band, squashed together matily on a couch, performing a snatch of ‘Bluebird’.

‘We’ll see you next time,’ he promised–rashly, it would prove. ‘Sayonara.’

‘They’d saved themselves for him’

The fourth track on Venus and Mars, ‘You Gave Me the Answer’, was not merely a nod to the vogue for 1930s pastiche epitomised by London’s Biba superstore and vocal groups like Manhattan Transfer. It was also the most pointed of many musical tributes over the years which Paul, consciously or subconsciously, had paid to his father.

From the moment he found his own voice on record, there had been constant reminders of the modestly extrovert cotton salesman who’d been his first–and only–music teacher, banging away on the old upright piano at 20 Forthlin Road. It was to ‘Gentleman Jim’ McCartney that he owed his enduring love of the traditional and sentimental, of northern brass bands, sonorous Anglican hymns and old Hollywood show tunes, that helped to lift his songs so many miles above any competitor’s, bar one.

So now with Wings, his drive to reinvent himself, and surpass everything he’d done in the Beatles, often gave way to a rather touching desire to please his father. Along with his Ram album in 1971, he’d made an instrumental version under the pseudonym ‘Percy Thrillington’, recorded in big-band style with easy-listening vocal accompaniment by the Mike Sammes Singers. The Thrillington character was modelled on high-society bandleaders like Harry Roy and Lew Stone who’d been the pop idols of Jim’s youth, just as ‘You Gave Me the Answer’ was a tight-lipped Mayfair love song in the style of Jack Buchanan or Noël Coward.

Jim was now in his seventies and in rapidly declining health due to rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis and bronchial problems caused by a lifetime of smoking. He still lived on the Cheshire Wirral with his 28-years-younger second wife, Angie. But his severely reduced mobility had made it impossible for him to remain at ‘Rembrandt’, the house in Heswall Paul had given him on his retirement. Paul had therefore bought back ‘Rembrandt’, enabling Jim and Angie to afford a more convenient bungalow in Beverley Drive in the nearby village of Gayton.

Now that Jim could no longer get to Scotland, Paul always called in on him during the long drive there from London or back. On one return journey, he arrived wearing shoes still caked in mud from High Park Farm. Outraged that he could go around looking so scruffy, Jim insisted on lending him more presentable footwear, a pair of deeply square suede Hush Puppies. Next day when he met David Litchfield at Abbey Road, he still had on the Hush Puppies. ‘It amused him to be wearing his dad’s shoes,’ Litchfield recalls. ‘“You watch,” he said to me, “by tomorrow, everyone around here will be in Hush Puppies, too.” And they were.’

Jim had always thought Paul couldn’t ever give him a more thrilling present than his racehorse, Drake’s Drum–but the summer of 1974 proved him wrong. During his years of leading the Jim Mac Jazz Band, he’d composed a tune for himself to play on the piano entitled ‘Eloise’. His family knew about this sole excursion into composing, though with typical modesty Jim always refused to say he’d ‘written’ it, believing himself disqualified from the company of Cole Porter or Rodgers and Hart by being unable to read or write music. Even after his son had flouted that rule dozens of times over, all he would ever say about ‘Eloise’ was that he’d ‘made it up’.

Paul had heard the tune often enough for it to be engraved on his memory like a pianola-roll. And during Wings’ rehearsal-sessions in Nashville, he recorded it as a part-country, part-jazz instrumental with an ad hoc group called the Country Hams, including Chet Atkins on guitar and Floyd Cramer on piano. Since a song named ‘Eloise’ had already been released by Barry Ryan, he renamed it ‘Walking in the Park with Eloise’.

Proving to Jim that he truly had ‘written’ a number which Nashville’s two greatest instrumentalists were happy to perform would be a memory to treasure. So would his dad’s delight, as ever imperfectly concealed by a dig in the ribs and a murmur of ‘You daft bugger’.

At the beginning of 1976, Jim’s condition took a sharp turn for the worse. Until then, Angie had been his only carer, helped by her teenage daughter, Ruth, whom Jim had adopted on their marriage. When he could no longer leave his bed, his sisters Gin and Millie and other Liverpool relatives told Angie he should go into a care home, assuring her that ‘Paul will pay for everything’. But Jim had made her promise long before that he’d die in his own bed, and both Paul and Mike wanted the same.

Thereafter, she and Ruth took turns in giving him round-the-clock care. ‘There was nothing wrong with his mind,’ Ruth McCartney recalls. ‘He’d often sit up in bed in the middle of the night and say he fancied a boiled onion or a tin of Crosse and Blackwell barley soup. Whatever it was, either Mum or I would be there to get it for him.’

Paul drove up to see him early in March, just before setting off for Europe with Wings. ‘He brought a new photograph of himself with Linda and the children, which Jim put beside his bed,’ his stepmother remembers. ‘As he was leaving, he put his arms around me and said, “I’ll never forget what you’ve done for my dad, Angie. You’ll never want for anything again.”’

On 18 March, Jim died of bronchial pneumonia. His last thoughts were of the gentle, refined Irish wife he’d lost to breast cancer exactly 20 years earlier. ‘I’ll be with Mary soon,’ he whispered to Angie.

As a 14-year-old, Paul had coped with the trauma of his mother’s death by ‘putting a shell around me’–and now seemed to do the same again. The day after Jim’s passing, he went ahead with Wings’ scheduled pre-tour press conference, outwardly his usual chirpy, jokey self, then departed for the opening shows in Copenhagen.

Jim’s funeral took place at Landican Crematorium, near Birkenhead, on 22 March. Paul was in Copenhagen and did not return home for the ceremony although Wings had no show that day and the journey by private jet would have been an easy one. ‘[He] would never face that kind of thing,’ Mike McCartney later commented.

His Wings sidemen were not told of his bereavement. Even Denny Laine, who had known and liked Jim, only found out by accident later that month during a French television interview with Paul, the American teen-idol David Cassidy and himself. When the interviewer asked Paul about his parents, he simply replied that they were both dead, in a tone that discouraged any further inquiry. ‘I was physically shocked on camera,’ Laine would recall. ‘But one thing you have to remember about Paul, he’s a very, very private guy. He doesn’t like to share certain things. He takes them on his own shoulders… He has to be out there looking like he’s Paul McCartney, happy-go-lucky and not bothering the world with his problems.’

Angie continued to live at the bungalow in Gayton that Paul had enabled Jim and herself to buy, but her relationship with the McCartney family soon began to deteriorate. Jim’s Liverpool relatives took it amiss that straight after the funeral she and Ruth had gone off on holiday to Spain–understandable enough after their months of arduous round-the-clock caring. Paul shared that disapproval and, despite his promise that his stepmother would ‘never want for anything again’, a rift opened up between them.

Angie, now widowed for the second time, was still only in her late forties, and needed to make a new life for herself. After Jim’s death, she entered on what she now admits was an ill-advised business venture, a partnership in a theatrical agency. It was a failure, and when Paul declined to rescue it, she lost everything including the Gayton bungalow, which she’d mortgaged to fund the agency.

She and Ruth moved to London, where they did a total of five low-paid jobs between them, and a burglary of their rented flat took most of their remaining valuables. Desperately short of money, Angie sold her story to the Sun newspaper which, without her permission, headlined it ‘THE MEAN SIDE OF PAUL McCARTNEY’. Several of Jim’s family souvenirs had passed to her and a few years later. Paul was angered to read that she’d sold his birth certificate to an American memorabilia-collector–though in fact it was only a copy.