The Love You Make (61 page)

Heady with the success of
Ringo,
Ringo started putting out an album a year. With minor exceptions, each of these albums was so undistinguished that none of them would ever have been given any airplay if it weren’t for the fact that Ringo was an ex-Beatle. In December of 1974 the overhyped
Goodnight Vienna
album was released, with its moronic “No No” novelty song that became a short-lived hit single, and “Only You.” In 1975 he formed his own, ill-fated record label, Ringo Records, but closed the company down when running it turned out to be too much hard work with no immediate results. Ringo also invested in a furniture design company with Robin Cruikshank called Ringo or Robin Limited, which featured items like a Rolls-Royce grille table or chrome-plated circular fireplaces. This company, too, met its demise.

By 1976, having been released from his Apple recording contracts, Ringo signed a deal with Polydor Records in England and released another solo album called
Rotogravure.
Although the album sold reasonably well, it, too, was considered a commercial and artistic failure. In 1977
Ringo the 4th
appeared, a desperately trendy disco album that was not only a failure but an embarrassment. His 1978 entry, this time on Columbia’s Portrait Records,
Bad Boy
, was equally unsuccessful, and his contract was canceled.
Rolling Stone
reported,
“Bad Boy
isn’t even passable cocktail music.”

Ringo acted in a few bit parts in films, most notably
That’ll Be the Day
and Mae West’s last movie,
Sextette.
Although he received some warm reviews, it was obvious he was no actor. He tried his hand at directing for a time and produced and directed glitter-rock star Marc Bolan in a concert film called
Born to Boogie,
but that, too, was doomed to failure.

So there was poor Ringo, a cameo part player without a part. He was an international celebrity and a wealthy man, but he had little daily purpose in life. Always fancying himself the lady’s man, he divorced Maureen in 1975. The poor girl was devastated. Even if it were true that she had gone to bed with George, even if she had strayed, Maureen still loved her “Ritchie” with as much passion and dedication as any northern girl could muster. She was his faithful servant and friend, always there for him, to cook and clean, to soothe him when he was tired and cranky. She turned her head when he started to fool around with other women, but she couldn’t hold him. Ringo made Maureen a wealthy woman with the terms of their divorce settlement, giving her a cash settlement of £500,000 with more to come as it was needed over the years. A short time later, when Maureen wanted to live in London, Ringo bought her and the kids a £250,000 house in Little Venice. He also bought Tittenhurst Park from John and Yoko and turned it into a rental property and recording studio. Then, for tax purposes, he signed the $1.7 million property over to his kids. Maureen pines for him to this day, and in the same sense that Cynthia waited for John, Maureen dreams that one day Ritchie will come home to her.

Ringo gave up his English residency because of the prohibitive tax laws and became a tax exile. He bought a lavish condominium in a luxury building on the side of a cliff in Monte Carlo, where he took up residency, but he was really a man without a country or a home. Ringo was always attracted to life in the fast lane, and he threw himself into a high-speed, jet-setting existence with a vengeance. He had a penchant for beautiful young women and took up for a time with American model Nancy Andrews. He gambled heavily in Monte Carlo’s Loews Casino and jumped from continent to continent at whim. It seemed Ringo was always in a plane, looking for the next good party. “Well, I am a jet-setter,” he said. “Whatever anyone may think and whoever puts it down, I am on planes half the year going places… Wherever I go it’s a swinging place, man.” Nancy Andrews soon grew tired of the pace and went back to Los Angeles, where she later slapped him with a $7 million palimony suit. Ringo also bought homes in Amsterdam and Los Angeles, where he rented a $300,000 home in the Sunset Hills just above Sunset Boulevard, and frequented his favorite haunts, like the private rock club, On the Rox. He caroused around Los Angeles with some of the more hell-bent rock stars, including Keith Moon and Harry Nilsson. There was always another beautiful young woman on his arm, including actresses Vivian Ventura and Shelly Duvall and singer Lyndsey De Paul.

One of Ringo’s frequent nightclubbing pals turned out to be none other than Mal Evans, the Beatles’ road manager. When the Beatles disbanded, Mal was at a loss for something to do. As Neil Aspinall put it, “He went from fixing telephones to Shea Stadium, overnight. He lived with the stars for a decade, and then suddenly he was an ordinary man again.” Bored with his wife and children, he left England and moved to Los Angeles in the early seventies, following the rock and roll action. But no work he could find in the U.S. equaled the exhilaration of working with the Beatles, and Mal’s life began to disintegrate. By 1976 he was living in an apartment complex in West Hollywood with some young girl, drinking and drugging heavily, seeing Ringo or John or one of the guys as they passed through town.

Because Mal was so big, he always thought he needed twice as much as anybody else: twice as much food, twice as much booze, and twice as many drugs. Neil remembers that when they first discovered LSD, Mal took five tablets at a time and was up for two days tripping. He did the same sort of thing one night in Los Angeles, except with downers. They made him drunkenly angry, and he got into a terrible row with his girlfriend. Allegedly, he pulled a gun on her, and she called the police. When the police arrived, pounding furiously on the door of the apartment, Mal barricaded himself inside. When the police broke down the door, this drunken giant was standing there with a gun, and they opened fire on him, killing him instantly in a barrage of shots. His girlfriend sent the bill for the cleaning of the carpet to Apple, but Neil refused to pay it.

There is a macabre twist to this already terrible story: Mal was cremated, and his ashes were lost in the mail. When John Lennon heard the story, he couldn’t help but quip that Mal had wound up in the dead letter department.

Life in the fast lane finally sidelined Ringo in late April of 1979, when he was rushed to a Monte Carlo hospital in critical condition. His fragile stomach, still sensitive from his childhood illnesses and operations, had given out from the large quantities of harsh substances he was ingesting, and doctors in Monte Carlo were forced to remove part of his intestines. Yet when he recovered after several months of rest, Ringo returned to the party circuit as if nothing had happened. Too much time on his hands was his greatest problem, and he seemed to straighten up a little in the late winter of 1980 when he went to Mexico to star in a spoof of caveman pictures, called
Caveman.
This clever yet simple film had no real dialogue; the actors talked in prehistoric grunts and pieces of made-up language. Ringo’s major task was to be a clown, and he was brilliant at it. He received glowing reviews and felt a sense of real achievement.

It was while he was filming
Caveman
that he met Barbara Bach, the leggy, buxom actress who co-starred in the picture with him. Bach was best known for her co-starring role in the James Bond movie,
The Spy Who Loved Me.
Like Ringo, she was divorced with children, and despite her glamorous image, she seemed to be a dedicated mother. They started dating during the filming, and the following month Ringo took her to London to meet his children—much to Maureen’s great distress. Ringo and Barbara Bach were nearly killed in an automobile accident on this visit, when Ringo’s car went out of control in South London and cut through three lampposts before it came to a halt. Ringo had pieces of the shattered windshield set in little gold lockets, which he and Barbara wear around their necks. Like John had done several years before, Ringo had the twisted wreckage of the car compressed into a cube, and he displays it as sculpture.

Ringo and Barbara were married in London at the Marylebone Registry on April 27, 1981. It was a Beatle reunion of sorts, because Paul and George both attended the ceremony with their wives. John was the only one missing.

Paul McCartney was thrown
into serious doubt about his own talent. Not only were John’s barbs about him being “the rock version of Engelbert Humperdinck” sticking to his flesh, but his first two solo albums,
McCartney
and
Ram,
were the objects of particular derision by rock critics. Indeed, the rock critics were flailing Paul’s flesh over the breakup of the Beatles. For the most part rock critics take personal delight in being able to castigate their heroes when disappointed. Because Paul (along with Yoko) was being labeled as the villain in the Beatles’ breakup, his reviews became so pejorative that they would have killed the career of a lesser artist. “It became a challenge to me,” Paul said. “I thought either I was going to go under or I was going to get something together.”

All along, even when he was with the Beatles, what Paul wanted to do was start all over, to get back to his audience and just be in a little rock band again; this seemed like the perfect moment to try and do it. With great courage, Paul formed a new band from scratch and named it Wings. No superstar group this, he hired all unknown musicians and paid them salaries, as little as $450 a week. His first hiring was a New York session drummer named Denny Seiwell, who auditioned for Paul in a decrepit New York loft. His second hiring was Denny Laine, a former vocalist with the Moody Blues and a sometimes competent, creative guitarist. The last member of the group, on the keyboards, was none other than Mrs. Paul McCartney herself, much to the delight and ridiculing of the rock critics.

Paul figured if John could do it with Yoko, he could do it with Linda. Of course, Yoko at least had some musical ability and aspirations; Linda was a photographer. But he insisted on injecting her into his professional life. If Paul thought the rock critics had been mean to him, they were downright cruel about Linda. Her ability at the piano was minimal, her vocal was worse, and she was even criticized for her clothing and appearance, right down to the hair on her legs. There was a popular joke going around London: “What do you call a dog with wings?” “Linda McCartney.”

Paul almost immediately found himself in a legal battle with Lew Grade and Northern Songs over Linda’s musical ability. The call to arms came with the release of a single called “Another Day.” Authorship of this tune was attributed to “Mr. and Mrs. Paul McCartney,” as most of the
Ram
album would be. This meant that a pure 50 percent of the publishing rights—millions of dollars in the long run—would go directly into Linda’s pocket, bypassing Northern Songs. Lew Grade was furious at what he saw as a deception on Paul’s part, for Linda had not been and was obviously not now a musician capable of composing with Paul. Grade maintained that 100 percent of the songwriting credit deserved to go to Paul, and he took the case to court. Yet another painful public trial unfolded in the daily newspapers. The essence of Grade’s lawsuit was that Linda had no musical ability, and this was what the attorneys had to prove. Linda took the witness stand to testify to her minimal talent, bravely sticking the trial out to the end. Paul’s lawyers maintained that Linda’s musical ability was not the point of the case and that it was his privilege to compose with absolutely anyone he wanted to compose with, regardless of their musical experience. It was to everyone’s surprise and delight when Paul and Linda won the suit. To smooth over the decision with Lew Grade, Paul agreed to star in a Lew Grade-produced TV special for ATV,
James Paul McCartney
, which turned out to be to their mutual benefit.

If the rock critics were waiting to feast on Paul, he served himself up to them on a silver platter with Wings’ first group album,
Wild Life.
This was a trivial, sophomoric LP, seemingly bereft of any redeeming melody or lyrics (“bip, bop bip bom bop bip bop bip bom bam”). Without pausing to take a breath, Paul added guitarist Henry McCullough to the Wings lineup and went back into the studio to record a new single, “Give Ireland Back to the Irish,” which he composed in the wake of the “Bloody Sunday” shooting in Londonderry. This single was seen both as a ploy to regain credence with a hip audience and as a weak attempt at making some serious political statement (as John was doing with no problem in America). The song was declared too incendiary to be played on British radio and television, and although it sold several hundred thousand copies in Great Britain, it was also considered a failure.

In early February of 1972, Paul and his new band set out into the English countryside in a van, just as the Beatles had done in Neil Aspinall’s van eleven years before. Without any advance warning, Paul turned up at the administration offices of Nottingham University and asked if he could set up his equipment and give a free concert for the students the following night. His only request was that the students not be told nor the press notified. On February 8, Paul gave a surprise concert for 700 deliriously happy students on what was the eighth anniversary of the Beatles’ first appearance on the “Ed Sullivan Show.”

Paul loved every minute of it. There was a thrill and satisfaction from entertaining a live audience that he could get nowhere else. He and Linda and Wings spent the following summer and fall touring around England and Europe in a double-decker bus painted with rainbows and clouds. It was their practice to turn up unannounced at various colleges and towns and offer to play. They took their meals on the road, often only bread and cheese and wine, and were a happy bunch of minstrels. Paul and Linda were enjoying themselves thoroughly. “We’ve no managers or agents,” Linda told
Melody Maker,
“just we five and the roadies. We’re just a gang of musicians touring around.”

And like any “gang of musicians,” they were traveling around with a stash of marijuana. Pot still remained Paul and Linda’s favorite recreational drug, and they were rarely without it. Since they were traveling on their own, with no more Neil or Mal to carry it through customs for them, they arranged to either carry it themselves or have friends mail it to them in various hotels around Europe throughout the summer. The McCartneys made it through France, Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark without any trouble, but their luck ran out in Gothenburg, Sweden, on August 10. The local police and customs officials had intercepted a reported half pound of grass that had been mailed to them at their hotel from London. Paul, Linda, and Dennis Seiwell were brought to the police station directly from the stage of the Scandinavian Hall, where they performed that night. After several hours of questioning, the three allegedly “confessed” to smoking pot and were fined £800. The public prosecutor said that formal charges would be brought against them later, but none were ever lodged.