Paul McCartney (45 page)

When a woman from the village gave a rendition of ‘The Fool on the Hill’, it wasn’t until midway through that he realised she was on crutches. He went over, danced a couple of gentle steps with her, kissed her on the cheek, then returned to the piano and struck up again.

On 30 August, the Apple label released its first four titles simultaneously in the UK: the Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’, Mary Hopkin’s ‘Those Were the Days’, ‘Thingumybob’ by the Black Dyke Mills Band and ‘Sour Milk Sea’ by Jackie Lomax. The last-named, formerly vocalist with Liverpool band the Undertakers, was a protégé of George Harrison’s, singing a George song; otherwise, everything had been either written, vocalised, discovered or produced by Paul.

A special presentation edition in a shiny black box, labelled ‘Our First Four’, was hand-delivered to each of the British establishment’s first four: the Queen at Buckingham Palace, the Queen Mother at Clarence House, Princess Margaret at Kensington Palace and Prime Minister Harold Wilson at 10 Downing Street. The music business had never seen a record company take such patent pride in its artistes, nor aim so high.

‘Hey Jude’ was paired with John’s ‘Revolution’ but marketed as the A-side for pragmatic commercial reasons, not least its greater acceptability to America, where real revolution currently seemed very close. (It clearly would also go down much better with the inhabitants of Buckingham Palace, Clarence House, Kensington Palace and 10 Downing Street.) John wasn’t happy with the decision but, having larger matters than the Beatles now on his mind, accepted it.

In America, it spent nine weeks at number one, the longest-ever run for a Beatles single, having ‘gone gold’ with sales of a million copies after only two. In Britain, it had just two weeks in the top spot before being displaced by ‘Those Were the Days’, which in turn was displaced by Joe Cocker’s cover of ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’ from the Sgt. Pepper album.

‘Hey Jude’ received its British TV premiere on the David Frost Show, in a seemingly live performance to a large studio audience. Though actually pre-recorded, it was still the Beatles’ first public recital since 1966 and as such attracted a colossal viewership. Coincidentally, John and Yoko had been Frost’s guests two weeks earlier, promoting a piece of Yoko performance art called ‘Hammer a Nail In’. Audience members took turns to hammer a nail into a block of wood and then describe the emotions it caused them. Even the fawning host, when asked to try it himself, could not pretend to have found it illuminating.

But for the ‘Hey Jude’ broadcast, to palpable general relief, Yoko was nowhere in sight, and even John chose to take an atypically low profile. It was virtually a solo turn by Paul at the piano in red velvet, brown eyes heartbroken above the mic as the singalong power of that four-minute-long ‘Na na na nanana na’ coda was unleashed for the very first time.

He could never resist a promotional opportunity, however small. Since closing down, the Apple boutique had stood empty and forlorn in Baker Street, its formerly riotous display windows blotted out by white paint. Unwilling to waste such a prime location, Paul paid it a visit, accompanied by Francie Schwartz and Alistair Taylor, and scratched ‘Hey Jude’ on the whitened glass. Unfortunately, it was mistaken for the anti-Semitic slogan ‘Juden Raus’ (Jews Out) that used to be daubed on Jewish-owned premises in Nazi Germany. An outraged passer-by smashed the window and a local Jewish shopkeeper telephoned Paul and threatened him with physical violence.

By now, he had tired of Francie and was cursing himself for having moved her into Cavendish. Though she didn’t realise she’d worn out her welcome, her Apple colleagues did–some hearing it directly from Paul himself. ‘I remember being with him at the house one day,’ Chris O’Dell says. ‘Francie was in the next room, and he was going, “How can I get rid of her?”’

Soon afterwards, Chris left the country temporarily. She had come from California to work at Apple without the necessary work permit, and the Home Office ruled she could only apply for one outside Britain. ‘I went to Ireland to get the permit, which took longer than I expected and I ended up being there for about three weeks. When I got back, Francie wasn’t around any more.’

With that problem tidied away, Paul turned back to someone with whom he’d always felt comfortable and who never asked anything from him. ‘Out of the blue, he rang me up,’ Maggie McGivern remembers. ‘He told me to pack my bags because we were off to the sun tomorrow. I told him I hadn’t got a passport. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You won’t need one.”’

The next day, a car collected Maggie from her Chelsea flat, then stopped to pick up Paul in St John’s Wood. As he came out, one of the girls who haunted his gate realised he was going on holiday and offered him an Instamatic camera, which he accepted. ‘At the airport, we met up with one of Paul’s Liverpool cousins [Uncle Jack’s son, John] and his American girlfriend. Paul had chartered a private jet. I still didn’t know where we were going.’

They flew to Sardinia, spending five days in a beach-side hotel and living in swimsuits, T-shirts and flip-flops. Looking back to illicit drives in his Aston Martin with Maggie, Paul started a song called ‘In the Back Seat of My Car’, too late for the now double album–and in fact never destined to be released by the Beatles.

‘We met this English couple on the beach who invited us to dinner and seemed so nice that Paul accepted,’ Maggie recalls. ‘We turned up in our shorts and T-shirts, only to find it was a formal banquet with women in long dresses, covered with expensive jewellery. Paul was complaining that he couldn’t get drunk any more, because the Beatles had got so used to every kind of booze, so the waiter started bringing us a local concoction called a Sardinia that was absolutely lethal.

‘We were in a big room with wooden rafters, and after a few Sardinias, he jumped up and started swinging from one of the overhead beams. I expected all these women in their jewels and finery to be shocked, but several of them got up and started swinging beside him.

‘One day when we were coming out of the sea, Paul said, “What would you think about getting married?” I gave some flip answer like “You never know what may happen.” That was how casual and jokey our relationship was.’

They weren’t spotted by the media until their last day, when a photographer snapped them walking through the town. The following Sunday, after they’d returned to London and gone their separate ways, the picture appeared in Britain’s Sunday People with a story about ‘Paul McCartney’s new girlfriend’.

‘I phoned him up and said, “If anyone asks me if it’s true, what shall I say?”’ Maggie remembers. ‘He said, “Tell the truth.”’ With that, he faded out of her life once again.

Chris O’Dell, too, recalls how he seemed ‘a little lost’ at this point, and compensated by devoting even more of his energies to Apple. He had launched a subsidiary of Apple Records called Zapple, to be run by his old Indica bookshop friend Barry Miles and devoted to the spoken word. Miles was to start with a series featuring top contemporary writers from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Charles Bukowski, Michael McClure and Richard Brautigan; later, world leaders like China’s Mao Zedong and India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi were to be invited to expound their political philosophies. No one doubted that, for Paul McCartney, they would all form an orderly queue.

Although he remained as meticulous and micromanagerial at 3 Savile Row as ever–even designing a uniform cover for Zapple’s intended ‘paperback records’–his out-of-office life now became atypically confused and chaotic. His former skill at disentangling himself from one-night stands seemed to disappear: at one point, he had three women at once living at Cavendish. ‘They argue,’ he complained to Barry Miles. When one of the trio remained stubbornly deaf to hints that her time was up, he threw her suitcase over the wall into Cavendish Avenue.

Not until late September did he realise the message of ‘Hey Jude’ that John had so taken to heart–‘you have found her, now go and get her’–applied equally to himself. He phoned Linda Eastman in New York and asked her to return to London without delay. She instantly agreed.

When she arrived, Paul was at Abbey Road with the Beatles, so Mal Evans met her at the airport and took her to Cavendish, where she was to wait for him. She was a little disconcerted by the squalor into which the house had descended since she’d last seen it. Previously, what had struck her were the paintings on the walls; now it was that, among all the state-of-the-art electronic gadgets, ‘nothing worked’. In the refrigerator, she found only a mouldering bottle of milk and a wedge of ancient cheese.

When Paul finally returned, he brought a tape of the song the Beatles had recorded that night. It wasn’t one of his, but John’s ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’–a horribly prophetic title if ever there was one. He still insisted on playing it to Linda before they fell into bed.

These comings and goings had, of course, been witnessed by the knot of his female fans who kept watch outside the front gate around the clock. On this balmy September night, their patience brought a rare reward: the sound of Paul singing ‘Blackbird’ through the open music-room window.

He was welcoming Linda into his world of perpetual song but the girls, eavesdropping ‘in the dead of night’, preferred to think it was for them.

‘You’ve been playing on the roof again and your Mommy doesn’t like it’

The arrival of the Beatles’ double album, on 22 November 1968, was an event like none in pop music before. Yes, there had been huge anticipatory audiences for other records, other long lines waiting for record stores to open, other dashes home to audio equipment like the diarrhoea-smitten to toilets. But never quite such hunger to possess, such prestige in ownership, such kudos in being first to know a tracklist by heart.

The packaging was as different as it could be from the dazzle and pomp and fun of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In place of Peter Blake’s psychedelic pantheon was a plain white front cover showing only the artistes’ name, in small, off-centre type, and a serial number. Created by a different, more cerebral pop artist, Richard Hamilton, it suggested some limited-edition print rather than a gramophone record mass-produced by the million. Its official title was THE BEATLES, though it would be known for ever afterwards as the White Album.

George Martin had felt the 30 tracks spread over four sides included many that were only average and some even rather poor (to say nothing of ‘Revolution 9’). Until the very last minute, he’d urged that the two discs should be edited down to just one, sardine-packed with quality in the tradition of Sgt. Pepper and Revolver. But neither John nor Paul would consider cutting anything. Now their ‘more is more’ approach seemed triumphantly vindicated. In the UK, the White Album spent seven weeks at number one and a total of 24 weeks in the Top 20. In the US, it sold 3.3 million in four days and was number one for nine weeks. It would ultimately be certified America’s tenth bestselling album of all time, having gone platinum (for one million-plus sales) 19 times over.

Yet the reviews seldom touched the same rhapsodic heights as Sgt. Pepper’s. Critics complained that the tracks seemed to have no unifying theme or concept and that their prevailing mood of gentle whimsy had little relevance to the political and social upheavals of the time. (In later years, when Paul and John individually sought to make their music more politically engaged, they would be censured just as severely.)

The now traditional moment of highbrow hyperbole came from the British TV director Tony Palmer. Writing in the Observer, Palmer called Lennon and McCartney ‘the greatest songwriters since Schubert’ and predicted the White Album would ‘surely see the last vestiges of cultural snobbery and bourgeois prejudice swept away’. Since few pop record-buyers realised Schubert had been a songwriter, this in itself was cultural snobbery of a high order.

The album was certainly remarkable in its efforts to raise its audience’s aesthetic sights. But the number of evergreen Beatles favourites it proved to contain would be even smaller than George Martin’s estimate; no more than half a dozen tracks of the 30. Ironically, too, after all his efforts to keep it on course and bring it home, Paul’s presence is nothing like as strong as the seemingly indolent and wayward John’s.

Under the stimulus of his affair with Yoko and his new sense of liberation, John travels through a remarkable creative spectrum, from the visceral ‘Yer Blues’ and the taunting ‘Sexy Sadie’, a coded swipe at the Maharishi, through the delicate and subtle ‘Dear Prudence’ to ‘Julia’, his lighter-than-air mourning fragment about his dead mother.

Paul, at the same time, was distracted by Apple, emotionally adrift after parting from Jane yet still not quite ready to commit to Linda. The result, for the most part, are songs in smiley masks: ‘Honey Pie’, a pastiche of 1930s Hollywood musicals; ‘Rocky Raccoon’, halfway between cod-Western and strip-cartoon; ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’, suggested by the sight of copulating monkeys in India; ‘Martha My Dear’, named after his Old English sheepdog. Only in ‘Blackbird’ does his talent fully show its glossy wings and golden beak; Bach on an acoustic guitar, and what sounds like a memo to self, finally putting aside those doubts about commitment:

All your life…

You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

The most joyous moments, as always, are where Lennon and McCartney co-operate, still with no hint of a sundering presence between them. Paul’s ‘Back in the USSR’ (minus an unmissed Ringo) revives their old talent for close-harmony mimicry with an expert take-off of the Beach Boys. John may have fulminated against ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ in retrospect but on the day of its recording he turned up at Abbey Road in high spirits, sat straight down at the piano and played its honky-tonk intro with all the brio at his command.

The pair’s ability to switch identities was never more remarkable. John’s ‘Good Night’ seemed pure Paul in its evocation of 1950s BBC Children’s Hour, glowing Magicoal fires and warm Ovaltine. Paul’s ‘Helter-Skelter’ (a conscious effort to be louder than the Who’s ‘I Can See for Miles’) was a heavy metal onslaught that made ‘Revolution’ seem almost decorous.