Paul McCartney (54 page)

In December, Badfinger’s ‘Come and Get It’–every detail of which Paul had dictated, despite the stress he was under–reached number four in the UK and seven in America. Reviewers remarked how much it sounded like the Beatles with him lead-vocalling in younger, happier days.

Just before the holidays, a series of enormous black and white billboards appeared in the centres of 12 major cities throughout the world, including New York’s Times Square. Each one read:

WAR IS OVER!

IF YOU WANT IT

Happy Christmas from John & Yoko

No billboards announced the end of Paul’s Scottish self-exile; yet again, John was making him take a back seat, though he didn’t intend to stay there for long. He returned quietly to London with Linda and the children and began work on a solo album.

‘It was a barrelling, empty feeling that just rolled across my soul’

And ‘solo’ really meant what it said. The whole thing was taped at Cavendish between December 1969 and January 1970 on a single four-track Studer machine set up in the living-room. Paul was his own producer and engineer, and played every instrument: bass, drums, lead, rhythm and steel guitar, piano, maracas, bongos, tambourine, Mellotron cowbell, wine glasses, xylophone and what would be listed as ‘bow and arrow’. His only helper was Linda on backing vocals.

The contents were a mixture of new songs, written in Scotland, and bottom drawer ones, like ‘Teddy Boy’ and ‘Junk’, which had already been tried out with the Beatles but fallen victim to the others’ indifference or impatience. There was even a relic of the Quarrymen era, ‘Hot as Sun’. Paul wanted the no-frills immediacy and informality which he’d intended for the Beatles’ Get Back, but which had somehow got lost along the way. So there was to be no tricksy editing, overdubbing or post-production; some of the tracks would be as brief as in the Abbey Road medley, some made up on the spot, some not even fully finished.

More important still, he wanted to tell the world of his new-found domestic bliss. The first thing he taped–intending simply to test the equipment–was a 45-second fragment called ‘The Lovely Linda’, which had noises from Linda in the background and ended with an involuntary giggle from them both as if they could hardly believe their own nerve. It would stay on the album, giggle and all.

One cannot but feel some sympathy for Allen Klein at this point. Klein had fought with every weapon at his disposal to win his all-time dream clients, only to have John quit on him and the break-up of the others guaranteed as a result. The only card he held was John’s promise of secrecy pro tem; a few months, maybe even weeks, to wring the maximum out of the Beatles that could be wrung.

Among their unexploited assets, he had found the band-in-rehearsal TV documentary, made by Michael Lindsay-Hogg more than a year earlier as a companion piece to the filmed performance that never was. Klein saw himself as a film mogul as much as a pop music one, and now instructed Lindsay-Hogg to expand the documentary to feature-length for cinema release. The problem was that much of the live performance captured at Twickenham Studios and in the Apple basement was not of sufficient quality for a film soundtrack and would have to be re-recorded.

Thus, on 3 January 1970, Paul found himself back at Abbey Road with Ringo and George to cut a new version of George’s song ‘I Me Mine’–an unwitting acknowledgement of the death of the ‘group mind’–on which he played bass, electric piano and Hammond organ and sang backup vocals. John and Yoko were away in Denmark, trying to give up smoking and having their identical long hair identically cropped; nonetheless, the session would pass into history as the last time the Beatles ever worked together on new material.

Klein’s most urgent need was for the band to keep putting out records, thereby triggering the munificent new royalty rate he’d negotiated with Capitol–and his own 20 per cent of it. So far, all Capitol had been given in return was a compilation album of past hits and B-sides, cobbled together by one of his ABKCO minions; from ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘I Should Have Known Better’ to ‘Rain’, ‘Lady Madonna’ and ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’. To add to Paul’s feelings of alienation and impotence, its title track was ‘Hey Jude’.

Klein was now making all the Beatles’ creative decisions, with the distracted air of a man watching sand run out in an hourglass. And the next one was to bring the worst affront Paul suffered under his regime.

The documentary which Michael Lindsay-Hogg was expanding to cinema-length clearly would need a soundtrack album to be released alongside it. And this could only come from the mass of tapes that was once supposed to become Get Back. Over the past year, the Rolling Stones producer Glyn Johns had heroically sifted through it and submitted two separate edits to the Beatles, but had both rejected without comment.

It was a musical slush-pile everyone tried to forget; the Beatles’ own equivalent of the amateur demos and cassettes that had once poured into Apple at Paul’s invitation. Yet buried in it were two future McCartney classics, ‘Let It Be’ and ‘The Long and Winding Road’.

‘Let it be’ was a saying he’d often heard from his mother, the sweet-natured but wise and practical district nurse, when she counselled him not to brood about some boyhood quarrel or grievance. At one of the many recent low points with the Beatles, he’d dreamed that ‘Mother Mary’ had come back to him, speaking such ‘words of wisdom’. ‘I saw my mum,’ he would recall. ‘It was so wonderful for me, and she was very reassuring. In the dream, she said, “It’ll be all right.” I’m not sure if she used the words “let it be” but that was the gist.’

The resulting song was like a hymn to the blessed presence that had gone out of his life when he was 14, now transmuted into an almost saintly visitant. Working with George Martin, he had since prepared a finished version in which church organ chords segued into soft rock without spoiling the devotional mood. He also employed the Liverpool accent his mother so wanted him to lose, singing ‘times of trooble’ rather than ‘trouble’.

It was also a first for Linda, whom Paul discovered to possess a sweet singing voice, instantly at home in the song’s fluid harmonies. He had therefore added her to the backing choir, initiating a career that had never previously crossed her mind.

‘Let It Be’ was released as a Beatles single, credited to Lennon–McCartney, on 6 March, coupled with ‘You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)’, the last time Paul and John had ever had fun together in a studio. The soft-rock hymn reached number one in America but only two in Britain–further proof to Paul of how the world had turned against him.

Although their creative partnership was plainly over, he and John still spoke at regular intervals, often with flashes of their old empathy. They could even joke about being boardroom adversaries and the way their respective courtiers sought to curry favour by bad-mouthing one to the other. ‘Do they try to set you against me?’ John once asked, ‘the way they try to set me against you?’

In March, Paul finally let John in on the secret of what he’d been up to all these weeks at home. ‘I’m doing what you and Yoko are doing. I’m putting out an album–and I’m leaving the group, too.’

‘Good,’ John replied. ‘That makes two of us who have accepted it mentally.’

John was in uncharacteristically buoyant mood, having just seen ‘Instant Karma’, his latest song for the Plastic Ono Band (now including George Harrison and Billy Preston) reach number three in America. To produce the session, he’d coaxed out of retirement the great Phil Spector, whose ‘Wall of Sound’ technique had revolutionised early-Sixties American pop. Though preceded by a fearsome reputation as a paranoid semi-hoodlum, Spector had behaved impeccably and contrived a brilliant single that would make John the first solo Beatle to sell a million.

Spector was also to produce the Ono Band’s first album that summer but, meanwhile, having such a maestro around seemed too good an opportunity to miss. So, on John’s recommendation, Allen Klein hired him to salvage the Get Back album–now, like its accompanying film, renamed Let It Be.

By this time, Paul’s album, simply titled McCartney, was nearing completion, still shrouded in secrecy. For some of the taping and mixing, he used the tiny Morgan Studios in Willesden, north London, booking in under the name ‘Billy Martin’. Linda, baby Mary and Heather went with him each day, strewing the place with baby paraphernalia, toys and picnic food. Only for the final stages did he use Abbey Road, keeping his Billy Martin alias–though he can hardly have gone unrecognised there. John Eastman then sought out New York’s most state-of-the-art studios and delivered the masters personally for a final tweak.

When Allen Klein finally learned of the project, he attempted to stop it in its tracks, afraid that it might jeopardise the Beatles’ Capitol Records contract. ‘He wrote to the president of Capitol, Sal Iannucci, saying Paul was contracted to the Beatles, so he wasn’t allowed to put out a solo album,’ Eastman recalls. ‘I talked to Iannucci and told him, “McCartney comes out on Capitol in five weeks or we go straight to Clive Davis at Columbia.”

‘Iannucci threatened to sue and I said, “So sue, it’ll be a great case and terrific publicity for the record.” “You can’t talk to me like that,” he said, “I went to Harvard Law School.” I said, “Well, I went to Stanford, so just go and fuck yourself.”’ Nonetheless, the risk of losing Paul to a rival label hit home, and the McCartney album’s release went ahead.

Paul was not the only Beatle with a solo album about to come out on Apple. Ringo, too, was breaking the mould with Sentimental Journey, a collection of standards, aimed primarily at pleasing his mum in Liverpool, which had elicited no objections from Klein and been scheduled for release on 27 March. Paul was given a release-date of 10 April for McCartney, but agreed to a one-week postponement to allow Ringo a little longer in the limelight.

However, it transpired that Phil Spector had worked so hard on his doctoring of the Let It Be tapes that a finished album could be ready for release on 24 April, a week ahead of the film’s world premiere in New York. The problem was that if McCartney came out as scheduled on 17 April, the two albums would be competing with each other. And to those now in power at Apple, there was no question which was the more important.

After his recent tussle with John Eastman, Klein was careful to stay out of the picture, leaving John and George to handle things in their capacity as Apple directors. John wrote to Apple Records’ distributors, EMI, that releasing two albums so close together ‘would not be in the best interests of the company’ and therefore McCartney was to be put back to 4 June. George then wrote to notify Paul of what had been done behind his back, signing off with a weak stab at affection and humour: ‘We’re sorry it turned out like this–it’s nothing personal. Love John & George. Hare Krishna. A Mantra A Day Keeps [Hindu goddess] Maya Away.’

In a last, heavy-handed attempt at conciliation, the letter was addressed ‘From Us To You’–echoing the Beatles’ second UK number one–then left in Apple reception to be collected by a messenger. There it was spotted by Ringo, who introduced the first touch of sensitivity into the proceedings. Thinking it wrong for Paul to be handed such a missive by just ‘an office lad’, he volunteered to deliver it personally.

No good turn ever goes unpunished. Having read the letter and gathered that Ringo agreed with John and George, Paul launched a furious attack on the messenger. ‘He went crazy,’ Ringo would recall. ‘He was out of control, shouting and prodding his finger towards my face, saying “I’ll finish you all now” and “You’ll pay”… he told me to get my coat on and get out.’ Subsequently, George received a phone call in which ‘[Paul] came on like Attila the Hun… shouting so loud that I had to hold the receiver away from my ear’.

Paul would never deny his outburst nor that, in the well-meaning Ringo, he had picked totally the wrong target. ‘I got really angry… I said, in effect, “This is the last straw and if you drag me down, I’ll drag you down.” I had to do something to assert myself because I was just sinking.’

Instinctively he turned for support to his old ally Sir Joseph Lockwood at EMI, but Lockwood was no longer the final arbiter concerning Beatles records, so had no choice but to accept John and George’s (and Klein’s) ruling. In the end, it was Apple’s unlucky Mister Postman who saved the day. Knowing now just how much McCartney meant to Paul–and feeling a twinge of compassion for one who’d never before invited such an emotion–Ringo talked the others into reinstating its 17 April release. It was Paul’s first victory in the Savile Row wars, but one almost immediately poisoned.

Phil Spector had professed himself a devoted Beatles fan who would handle their material as sensitively and respectfully as fine china. In remixing the Let It Be album, he had therefore been given a totally free hand, authorised to bring in extra musicians and arrangers as he saw fit, and left to get on with it unsupervised.

It was never likely that a man once known as ‘Pop Music’s First Svengali’ would settle for a self-effacing editorial role like George Martin or Glyn Johns. And, sure enough, the demo Spector turned in with such impressive speed reeked of his conviction that he alone knew what was best for the Beatles and that even their most musically-gifted member lacked his transforming touch. Thus, he’d revamped the original version of ‘Let It Be’ by Paul and George Martin (which by then had been an international hit), inserting a seam of brass and juggling the guitar breaks, all to no effect but the coarsening of its sweet, prayerful mood. But that was minor compared with his treatment of ‘The Long and Winding Road’.

Paul had recorded the song as a simple piano ballad in the style of Ray Charles, accompanied only by the other Beatles and Billy Preston. (John had taken over on bass, fluffing so many notes that he’d later be suspected of deliberate sabotage.) Though not prompted by a dream like ‘Let It Be’, it had a similar heart-aching confessional feel with its references to being ‘full of tears’ and ‘crying for the day’. Onto this, Spector had superimposed a massive orchestra, including 18 violins, and a 14-strong female chorus, so turning a perfectly-mixed dry Martini into an over-sugared milk shake. As an extra unkind cut, the arranger was Richard Hewson, who had created the perfect setting for Paul on Mary Hopkin’s ‘Those Were the Days’.