Paul McCartney (55 page)

John, George and Ringo approved the demo immediately, thankful that the shaming, shambolic Get Back had been turned into a releaseable product at last. To John especially, Phil Spector was, and would always be, a hero on a par with Hercules in the Augean Stables. ‘He was given the shittiest load of badly-recorded shit with a lousy feel to it ever, and he made something of it.’ Posterity would feel that on two tracks, at least, it was the other way round.

Not since the earliest days with George Martin had anyone challenged, let alone changed, Paul’s work. As everyone at Apple well knew, his reaction was likely to make the contretemps with Ringo look mild. However, the album’s production deadline was now so tight that altering any of the tracks would be impossible. And, seemingly, no great haste was made in sending a copy of the Spector demo to him at Cavendish.

Absorbed as he was by the final stages of McCartney, Paul put off listening to it for several days. When he finally got around to it, he immediately called 3 Savile Row and asked to speak to Allen Klein. On being told Klein was out, he dictated a letter over the phone, demanding that his version of ‘The Long and Winding Road’ be used on the album and that his music should never be tampered with again. But it was, as he realised, a futile gesture.

An interview with the Evening Standard’s Ray Connolly offered a perfect opportunity to vent his feelings. But he still stuck to soufflé-speak, insisting that he didn’t dislike Klein personally and making only vague reference to the ‘Long and Winding Road’ issue. ‘I don’t blame Phil Spector for doing it, but it just goes to show it’s no good me sitting here, thinking I’m in control, because obviously I’m not. I’ve sent Klein a letter, asking for some things to be altered, but I haven’t received an answer yet.’

In places, the interview felt almost like an appeal to the other Beatles to make peace. ‘We are beginning now only to call each other when we have bad news… There’s no one to blame, we were fools to get ourselves into this situation…’ However, it contained a second unmistakable public warning: ‘The party’s over, but none of us wants to admit it.’

Just as he’d sung and played every note on McCartney, so–in consultation with his photographer wife–he oversaw every detail of its packaging. The front cover was an image of cherries scattered on a white counter around a bowl of, possibly, wild cherry soup; the reverse showed a stubble-faced Paul in the Scottish wilds with baby Mary peeping out from inside his sheepskin coat. A gatefold opened to reveal 21 colour snapshots by Linda of the new McCartney family.

Marketing and publicity were organised from 3 Savile Row, without any of the input Paul was wont to lavish on Beatles albums. In the press advertisements, he discovered a further affront: the Apple logo, once his pride and joy, was now subtitled ‘An ABKCO-managed company’. To remove even that tiny shadow of Allen Klein, he commissioned a set of new ads at his own expense that made no mention of ABKCO or Apple.

He did not release a single from the album and refused all requests for interviews. ‘Whenever I’d meet a journalist, they always floored me with one question,’ he would later explain. ‘They’d say “Are you happy?” [i.e. professionally] and it almost made me cry. I just could not say “Yes, I’m happy” and lie through my teeth.’

Instead, the UK edition came with a sheet of dialogue confected between Apple’s Peter Brown and himself, answering the questions every interviewer would have put. As a public relations gambit, it was familiar enough–but this was no longer PR man Paul. Bypassing the media he had always played with such consummate skill, he’d decided to come clean directly to his public:

Q. Are all songs by Paul McCartney alone?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. Will they be so credited: McCartney?

A. It’s a bit daft for them to be Lennon–McCartney-credited, so McCartney it is.

Q. Did you enjoy working as a solo?

A. Very much. I only had me to ask for a decision and I agreed with me. Remember Linda’s on it, too, so it’s really a double act.

Q. What is Linda’s contribution?

A. Strictly speaking she harmonises but of course it’s more than that because she’s a shoulder to lean on, a second opinion and a photographer of renown. More than all this, she believes in me–constantly…

Q. The album was not known about until it was nearly completed. Was this deliberate?

A. Yes, because normally an album is old before it ever comes out (aside) Witness Get Back.

Q. Are you able to describe the texture or feel of the album in a few words?

A. Home. Family. Love.

Q. Will Linda be heard on all future records?

A. Could be. We both love singing together and have plenty of opportunity for practice.

Q. Will Paul and Linda become a John and Yoko?

A. No, they will become Paul and Linda.

Q. Is it true that neither Allen Klein nor ABKCO have been nor will be involved in any way with the production, manufacturing, distribution or promotion of this new album?

A. Not if I can help it.

Q. Did you miss the other Beatles and George Martin? Was there a moment when you thought ‘I wish Ringo were here for this break?’

A. No.

Q. Assuming this is a very big hit album, will you do another?

A. Even if it isn’t, I will continue to do what I want, when I want.

Q. Are you planning a new album or single by the Beatles?

A. No.

Q. Is this album a break away from the Beatles or the start of a solo career?

A. Time will tell. Being a solo album means it’s the start of a solo career and not being done with the Beatles means it’s a rest. So it’s both.

Q. Is your break with the Beatles temporary or permanent, due to personal differences or musical ones?

A. Personal differences, business differences, musical differences, but most of all because I have a better time with my family. Temporary or permanent? I don’t really know.

Q. Do you foresee a time when Lennon–McCartney will become an active songwriting partnership again?

A. No.

Q. What do you feel about John’s peace effort? The Plastic Ono Band? Yoko’s influence? Yoko?

A. I love John and respect what he does. It doesn’t really give me any pleasure.

Q. What is your relationship with Klein?

A. It isn’t. I am not in contact with him and he does not represent me in any way.

Q. What are you planning now? A holiday? A musical? A movie? Retirement?

A. My only plan is to grow up.

The Daily Mirror got hold of an advance copy and splashed the story on 10 April: ‘PAUL IS QUITTING THE BEATLES’. So 12 years, nine months and four days after he’d played ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ to John in St Peter’s Church Hall, it was all over.

Despite the uproar of corroborative banner headlines and newsflashes around the world, there was an odd sense of anticlimax–almost relief that the months of uncertainty were finally at an end. The Beatles were dissolving in sync with the Sixties: to their followers, it felt like waking from a blissful dream with nothing but bleary hangover to be discerned in the new decade stretching ahead.

In London, there was a vigil around the front steps of the Apple house like those traditionally held outside Buckingham Palace on the passing of monarchs. Among the ‘Apple Scruffs’ interviewed on camera, the consensus was that it was all Linda’s fault. ‘Technically, she’s supposed to be Paul’s wife,’ one of them explained to a BBC reporter. ‘But she’s his ruler, his guardian… she says “jump”, he jumps. A genius like that… you can’t let a woman do that to a man.’

Paul defended himself vigorously against the charges of wilful destruction from every side. ‘I didn’t leave the Beatles,’ he protested. ‘The Beatles have left the Beatles, but no one wanted to be the one to say the party’s over.’ It made little difference: the media almost unanimously accused him of overweening egotism, selfishness–and ruthlessness in pegging the terrible moment to the release of his first solo album. For even the best-informed commentators knew nothing about the ostracism, marginalisation, back-stabbing and humiliation within the band that he’d endured over the past months, yet still gone on trying to hold it together.

John meanwhile erupted in fury to think how he’d been talked into delaying his own resignation for the common good six months earlier. Now here was Paul, stealing the grand exit that ought to have been his. When asked for a reaction, he had plenty to say, albeit with a hefty dose of amnesia: ‘It’s a simple fact that [Paul] can’t have his own way so he’s causing chaos. I put out four albums last year, and I didn’t say a fucking word about quitting.’

After the momentous event it had signalled, McCartney, too, came as something of an anticlimax. Listeners expecting the ambition and finesse of ‘Penny Lane’ or ‘Eleanor Rigby’, and the tightness and cohesion of Sgt. Pepper or Revolver, were disconcerted, if not disappointed, by its home-made, often half-finished quality. Most of the new songs–‘Teddy Boy’, ‘Junk’, ‘Every Night’–were in Paul’s softest, blandest manner, and there was a puzzling emphasis on guitar-led instrumentals whose underlying message seemed to be ‘Anything George can do, I can do better.’ The Quarrymen number, ‘Hot as Sun’, sounded like nothing so much as Hamburg lounge-music, and segued into a fragment called ‘Glasses’ lasting only seconds but a glaring waste of space nonetheless. Even Paul McCartney on musical wine glasses sounded no different from anyone else.

Two tracks only strayed from the overall atmosphere of having fun at home. ‘Suicide’–which, bizarrely, Paul had once hoped Frank Sinatra might cover–came from the same well of chirpy sick humour as ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’. And the Linda-inspired ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ did not sound in the least home-made: a soaring ballad whose unspoken eroticism matched the best of Cole Porter.

Reviews were mixed, although every one singled out ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ as outstanding. Richard Williams in Melody Maker attacked the album’s ‘sheer banality’, calling the faux-hillbilly ‘Man We Was Lonely’ ‘the worst example of [Paul’s] music-hall style’. But to the NME’s Alan Smith, it was all ‘like hearing a man’s personal contentment committed to the sound of music… Excitement is not a word to use for this album. Warmth and happiness are.’

Whatever the critics might say, the supposed beady calculation of McCartney’s release more than paid off: it spent three weeks at number one in Billboard’s Hot Hundred, reached number two in Britain and topped charts all around the world.

Despite everything, the reaction which meant most to Paul was that of his now ex-bandmates. George, wrapping cattiness in a tone of affected concern, regretted how he had ‘isolated’ himself from musicians of his own calibre, so that ‘the only person he’s got to tell him if a song’s good or bad is Linda’. There was nothing, however, from the person who’d been a sounding-board for his music since he was a schoolboy and whose rare approval had always meant most to him. Actually, John hated the album to the point of apoplexy but–for the moment–held his peace.

On 13 May, the Let It Be film received its world premiere in New York, followed later by grand openings in London and Liverpool. The Beatles were present only on a poster showing their four faces rigorously fenced off from each other by borders of thick black; in truth, these were not galas but wakes.

There finally, projected onto a big screen in unsparing close-up, were the chilly rehearsal-sessions at Twickenham Film Studios 16 months earlier for an album that was never to be, with Paul so much like some obsessive young schoolteacher struggling to motivate a reluctant class. There was George, dourly answering teacher back (‘Look, I’ll play whatever it is you want me to play. Or I won’t play at all. Whatever it is that’ll please you, I’ll do it…’) before his own, unrecorded, walk-out. Counting Ringo’s brief defection during the White Album, everyone else had walked before Paul.

There, climactically, was the Apple rooftop concert, the four’s last-ever live performance together, at noon on a winter weekday, rounded off by Paul with ‘Get Back’ while polite police invaders waited for him to finish. There was the horribly final sound of plugs being pulled, and the sardonic ad-lib from John: ‘I’d like to say thank you very much from the group and ourselves and I hope we passed the audition.’

The film was generally panned. Billboard, whose chart the Beatles had once almost owned, felt no regret at the exit of ‘four moppet dolls who, for the good part of a decade, have danced and squealed as the creative playthings of a great mass who built an economy around their pleasant music’. The Sunday Telegraph noted how in the rehearsal sequences ‘Paul chatters incessantly… even when, it seems, none of the others is listening’.

The album also attracted widespread criticism, not least because lavish packaging pushed its price to almost double the cost of a standard LP. The NME’s Alan Smith, so long a staunch ally, called it ‘a cheapskate epitaph… a sad and tatty end to a fusion which wiped clean and drew again the face of pop music’. But without those disillusioning film-sequences, enough of the old magic remained for it to go to number one almost everywhere, as instantly as when the Beatles used to be happy.

No one seemed to care that neither of Paul’s two main contributions was as perfect as he’d intended. ‘The Long and Winding Road’, in its over-produced, chocolate-boxy version, became the band’s last number one single in the US, selling 1.2 million copies in two days, while ‘Let It Be’, however reconfigured, won him a large measure of forgiveness for his defection. The same comfort ‘Mother Mary’ had given him, he now seemed to be offering the world at this most monumental ‘time of trooble’. On the record, John tried to spoil the mood by introducing it in a comic child-voice as ‘’ark the Herald Angels Come’.

The album later won the Beatles their only Oscar for ‘Best Original Song Score’ in a film. As proof of their indifference, none showed up at the awards ceremony and the statuette was collected on their behalf by the night’s musical director, Quincy Jones.

That summer of 1970, John submitted himself to the American psychotherapist Dr Arthur Janov for a course of so-called Primal Therapy designed to exorcise the demons of his childhood. Paul might have no childhood demons to exorcise, but his concurrent psychological state was hardly less fragile.