Paul McCartney (58 page)

Worse consequences were to follow. The track called ‘Too Many People’ contained several references to John, albeit so oblique that they went unnoticed in the media. ‘Too many people preaching practices’ meant the Yoko-inspired peace campaign and all the other attention-seeking crusades which Paul thought ‘a little bit hypocritical’. ‘You took your lucky break/ And broke it in two’ (toned down from ‘Yoko took your lucky break…’) reproached John for giving over his life to someone who didn’t even say ‘the Beatles’. In the repeated phrase ‘piece of cake’, the first two words were slurred into ‘piss off’. The very album-artwork featured its own little sidelong, symbolic dig, a back-cover picture of two beetles copulating. Translation: You tried to fuck me over and look what happened.

Even allowing that his and John’s relationship had always been based on such schoolboyish stuff, it’s hard to reconcile with the subtle intelligence of ‘Another Day’. And, coming so soon after his High Court victory, it was obviously asking for trouble.

In fact, John not only picked up every slur on Yoko and himself, and himself singly in ‘Too Many People’, but others on different tracks that Paul had never intended. ‘Dear Boy’, the song about Linda’s ex-husband, he decided was all about him even though it contained not a single line that could be so interpreted. Also on the list were ‘3 Legs’ (‘Well, I thought you was my friend…’), ‘Smile Away’ (‘Man, I can smell your breath a mile away…’) and ‘The Back Seat of My Car’, a song actually dating from Paul’s pre-Linda affair with Maggie McGivern (‘We believe we can’t be wrong’).

John at the time was making his first solo album without the Plastic Ono Band, whose title track was a plea to ‘imagine all the people, living life in peace’. To this he now added a venomous ‘answer’ song entitled ‘How Do You Sleep?’, with help on the lyrics from Yoko, and even Allen Klein, and George, that other disgruntled co-litigant, playing slide guitar.

The title was nonsensical; Paul had done nothing to lose sleep over. But fairness was not on John’s agenda. With withering contempt, intensified by faux-blues diction, he lampooned his old friend for ‘liv[ing] with straights’ and ‘jump [ing] when your momma [Linda] tell you anything’. Some of the barbs were unintentionally self-revealing. A whiff of envy of Paul’s looks accompanied the dismissal of his solo career with ‘A pretty face may last a year or two/ But pretty soon they’ll see what you can do’. Rancour over his recent hit single surfaced in ‘Since you’re gone you’re just another day’.

Ringo was also around during the song’s gestation, feeling more and more uncomfortable as John’s rant lost any touch with reality: ‘Those freaks was right when they said you was dead’ (i.e. in the rumour-epidemic of 1969), ‘The sound you make is Muzak to my ears’ and, most monstrously, ‘The only thing you done was Yesterday’. This last was meant to be followed by a scream of ‘You prob’ly pinched that bitch, anyway!’ but Klein ordered it to be cut, fearing Paul might sue for libel.

The nuclearly disproportionate tit-for-tat also included an answer to the copulating beetles on Ram’s back cover. Inside John’s Imagine album was a postcard on which he parodied Paul’s parody-rodeo pose with the blackface ram, but wrestling a pig instead.

Far from having second thoughts about what he’d done, he positively gloried in it, publicly thanking Allen Klein for contributing the ‘just another day’ jibe. ‘Some people don’t see the funny side of it,’ he complained in a self-review for Crawdaddy magazine. ‘It’s what you might call an angry letter–sung. Get it?’

Paul responded in an interview with Melody Maker’s Chris Charlesworth, prefacing most of his answers with ‘Don’t print this’ but still plainly on the record throughout. ‘Everyone thinks I’m the aggressor but I’m not, you know. I just want out… I just want the four of us to get together somewhere and sign a piece of paper saying it’s all over and we want to divide the money four ways. No one else would be involved, not even Linda or Yoko or Allen Klein. We’d just sign the paper and hand it to the business people and let them sort it out… but John won’t do it.

‘“How Do You Sleep?” I think it’s silly. So what if I live with straights? I like straights. I have straight babies… He says the only thing I did was “Yesterday”. He knows that’s wrong. I used to sit in the studio and play, and he’d really dig some of the stuff I played to him. He can’t say all I did was “Yesterday” because he knows and I know it’s not true.’

At one point, the mild, conciliatory tone gave way to a defiant twirl of the matador’s cape. ‘John and Yoko are not cool in what they are doing. I saw them on television the other night, and thought that what they’re saying about what they want to do together is basically the same as what Linda and I want to do.’

John demanded equal space in the MM to reply, and did so in a letter addressed to ‘Paul, Linda et all the wee McCartneys’, from which a section had to be cut for fear of libel.

‘It’s all very well playing “simple ole honest Paul” in Melody Maker, but you know damn well we can’t just sign a piece of paper. You say “John won’t do it”, but I will if you indemnify us against the Tax man.

‘If YOU’RE not the aggressor (as you claim) who the hell took us to court and shat all over us in public?… As I’ve said before, have you ever thought that you might POSSIBLY be wrong about something? Your conceit about us and Klein is incredible. You say… “we secretly feel that you’re right” [about Klein]. Good God! You must know we’re secretly right about Eastman.

‘… Wanna put your photo on the [album cover] like uncool John and Yoko, do ya? (Ain’t ya got no shame?) If we’re not cool, WHAT DOES THAT MAKE YOU?

‘No hard feelings to you either. I know basically we want the same… whenever you want to meet, all you have to do is call.’

But Paul didn’t.

That summer of 1971, two of the New York session musicians who’d played on Ram, drummer Denny Seiwell and guitarist Hugh McCracken, were invited to visit him and Linda in Scotland. Thinking they’d merely been offered a holiday, Seiwell and McCracken brought along their respective wives, Monique and Holly.

The two couples were put up at Campbeltown’s best hotel, the Argyll Arms, and given a tour of High Park Farm, where Paul’s latest DIY project had been to turn its tumbledown outbuilding into a recording studio with a four-track machine sent up from London by EMI. He called it Rude Studio, which it certainly was, though the word was meant in the reggae sense of cockily rebellious.

As the visitors were leaving, Linda took Seiwell and McCracken aside and asked if they’d return the following day without their wives ‘to play some music’. Only then did they realise why they were there.

The idea had come to Paul in between sheep-shearing or mowing fields on the tractor Linda had given him. ‘Instead of thinking “After the Beatles, it’s got to be important… super musicians… let’s just find ourselves”… One night, I said to Linda, “I’m going to form a band, do you want to be in it?” [and] with some trepidation, she said, “Er, yes”.… She and I knew she was a novice while I was a veteran… But I liked the tone of her voice [because] I’d never sung with a woman before. All my harmonies to that date had been with males.’

The musical chemistry with Seiwell and McCracken proved just as immediate with real rams ripping at grass and covering ewes just a few yards away. Unfortunately, Monique Seiwell and Holly McCracken chafed at being left to their own devices at the Argyll Arms, where the food was poor and the rooms were so cold they needed hot-water bottles in their beds even in June.

In any case, this particular line-up was never going to work. McCracken had two small children by his previous wife back in America and couldn’t contemplate moving to Britain permanently. After a few days, he decided to return to New York. Denny Seiwell also left, to visit Monique’s family in France, but offered to return when Paul found another guitarist.

This he soon did in Denny Laine, formerly of the Moody Blues, who’d voiced the Birmingham band’s huge 1964 single ‘Go Now’. The ‘Moodies’ had often supported the Beatles on tours, including their last UK one in 1965, and known them well socially. A talented guitarist and keyboard-player, Laine had gone on to leading roles with the Incredible String Band and Ginger Baker’s Air Force, and written several successful songs, notably ‘Say You Don’t Mind’ for Colin Blunstone.

It was significant that Paul should have chosen someone with established form in every area where he’d lately enjoyed autonomy: singing, soloing and songwriting. Since 1957, he’d been accustomed to working with a strong, stimulating musical partner; even though Linda had officially succeeded to that role, he also felt he needed something by way of a John-substitute.

Denny Laine just then happened to be at a low ebb, without a regular band and reduced to sleeping in his manager’s office. ‘Paul phoned me up out of the blue and said, “Hey, man, what are you up to now?”’ he recalls. ‘I said, “Nothing.” “Why don’t you come up to Scotland then?” Paul said. “We’ll just jam around and see what happens.”’

The two Dennys, Laine and Seiwell, were each put on a weekly retainer of £70, and rehearsals in Rude Studio began. As an old friend of Paul’s, Laine stayed at High Park while the Seiwells rented a farmhouse with its own 300 acres at Kilkenzie-by-Campbeltown. ‘We started with old rock ‘n’ roll numbers, Buddy Holly, Elvis and them, and it all just felt right,’ Laine recalls. ‘Nobody knew we were there, and no one around there knew who we were. There was no publicity… no pressure.’

Linda–by now heavily pregnant–had been having piano lessons from a neighbour in Cavendish Avenue. ‘Now and then Paul would show her something on the organ, but Denny and I had no idea that she was going to be in the band,’ says Laine. ‘She just organised him and the two kids and did the cooking.’

In August, George Harrison mobilised friends like Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Leon Russell to join him onstage at New York’s Madison Square Garden in a benefit concert for the victims of famine, flood and genocide in newly-created Bangladesh. (Paul was invited to appear but declined, fearing it would make the event look like a Beatles reunion.) With the Concert for Bangladesh added to All Things Must Pass and ‘My Sweet Lord’, George found himself not only rock’s biggest performer of the new decade but also its first saint.

Meanwhile, in a shed on a sheep-dotted hillside in Kintyre, eight tracks had been laid down–five of them in a single take–by a band which as yet had no name. Denny Seiwell tried to persuade Paul to bring in a keyboard-player named Paul Harris, who’d backed top-notch names like ex-Lovin’ Spoonful John Sebastian. ‘That’s when he told me he was going to teach Linda how to play. I was used to working with the best in the world, and here I am working with the best in the world, and suddenly we’re going to have an amateur on keyboards. But what could I say?’

The band still lacked a name in early September, when Paul and Linda returned to London for the birth of their second child. On the 13th, Linda went into labour and was taken to King’s College Hospital. There she was found to be suffering from placenta previa, a condition in which the placenta is situated too close to the uterus, complicating the delivery process and causing heavy bleeding.

An emergency Caesarian section had to be performed and, for a time, both mother and baby were in serious danger. Paul later recalled ‘praying like mad’, and being answered by a further vision from his midwife mum that named his band before his new–and perfectly healthy–daughter, Stella Nina.

As if angels hovered around Mother Mary, he seemed to see a multitude of golden, spreading… wings.

‘Hell, we’ve really blown it here’

At around noon on 9 February 1972, Elaine Woodhams, social secretary of the Nottingham University students’ union, was drinking with friends in the union bar when two unfamiliar, uncollegiate-looking young men approached her. ‘They said “We’re with Paul McCartney and his band, Wings,”’ she recalls. ‘“We’re on the road and looking for places to play. Would you like them to do a show here?”

‘I went outside with them, thinking it was all a joke and my mates would all be there laughing or I’d have buckets of water chucked over me. A van was parked in the road, the window rolled down and there in the driving-seat was Paul McCartney, with his family and two dogs in the back.’

A succession of other British provincial universities were to have the same unreal experience–a pop giant turning up unannounced with wife, children and pets in tow and asking, rather humbly, if he and his new band could play for the students. Paul’s way of breaking in Wings was to do the surprise live gigs he’d once seen as the Beatles’ salvation. Only now he was out to prove he still had what it took as a stage performer by starting from even below Square One.

There was also an element of back-pedalling from Wings’ extravagant launch the previous November. To introduce them and their first album, Wild Life, Paul had hired the Empire ballroom in London’s Leicester Square and invited 800 guests including some of the fellow musicians he most hoped to impress: Elton John, Keith Moon, Ronnie Wood and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page.

Wild Life consisted of the eight tracks he’d rehearsed in Scotland with Linda, Denny Laine and Denny Seiwell, supplemented by leftovers from the Ram sessions and mostly sounding even more home-made than McCartney. ‘We weren’t trying to be too clever, just trying to find a couple of grooves,’ Laine says. ‘A bit like Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, if you like.’

The title track was not about a rock star’s existence but about real wild animals and their mistreatment–an issue that would become increasingly important to Linda and Paul. Unfortunately, it revealed that while he could write devastatingly about small human detail, broad-brush campaigning in the John Lennon mode reduced him to banality (‘What’s gonna happen to… the animals in the zoo?’).

Only here and there was a track not redolent of long-haired blokes jamming in a pine shack in the Scottish Highlands. ‘Love Is Strange’ was a catchy reggae version of Mickey and Sylvia’s 1950s hit, later covered by the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly. And ‘Dear Friend’, as opposed to ‘Dear Boy’, was a message of real love and regret to John (‘Dear friend, what’s the time?/ Is this the borderline?’) which, if Paul had included it on Ram as he’d originally intended, might have spared him an awful lot of Lennon bile.