Paul McCartney (60 page)

Of the two, he was closer to John since their journey from seeming hopelessness to victory in the High Court. Each summer, the McCartney family would exchange the austerity of Kintyre for East Hampton, Long Island, where John, a passionate sailor, and his wife, Jodie, had a home. ‘They virtually lived in our house,’ he recalls. ‘Our kids got along great and virtually grew up together.’

Lee also had a home in East Hampton, as did Eastman & Eastman’s most illustrious artist-client, the great abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning. Paul revered de Kooning, so was hugely impressed that the Eastmans called him ‘Bill’ and knew him well enough to ask him to do a drawing of the family as a sixtieth birthday gift for Lee.

Between Paul and Lee things were trickier, for even now that Linda was married to one of the world’s most famous men, her father still tended to treat her like a wayward teenager. Once at his New York apartment, when he was haranguing her over the dinner-table, Paul quietly chipped in, ‘I’d rather you didn’t do that.’

‘[Lee] looked at me like “Who are you?” and I said, “I’m her husband and I’d really prefer you didn’t do that,”’ he later recalled. ‘It was like throwing a grenade into the middle of the table. I just took her hand and said, “Right. Good night everyone. Pleasant evening. Thank you very much,” and we left.’ Significantly, Linda did not leap to her father’s defence, as many daughters would have, but went unresistingly.

But as an attorney-cum-business manager, no one suited this particular client better. Having been rejected by the Beatles to run Apple, Lee was to help Paul build a business organisation that would never suffer Apple’s problems–and ultimately be even more profitable than his music.

Back in February 1969, before the Beatles’ break-up was anything like a reality, he had bought a small company called Adagrove Ltd, renaming it Paul McCartney Productions and basing it in a one-room office in Greek Street, Soho. To be managing director, he hired 32-year-old Brian Brolly, a film and television producer who had presciently encouraged Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice to create their first stage musical, Jesus Christ Superstar. Brolly would also act as Paul’s personal manager, though in this case the title brought with it rather less power and influence than normal.

In April 1970, Paul McCartney Productions had announced as its first project a cartoon film based on Alfred Bestall’s Rupert Bear strip in the Daily Express. As with most postwar British children, the adventures of check-trousered Rupert and his friends Bill Badger and Pong-Ping the Pekinese had been a staple of Paul’s boyhood. He still possessed a Rupert Christmas annual he had been given aged ten and it was proudly inscribed with his name and address (12 Ardwick Road, Speke). Before a frame of animation was drawn for the film, he’d completed a song for its soundtrack, ‘Little Lamb Dragonfly’.

Over time, however, it would not be films but Lee Eastman’s knowledge of American music publishing that ensured the success of Paul McCartney Productions, later known as McCartney Productions Ltd, then MPL. Paul might have been helpless to prevent the copyrights of his Beatles songs being bought up by Lew Grade’s ATV. But with his father-in-law’s guidance there would be some solace, as well as great profit, in buying up other great songwriters’ back catalogues in his turn.

Wings’ second exploratory flap as a live band was a continental tour between July and August of 1972, somewhat grandiosely billed as Wings Over Europe although its 28 small-venue dates were concentrated in France, Belgium, Switzerland, West Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Once again, Paul and Linda took their children with them.

McCartneys and musicians travelled together in a personalised London double-decker bus, its top deck open, its lower one fitted with aircraft-style seats, a kitchenette and bunk beds for Heather and Mary. In a nod to the Magical Mystery Tour, its usual red paintwork was covered by psychedelic cartoons. The party flew to Marseilles to pick up the vehicle, which had been driven overland from London. As the roadies loaded the gear on board, the painters were still putting the final touches to its decoration.

Actually, the atmosphere would turn out to be closer to Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday, with bare-torsoed musicians sunning themselves on mattresses on the open top deck amid guitars, plastic toys, potties and ten-month-old Stella’s playpen. That one-class democratic spirit also applied to the venues, where everyone shared the same dressing-room, even on occasion the same washing facilities.

‘Most nights, I used to see baby Stella put to bed on a pillow inside a drawer,’ Denny Seiwell says. ‘Paul and Linda didn’t alter their lives for their kids: the kids had to fit in with them. But there was never a time when those girls didn’t have someone looking out for them, something to eat and something to do. I’d never seen such great parents before, and I never have since.’

In Paris, time had also been booked at EMI’s Pathé Marconi Studios for Wings to record the first full song Linda had written, the reggae-flavoured ‘Seaside Woman’. Paul was in sufficiently high spirits to risk re-igniting the row with John by introducing her to the French media as ‘Yoko’.

Early-Seventies rock musicians on tour lived an orgiastic life unmatched since the days of the nastier Roman emperors, gorging food and drink on bottomless tabs and competing with each other in sheer, mindless waste. The Rolling Stones–who were travelling across America this very same month–would order tray after tray of high-priced cocktails simply for the infantile pleasure of throwing them out of the window, trays and all. Led Zeppelin were famous for having once stayed at a hotel overlooking the Pacific and fished for sharks from their suite, using costly room service steaks as bait.

But Paul had learned his lesson from Apple–and from Beatles tours long before that. His sidemen were booked into the same luxury hotels as Linda and himself, but with only bed and breakfast paid for. Bar-and room-service bills were their responsibility. Since all three were still on the same £70 per week salary, the tour ate up everything they earned.

Wings were now unequivocally a Glam Rock band, with Paul in a sparkly top, open almost to the navel, and Linda more glammed up than ever in her life before, with tumbling blonde hair, sheer backless dresses and crimson suede knee-boots.

In fact, this first exposure to paying audiences, rather than starstruck college students, had terrified her. Before the opening show, at Châteauvallon, near Arles, she wept with stage-fright on Denny Seiwell’s shoulder. ‘I tried to tell her everything would be okay,’ he recalls, ‘and when we got out there, she did a pretty good job.’

She also acted as Paul’s chief protector, putting herself in harm’s way rather than leave him exposed. ‘On the French Riviera, we were at a dinner after the show,’ Seiwell remembers, ‘when this guy comes up to Paul and says he’s got a gun in his pocket. Linda would have taken the bullet no question, but suddenly this little French security man sitting at our table makes a move–and the guy is gone.’

Her protectiveness was needed on many levels. For public and committed family man though Paul now was, almost every woman who crossed his path still shamelessly came on to him. And the Beatles had virtually invented the old rock musicians’ adage that ‘it doesn’t count on the road’.

Denny’s wife, Monique, was no threat, frequently acting as a babysitter to the McCartney children. Such could not be said for Joanne–alias Jo Jo–La Patrie, a 20-year-old model and would-be pop singer from Boston, USA, who talked her way backstage after the Juan-les-Pins show. While waiting for either couture-or chart-stardom, Jo Jo had notched up an impressive record as a groupie, losing her virginity to Jimi Hendrix at the Woodstock festival, moving on to Jim Morrison, then Rod Stewart who, she claimed, had written ‘You Wear It Well’ for her.

She now set methodically to work on Wings, first seducing one of the roadies, which allowed her to hitch a ride aboard the equipment bus following the double-decker and make eyes at Denny Laine whenever the two vehicles drew level. Having hooked Laine and won a seat on the band-bus, she revealed that, as a 17-year-old Beatles fan, she’d bombarded Paul with passionate letters and had first come to Britain with the sole object of meeting and marrying him. Finally, an embarrassed Laine had to tell her that ‘Paul and Linda are very uptight about you being around’. But unlike the one in ‘Get Back’, Jo Jo refused to get back to where she once belonged.

‘We weren’t a druggy band, any more than we were a drinking band,’ Denny Seiwell says, ‘but in Sweden, Linda said she’d like a little grass. I knew a guy in London, so I got him to drop off some at the office for them to mail it to me at the hotel where we were staying in Gothenburg. When we came into town, Paul and Linda stopped off at the hotel to pick it up so that we could all have a little at the gig.

‘The customs form said the package contained cassettes, but someone at the hotel must have noticed that it felt squishy. During the show that night at the Scandinavian Hall, the place suddenly gets full of armed police. The encores kept going on, so they tried to stop us by chopping through a 20,000-watt PA cable, which could have killed someone. Backstage, I’m arrested, put in a police car and taken to police headquarters. Then a few minutes later, they also bring in Paul and Linda.’

Threatened with charges of trafficking, the McCartneys protested that the grass had been sent to them as a gift by fans, and that they’d had no idea what was in the package when they picked it up. They were believed, and the group got off with a collective fine of £1000.

The following day, they gave an interview to the Daily Mail, repeating the same story. But Paul didn’t deny that they used grass, nor feel any need to apologise. ‘We smoke [it] and we like it, and that’s why someone sent it to us in an envelope. At the end of the day, most people go home and have a whisky. Well, we play a gig and we’re exhausted, and Linda and I prefer to put our kids to bed, sit down together and smoke a joint. That doesn’t mean we’re heavily into drugs or anything. You can’t expect us to pretend we don’t smoke for the sake of our fans. But now that I’ve been caught, I’ll say “Yeah, it’s true.”’

‘We had to sign a written promise not to use marijuana again while we were in Sweden,’ Seiwell says. ‘But the next day, a guy from Holland gave us some and we shared it from a paper plate inside the bus with all the press and the fans right outside.’

Back in Britain, further trouble of the same kind was waiting–this time in the place where Paul had always felt most private and able to do as he liked. And yet again the postal service would take the rap.

On 19 September, a uniformed officer of the Campbeltown police, PC Norman McPhee, paid an unannounced visit to High Park Farm. Paul and Linda were in London, just back from Wings Over Europe, and no one else was at the property. McPhee later claimed merely to have been carrying out a routine security check. But just a few days previously he’d been away on a drug-awareness course in Glasgow, learning how to recognise illegal substances, both artificial and natural. Nor could he have been unaware of the Daily Mail’s ‘WHY I SMOKE POT–BY PAUL’ headline, and of feelings among Kintyre’s predominant conservative, God-fearing element. It’s even possible he was acting on a tip-off from one of Paul’s less-enamoured neighbours.

The spot-or, rather, pot-check yielded rich dividends. In the farm’s tumbledown greenhouse were growing five of the distinctive spikey-leaved plants PC McPhee now knew to harbour cannabis resin. He took one away for analysis and, the results proving positive, returned with a search-warrant and seven colleagues to seek further drugs in the farmhouse, Rude Studio and other outbuildings. But the five cannabis plants proved the extent of it.

Next day, Paul was charged with three counts of growing and possessing cannabis, a crime far graver in 1972 than nowadays and usually punished by imprisonment. As Scotland’s legal system differs radically from England’s, a Glasgow-based solicitor, Len Murray, was engaged to represent him. Murray entered a plea of not guilty to all three charges by letter and the case was set for trial at Campbeltown Sheriff Court the following March.

With that cheerless prospect ahead, Paul took Wings back into the recording studio to finish the album that had been interrupted the previous spring, only now as a single one rather than the double he’d first intended. Guitarist Henry McCullough took credit for persuading him it would be better shorter–something that George Martin had so signally failed to do with the Beatles’ White Album. After the problems with Glyn Johns, he decided to produce the remainder of it himself.

Midway through the sessions, as it happened, the Beatles’ old producer offered him a commission only someone with his talent for multitasking could have accepted. Martin had been asked to score the eighth James Bond film, Live and Let Die, and had persuaded its producers that the title song–invariably a hit in the pop charts–should be written by Paul and recorded by Wings.

Stimulated as always by composing to order, he speed-read Ian Fleming’s novel, then set to work, calling on Linda for help yet again. Like a famous co-composition with John, the song ended up in two distinct halves, its soft, pensive opening by Paul, its perky reggae middle by Linda. As arranger and producer, George Martin brought in percussionist Ray Cooper, and added ‘Day in the Life’-like symphonic effects as explosive as a Bond car chase. With that kick from 007, Wings really rocked for the very first time.

The problem was that Bond movie songs had previously been recorded by solo artistes, usually female ones. When the franchise’s co-producer, Harry Salzman, heard Wings’ track, he assumed it was merely a demo. ‘That’s great–now who do we get to make the record?’ he asked Martin. ‘Whaddaya think of Thelma Houston?’ Only with great misgivings was he persuaded that Paul McCartney’s new band was the better bet.

With Wings’ new album–now titled Red Rose Speedway–still not ready for the Christmas market, Paul released their third single in 1972, the rock-boogie ‘Hi Hi Hi’. It earned him his second BBC ban of the year, both for its blatant drug-references (‘We’re gonna get hi hi hi’) and crude, not to say chauvinistic, sexual sentiments like ‘Get ready for my body-gun’, which he rather implausibly claimed was a mishearing of ‘polygon’.