Shout! (82 page)

Yet there she was with Paul onstage, filling the place once occupied by John Lennon, her blonde hair now cut in a modish seventies sheaf, dressed in gaudy glam-rock shirts and waistcoats, but still not smiling very much, even when waving puffy sleeves above her head to encourage audiences to clap along. In some Wings songs she took the vocal, closely backed by Paul; in others she played an elementary keyboard solo he had obviously taught her that was only a step or two on from “Chopsticks.” Halfway through the show, he would introduce her in homely Liverpool style as “Our Lin,” though to applause never more than polite.

In fact, as Linda later admitted, it was all Paul’s idea that she should join Wings, mainly so that they wouldn’t be separated when the band went out on tour. She said she never felt comfortable onstage and would always much rather have stayed at home with her children and animals. She did it only because it meant so much to Paul.

Despite its huge success and cozy family image, Wings was never to be a happy or stable band. As if in reaction to the old democracy of the Beatles, Paul proved an iron-fisted autocrat. A succession of talented musicians flocked to his banner, but soon left again, frustrated by his dominating ways and refusal to share the limelight with anyone but “Our Lin” and her Chopsticks solo. Even the talented and crucial Denny Laine was given no percentage of the band’s earnings, simply receiving a wage of just seventy pounds per week (though Paul later raised this to seventy thousand pounds per year and paid off Laine’s outstanding income tax). “It was inevitable,” a former Wings associate comments. “You had a leader who was a multi-instrumentalist, a perfectionist—and a former Beatle. Other than John, George, and Ringo, he wasn’t going to regard anyone else as nearly in his league.”

On record, too, Wings had a bumpy takeoff. For their debut single Paul chose to air his Hibernian Catholic roots in an overt political statement whose title, “Give Ireland back to the Irish,” could hardly have been worse timed. When the record appeared in 1972 the so-called Provisional IRA were escalating their campaign of sectarian murder in
Northern Ireland and were soon to extend indiscriminate mass murder to the British mainland. The simplistic sentiments of “Give Ireland back to the Irish” seemed all too much in tune with hooded thugs now bombing and knee-capping in the name of Republicanism. Like John Lennon with “I Am The Walrus” five years earlier, Paul found himself banned by the BBC and so deprived of any significant airplay within the U.K.

His heavy-handedly ironic response was to make Wings’ follow-up single a song no one on earth could accuse of being politically controversial. This was the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” in a setting that he had originally devised to sing to his daughter, Mary, while he put her to bed. “La-
La
” ran its chorus—then, by way of a change,
“La
-la”. When Wings premiered the single on American television, there were sarcastic comments even from the talk-show hosts who introduced them. “Once upon a time, Paul McCartney recorded songs like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Hey Jude.’ Now here he is with his new group and ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’”

Wings’ continuing struggle to be taken seriously was further illustrated that same year, 1972, when Paul agreed to provide a title song for the latest James Bond film,
Live and Let Die
. Having written the song, he went into the studio on his own to record it with Wings, using the Beatles’ old producer, George Martin, to score and produce it. A justifiably excited Martin then played the result to the Bond film’s American co-producers Harry Salzman and Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. “Great demo,” they enthused. “Now…who are we going to get to make the
record
?” It took all Martin’s powers of persuasion to convince them that Paul McCartney’s imprimatur could take Bond to a new, younger market and that they shouldn’t call up Shirley Bassey or Lulu. “Live and Let Die” became a Top Ten single for Wings and was rated the best Bond theme since John Barry’s original one for
Dr. No
in 1962.

This breakthrough was consolidated by their 1973 album
Band on the Run
, whose packaging was both an oblique allusion to their spell as highway-wandering outsiders and a throwback to
Sgt. Pepper
in-jokiness. The cover showed a melodramatically slinking posse of cloaked “fugitives” including the Hollywood actor James Coburn, the television interviewer Michael Parkinson, and the gourmet-soon-to-be-Liberal-MP Clement Freud. Two tracks from the album, its title song and “Jet”—a number likewise hinting at bonds triumphantly burst and
the accelerator now pressed down flat—each became huge-selling singles.

From here on, Wings would compete with David Bowie, Elton John, T-Rex, and Queen as the surest crowd-pullers of 1970s glitter rock. Their 1976 American tour sold out every venue, and found no chat-show hosts snickering now. For Paul it was an especially sweet triumph, coming as it did exactly ten years after the Beatles’ farewell concert in San Francisco.

Although Allen Klein had retained managerial control of John, George, and Ringo until 1973 (as he did of the Rolling Stones until 1975), Paul had the further satisfaction of seeing “the Robin Hood of Pop” finally go down with an arrow in his back. In 1977, two years after Klein finally ended all connections with the Beatles, he was charged on six counts of income tax evasion by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Thanks mainly to incriminating testimony from his old associate, the scary Pete Bennett, he was convicted of failing to declare income made from the illicit sale of promo Beatles albums. He was fined five thousand dollars and sent to prison for two months.

From here on, the new brand of McCartney songs rolled forth in the new, faintly mid-Atlantic McCartney voice that had Linda’s insubstantial harmony clinging permanently to its underside like barnacles to a ship’s keel. They were always catchy, always pleasant, always empty of real content and lacking that extra effort and edge that used to come from John peering over his shoulder.

The honed perfection of a lyric like “Eleanor Rigby” or “Yesterday” was replaced by sloppy first drafts of half-thoughts: “Silly Love Songs,” “Listen to What the Man Said,” or “Let ’Em In,” the latter merely a rambling name check—reminiscent of John’s on “Give Peace a Chance”—from “Martin Luther” (King) and “Phil and Don” (Everly) to McCartney family members like “brother Michael” and Auntie Jin. Clunky rhymes got through that John would have mocked to the skies (“The county judge / held a grudge”). The relentless journey to the middle of the road that had begun with “When I’m Sixty-Four” took another less-than-giant step when he agreed that Wings should record the theme music for television’s tackiest soap opera,
Crossroads
. To Beatle-Paul fans (now being fast overtaken by Wings-Paul ones) his
Crossroads
instrumental seemed the nadir—but they were soon to be proved wrong.

In 1977, inspired by the tract of water near his Argyllshire farm, and
gratefully recalling its healing properties during his post-Beatles depression, he wrote a ballad entitled “Mull of Kintyre.” Recorded at dirgelike tempo, with full bagpipe accompaniment, it seemed to have all the appeal of Fort William on a wet afternoon. Reviewers in the domestic pop press (who then still aspired to a degree of literacy) were unanimous in calling it the dreariest, blandest solo McCartney production yet. It stayed at number one in the U.K. for nine weeks, sold two million copies, and was to remain Britain’s top-selling single until Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” in 1984.

With Wings now triumphantly spread, Paul set up a publishing company, MPL (McCartney Productions Ltd). The organization was as small and low-key as Apple had been diffuse and flamboyant, operating from one unshowy office in London’s Soho Square and another in New York. The New York end was run by Linda’s brother John, with frequent recourse to the legal expertise of her father, Lee—the very management team, in fact, that Paul had once proposed should run the Beatles.

The new company was not long in pulling off a major publishing coup. In 1975, the song catalog of Buddy Holly, the Beatles’ first great idol and inspiration, was put up for sale by Holly’s former manager, Norman Petty. For a knockdown price of less than one million dollars, MPL snapped up the rights to Holly’s music in the United States and Canada. So moved was Paul to have become the custodian of “That’ll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue,” and all the rest that he decreed an annual “Buddy Holly Week” of Holly-related concerts and events that was to be faithfully observed for some years afterward. Norman Petty himself came over from New Mexico to inaugurate the first Buddy Holly Week; at the celebration lunch, he presented Paul with the cufflinks Holly had been wearing at his death in a plane crash in February 1959.

That was just the beginning for MPL, whose body may have been small but whose mouth quickly proved as large and ever open as that of an angler fish. Over the following years, often acting on advice from Lee Eastman, it gobbled up the publishing for a succession of hit stage shows, including
A Chorus Line, Grease, Annie
, and
Hello, Dolly!
, as well as for innumerable standards and even TV theme music, notably that for Lucille Ball’s 1950s comedy show,
I Love Lucy
.

Paul had always fought shy of the rock star’s lifestyle. Now, as his new
band rocked the world, as he found his wealth growing far beyond any he had ever known as a Beatle, his personal life became proportionally more modest. By the mid-seventies he and Linda and their growing brood had left London, keeping on his old St. John’s Wood mansion as a pied-à-terre but settling permanently in a small house near Rye, Sussex. Given that those were far safer, less media-intrusive times, it was still an extraordinarily unpretentious and accessible roost for a multimillionaire ex-Beatle. It had neither security fences nor patrolling guard dogs; for many years, indeed, the entrance to its front drive did not even have gates. “It wasn’t much more than a hole in the hedge,” remembers one McCartney fan who trekked down for a look. “I used to think how many cars passed that gate each day without ever knowing Paul was there.”

The interior was equally unshowy, save for Paul’s growing collection of modern art. Ever the autodidact, he had developed a passion for twentieth-century American painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning (the latter, fortuitously, a client of Lee Eastman’s). The knack for cartooning that he himself had had since school days now developed into full-blown painting, though as yet for purely recreational purposes.

His house might look open and accessible, but Paul guarded its privacy as fiercely as if it were surrounded by razor wire and searchlights. Most people, and almost all journalists, thought he lived in the rather larger and more opulent mill house nearby that he’d turned into a recording studio. Even some of his closest professional colleagues never got to see inside his real home. A public relations man who worked closely with him during the late seventies remembers being kept firmly at arm’s length in this way. When they needed to discuss something the PR man would drive down from London, wait in his car outside the house, and Paul would emerge and talk to him there.

After Mary in 1969, Linda bore two more children: Stella (born in 1971) and James (Paul’s baptismal name, born in 1977). Together with Linda’s daughter Heather, they grew up in an atmosphere of absolute parental love and security, with a father who could not have been more hands-on. Unlike most rock-star kids, however, none was in the least spoiled: all four were born in National Health maternity wards, attended local state schools, and were firmly inculcated with the old-fashioned Liverpudlian virtues of politeness, considerateness, and
respect that their grandfather, Jim McCartney, had unknowingly bequeathed them.

Linda immersed herself in family and country life, proving to be a devoted mother and an increasingly skillful cook (witness that rather patronizing album track, “Cook of the House”). Under her influence, Paul became both a vegetarian and an animal rights enthusiast, proselytizing to the extent of hanging
GO VEGGIE
banners above the stage at Wings concerts—so fueling the worst fears of Beatle-Paul fans who’d wondered what “she” would do to him next.

From their Sussex neighbours, the couple won esteem for their refusal to come on like rock ’n’ roll royalty and their obvious love and respect for the surrounding countryside. The only waves they made in the community came from their fierce opposition to the local hunt—and flat refusal to allow it to cross their land. When the district’s only NHS hospital was threatened with closure, Paul stepped in and donated enough money to keep it going. Despite her crowded new domestic life, Linda persisted with her photography, snapping her husband, children, animals, and surroundings at every opportunity and putting together a Christmas calendar made from the best of her year’s shots.

At some moment in the mid-seventies, British pop journalists ceased referring to Wings’ front man as “Paul” and instead dubbed him “Macca.” Though merely a contraction of “McCartney,” vaguely evoking both his Irish and Liverpool working-class heritage, it perfectly fitted the new and very different persona that came more clearly into definition with each seven-league leap of solo success. Whereas Paul, in Beatles times, had suggested almost saintly softness and charm, Macca suggested something altogether tougher and more synthetic; a perhaps-not-too-distant cousin to Formica. Whereas Paul had been adept at concealing his prodigious vanity from the world, Macca sometimes let it show as helplessly as a “flasher” in a raincoat on Clapham Common. Whereas Paul had steered a largely trouble-free path through the minefields of pop stardom, Macca at times would seem almost hell-bent on blundering into the most obvious trip wires.

His and Linda’s devotion to family values did not prevent them from still indulging the emblematic habit of sixties flower children. They used marijuana, both at home and while traveling with Wings. And, alas,
there was now no magic shield to protect pot-smoking ex-Beatles from retribution.