by Peter Brown
Ringo gave up his English residency because of the prohibitive tax laws and became a tax exile. He bought a lavish condominium in a luxury building on the side of a cliff in Monte Carlo, where he took up residency, but he was really a man without a country or a home. Ringo was always attracted to life in the fast lane, and he threw himself into a high-speed, jet-setting existence with a vengeance. He had a penchant for beautiful young women and took up for a time with American model Nancy Andrews. He gambled heavily in Monte Carlo’s Loews Casino and jumped from continent to continent at whim. It seemed Ringo was always in a plane, looking for the next good party. “Well, I am a jet-setter,” he said. “Whatever anyone may think and whoever puts it down, I am on planes half the year going places... Wherever I go it’s a swinging place, man.” Nancy Andrews soon grew tired of the pace and went back to Los Angeles, where she later slapped him with a $7 million palimony suit. Ringo also bought homes in Amsterdam and Los Angeles, where he rented a $300,000 home in the Sunset Hills just above Sunset Boulevard, and frequented his favorite haunts, like the private rock club, On the Rox. He caroused around Los Angeles with some of the more hell-bent rock stars, including Keith Moon and Harry Nilsson. There was always another beautiful young woman on his arm, including actresses Vivian Ventura and Shelly Duvall and singer Lyndsey De Paul.
One of Ringo’s frequent nightclubbing pals turned out to be none other than Mal Evans, the Beatles’ road manager. When the Beatles disbanded, Mal was at a loss for something to do. As Neil Aspinall put it, “He went from fixing telephones to Shea Stadium, overnight. He lived with the stars for a decade, and then suddenly he was an ordinary man again.” Bored with his wife and children, he left England and moved to Los Angeles in the early seventies, following the rock and roll action. But no work he could find in the U.S. equaled the exhilaration of working with the Beatles, and Mal’s life began to disintegrate. By 1976 he was living in an apartment complex in West Hollywood with some young girl, drinking and drugging heavily, seeing Ringo or John or one of the guys as they passed through town.
Because Mal was so big, he always thought he needed twice as much as anybody else: twice as much food, twice as much booze, and twice as many drugs. Neil remembers that when they first discovered LSD, Mal took five tablets at a time and was up for two days tripping. He did the same sort of thing one night in Los Angeles, except with downers. They made him drunkenly angry, and he got into a terrible row with his girlfriend. Allegedly, he pulled a gun on her, and she called the police. When the police arrived, pounding furiously on the door of the apartment, Mal barricaded himself inside. When the police broke down the door, this drunken giant was standing there with a gun, and they opened fire on him, killing him instantly in a barrage of shots. His girlfriend sent the bill for the cleaning of the carpet to Apple, but Neil refused to pay it.
There is a macabre twist to this already terrible story: Mal was cremated, and his ashes were lost in the mail. When John Lennon heard the story, he couldn’t help but quip that Mal had wound up in the dead letter department.
Life in the fast lane finally sidelined Ringo in late April of 1979, when he was rushed to a Monte Carlo hospital in critical condition. His fragile stomach, still sensitive from his childhood illnesses and operations, had given out from the large quantities of harsh substances he was ingesting, and doctors in Monte Carlo were forced to remove part of his intestines. Yet when he recovered after several months of rest, Ringo returned to the party circuit as if nothing had happened. Too much time on his hands was his greatest problem, and he seemed to straighten up a little in the late winter of 1980 when he went to Mexico to star in a spoof of caveman pictures, called Caveman. This clever yet simple film had no real dialogue; the actors talked in prehistoric grunts and pieces of made-up language. Ringo’s major task was to be a clown, and he was brilliant at it. He received glowing reviews and felt a sense of real achievement.
It was while he was filming Caveman that he met Barbara Bach, the leggy, buxom actress who co-starred in the picture with him. Bach was best known for her co-starring role in the James Bond movie, The Spy Who Loved Me. Like Ringo, she was divorced with children, and despite her glamorous image, she seemed to be a dedicated mother. They started dating during the filming, and the following month Ringo took her to London to meet his children—much to Maureen’s great distress. Ringo and Barbara Bach were nearly killed in an automobile accident on this visit, when Ringo’s car went out of control in South London and cut through three lampposts before it came to a halt. Ringo had pieces of the shattered windshield set in little gold lockets, which he and Barbara wear around their necks. Like John had done several years before, Ringo had the twisted wreckage of the car compressed into a cube, and he displays it as sculpture.
Ringo and Barbara were married in London at the Marylebone Registry on April 27, 1981. It was a Beatle reunion of sorts, because Paul and George both attended the ceremony with their wives. John was the only one missing.
Paul
Paul McCartney was thrown into serious doubt about his own talent. Not only were John’s barbs about him being “the rock version of Engelbert Humperdinck” sticking to his flesh, but his first two solo albums, McCartney and Ram, were the objects of particular derision by rock critics. Indeed, the rock critics were flailing Paul’s flesh over the breakup of the Beatles. For the most part rock critics take personal delight in being able to castigate their heroes when disappointed. Because Paul (along with Yoko) was being labeled as the villain in the Beatles’ breakup, his reviews became so pejorative that they would have killed the career of a lesser artist. “It became a challenge to me,” Paul said. “I thought either I was going to go under or I was going to get something together.”
All along, even when he was with the Beatles, what Paul wanted to do was start all over, to get back to his audience and just be in a little rock band again; this seemed like the perfect moment to try and do it. With great courage, Paul formed a new band from scratch and named it Wings. No superstar group this, he hired all unknown musicians and paid them salaries, as little as $450 a week. His first hiring was a New York session drummer named Denny Seiwell, who auditioned for Paul in a decrepit New York loft. His second hiring was Denny Laine, a former vocalist with the Moody Blues and a sometimes competent, creative guitarist. The last member of the group, on the keyboards, was none other than Mrs. Paul McCartney herself, much to the delight and ridiculing of the rock critics.
Paul figured if John could do it with Yoko, he could do it with Linda. Of course, Yoko at least had some musical ability and aspirations; Linda was a photographer. But he insisted on injecting her into his professional life. If Paul thought the rock critics had been mean to him, they were downright cruel about Linda. Her ability at the piano was minimal, her vocal was worse, and she was even criticized for her clothing and appearance, right down to the hair on her legs. There was a popular joke going around London: “What do you call a dog with wings?” “Linda McCartney.”
Paul almost immediately found himself in a legal battle with Lew Grade and Northern Songs over Linda’s musical ability. The call to arms came with the release of a single called “Another Day.” Authorship of this tune was attributed to “Mr. and Mrs. Paul McCartney,” as most of the Ram album would be. This meant that a pure 50 percent of the publishing rights—millions of dollars in the long run—would go directly into Linda’s pocket, bypassing Northern Songs. Lew Grade was furious at what he saw as a deception on Paul’s part, for Linda had not been and was obviously not now a musician capable of composing with Paul. Grade maintained that 100 percent of the songwriting credit deserved to go to Paul, and he took the case to court. Yet another painful public trial unfolded in the daily newspapers. The essence of Grade’s lawsuit was that Linda had no musical ability, and this was what the attorneys had to prove. Linda took the witness stand to testify to her minimal talent, bravely sticking the trial out to the end. Paul’s lawyers maintained that Linda’s musical ability was not the point of the cas
e and that it was his privilege to compose with absolutely anyone he wanted to compose with, regardless of their musical experience. It was to everyone’s surprise and delight when Paul and Linda won the suit. To smooth over the decision with Lew Grade, Paul agreed to star in a Lew Grade-produced TV special for ATV, James Paul McCartney, which turned out to be to their mutual benefit.
If the rock critics were waiting to feast on Paul, he served himself up to them on a silver platter with Wings’ first group album, Wild Life. This was a trivial, sophomoric LP, seemingly bereft of any redeeming melody or lyrics (“bip, bop bip bom bop bip bop bip bom bam”). Without pausing to take a breath, Paul added guitarist Henry McCullough to the Wings lineup and went back into the studio to record a new single, “Give Ireland Back to the Irish,” which he composed in the wake of the “Bloody Sunday” shooting in Londonderry. This single was seen both as a ploy to regain credence with a hip audience and as a weak attempt at making some serious political statement (as John was doing with no problem in America). The song was declared too incendiary to be played on British radio and television, and although it sold several hundred thousand copies in Great Britain, it was also considered a failure.
In early February of 1972, Paul and his new band set out into the English countryside in a van, just as the Beatles had done in Neil Aspinall’s van eleven years before. Without any advance warning, Paul turned up at the administration offices of Nottingham University and asked if he could set up his equipment and give a free concert for the students the following night. His only request was that the students not be told nor the press notified. On February 8, Paul gave a surprise concert for 700 deliriously happy students on what was the eighth anniversary of the Beatles’ first appearance on the “Ed Sullivan Show.”
Paul loved every minute of it. There was a thrill and satisfaction from entertaining a live audience that he could get nowhere else. He and Linda and Wings spent the following summer and fall touring around England and Europe in a double-decker bus painted with rainbows and clouds. It was their practice to turn up unannounced at various colleges and towns and offer to play. They took their meals on the road, often only bread and cheese and wine, and were a happy bunch of minstrels. Paul and Linda were enjoying themselves thoroughly. “We’ve no managers or agents,” Linda told Melody Maker, “just we five and the roadies. We’re just a gang of musicians touring around.”
And like any “gang of musicians,” they were traveling around with a stash of marijuana. Pot still remained Paul and Linda’s favorite recreational drug, and they were rarely without it. Since they were traveling on their own, with no more Neil or Mal to carry it through customs for them, they arranged to either carry it themselves or have friends mail it to them in various hotels around Europe throughout the summer. The McCartneys made it through France, Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark without any trouble, but their luck ran out in Gothenburg, Sweden, on August 10. The local police and customs officials had intercepted a reported half pound of grass that had been mailed to them at their hotel from London. Paul, Linda, and Dennis Seiwell were brought to the police station directly from the stage of the Scandinavian Hall, where they performed that night. After several hours of questioning, the three allegedly “confessed” to smoking pot and were fined £800. The public prosecutor said that formal charges would be brought against them later, but none were ever lodged.
Their arrest was widely reported in the press back home, and in a move that only seemed to exacerbate the incident, Paul’s next Wings single was called “Hi, Hi, Hi,” which was understood to be a drug reference. The song was banned by the BBC and was a relative commercial failure in America. To pour salt in the wound, a few months later a local constable in Campbelltown, Scotland, snooped around Paul’s farm when he wasn’t there and found marijuana plants growing in the greenhouse. With the utmost of leniency, the courts fined Paul only £100. Paul testified that an American fan had sent him the seeds, and he didn’t know what they were when he planted them.
Always the workaholic, Paul kept busy with a second Wings LP entitled Red Rose Speedway. Although not very distinguished by Paul’s standards, it was a million selling commercial hit and spawned another one of Paul’s brilliant, albeit saccharine, love songs, “My Love.” Paul also composed the internationally acclaimed theme music to the James Bond movie Live and Let Die, which was produced by George Martin in his first work with a Beatle since the breakup. “Live and Let Die” was one of the biggest singles of the year and earned Paul an Oscar nomination for best song. In late spring of 1973, Paul also undertook the first scheduled commercially booked tour of an ex-Beatle in Great Britain.
It was on this British tour that Paul’s overbearing nature started to cause him trouble again. During their off hours much of the band’s time was spent composing and rehearsing Wings’ next album, this one to be recorded in the exotic surroundings of Lagos, Nigeria, just for the fun of it. One day during rehearsals, Paul insisted that Henry McCullough play the guitar part in just a certain way—the way he wanted it—something Paul used to do quite often to superstar George Harrison. Well, McCullough wasn’t a superstar, but he was no sideman either. He tried to avoid a head-on confrontation by telling Paul that the guitar bit couldn’t be played the way Paul wanted it. “I, being a bit of a guitarist myself,” Paul said, “knew it could be played, and rather than let it pass, I decided to confront him with it, and we had a confrontation. He left rehearsals a bit choked, then rang up to say he was leaving...”
To complicate matters, Denny Seiwell also rang up Paul in London just hours before they were supposed to leave for Lagos to tell him that he couldn’t face playing with him any longer. Characteristically determined, Paul left for Lagos anyway with Linda, the children, and Denny Laine. They rented a two-bedroom house near the airport at Ikeja and drove to a recording studio nearby in the late afternoons. They would record far into the night, just the three of them, with the occasional help of an African drummer Paul hired for a few sessions.
Even this did not go well. The local gossip was that Paul had come to Lagos to steal the black man’s rhythms. One night a fight developed in a local nightspot, and Paul reportedly told one of the owners, “I’ve done perfectly all right without your music so far. Nobody’s gonna steal your bloody music.” Lagos didn’t have the prettiest terrain or the most pleasant weather, either. It was a steamy, dirty, often frightening place. The humidity made Paul think he was having a heart attack one day, and Linda summoned a doctor. On another occasion late one night, while returning from the studios, they were chased by several black men in a car. Trapped on a dark street, the men herded them into a doorway and held them at knifepoint while they searched them and stole their wallets and jewelry. Linda kept screaming at them, “Don’t hurt him! He’s Beatle Paul! He’s Beatle Paul!” The authorities later said it was a fortunate thing Linda had done this, otherwise they most certainly would have been killed.
The tension, danger, and sense of furtiveness of Lagos, combined with the success of Paul’s James Bond theme music, gave him a sense of confidence and power in these recording sessions. The results are evident on the album, appropriately entitled Band on the Run. Released in December of 1973, this is an inventive and unique album, which spawned three hit singles, including the title song and “Jet,” which were both number one on record charts the world over. Band on the Run sold six million copies, the highest amount of any ex-Beatle and an amount equaling the group’s biggest success, Let It Be.
Rejuvenated by the success of Band on the Run, Paul formed yet another band called Wings. The new drummer was named Geoff Britton, who was perhaps best known for representing Great Britain in an international karate tournament with Japan. Britton auditioned with fifty-two other drummers for the job. The new guitarist, Jimmy McCulloch (a name strikingly similar to the McCullough he replaced), was only twenty years old and had played with several second-string rock groups since he was thirteen.
Paul spent the next year traveling extensively wit
h his new group. He passed the summer of 1974 in Nashville recording singles and then went on to New Orleans in January and February of 1975, where he recorded Wings’ next LP, Venus and Mars, another best-selling, workmanlike LP that spawned the hit single, “Listen to What the Man Said.”
That same summer I heard from Paul unexpectedly one Sunday night. I was staying in the Beverly Hills Hotel on business for the Robert Stigwood Organization. Paul and Linda and the kids were living in a rented house in Los Angeles and vacationing around southern California in a rented car, just like any family from Orange County. It was near midnight when the phone rang in my room. Paul was calling from the house phone in the lobby. He said there was a bit of trouble and asked if he could come up to my room to see me. When he appeared at the door I could see he was as pale as a ghost and very upset. He and Linda and the kids had been returning from a day’s outing, driving along Sunset Boulevard in their rented car, when they jumped a red light. Two officers of the L.A. Police Department pulled them over to the side of the road and asked Paul to produce his license and registration. By the time the officers realized who it was they had pulled over, they also had taken a good whiff of the marijuana odor emanating from the closed car. The police conducted a spot search and found marijuana in the glove compartment. Because Paul was a foreigner on a visa—and already had two pot busts on his record—Linda took the blame, saying the grass was hers. She had been arrested and was being held at the station house. Bail had been posted at five hundred dollars, but Paul had only two hundred dollars in cash and traveler’s checks with him and needed to borrow the rest. Unfortunately, I had only one hundred and fifty dollars in cash with me, and the hotel cashier, although sympathetic, was unable to help because the safe was locked on a timing device. I finally borrowed the money from a friend, and Paul went off to get Linda out of jail. John Eastman flew out to Los Angeles to handle the case. The judge at first suggested that Linda see a psychiatrist for drug rehabilitation, but the case was later dismissed.
