by Tom Doyle
The girl claimed that she couldn’t remember much of what happened next, except that, in the aftermath, her nose was bleeding. The inference, obviously, was that McCartney had assaulted her, which Paul denied. ‘I have been asking her politely – pleading with her – to leave me and my family alone,’ he stated. ‘She refuses to recognise that I am married with a family.’
The greater solution to all of this was simple, if expensive, and required much in the way of patience. Now, whenever any of the McCartneys’ neighbours put their properties on the market, Paul snapped them up. In time he became the owner of two other neighbouring farms, Low Park and Low Ranachan, using the barn of the latter as a makeshift rehearsal space. Acre by acre, Paul bought back his privacy.
That summer, in the light of the pressures of the first half of the year, the McCartneys decided to escape further into Scottish solitude by taking a trip to Shetland. ‘We just took off in the Land Rover,’ Paul says. ‘We piled everything in the back, kids and us in the front, dogs in the back too. The potty on top of everything and off we went.’
The McCartneys drove to the small port of Scrabster on the northeastern coast of Scotland, with the notion of taking a ferry to Orkney, from where they could fly on to Shetland. But the plan was thwarted when, two cars ahead of them, the announcement came that the ship was full. Still determined, Paul began enquiring around the harbour about the possibility of hiring a fishing boat, romantically fancying that it might involve giving the skipper a salmon or a bottle of whisky.
Rousing from his slumber the Shetland-jumper-wearing captain of a modest vessel named The Enterprise, Paul successfully offered him £30 to take the McCartneys aboard. The kerfuffle involved in getting all of the family’s stuff on the boat at low tide, including gently easing sheepdog Martha down in a net, drew a crowd to the quayside. As Paul and Linda and the girls and the dogs pulled out of the harbour on their rented craft, the locals cheered and waved them off.
Once into their voyage, passing around beers, the choppy waters ensured that the McCartneys began feeling green around the gills. The baby Mary was first to be sick, quickly followed by Linda. Paul manfully gripped the mast and tried to keep his nausea at bay. Soon, it became obvious that this wasn’t going to be possible. The skipper, George, gestured towards the fishing baskets, saying, ‘Do it in there!’
And so, far from the luxuries of the SS France six months earlier, there at the edge of the world, Paul leaned over and threw his guts up.
McCartney and Ram weren’t the first records of yours that Linda appeared on, were they?
No. She sang back-ups on ‘Let It Be’. She’d done a real good job. I’d just taken her in the studio quietly one time and said, ‘We need a high note on the top of the chorus.’ She just went bang, hit it. Great, y’know.
3
Knee Deep in the River
Picture the scene, he asked her. Imagine us standing behind a curtain and it parts to reveal a waiting, expectant audience.
‘Would it completely freak you?’ he said.
She suspected it might, but she was at least up for finding out whether or not it did.
The McCartneys were in bed one night when Paul first floated the idea by Linda: ‘Do you think you could handle being in a band?’
‘He made it sound so glamorous,’ she said, ‘that I agreed to have a go.’
Aside from anything, as he pointed out, if she decided not to come on the road with him, it would curb the family’s self-fashioned lifestyle as ‘roving hippies’. This, it seems, sealed the deal.
In the days and weeks that followed, Paul began to map out the basic piano chords for Linda, in her new role as keyboard player. Fourteen years earlier he’d done something similar with John: shown him how to retune his guitar from the banjo standard taught to Lennon by his mother Julia, demonstrated how to reposition his fingers to play rock’n’roll shapes.
With Linda, though, Paul didn’t display as much in the way of tolerance or enthusiasm. ‘He has no patience,’ she moaned. ‘I had to learn it myself. The few things he’d show me, if I didn’t get it right, he’d get really angry. So I said, “Like, forget it.”’
His frustration with Linda’s lack of natural musical ability aside, there was a part of McCartney that was tempted to indulge in the current vogue for the supergroup. In his mind, he saw himself surrounded by Eric Clapton, John Bonham, Billy Preston; even, in a parallel, ideal world, John Lennon.
But then he cast his mind back to how The Beatles had begun and the camaraderie that couldn’t be faked with a bunch of ‘name’ musicians. ‘All I thought was, How do you start a band?’ he says. ‘Well, you start with nothing and you just learn and you improve. The idea was to get a bunch of mates together. I wasn’t interested in putting it together professionally.’
Elsewhere, skint and sleeping on an old mattress in the back room of his manager Tony Secunda’s office in Mayfair, Denny Laine was about to get the call that would reroute the next ten years of his life. The Birmingham-born former singer with The Moody Blues, front-man of their yearning 1964 hit ‘Go Now’, was on his uppers, his life after quitting the band being the slightly desperate one of the nearly-but-not-quite-successful musician.
Laine had gone on to form the proto-classical/rock cross-pollination act the Electric String Band, whose performance at the Saville Theatre in June 1967, supporting Jimi Hendrix, had been witnessed by McCartney three days after the release of Sgt. Pepper. In time it proved too expensive for him to keep such an ambitious project on the road, particularly after, comically, the tapes of the band’s third single were lost after being posted to their own record label, Decca.
The apparently luckless Laine drifted to Spain where, in Andalucía, he lived with gypsies, rented an artist’s hut neighbouring a pigsty and learned flamenco guitar. Returning to England in 1969, he formed the unfortunately named Midlands supergroup Balls, which quickly disintegrated. Feeling sidelined by Secunda after the manager turned his attentions to his new charge, soon-to-be-superstar Marc Bolan, Laine was half-considering a solo career when McCartney phoned him, mooting the idea of a band.
‘I was needing the money, really,’ Laine admits. ‘But I wouldn’t have just gone out and done anything either. So when I got the call from him, it was like, Oh, this is gonna be fun. I know Paul, I know I can make some dough eventually in doing this and I’ll be back to doing what I like doing.’
McCartney and Laine already knew one another, from the days when both The Beatles and The Moody Blues were managed by Brian Epstein’s NEMS outfit and shared tour buses together. Reconnecting now, Laine sensed a surprising nervousness in the newly ex-Beatle. ‘I think his confidence was a little bit in question because, trying to follow The Beatles, what are you gonna do?’
Paul was certainly looking for a vocal foil to replace Lennon, if not exactly a songwriting partner. ‘Just a fellow vocalist so we could harmonise together,’ he says. ‘As far as composing was concerned, probably I was spoilt with John as a collaborator.’ The New York sessions for Ram had made McCartney hanker for the musical closeness of The Beatles. For various reasons, he missed being in a band. ‘Camaraderie was one thing,’ he says. ‘Musical turn-on was another.’
To this end, in June 1971, he invited Denny Seiwell and New York guitarist Hugh McCracken (who had filled the boots of the increasingly errant David Spinozza as the making of Ram progressed) to Scotland for a part-holiday, part-potential-band sound-out. Perhaps harbouring over-romantic ideas about Scotland, the Americans – Seiwell and McCracken and their respective wives, Monique and Holly – found themselves living in basic, unglamorous rooms at the Argyll Arms in Campbeltown. Neither did they take to the nation’s famously stodgy, greasy food.
On the day they arrived, the party drove over to the McCartneys’ farm for drinks. As they were leaving, though, the men were pulled aside by Linda and asked not to bring their wives the following day, since the plan was for the band, including Mrs McCartney, of course, to work. This did not go d
own well with the women, for whom this wasn’t turning out to be much of a holiday.
Within days the McCrackens returned to New York. Clearly not at one with the farm-centred or hippiefied existence, Paul reckoned that Hugh ‘didn’t want to go that far out with his life’. Seiwell, however, apparently did. Although he and Monique initially followed the McCrackens back to the States, two months later, in August 1971, the drummer returned.
Denny Laine first hooked up with Denny Seiwell at Glasgow Airport, where the two met to take the 40-minute flight across the Firth of Clyde and over the Isle of Arran, down to Campbeltown. Having made their way to High Park, the evening was spent drinking and, for Paul and Denny Laine, reminiscing, while sketching the plans for the new band.
Laine was impressed that Paul was apparently now ‘just a farmer who plays guitar . . . out on his tractor, growing vegetables . . . he’s not a Beatle any more’. Paul would joke that, in green-fingered terms, whether digging the vegetable patch or tinkering around in their recently assembled greenhouse, he remained second to Linda. ‘She’s the lead gardener,’ he quipped. ‘I’m the rhythm gardener.’
But, as the band started to rehearse, Linda struggled to keep up. Initially there hadn’t even been any mention of her being part of the band, says Laine. ‘She was taking pictures and Paul would just say, “Linda, can you just try and play that note or sing that line there?” They were seeing whether it would work.’
Privately, Laine thought that the outfit would get tighter far quicker with a professional keyboard player, while slightly resenting having to coach an amateur. However, both the drummer and the guitarist understood that Linda’s influence on the group, through her love of design and photography, would be great, and that, crucially, she provided unconditional support and stability for Paul.
‘She was his security blanket, his inspiration, his wife and mother of his kids,’ Seiwell says. ‘She was the one who got Paul off his ass when he was having to sue the other Beatles. His heart was broken. He would’ve sat up there in Scotland and just become a drunk. If she hadn’t got on his case, none of it would have ever happened.’ At the same time, the drummer acknowledges that Linda wasn’t an important addition to the line-up on a musical level. ‘Not musically. But she was more than an important element, she was a necessity.’
‘The thing is,’ says Paul, ‘we wanted to be together and we said, “What right has anyone got to say we shouldn’t be together in a band? Whose affair is it but ours?”’
For the musicians, life at High Park was rough and ready. With no room in the small family house for them, Seiwell and his wife rented nearby Brechie Farm, at Kilkenzie, while Laine, ever the gypsy, pitched up in a caravan on the McCartneys’ land. All visitors to the farm were expected to live the basic rural life, although some extra efforts would be made for special guests. When his father Jim and Jim’s second wife Angela came to stay, Paul scrubbed the floor of the garage before laying a mattress down for them.
Seiwell and Laine were both put on a £70 weekly retainer – not exactly a fortune, but a decent working wage for the early 1970s. Paul’s money remained tied up in Apple, and there was a casual understanding that there was more to come for the musicians in the future.
Inside the small, low-ceilinged, wood-panelled musical den that was Rude Studio, the band quickly moved on from jamming rock’n’roll standards to picking their way through Paul’s latest, half-finished songs. On days when the weather was fine, the musicians would move their amps and instruments outside and play al fresco.
A snapshot from the time captures the four of them rehearsing on the grass in front of the studio lean-to – all in muddy wellies, toasting the birth of the group with glasses and cups of whisky and Coke. Seiwell, tellingly, wears a white T-shirt printed with a green marijuana leaf, revealing the other key ingredient in their bonding. ‘We weren’t Bob Marley and the Wailers by any means,’ he laughs. ‘We enjoyed a bit of the herb for the creative conscious, you know what I’m saying?’
The sound of the nameless band would echo freely out over the hills, but trying to confine this unbridled noise to the environment of the recording studio was to prove far harder.
Enthralled by his new group, McCartney was suddenly gripped by the notion of spontaneity. Bob Dylan had the year before recorded most of the light country breeze of New Morning in an impressively tight five-day period. ‘Coming off the back of taking a long time over records,’ says Paul, ‘it just seemed like an interesting idea to do a record quickly.’
Thus inspired, McCartney blocked out a week in August at Abbey Road and the band nailed eight songs, five of them in the first take. This sense of urgency is captured right at the top of the album that was to become Wild Life when, in the opening seconds, McCartney can be heard to excitedly shout ‘Take it, Tony’ to engineer Tony Clark, asking him to roll the tape at the height of the jam that became ‘Mumbo’.
‘Paul wanted to give the world a real true look at a new band,’ says Seiwell. ‘We did not mess around with that record. It was done quickly and honestly.’ Still, there remained a feeling that these tracks were just being carelessly thrown down. The other engineer on the sessions, Alan Parsons, thought as much: ‘I was so excited to be working with Paul, but I did feel a certain lack of precision.’
For all that the band appeared to be a democratic arrangement, Parsons says that when the other members pitched in their ideas, ‘they would occasionally be shouted down’ by Paul. Meanwhile, Linda’s keyboard contributions to the album were competent, and made all the more impressive by the fact that she was eight months pregnant.
Out in the wider world, it was impossible to tell whether McCartney’s commercial stock was rising or falling. Within weeks of one another, ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’ made US number 1, while the far hookier ‘The Back Seat Of My Car’ struggled to number 39 in the British singles chart – notably Paul’s most miserable performance to date, whether solo or as a Beatle.
It was a sign, among others, that the last of the shine was coming off the previously untarnishable Fabs, whose post-split interpersonal relationships were further deteriorating. McCartney was invited by George Harrison to appear on 1 August 1971 at Madison Square Garden in New York alongside Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton at his Concert for Bangladesh, hastily arranged as a benefit for the flood-stricken nation. Paul flatly declined. Visa problems were cited as the reason for his non-appearance when, in truth, it was due to Allen Klein’s involvement and the ongoing Beatles friction.
Klein, never one to miss a media opportunity, immediately jumped on the no-show to inform the press that Paul was refusing to perform for the suffering refugees. But if he and Harrison were pushing for a Beatles reunion to crown the event, both Lennon and McCartney were less than keen. John said he couldn’t be bothered rehearsing and getting into the whole ‘showbiz trip’ that the occasion entailed. ‘I thought, What’s the point?’ Paul said. ‘We’ve just broken up and we’re joining up again? It just seemed a bit crazy.’
In the meantime, over the summer, Lennon had sharpened his blade for what would be regarded as his deepest and most vicious stab at McCartney. The deceptively laidback rocker ‘How Do You Sleep?’, from his Imagine album, released in October 1971, was a swift and hateful response to what John perceived as Paul’s cryptic digs at him and Yoko in ‘Too Many People’ and ‘3 Legs’ from Ram, released only four months earlier.
‘How Do You Sleep?’ attempted to demolish McCartney’s character. The vengeful lyric accused Paul of living with ‘straights’ buffing the ego of the king who, with an irony surely not lost on Lennon, was utterly controlled by his wife-cum-mother-figure. His music was ‘Muzak’; the ‘freaks’ had been right in saying Paul was dead; his best work was far behind him and even his doe-eyed good looks would only distract the public from his shallow talent for ‘a year or two’. Using a sibilant echo effect on his voice, Lennon ended the choruses mimicking the hissing sound of a snake.
It was a precision att
ack that hit hard at the still fragile McCartney. Cruelly, if amusingly, Lennon even poked fun at McCartney’s new country life, with a postcard tucked into Imagine’s sleeve featuring a piss-take of the cover of Ram: a photograph of John holding the ears of a snuffling pig. Harrison, playing slide guitar on ‘How Do You Sleep?’, was silently complicit in the hazing. Starr didn’t contribute to the track, but was there when it was being written, growing visibly upset as the lyrical taunts became more and more barbed, before finally saying, ‘That’s enough, John.’
Lennon was unrepentant, however. At one point, during a run-through of the song, he turned and stared into a camera documenting the proceedings for the Imagine film, remotely eyeballing McCartney and asking him, ‘How do you sleep, ya cunt?’
‘The joke was,’ says Paul, ‘my answer – although I never rang him up and told him – was, “very well”. That was the one thing, I was sleeping very well, ’cause I was in the countryside. Fresh air.’ He admits, nonetheless, that the track did needle him. ‘Oh yeah. It was a massive, massive bug. I was just really sad, y’know, ’cause we’d been really tight mates since about sixteen or something. So it was a very, very strange turnaround.’
Upon its release, Lennon back-pedalled when questioned about the savagery of ‘How Do You Sleep?’, explaining that it was written as a bitter studio in-joke, with chipped-in contributions from Yoko and Allen Klein. He admitted, however, that he’d been blinded by fury and determined to wound McCartney. Even if Paul only had himself to blame, he argued, since he had started it.
‘Listen to Ram, folks,’ Lennon instructed the public. ‘It’s an answer to Ram . . . a moment’s anger.’
