by Tom Doyle
It was four dates into the Swedish leg, in the west coastal city of Gothenburg, when trouble really hit. On Thursday 10 August, at the Scandinavium Hall, as Wings finished the last number in their set, a fiery ‘Long Tall Sally’, the power to the PA was unceremoniously cut. A line of armed policemen then appeared in the seated upper levels of the arena. ‘They all came shuffling round with rifles,’ says Henry McCullough. ‘We’re thinking, What’s going on?’
When the band tried to make their way to the dressing-room, their path was aggressively blocked. Paul, Linda and Denny Seiwell were forcefully peeled away from the others and told they were being arrested for possession of marijuana. The McCartneys, as it transpired, had collected a postal package containing weed, addressed to Denny Seiwell, from their hotel earlier that day – unaware that they were being watched.
The scenes in the concert hall quickly descended into chaos. As the police gripped the suspects more firmly than was strictly necessary, Linda shouted to tour photographer Joe Stevens to keep on taking shots: ‘Just get the pictures,’ she yelled. One dramatic frame caught the McCartneys amid the tumult – Paul burying his head in the bosom of a distressed Linda, who was bawling furiously at the policemen. In the event, the three suspects, along with tour secretary Rebecca Hines, were dragged off for questioning.
Throughout an intense grilling, all sorts of threats were thrown at them, not least that the police would refuse to let the McCartneys and Seiwell leave until they offered their confessions. Any denials were in any case worthless: the Swedish police had been snooping on McCartney, a known marijuana smoker since his Beatle days, since he had arrived in the country. They’d even recorded a call that Linda had placed three days earlier, from Stockholm to MPL in London, arranging for two cassette boxes of weed to be posted to the band.
‘Where shall they send it?’ Linda could be heard asking Paul on the recording. ‘Do you have a copy of the itinerary?’
‘Send it to Gothenburg,’ Paul said, ‘to the hotel.’
It was a system that had worked until now. Henry McCullough remembers that at the beginning of the tour they’d ‘set off with a small bit each, and then there was weed sent from the office’. In each new country, there would be an agreed destination for the band’s postal drop. As a result, Jo Jo Patrie remembered, when leaving one country for another, Paul would force everyone to jettison their remaining supplies before the party reached the border. Together, they would dejectedly perform a ritual where they chucked ‘big handfuls’ of weed over the side of the open-topped bus, as if scattering the ashes of a dear departed one.
At the police station, in the early hours of the morning, after three hours of questioning, Seiwell and the McCartneys finally admitted that the weed was theirs. It was a hefty amount – seven ounces – and revealed how heavy their intake was, considering this was only intended to last them for the remaining two days they were to be in Sweden. The police later claimed that the three confessed that they smoked marijuana every day and they were effectively addicted to it.
Ultimately they were forced to convince the authorities that the dope was for their own personal use and not for sale – the charge of intent to supply being a far more serious one than personal possession. Of course, in the end it was not difficult to persuade the police that the ex-Beatle had not become a pot dealer to help make ends meet.
Nevertheless, tour manager John Morris, likely anticipating the unwanted knock-on effects the bust would have in terms of acquiring international visas in the future, attempted to play down the situation. ‘Lots of people send drugs to the band,’ he told reporters. ‘They think they are doing them some kind of a favour. Instead it causes all kinds of trouble. It was simply a case of pleading guilty, paying the fine and getting out of the city. As far as we’re concerned, the whole business is finished.’ The three were fined a total of $1,800 and sent on their way.
The bust made the front page of the Daily Express in Britain the next day, with the ambiguous if unwittingly accurate headline ‘McCartney Fine After Police Raid Concert’. Rather than being ashamed, all involved were defiant, and quietly tickled by the thought that this kind of notoriety would lend Wings an air of outlaw cool.
The day after the bust, an unrepentant Paul and Linda gave an interview to the Daily Mail, published under the provocative splash ‘Why I Smoke Pot – By Paul’.
‘You can tell everyone that we’re not changing our lives for anyone,’ he stressed. ‘We smoke grass 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’re not the kind of people who can’t go on without it,’ he added, perhaps disingenuously. ‘We wouldn’t be on tour if we were.’
In the wake of the arrest, Linda clearly now saw herself and Paul as pro-pot campaigners, publicly arguing the case for marijuana use. ‘Every time we appear in public and people see that we are smoking hash or pot, it’ll make things just a bit easier for an ordinary person,’ she stated. ‘I’d love to be one of the reasons for people changing their minds about soft drugs. But people must lead their own lives. They must make up their own minds. And I know that Paul and I like weed. To us, it’s just like nothing, and when other people share that point of view, I’ll be happy.’
Paul, however, ended the interview on a slightly resigned and unhappy note. ‘We’re just easy people who like to smoke if we can,’ he offered. ‘But now that’s out of the question, and I’m sorry.’
In reality, far from being contrite, as Denny Seiwell recalls, the band’s dope supplies were quietly replenished by a local source in Lund. This, more than anything, spotlights Paul and Linda’s outlook at the time on marijuana and the laws that prevented them from smoking it. By scoring more weed the very day after they’d been so publicly busted, the couple were clearly unrepentant.
If there was a trace of arrogance to be detected in all of this, it was surely rooted in the fact that The Beatles had enjoyed almost diplomatic immunity when crossing international borders. Now that the untouchable Fabs were over, though, gone too were those privileges. And so this carefree (and careless) way of dealing with their fondness for dope was, as the decade progressed, to cause the McCartneys problems time and time again.
Five weeks later, in Argyll, Norman McPhee, a police constable from Campbeltown, fresh from a drug identification course among the bright lights of Glasgow, decided to have a nose around the vacant High Park Farm. Following the publicity that surrounded the Swedish bust, he was looking for anything suspicious, on the premise that he was checking the security of the property. Peering through the glass of the McCartneys’ greenhouse, among the tomato plants, he spied cultivations of an altogether more exotic nature, bearing the distinctive serrated leaves he had recently been taught to recognise.
He left, taking with him a couple of the plants to have them checked out back at the police station in the town. When they were positively identified as marijuana, McPhee returned to the farm with seven colleagues, finding more plants at the Low Ranachan property. Once the search was completed, the police had collected five tiny plants, the product of which would have amounted to very little weed.
It was beginning to look like open season on the apparently lawless McCartneys, who were back in London at Cavendish Avenue when they were given the news. Worse, Paul’s lawyer in Scotland, Len Murray, had heard that the raid had been prompted by a local tip-off. Three days after this second bust, on 20 September, McCartney was charged in absentia on three counts – two of possessing marijuana and a third of growing it.
Paul was now viewed as a notoriously open dope smoker. From 1965 on, The Beatles had used the drug to spark their imagi
nations, but McCartney admits that, in creative terms, by the early 1970s, it had begun to have the opposite effect at times, leaving him lost in clouds of indecision. ‘In songwriting,’ he says, ‘the amount of times I have got stuck on a word that really didn’t matter . . . It was absolutely inconsequential what the word was – it could’ve been “boot” or “chump”. It did not matter, y’know. And you just totally come to a grinding halt, so the song never gets finished. I had a lot of that through substance misuse.’
There remained flashes of real inspiration in McCartney’s songwriting, however. One day, talking to former Apple Records head Ron Kass, Paul mentioned his previously unspoken ambition to write the theme for a James Bond film. Kass said that he knew the Bond producers, Harry Saltzman and Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli, and that he was sure they would love the idea of the former Beatle penning the title song for the next movie. The connection duly made, and with the producers more than agreeable to the idea, McCartney was given a copy of the book Live and Let Die, which he read one Saturday in October 1972 before starting and finishing the song the following day.
Paul says he relished the idea of being commissioned to write to order. ‘As a writer who thinks of himself as part-craftsman,’ he says, ‘the idea is akin to being asked to make a bit of furniture for the national collection or something. Y’know, there’s a prestige thing. There was for me, anyway.’ Working the title into the lyrics was the trickiest part of the process for him. ‘I thought, live and let die . . . OK, really what they mean is live and let live, and there’s the switch. So I came at it from the very obvious angle. I just thought, When you were younger you used to say that, but now you say this. So it just found its way easily into a song, really.’
The gorgeously atmospheric ballad, mined with explosive up-tempo instrumental passages, was to prove one of McCartney’s most enduring creations, revealing that he worked best perhaps when given a directive or challenge or, as in his partnership with Lennon, a spot of friendly rivalry. The song was quickly recorded with Wings at Morgan Studios in Willesden the next week, with its dynamic orchestration added later by George Martin at his studio AIR London in Oxford Circus.
Once completed, Martin flew to Jamaica with an acetate of ‘Live And Let Die’ to play to Saltzman. The film producer was impressed but, mistaking the recording for a demo, casually wondered aloud who Martin and McCartney were planning on asking to sing on the master. It was down to the diplomatic Martin to point out that this was indeed the final version. ‘I think they were looking for Shirley Bassey,’ laughs Paul. ‘Burly Chassis.’
In the same week as recording ‘Live And Let Die’ at Morgan, Wings laid down their next single, ‘Hi Hi Hi’, a shuffling rocker and seemingly blatant paean to the wonders of smoking dope. Paul felt the lyric invited interpretation, in much the same mischievously playful way as the ‘everybody must get stoned’ double entendre of Bob Dylan’s ‘Rainy Day Women Nos 12 & 35’. ‘It was like, “Ooh, what does Dylan mean?”’ says McCartney. ‘“Does he mean you get high? Or does he mean getting stoned, like, getting drunk?” So there was the ambiguity, and I assumed the same would apply to me.’
He was soon to learn that it didn’t. Upon its release in the first week of December 1972, ‘Hi Hi Hi’ was instantly banned by both Radio 1 and Radio 2. Ironically, however, it wasn’t the apparent drug reference that found it blacklisted, but an innocent line sexually misconstrued. The song’s publisher, Northern Songs, sent a wrongly typed lyric sheet to the radio stations, someone having misheard the abstract innuendo of the line ‘Get ready for my polygon’ as ‘Get ready for my body gun’.
The same month, Paul’s trial for the High Park Farm bust was set for March of the following year. And so, for McCartney, 1972 was characterised by two drug busts and two banned singles. Interviewed at the close of the year, Denny Laine looked ahead to the upcoming twelve months with a quote that, in retrospect, would seem loaded with unintended portent.
‘The next year is really going to be exciting for Wings,’ he frothed. ‘A lot of amazing stuff is bound to happen.’
La Mamounia – its name meaning ‘safe haven’ in Arabic – is one of the most exclusive hotels in Marrakesh. Once described by Winston Churchill, who regularly spent his winters there, as ‘the most lovely spot in the world’, it was a destination of choice for Charlie Chaplin, Charlton Heston and Alfred Hitchcock, who used it as a central location for his James Stewart and Doris Day-starring The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956.
Bucking his reputation for extreme thriftiness, it was to La Mamounia in February 1973 that Paul McCartney took his Wings bandmates, treating them to a two-week Moroccan holiday. Here the musicians swam or loafed around the pool, strumming acoustic guitars, or meandered through the hotel’s twenty acres of citrus trees and olive groves, or went on long camel treks in the deserts outside the city.
Ever productive, Paul spent the time writing songs for the next Wings album. ‘Then it would be, “Wait till you hear this, lads,”’ Henry recalls. ‘It was a lovely place to be. It was also another bonding period. It was as much a holiday as Wings Over Europe was.’
Paul returned to face his trial at Campbeltown Sheriff Court. Clearly keen to waste no more time than was necessary on this jaunt north, the McCartneys hired a private plane to fly them to RAF Machrihanish. When they emerged from the plane, their QC, John McCluskey, immediately noticed that Linda appeared ‘stoned out of her mind’. Arriving at the court, Paul seemed keen to treat the proceedings with something approaching respect, while his wife clearly saw it all as a bit of a laugh.
Once the trial got under way, McCluskey presented McCartney’s flimsy defence: he had received the seeds in the post from a fan and, curious, had naïvely planted them. The QC told the court that McCartney’s innocence could be proven by the fact that no attempt whatsoever had been made to conceal the plants. This argument seemed to sway the judge, Sheriff Donald McDiarmid, who gave McCartney a £100 fine and allowed him fourteen days to pay, prompting an outburst of open laughter in the courtroom. Speaking to a reporter in an anteroom immediately afterwards, Paul said that, if jailed, he had planned to pass his prison time writing songs. Typically ebullient, and a touch relieved, he described the judge as ‘a great guy’.
Stepping out of the court building, the McCartneys were interviewed by a Scottish television reporter. Paul, in grey suit with a white scarf swept rakishly over his left shoulder, haircut now a proto-mullet, was faux-sincere, peppering his statements with knowing smiles. Linda, wearing a top hat pinched from McCluskey, and looking like a toddler emerging triumphant from the dressing-up box, giggled by his side.
‘It was said that those seeds had been sent to you,’ noted the reporter. ‘How did you come to grow them?’
‘Yeah, well, we got a load of seeds, y’know,’ Paul replied, fixing the reporter with his doe eyes, playing the innocent wee laddie. ‘Kind of in the post. And we didn’t know what they were, y’know. And we kind of planted them all and five of them came up, like . . .’ He paused, trying not to laugh, smiling impishly. ‘Five of them came up illegal.’
‘Now, of course, this conviction,’ the reporter went on, ‘it might affect your entry to the States, where you have considerable business interests. How do you feel about that?’
‘Well, y’know, I understand that I might not get stopped from going into the States,’ Paul went on, looking entirely unruffled. ‘I hope not, anyway.’
Around the same time, a different legal pothole was finally smoothed over. In February, Lew Grade of ATV had tracked Paul down to Morocco and sent over an emissary with an unusual offer to settle their legal tussle over his post-Beatles songwriting partnership with Linda. If McCartney agreed to make an hour-long television special for the company, the $1 million lawsuit would be dropped. Paul immediately agreed to the deal. The resulting programme, titled James Paul McCartney, was an ambitious affair, being the first time since the misunderstood and derided Magical Mystery Tour that a major pop act had attempted a p
rime-time TV special.
Still, when filming began, it seemed as if the grand concepts dreamed up for the show might be upended by hubris. Shooting on location on Hampstead Heath in north London, Wings gathered on 10 March 1973 to mime to the perhaps better buried ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’. It was a bizarre performance, with the band dressed all in white – save for Denny Seiwell in unsportingly beige trousers – and looking like piously virginal New England pioneers. Wings arranged themselves under a weeping willow as Paul sat pawing away at an electric piano among a flock of actual sheep. Linda, looking like a crinoline-skirted Royal Doulton milkmaid figurine come to life, swung back and forth on a tree swing over a pond, singing and bashing a tambourine. Later, the group marched the sheep over a bridge, then juggled themselves into a rowing boat for a leisurely bob on the water.
All the members of Wings appeared entirely at ease with this scenario, except for Henry McCullough, who looked mortified. ‘I had to stand playing a mandolin, dressed in white trousers and a white shirt,’ he says, cringing. ‘The shepherd had the sheep running round our feet. It was just a bit strange.’
There was worse to come. In the tradition of ‘Your Mother Should Know’ from Magical Mystery Tour, Paul further indulged his song-and-dance-man fantasies in a Busby Berkeley-flavoured routine, ‘Gotta Sing Gotta Dance’, in which dozens of dancers appeared in vertically divided half-male, half-female costumes: part slick-haired 1930s gent, part blonde-locked showgirl. An oily-mulleted and fake-moustachioed Paul fronted the routine, tap-dancing in glittery golden shoes, pink suit and tails. As daft and camp as it was intended to be, the result looked hopelessly out of step with the shaggy, bell-bottomed fashions of 1973.
But it turned out that McCartney had shied away from an even grander transformation: ‘At one point I was gonna be in drag and do a full-blown impersonation of Diana Ross. But as the moment grew nearer and wardrobe started to measure me for the frock and get all serious with the wig and stuff, I started to bottle out.’ When the show’s US sponsors got wind of the fact that the singer was planning to go tranny for TV, they warned him to back down. ‘Luckily this telegram came from the conservative Chevrolet people, who said, “Under no account must McCartney do drag impression of Diana Ross. We’ll pull funding if he does.”’
