Man on the Run

by Tom Doyle

  The main obstacle in the path of reconciliation was that George didn’t want to have anything to do with Paul any more. ‘How can we get together if George won’t play with Paul?’ Ringo asked a quizzing reporter. ‘Paul is a fine bass player,’ George said, not a little patronisingly, ‘but he’s a bit overpowering at times. I’d join a band with John Lennon any day, but I couldn’t join a band with Paul McCartney.’

  Still, by autumn, John was making encouraging noises about The Beatles working together again, saying they’d probably leave it until 1976, when their contract with EMI was due to expire. ‘I’d like The Beatles,’ he told a journalist, coolly sucking on a cigarette, ‘to make a record together again.’

  If he did, he had a funny way of showing it. In the second week of December, three of the ex-Beatles were by chance in New York at the same time. A plan was swiftly hatched to meet up for the signing of the recently completed 202-page document that would finally dissolve the band’s partnership, freeing up millions in royalties. The papers were to be ceremoniously inked at the Plaza Hotel on Central Park South. On the morning of 19 December 1974, Paul and George arrived at a suite there, to be met with piles of contracts laid out on green baize tables.

  Lennon didn’t show, on the advice of his astrologer, revealing that the superstitious influence of Ono – she and John having begun the tentative process of reuniting – was back in play. Instead, he sent a balloon to the hotel bearing the enigmatic message ‘Listen to this balloon’. Harrison hit the roof. He furiously rang Lennon, only across Central Park visiting Yoko at the Dakota, and bawled down the line, ‘You fucking maniac. You take your fucking dark glasses off and come and look at us, man.’

  It didn’t work. An untypically huffy Linda later noted, ‘The numbers weren’t right, the planets weren’t right and John wasn’t coming. Had we known there was some guy flipping cards on his bed to help him make his decision, we would all have gone over there.’

  ‘It was all quite far out,’ said Paul.

  George was at the end of his first and only solo tour of the US, which had found him being criticised for his weak vocal performances, and for taking a haphazard, Dylan-like approach to radically rearranging his best-known songs. That night, Paul and Linda attended his show at Madison Square Garden, heavily disguised in shades, Afro wigs and fuzzy fake moustaches, highlighting the sense of the ludicrous in the air.

  John, meanwhile, finally signed the dissolution papers releasing the Beatles’ money, in Florida, over Christmas, where he was on holiday with Pang and his son Julian. Perhaps fittingly, given the cartoon reality of having been a Beatle, he put pen to paper at Disney World.

  The following month, January 1975, Paul invited John down to New Orleans to get involved in the next Wings album. Lennon was seriously toying with the idea and had been sounding out various individuals for their opinions over the previous weeks. He asked Art Garfunkel, who had recently made up with Paul Simon, what he should do about the overtures from ‘my Paul’. Garfunkel told him that he thought Lennon and McCartney should try to forget their personality differences and just make music together. John then wrote to former Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, saying that he was possibly going down to New Orleans ‘to see the McCartknees’.

  One evening in the East 52nd Street apartment, out of nowhere, Lennon asked Pang, ‘What would you think if I started writing with Paul again?’

  She turned to him, open-mouthed, and said, ‘Are you kidding? I think it would be terrific.’

  Later that night, Lennon disappeared to the Dakota, enticed by Ono who claimed to have discovered a foolproof smoking cure. Whatever happened that night, Pang says that Lennon returned to her changed. The reunion with Paul in Louisiana wasn’t ever mentioned again.

  The allure of the city’s kaleidoscopically funky music scene had drawn Paul to New Orleans. Besides, there were tax advantages to be gained by recording in the US again – he’d be earning 70 cents in the dollar, rather than two pence in the pound. Added to this, McCartney loved the punchy drum sound captured on Labelle’s lascivious 1974 hit ‘Lady Marmalade’, recorded at Allen Toussaint’s Sea-Saint Studio, which became the setting for the recording of the next Wings album, Venus And Mars.

  Ironically, given the fact that McCartney had been attracted to the southern recording facility because of the drum sound, Paul felt Geoff Britton was struggling, both on a playing level and emotionally. The drummer’s marriage was in trouble and he had been dreading the trip. ‘I was so depressed,’ he admitted. ‘It should have been the happiest time of my life. But I was miserable and hated it. There was no sincerity in the band, and every day it was a fight for survival, a fight to re-establish yourself.’

  Britton noticed that, from the outset in New Orleans, Laine and McCulloch were distant with him, although he wasn’t exactly trying to reach out to them with his talk of ‘thick Northerners’. ‘Well, they were thick Northerners,’ he contended. ‘There’s no hiding facts.’ He unequivocally considered Denny ‘a bastard’. Jimmy, meanwhile, was ‘a cunt’. For his part, Laine thought that Britton was only in it for the money: ‘He was always talking about “When I get my big house . . .” The guy was an opportunist. It was a disaster, basically.’

  In Paul’s measured, diplomatic opinion, ‘He wasn’t quite like the rest of us. We had a sense of humour in common. He was nearly in with it all. But it’s a fine line.’

  Two weeks into the sessions, one morning at their hotel in the French Quarter, the McCartneys turned up at Britton’s room and told him that they were letting him go. ‘I got marched out and that was the end of it,’ he says.

  ‘It was horrible because we really wanted it to work,’ said Linda. ‘It was another depressing period. We had started Venus And Mars, but it just wasn’t working.’

  On many levels, Britton hadn’t clicked. In his place came Joe English, a New Yorker blessed with natural swing, recommended by Venus And Mars trombone player and arranger Tony Dorsey. The drummer had played with an outfit called the Jam Factory, who had supported Jimi Hendrix and the Allman Brothers, but he had been on the skids for the previous two years. He was playing some sessions on the Macon-centred southern rock circuit, but he was broke and his wife had left with their two kids. It would be some time before it was revealed that English was expertly masking some serious demons of his own.

  Floating above their worries, while in New Orleans the McCartneys were determined to enjoy the everlasting party. They took five days off for Mardi Gras and slipped into the crowds dressed as clowns. They threw a party-cum-press-conference on a riverboat, the Voyager, and sailed up and down the bayou to the groovesome live R&B sounds of The Meters. The members of Wings turned out, looking resplendent in black top hats. They remained, for the meantime at least, a band projecting the illusion of unity, held together by mirrors and sticky tape.

  The mid-1970s seemed to become very intense for you . . .

  Well, yeah. But we did what we set out to do. Didn’t cave in under the pressure.

  9

  Lift-offs and Landings

  It was just after midnight when the patrol car pulled them over. They had been driving down Santa Monica Boulevard in their silver Lincoln Continental when Paul took a right turn, missing a sign forbidding the manoeuvre and running a red light. As the officer leaned into the car he caught a whiff of grass. Everyone – Paul, Linda and the three kids asleep in the back – was ordered out of the vehicle.

  According to the patrolman’s report, a search of Linda’s purse produced a plastic bag containing seventeen grammes of marijuana, along with a still-smouldering joint fished out from under the passenger seat. Linda and Paul were immediately placed under arrest, before the former – probably fearing ensuing US visa problems – protested that the dope was hers and that it had been her alone, not her husband, smoking the spliff.

  Paul insists to this day that the weed was planted by the police. ‘They came up with a big bag of stuff that wasn’t ours,’ he says.

  Whate
ver the truth, the outcome was that Linda was detained for two hours while Paul drove the kids back to their rented house in Coldwater Canyon. He returned to the station where his wife was being held to discover that she had been charged with possession, her bail set at $500. Embarrassed, Paul had to confess that he was only carrying $200. In the middle of the night, he was forced to call former Apple executive director Peter Brown, who he knew was in town staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, to borrow the rest.

  Worse, there was the threat that a second and more damning charge – contributing to the delinquency of a minor – might be thrown at Linda, since she’d admitted smoking weed while looking after her children. It all added to the couple’s mounting feelings of harassment. ‘We were being targeted all the time,’ Linda groaned. ‘Maybe we were asking for it. Maybe we were a bit stupid. But we’re not criminals.’

  The McCartneys were in Los Angeles enjoying something of a partying lifestyle, living it up at the Beverly Wilshire (where Jo Jo Patrie noted the normally thrifty couple put no limits on the hotel tabs) before moving into the Coldwater Canyon house. There was much to celebrate. Two nights earlier, on 1 March 1975 – before an audience which included the reunited Lennon and Ono, who turned up with a tux-wearing, cocaine-emaciated David Bowie in tow – they had picked up two Grammys for Band On The Run. The album had steadily grown to become a towering success: five million copies sold, the best-selling UK album of 1974, named Album of the Year by the previously sniffy Rolling Stone, and so on and on.

  Wings were in LA putting the finishing touches to the initially troubled Venus And Mars, the making of which had become far easier with the introduction of Joe English and the move to California. To toast its completion, the McCartneys decided to throw a costly wrap party for the record aboard the RMS Queen Mary, a retired ocean liner docked in the waters off Long Beach. The 200 guests included some of the top players in music and film at the time including Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, Cher, Led Zeppelin, Ryan and Tatum O’Neal, Dean Martin and Tony Curtis. Guests were guided into the ship’s Grand Saloon along a corridor bearing posters featuring the album’s cosmic, cryptic slogan, ‘Venus and Mars are alright tonight’. Later a woman, mistaking the planets of the album title as alter egos for the McCartneys, confounded them by walking up to them and saying, ‘Hello Venus, hello Mars.’

  Surprising everyone, given his recent putdown of McCartney in the press, George Harrison showed up, and he and his estranged band-mate were seen chatting. The party also marked the first time that Paul and Michael Jackson met. Jackson remembered that he and McCartney were introduced and shook hands amongst a large crowd of people, before the latter said, ‘You know, I’ve written a song for you.’

  ‘I was very surprised and thanked him,’ a thrilled Jackson recalled. ‘And he started singing “Girlfriend” to me.’

  Paul didn’t make quite such an impression on everyone. As the evening wore on, an utterly soused Dean Martin sat at a table with the McCartneys, repeatedly roaring, ‘Who the hell is giving this party? Do I know these people?’

  His star in the ascendant once more, Paul began planning a world tour befitting his status. There were signs, however, that he was doing so with some trepidation.

  McCartney Productions had recently become the more ambitious MPL Communications, and moved premises from Greek Street in W1 around the corner to a five-storey townhouse at 1 Soho Square. Paul fancied turning its sizeable basement into a club, where he could play lunchtime gigs for office workers and serve up hot dogs, taking him back to the days of the cellar-based Casbah Club in Liverpool. MPL managing director Brian Brolly talked him out of the idea, pointing out that demand for tickets would be unreasonably high and the scheme would prove unworkable. If Paul was trying to shy away from the pressures of a big tour, this wasn’t the way to go.

  Instead, Wings got their heads down for an intensive rehearsal period lasting four whole months, highlighting just how determined McCartney was to get the band sounding right. There were rumours that the group were to play an outdoor show at Knebworth House in the summer of 1975. Instead, the slot was filled by Pink Floyd, who performed before an audience of 100,000 – too head-spinning a leap for the fledgling second line-up of Wings.

  Venus And Mars, however, was a record built for touring. It even opened like a gig, with the gentle acoustic guitar-picking of the title track finding the singer imagining himself in the audience at an arena concert, waiting for the lights to go down. This segued into the thumping ‘Rock Show’, with its references to Jimmy Page, Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl and, perhaps tellingly, scoring an entire ounce of dope, far more than the average longhaired punter could afford.

  Rather than being Wings’ New Orleans-flavoured album, Venus And Mars was far more adventurous stylistically, from the floaty Californian FM sound of ‘Listen To What The Man Said’ and the glassy-eyed hippie balladry of ‘Love In Song’ to the tap-dancing music-hall frippery of ‘You Gave Me The Answer’. The lyrical references took in the lowbrow (‘Magneto And Titanium Man’, inspired by a comic book found in Jamaica) and the high-minded (sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov influencing the futuristic couplets of ‘Venus And Mars – Reprise’).

  Yet having turned in a credible rock album in tune with the times, McCartney came close to blowing it with an oddball ending. ‘Treat Her Gently/ Lonely Old People’ was a sensitive, if syrupy ode to old age and dementia, which gave way to a rocktastic rendering of the theme from cosy UK teatime soap opera Crossroads. To Paul, it sounded like a show-stopping Diana-Ross-is-leaving-the-building concert crescendo. To everyone else, it was a touch more cheese than was palatable, even if the soap’s producers were subsequently moved to use the Wings version to soundtrack the programme’s end credits.

  ‘One of the big things for lonely old people in England is to watch Crossroads,’ Paul argued, explaining the thinking behind this slightly strange finale. ‘That was it, just a joke at the end.’ Around the same time, more illuminatingly perhaps, when filling in the ‘weight’ section of a teen-mag fact file, Paul wrote, ‘2 stoned’.

  Jokey ending notwithstanding, there were high expectations for Venus And Mars. Pre-orders alone for the LP exceeded 1.5 million. The cover was just as striking as the one for Band On The Run: red and yellow billiard balls, representing the planets of the title, expertly shot by Linda on a low-lit deep-blue baize.

  In spending most of their time getting ready for the tour, rarer now were the occasions when the McCartneys would all pile into their new green Rolls-Royce convertible and motor north to High Park. Instead, aside from a summer break in the US when they stayed with the Eastmans in the Hamptons, the family were based for most of the time at Cavendish Avenue in London, where slightly aghast visitors would note that the kids were allowed by their indulgent parents to scribble on the walls.

  To the horror of their snooty neighbours, over the years since Linda’s arrival the McCartneys’ St John’s Wood abode had increasingly begun to resemble a city farm. The garden was full of weeds and, on wet days, mud. Alongside a glass-built geodesic ‘meditation dome’, erected in the late 1960s and containing a large round bed given to Paul by Alice Cooper (who had originally been gifted it by Groucho Marx), it was home to a vegetable patch and a mucky menagerie of animals from dogs and cats to ducks and rabbits. On one occasion Paul left the window of the Roller open and, for a time, the chickens moved in, necessitating a reupholstering job costing £6,000. The family’s cockerel would crow the long-suffering neighbours awake at first light. The McCartneys reinstated the stable blocks in the garden, keeping four horses, which, donning hats and jodhpurs, they would ride on Sunday mornings.

  All of this made the McCartneys less than popular in their exclusive urban locale. Once an irate neighbour phoned the RSPCA to complain that the dogs were left alone in the house all day when the family were elsewhere. A representative of the animal welfare charity visited, but left satisfied with the assurance that the family’s part-nanny, part-housekeeper R
ose Martin popped in once a day to make sure they were fine.

  Inside, the living-room décor of Cavendish Avenue was millionaire boho with a hint of working-class. There were dark grey and brown carpets, a green armchair and couch – with a rip that the kittens would disappear into – arranged around a low coffee-table covered with a chequered Madras tablecloth. The furniture was cheap or second-hand, and matched with more expensive or antique items: Tiffany lampshades, a clock from the 1851 Great Exhibition, a robotlike sculpture by Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi named Solo. Dotted around the walls were originals by Magritte and De Kooning.

  At the same time, missing their bucolic Scottish retreat, the couple bought an unusual property for £42,000 in Peasmarsh, near Rye, on the Sussex coast. A circular, slightly cramped two-bedroomed cottage with wedge-shaped rooms and over 160 acres of land, it mirrored High Park in being a small house set in an expanse of untamed nature. Its insides were soon filled with the McCartneys’ clutter, and the couple shifted half an ark’s worth of animals on to the land: horses, sheep, hens, pheasants, even an aviary of budgies. A stream that cascaded over a drop gave the property its name, Waterfall.

  Back in London, at the same time, the pressures were piling up. In anticipation of the upcoming tour, a news story in Melody Maker carped, ‘Linda McCartney faces her sternest test yet . . .’ On 5 September, Wings performed a dress rehearsal of the tour production at Elstree Studios for an invited audience of guests including Ringo and Harry Nilsson. According to Paul, even after the months of pernickety rehearsal, ‘it showed up a lot of holes in the show’.

  These were holes that needed to be filled, and quickly. This time around, Wings weren’t just a bunch of hippies jumping into a van. This time, there would be no room for mistakes.