Man on the Run

by Tom Doyle

  ‘Just what keeps you going?’ called out one reporter.

  ‘Drugs!’ replied a chipper McCartney.

  It was 11 September 1975, the morning after the second date of the British leg of Wings’ World Tour, an ambitious jaunt expected to last a year and to sweep through Europe, Australia, Japan and America. To fire up the excitement surrounding it, the band were giving a press conference at the Post House Hotel in Bristol, the city having been the scene of the previous night’s show.

  As much as Paul was attempting to draw a deep line in the sand between The Beatles and the newly streamlined Wings, he couldn’t avoid the inevitable questions.

  ‘Have you seen The Beatles lately?’ quizzed another journalist.

  ‘We run into each other and stuff,’ said Paul. ‘We’re just good friends.’

  ‘Is Wings really a logical development from The Beatles?’

  ‘Well, I’ve always written songs, but with The Beatles we only ever rehearsed for three days at the most. With this band, we rehearse a lot.’

  ‘Will Wings ever become as big as The Beatles?’

  ‘I think it could be, funnily enough.’

  ‘How different is Wings from The Beatles?’

  ‘They scream at our concerts, but they don’t scream as much. People used to come and scream and didn’t hear any of the music. Now they can.’

  ‘Do you want to bring back The Beatles?’

  ‘It wasn’t within my power to bring back The Beatles. It was a four-way split and we all wanted to do different things. We’re all very good friends. John is keeping very quiet at the moment, while unfortunately I’m out working. I like it.’

  Later, Linda confessed to one journalist that the ex-Fabs were unsurprisingly sick of being asked over and over and over again about the possibility of them reforming. ‘They’ll ask about The Beatles forever,’ she rightly pointed out. Even onstage, McCartney couldn’t escape the relentless interrogation. Midway through the second of two sold-out shows at Hammersmith Odeon in London a week later, one fan shouted, ‘What about John Lennon?’ Trying to remain cheery and playfully dismissive, Paul responded, ‘What about him?’

  Nevertheless, the set list for the tour proved that McCartney was confident about his post-Beatles output, comprising as it did mainly songs from Band On The Run and Venus And Mars. In a nod to his past, however, part-way through, he offered up a crowd-pleasing medley of ‘Lady Madonna’, ‘The Long And Winding Road’, ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’, ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Yesterday’ – the last two performed solo, on acoustic guitar, literally spotlighting his formidable talents, lest anyone had forgotten. From the outside, Paul projected nothing but self-assurance.

  Internally, however, it was another matter. If during a show, from the stage, he could see someone in the audience walking out or even lighting a cigarette, he would fret that he had lost their attention. He hated the fact that, at 33, he was being cast as an old man of rock by the music press or, denting his ego, a throwback to the 1960s. ‘I suppose I am from another age,’ he ruminated wistfully.

  Still, in perhaps the first wave of rock nostalgia, there was enormous demand for tickets for the tour. Fanning the flames of anticipation, in their review of the show, Melody Maker deemed it to be ‘excellent’, going on to say that it would ‘awaken Beatlemania across the Atlantic’.

  As the tour progressed, this didn’t seem like hot air. In Melbourne, 1,500 hardy and determined souls queued for tickets overnight under skies filled with rain, thunder and lightning. Displaying less dedication, the McCartneys slept in for the flight down under on 27 October, forcing a Qantas jet filled with their tetchy fellow passengers to idle on the tarmac for 45 minutes while the family rushed to Heathrow. Hitting him precisely where it hurt, the airline fined Paul $9,000 for holding the plane up – $200 for every minute of the delay.

  A cartoon appeared in The Sun two days later, sketched by their regular satirist Franklin, depicting a planeload of furious passengers spitting out their Foster’s lager, chewing the seats, suffering heart attacks and in one instance pulling out a revolver, as a grinning, laidback Paul, reclining with his hands behind his head, receives the cabin PA announcement, ‘We regret having to turn back, cobbers, but Mr McCartney has forgotten his toothbrush . . .’

  It had been eleven years since Paul had toured Australia with The Beatles, and once Wings had landed in the country, the response was no less overwhelming. Beatlemaniacal scenes met the McCartneys at Perth Airport, with Paul walking along the front row of fervent fans, shaking hands, while carrying a bemused, four-year-old Stella.

  One television reporter touched a recently exposed nerve when he pointed out to McCartney, ‘Thirty-three, that’s a bit old for rock’n’roll.’

  ‘Ancient . . . ancient,’ Paul responded, fiddling with his hair, annoyance clearly bubbling just below the surface.

  ‘Do you think you’re past it?’ asked the hack.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Paul replied, visibly ruffled. ‘I wouldn’t be here if I thought I was. But you come and see the show, and if you like the show, you tell me if I’m over my peak after it, OK?’ Before he broke away, he added, ‘And if you tell me I am, it’s coats off outside, cobber.’

  Wings quickly settled in Australia, throwing a 31st-birthday party for Denny Laine on 29 October, cruising around the Perth waters on a hydrofoil. As was fast becoming their routine, they threw a press conference in the city to meet the media. Arriving in a room filled with 200 representatives from newspapers, magazines and TV channels, the group found a figure – in a cheap brown suit, his thinning hair greasily slicked forward, a piece of toilet paper sticking to a shaving cut – apparently asleep in one of their chairs.

  It turned out to be Aussie comic creation Norman Gunston (in reality, actor Garry McDonald), who awoke and immediately hijacked the proceedings, turning them into a two-way piss-taking routine between himself and the band. Was Paul planning to open another fruit shop after the failure of Apple? Was there any truth in the rumour that he’d been dead? As a wedded couple in a band, did Linda ever feel like telling her husband that she couldn’t perform that night due to a headache? How, indeed, was the marriage going?

  ‘It’s alright,’ Paul responded, as gales of slightly nervous laughter blew around the room. ‘But you’re not helping it, Norm.’

  McCartney was in a jocular mood throughout the tour. During his solo portion of the set, he took to introducing ‘Yesterday’ by saying, ‘Tell you what, see if you remember this one,’ picking the opening chords of his most famous song to thunderous applause before atonally singing, ‘What a jolly swine’. The audience, teased, would howl with laughter. He’d pause and begin again to a deafening chorus of female screams and male roars.

  The news that arrived on 11 November temporarily wiped the smile off his face, however. The Japanese authorities, citing the Scottish marijuana conviction of 1973, were refusing Wings entry to the country. The gigs there had to be scrapped. Paul was initially angered by the ban: the Japanese Embassy in London had already approved his visa. ‘They’re still old-fashioned out there,’ he reasoned. ‘The older folks see a great danger in allowing in an alien who has admitted smoking marijuana and they’re trying to stamp it out, using all the wrong methods as usual.’

  The Melbourne show, having been filmed for Australia, was sent to Japan to be screened as an apology to fans, along with a televised Japanese debate about marijuana. Paul lamented the fact that the McCartneys ‘had become martyrs for the cause’. Interviewed in Australia on daytime chat programme The Mike Walsh Show, as Linda, Jimmy and Denny lolled around him, looking and sounding lightly refreshed, Paul pointed out that it was a two-year-old charge and that, after arguing their case, the authorities in both Australia and the United States had agreed to let him in. It was the Japanese Minister of Justice alone who had nixed the visit.

  ‘He’s no friend o’ mine!’ joked Paul, in a passable Scottish accent, eyeballing the viewers at home.

  ‘The first
chance I get, I’ll put him doon,’ added Denny Laine.

  ‘You could put him doon, I’ll stick the heid on him,’ slurred the genuinely Scottish Jimmy McCulloch, looking as if he just might, given the chance.

  As a postscript, Paul filmed a message of apology to the Japanese fans. But it was a smirking McCartney who faced the lens to say, ‘We’re very sorry that we can’t come to Japan to play our music to you this time. But if the Minister of Justice says we can’t come in, then we can’t come in. Don’t worry, we’ll see you when we come back to your beautiful country . . . sayonara.’

  He put his hands together and bowed his head, spread them into a W shape to represent the Wings logo, and then smiled knowingly.

  If there was a certain cockiness now evident in the McCartneys’ demeanour, it was noticed by others. In New York, Linda’s longtime friend, writer Danny Fields, was gobsmacked when the couple visited him, got stoned and then asked to borrow money from him for the cab fare back uptown.

  ‘We don’t bother carrying money in New York,’ Linda told him. ‘We just tell the cab driver who we are, and then we sign autographs for him and he says we should forget what’s on the meter.’ On this occasion they needed cash for the return journey since, on the way down to Fields’s apartment, they’d encountered a driver who hadn’t recognised them. ‘Sure enough, he wanted money,’ Linda moaned. ‘I had some coins in my purse. We told him it was a lot of money in New Zealand or something.’

  Eight days before Christmas 1975, Paul and Linda turned up unannounced to see John and Yoko at the Dakota. The Lennons were sitting in their bedroom with photographer Bob Gruen when they heard voices directly outside their apartment door. Lennon was instantly freaked, since the arrangement at the building was that any visitors first had to pass by the doormen at the gates and introduce themselves to the concierge, who would then call upstairs.

  The Lennons nervously asked Gruen to check who it was. He walked into the hall and unlocked the inner door, leaving the outer door closed. Hearing the sound of voices harmonising, he shouted back to John and Yoko in the bedroom, ‘Don’t worry, it’s just kids in the building singing Christmas carols.’ Opening the second door, there before him stood Paul and Linda singing ‘We Wish You A Merry Christmas’. The photographer, taken aback, said, ‘I think you’re looking for the guys in the bedroom . . . come on in.’

  As Gruen remembers, ‘It was like old friends meeting by surprise and really glad to see each other. We sat around and drank tea.’ Paul and Linda griped to a sympathetic John and Yoko about the Japanese dope ban. ‘They were talking about what a small thing it was. They were very sorry that they couldn’t go to Japan for such a seemingly trivial reason.’

  As Lennon and McCartney began to rebuild their friendship properly, in February 1976 a US promoter called Bill Sargent made them an offer that seemed irresistible. He was willing to pay a reformed Beatles $50 million for a one-off show. When, by March, there had been no response, he doubled the offer. At the same time, a US industrialist, Mike Matthews, the head of guitar effects pedal company Electro-Harmonix, offered them $3 million, with an additional cut of pay-per-view TV revenue that would up their share to more than $30 million. Lee Eastman, speaking for McCartney, stated that these offers weren’t ‘even being considered’.

  Privately, Paul asked the other ex-Beatles if they should put out a joint statement turning down the offers. No one would commit to it. Going it alone, McCartney began to contradict himself in the press. One minute he was saying that his response to the offer was a ‘positive maybe’, the next that any Beatles reunion would only happen ‘if we wanted to do something musically, not . . . just for the money’. It came back to that familiar fear that they might desecrate their legacy. Around this time, Paul in London and John in New York had a long chat on the phone. Never once were the offers or the spectre of a reformation even mentioned.

  Still, with the Wings tours of Europe and the US looming, The Beatles once again threatened to overshadow everything as Parlophone/EMI reissued all 22 of their UK singles at once, along with a 45 of ‘Yesterday’. Reveille magazine in Britain reported that this had created a ‘Beatles Boom!’, particularly among a new generation of teenagers discovering the group for the first time. At one point, in the UK Top 100, The Beatles occupied 23 places. Accordingly, EMI’s profits for the period rose by a third.

  But Paul, who had just released the chirpy, critic-challenging ‘Silly Love Songs’ with Wings, was riled by the idea of having to compete with the ghost of his younger self. ‘I wouldn’t want “Silly Love Songs” kept off the top by “Love Me Do”,’ he bristled.

  On 18 March 1976 Paul’s father Jim died, from a combination of bronchial pneumonia and heart failure, at home in Rembrandt, the house his famous son had bought for him in the village of Gayton on the Wirral, Merseyside. Paul received the news from his stepmother, Angie, in a telephone call to the Royal Garden Hotel in London, where Wings were staying en masse prior to leaving for the European tour.

  ‘I’m sorry, son, it just happened,’ said Angie.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Paul asked her, shocked.

  To the astonishment of outsiders, McCartney didn’t attend the cremation, held four days later at Landican Cemetery, near Jim McCartney’s home. The idea that a son wouldn’t attend his own father’s funeral was, of course, unthinkable. In the end, there were two reasons for Paul’s decision: first, the media attention would mar the service – Angie said ‘it would just be a circus’; second, he couldn’t face the emotional trauma of grieving in public. His brother Mike admitted, ‘Paul would never face that sort of thing. As Dad would say, “It’s just the way you’re made, son.”’

  Instead, Paul threw himself back into work. ‘That’s just my character. I suppose I coped by remembering him as he was. He used to hate funerals and all of that sort of stuff, so I didn’t get involved. I sort of thought, Well, he hated it, so it would be kind of hypocritical to go and do all the weeping and wailing.’

  Linda admitted to Danny Fields that going to the funeral would have ‘caused problems’, but worried that the McCartneys were being criticised for not attending. Paul was later to become estranged from Angie and his stepsister Ruth, who he believed profited from selling memorabilia from his dad’s home.

  Weirdly, however, even though Lennon was among the first to hear the news and called McCartney to offer his condolences, Paul didn’t tell the other members of Wings. The first that Denny Laine knew about it was when Paul was randomly asked in a press conference in Paris whether either of his parents were still alive. McCartney flatly replied, ‘No.’ Laine was gobsmacked. ‘Paul is . . . quite privately shy,’ he reasons. ‘It’s just his personality.’

  Meanwhile the group were on a roll, having swiftly completed their fifth album, Wings At The Speed Of Sound, released a mere ten months after Venus And Mars. The reason for this increased productivity was partly down to the fact that this was the band’s first ‘democratic’ album, opening up the lead vocal performances to all members in overtly trying to prove that Wings was a real band and not merely a construct of session musicians built to prop up McCartney’s ego.

  In both this open band arrangement and its mellow West Coast characteristics, Wings At The Speed Of Sound went some way to emulating the Eagles, then a dominant force in the US charts. The record opened with the literally inviting ‘Let ’Em In’, in which a languid-voiced Paul acted as welcoming host to an imaginary parade of guests including The Everly Brothers, his brother Mike and his Auntie Gin. Elsewhere, Denny Laine turned in an aching performance on ‘The Note You Never Wrote’, Joe English was cast as a broken-hearted country singer on the lonesome ‘Must Do Something About It’, and Linda played it for laughs with the protorock’n’roll of ‘Cook Of The House’, which depicted her getting busy-busy in the kitchen and closed with the sound of chips frying, sounding like applause.

  Jimmy McCulloch, meanwhile, in cahoots with former Stone the Crows drummer/lyricist Colin Allen offered another of t
heir antidrug songs, mined from the same vein as the cautionary ‘Medicine Jar’ from Venus And Mars. ‘Wino Junko’ closed the first side of Wings At The Speed Of Sound with a lilting melody, finding the ‘pill freak’ narrator addressing his addictions and even noting that he was unafraid to risk his life for his beloved highs. Even if the words weren’t his own, McCulloch might have been advised to listen closer to the song he was singing, since he was increasingly becoming a worrying and unstable element of Wings. At the outset of the European tour, photographer Robert Ellis noted that Jimmy was becoming ‘really hard to handle . . . he was constantly paranoid and constantly out of his head’.

  This was proved in ludicrous fashion on 26 March 1976 in Paris, where Wings had taken up residence at the swish Hotel George V. After the show at the Pavilion de Paris, the band and entourage, sans McCartneys, sprawled out in the bar, where they began drinking heavily, pulling teen idol David Cassidy into their orbit. At some point the party repaired upstairs, where a fight broke out when a spectacularly leathered McCulloch accused Cassidy of being a ‘fag’ and took a swing at him. Cassidy went to block McCulloch’s punch, accidentally knocking him to the floor. The heated and chaotic scene quickly cooled when it became apparent that McCulloch had injured a finger, fracturing the bone.

  The much trumpeted upcoming US tour – due to be the first time McCartney had appeared live in America in a decade, before an expected audience of half a million, yielding an estimated $4 million in profits – was postponed, at great expense, for three weeks, due to McCulloch’s drunken antics. Talking to reporters, Jimmy and Paul tried to laugh off the incident. The guitarist fibbed and said he’d broken the finger after slipping on a wet floor when getting out of the bath.

  ‘Yeah,’ Paul added darkly. ‘We’re gonna break his arm next week.’

  It’s tempting to snip up those solo Beatles LPs and picture maybe ‘Jet’ on the same album as ‘Imagine’ and ‘My Sweet Lord’ . . .