Man on the Run

by Tom Doyle

  That’s right. Could’ve been alright. Let’s do that then and we’ll call it The Beatles. It would have been good, I suppose, from that point of view. But we just decided we’d done it. We’d come full circle and enough was enough. It would’ve been a calculated move to put The Beatles back together, just ’cause some guy offered us millions. Between us, at various moments, one of us would get hot on the idea and the big offer would come in, but, it was, like, Nah. That was one good thing about The Beatles, it just all flowed, it just came shooting out of us. And it was, like, Let’s leave it. Let sleeping dogs lie.

  10

  High over America

  Sitting behind a desk, adopting an air of mock-seriousness, Lorne Michaels, producer and occasional presenter of NBC’s comedy and music revue Saturday Night Live, faced the camera, twelve items into the show’s broadcast of 24 April 1976. The starring guests that week included voluptuous film star Raquel Welch and John Sebastian, founder of feelgood 1960s pop band The Lovin’ Spoonful, plugging his theme song to high-school sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, set to become the US number 1 the following month. Comedian Chevy Chase had opened the show, in a skit where he presented an award to the best ‘political actor’, the nominees including presidential candidates Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. There had been a spoof ad for a Purina pet food for rats, and John Belushi had turned in his uncomfortably gurning impersonation of British singer Joe Cocker.

  Now, in what appeared to be a break in transmission, Michaels looked set to make an important announcement.

  ‘We’re being seen by approximately 22 million viewers,’ he began. ‘But please allow me, if I may, to address myself to four very special people . . . John, Paul, George and Ringo . . . The Beatles. Lately there have been a lot of rumours to the effect that the four of you might be getting back together. That would be great. In my book, The Beatles are the best thing that ever happened to music. It goes deeper than that. You’re not just a musical group. You’re a part of us. We grew up with you.

  ‘It’s for this reason that I’m inviting you to come on our show. Now, we’ve heard and read a lot about personality and legal conflicts that might prevent you guys from reuniting. That’s none of my business. You guys will have to handle that. But it’s also been said that no one has yet come up with enough money to satisfy you. Well, if it’s money you want, there’s no problem here. The National Broadcasting Company authorises me to authorise you a cheque for $3,000. Here, can you get a close-up of this?’

  Michaels held a cheque up to the camera, clearly inked out to The Beatles.

  ‘As you can see,’ he went on, ‘verifiably, a cheque made out to you, The Beatles, for $3,000. All you have to do is sing three Beatles tunes. “She loves you, yeah yeah yeah” . . . that’s $1,000 right there. You know the words and it’ll be easy. Like I said, this cheque is made out to The Beatles. You divide it any way you want. If you want to give Ringo less, that’s up to you. I’d rather not get involved. I’m sincere about this. If it helps you to reach a decision to reunite, well, it’s a worthwhile investment. You have agents. You know where I can be reached. Just think about it, OK?’

  Unknown to Michaels, only 22 blocks north of the TV studio at Rockefeller Plaza, Paul and John, together with Linda and Yoko, were sitting up late at the Dakota – watching the show, laughing their asses off and, just for a minute, actually considering his offer.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we went down?’ said John. ‘We should go down there. We should go down now and just do it.’

  The pair toyed with the idea of jumping in a cab and making it to the studio before the end of the 90-minute broadcast. Then, once their laughter had subsided, the cold reality of the prospect set in, and they decided they were too tired. When the show was over, in the small hours of Sunday morning, Paul and Linda left John and Yoko settling down to watch a screening of the 1960 film adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

  As jokey as it was, Michaels’ offer obviously planted a seed in McCartney’s mind. Later that Sunday evening, he returned to the Dakota, this time carrying a guitar. But John, who had been looking after baby Sean all day, was in a very different mood from the previous night, and bluntly snubbed him. There was likely some jealousy at play on Lennon’s part – the previous day had seen Wings At The Speed Of Sound rise to the top of the US album chart in the first of a seven-week run; he had recently read that Paul, due to Wings’ newfound earning power, was worth $25 million and moaned to Yoko that he would never earn that kind of money.

  ‘Please call before you come over,’ he snapped at an upset McCartney. ‘It’s not 1956, and turning up at the door isn’t the same any more.’

  Later, a contrite John stated, ‘I didn’t mean it badly.’ But the damage was done. Paul turned and left, before flying off in the morning to Dallas to hook up with Wings and begin rehearsals for their American tour. Lennon and McCartney would never see each other again.

  Eight nights later, on 3 May, Paul stood side-stage at the Tarrant County Convention Center, Fort Worth, Texas. The venue had been chosen as the best location for the opening night, to ease the band into the tour as far out of the way of the major cultural capitals as was reasonable. It was to be the first time McCartney had performed live in America since the frazzled, road-sick Beatles had retired from touring, just under ten years earlier, before vanishing into the studio. Stepping back into the light, Paul was stunned by the response: fifteen minutes of ovation from the 13,500-strong crowd before Wings had even struck the opening chord.

  After months of rehearsals and the preliminary legs of the tour, the Wings Over America show was by this stage a very polished presentation, if still edging towards the softer end of the rock spectrum when held up against the likes of The Who or Led Zeppelin. Nevertheless, it had a suitably dramatic, audience-stirring opener, with McCartney emerging alone from the darkness, lit in red, in a cloud of dry ice, for the gentle ‘Venus And Mars’ introduction that slammed into ‘Rock Show’. The band, long-haired and in fashion able shirts and waistcoats, looked very 1976, with the black-clad, white-scarf-draped singer fronting them on assured, grinning form as, stage left, his wife in her feather-collared dress shifted from Moog to Hammond to Mellotron and heartily sang and clapped along.

  One new feature of the live production was a laser display, of which, Paul comically states, he was initially a touch nervous. ‘I’d seen lasers at Led Zeppelin’s concert at Earls Court [in 1975] and the only thing I knew about them was from the Bond movie where the baddie was about to slice Mr Bond with a laser. So, I literally thought that Robert Plant was being really courageous and endangering his life dancing around in front of these lasers. I was like, “God, that’s amazing, what he does for his art, y’know.” I fully expected to see Planty sliced up by the end of the show.’

  This new, cutting-edge Wings show was a far cry from the shambling UK university tour of four years before. The quintet, with added drama and swing supplied by their four-piece brass section, threw themselves into a set that showcased the strength of Paul’s post-Beatles catalogue, from tougher-sounding numbers such as ‘Jet’ and ‘Let Me Roll It’ to grandstanding ballads ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ and ‘My Love’, which were complemented, rather than overshadowed, by the selection of Beatles songs reclaimed by McCartney.

  For once the critics were, as one, bowled over. ‘When the house lights dimmed,’ wrote the reviewer from the LA Times, getting caught up in the sense of occasion, ‘virtually everyone in the arena stood in anticipation of what was clearly the most notable return to rock concerts since Bob Dylan’s 1974 appearance in Chicago. Not only did the two-hour concert demonstrate McCartney’s ability to satisfy audiences with his post-Beatles work, it also enabled many in the audience to relive some of the magic of the heralded Beatles era. A double triumph.’ The New York Times enthused: ‘Mr McCartney established himself and his band, Wings, as concert artists in their own right . . . and he did so triumphantly.’

  The US tour was run on an enormous
scale. Three articulated trucks lugged twelve and a half tons of gear, their roofs stencilled in red with the words ‘Wings . . . Over . . . America’. Their drivers communicated via CB radio, as a helicopter rotored overhead, filming the progress of this showy cavalcade. The expanded tour personnel stretched from new guitar tech John Hammel (later to become Paul’s personal assistant) and the McCartney brood’s nanny Rose Martin to ex-FBI-agent turned security-man Orrin Bartlett, who was employed to oversee a sweep of each venue and grill the staff about potential bomb threats, weapons screening and any strange calls they might have received. In America, the atmosphere felt heightened and possibly more dangerous. According to Time magazine, Paul ‘worried about snipers’. At the same time, McCartney was being more upfront about his wife’s role in his professional organisation. He needed her, he admitted, ‘for my confidence’.

  The centrepiece of the travelling circus was a rented and customised BAC One-Eleven jet with the obligatory tour logo painted on the fuselage. Inside, the plane was equipped with the usual comforts and distractions of the premier-league touring 1970s rock band – video machine, table-tennis set-up and, hidden behind a curtain at the rear, a mini-discotheque, painted with stars and dotted with fluorescent lights, which was much loved by the McCartney girls. The rest of the interior was kitted out like a lounge, where the band could laze around and be served endless drinks from the corner bar by stewards, before retreating to one of the sectioned-off bedrooms.

  Attempting to replicate some sense of familial normality, rather than stay in hotels, the McCartneys had four bases for the American tour: rented houses in Dallas, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, which they would fly to directly after each show, depending upon where they were in the country. As ideal as the arrangement sounded, the time spent in those lavish houses only served to fuel Linda’s homesickness. ‘I felt very empty and very lonely,’ she admitted.

  Her pining was temporarily ameliorated on a day off in Texas in the first week of May, when she spotted a chestnut Appaloosa stallion in a field by the side of the road. Turning off and taking a detour into Lucky Spot Stables, she asked the owner, ‘Could we look at that horse out in the field?’ He insisted the horse wasn’t for sale, but allowed Linda to take it for a ride. Afterwards, and with some persuasion, the owner caved in and agreed to a price. The horse, named Lucky Spot, was shipped to England, where the McCartneys began successfully breeding Appaloosas.

  Meanwhile, the tour powered onwards. On the second date, in Houston, Paul was nearly injured by a piece of scaffolding that fell from the elaborate rigging during the set, the metal pole instead hitting tour manager Trevor Jones on the head, an injury that required thirteen stitches. In Detroit, McCartney was ratty onstage, coping with feedback and a pizza-slicing cut on his finger that caused him to mess up the complex guitar-picking of ‘Blackbird’, and later to lash out at one reporter who had dared to ask the Beatle Question, ‘Look, mate, it’s 1976, and I don’t think most people care about what happened ten years ago.’ In Toronto, Ringo and George turned up, sitting in the audience and appreciatively nodding along.

  In Boston, Paul and Jimmy McCulloch suffered their first serious bust-up. Closing the main set, Wings jogged to the side of the stage for a breather in preparation for their first encore. Jimmy had left his guitar resting on his amp, volume up, causing it to howl with feedback through the state-of-the-art PA. Then the inexplicably stroppy guitarist announced that he wasn’t going back on and swaggered off in the direction of the dressing-room.

  McCartney remembers: ‘It was like, “What?” I mean, I’d never had anyone decide that ever before. So I just ran off and sort of grabbed him.’ According to saxophonist Howie Casey, McCartney did more than just ‘sort of grab’ McCulloch. ‘Paul came flying in and smacked him,’ he says. The four members of the horn section quickly waded in to separate the pair, with trombonist Tony Dorsey taking it upon himself to hold McCartney back.

  ‘There was violence involved,’ Paul concedes. ‘I gave him what he understood, really. Now obviously that’s not the way you want to operate. But at that moment there was no alternative. He probably would have done the same to me if he’d have been the leader of the band.’

  ‘Jimmy was acting up big-time,’ says Casey. ‘And it’s Paul’s show . . . he’s the leader, he’s the star and all that. You don’t do that. But Jimmy had that thing in him.’

  ‘Jimmy was his own man, shall we say,’ says Paul, who noted that the guitarist played ‘a blinder’ following the confrontation. From this point on, McCartney would sometimes take McCulloch aside on the plane for pep-talks meant to steer him away from the self-destructive habits that were intensifying his rollercoaster moods. ‘He was always a little dangerous. I did try and warn him a couple of times. Like, what’s going to happen when you’re 30? You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. But he liked partying too much and was getting into too many things.’

  He wasn’t the only one. Wings were far from clean-living and willingly surrendered to the many temptations on offer. In the tour-planning stage, each member of the band was asked what their favourite tipple was and, accordingly, a bottle of whisky or vodka or whatever spirit they preferred would be waiting for them in the dressing-room before soundcheck. The bottles would be immediately cracked open, joints would do the rounds, and some of the more likely suspects might chop out a pre-show line of coke. Unsurprisingly, by the time the gig began, Wings were pretty loaded. Backstage afterwards: more spirits, more spliffs, more lines. It’s no surprise that a TV crew who came to the dressing-room of the Chicago Stadium to interview the non-McCartney members found them to be conspicuously wasted.

  ‘There’s a lot more going for this band than you actually see,’ argued a heavy-lidded Denny Laine, finding it hard to focus.

  ‘It’s a question of everybody just putting a lot into it,’ Jimmy McCulloch offered vaguely.

  Elsewhere, Joe English was on notably chatty if visibly glazed form. ‘It’s an easy gig, it’s a good gig, it’s the easiest gig I’ve had. I mean, it’s easy meeting people I’m working with and getting along.’ He paused to think about what else to say, before adding, ‘Good gig.’

  The drummer, it transpired, was something of a dark horse. Howie Casey was the first to notice that, on the UK tour, the genial New Yorker had taken a keen interest in the wares available in British chemists, particularly cough medicines containing active ingredients banned from over-the-counter sale in the States. ‘He’d drink bottles of it,’ says Casey. ‘He’d get out of it on stuff like that. He might have been a little distant at times, but he was alright. Most of the time he seemed on top of it. He was a bloody good drummer.’

  Secretly, Joe English was battling a serious drug habit, including heroin addiction. While he never missed a gig, he was prone to becoming utterly zonked and falling unconscious for twenty-four hours at a time before waking up not knowing exactly where he was. He later admitted that there were two or three occasions during his time in Wings when he overdosed on smack. The money he was earning from being in the group was essentially fuelling his addiction and dragging him down.

  Whatever state everyone was in, post-show a routine was established where the band immediately left the venue in a fleet of limos and returned to the airport and the waiting BAC One Eleven, before typically hanging around for Paul and Linda, who were always running late or otherwise detained by fans, well-wishers or hangers-on. Then, once the plane’s doors were closed, the group and their entourage found themselves in what tour photographer Robert Ellis calls ‘a superbubble’.

  There was a photograph taken during the 1976 tour, which perfectly illustrated how being a member of the McCartney family must have been, in some ways, completely normal and at the same time utterly surreal. In it, Linda and the four-year-old Stella are seen settling down to dinner in their lounge, the former perched on a sofa while balancing a tray on her lap. Across from them, Paul sits playing a bass guitar as Mary, only six, leans in to listen. It appears to be a fa
irly typical, cosy, slightly boho picture. Except for the fact that it found the McCartneys aboard their private jet, high in the skies above America.

  ‘That became normal for us,’ says Paul. ‘In our minds, we were giving the kids a normal upbringing. While at the same time we knew it was not.’

  Somehow, the delicate balance that the McCartneys had created between family life and band life seemed to work. Even the more hedonistic tendencies of certain members were successfully hidden from the kids. ‘Anyone who was likely to get crazy,’ says Paul, ‘it would be on their own time, in a hotel room. It would be somewhere where the kids weren’t. They were very respectful, and the kids never really saw any kind of hedonistic behaviour.’

  ‘You’ve got this weird mixture of little kids bounding about the plane and all these hard-arsed musos swilling whisky and smoking fags,’ says Howie Casey. ‘Maybe we were like uncles. They could be cheeky to us, they could ask us things. It was really nice.’ But even if Wings seemed like an egalitarian set-up, from Casey’s point of view there was an obvious pecking order. ‘We socialised totally with them, but they were the bosses. You knew your place a little bit.’

  As much as he wanted to be one of the boys, sometimes the dividing line between McCartney and the others was all too obvious. On the plane, to fritter away the flight times, the musicians would often dig out cards and play a few hands of ten-card brag, gambling with nickels and cents. During one flight, Paul heard the others laughing over a game and asked if he could join in. He was quickly taught the rules and play continued. McCartney nearly won a couple of hands before Casey scooped the pot after showing a game-ending four-of-a-kind. Paul, apparently, ‘did his nut’ and stormed off in a huff.

  ‘See, that shows something,’ Casey reckons. ‘It’s not the money. It’s the winning. He’s used to winning.’