Man on the Run

by Tom Doyle

  On an altogether more serious level, the first months of 1977 saw Apple finally sever all remaining ties with Allen Klein, following a stinging $5 million settlement. McCartney, though, insisted there was still a massive, unexplained hole in the Beatles’ earnings. Though he never liked to talk about money, Paul felt moved to point out to the Daily Express that with Wings, between 1974 and 1976, he had ‘earned more money than I ever earned in all those other so-called boom years’. He said the Fabs had been told that they’d sold somewhere in the region of 300 million records. ‘If you compute that,’ Paul reckoned, roughly crunching the numbers, ‘and say the group should have had 10p a go, then where did that money go?’

  Meanwhile, the Saturday Night Live joke had run and run. Having had no response from the former Beatles since his spoof reunion appeal, and unaware that John and Paul had watched it live, Lorne Michaels upped his offer to $3,200 and promised to throw some hotel accommodation into the deal. Five months later, he used the ongoing stunt to introduce the first footage of The Rutles, the uncanny, parallel-universe send-up of The Beatles created by Eric Idle of Monty Python and Neil Innes of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

  According to the latter, who bumped into an apparently ‘edgy’ McCartney at a party at George Harrison’s house, Paul wasn’t entirely enamoured of the clearly affectionate fan-boy parody, featuring Idle’s portrayal of him as the wide-eyed showbiz opportunist, Dirk McQuickly, with his knack for writing light, frothy tunes. In truth, the crux of the problem seemed to be that a narked McCartney was being asked his opinion of The Rutles in virtually every interview.

  Later, George Harrison, always the most comedy-friendly ex-Beatle, not least in his endorsement and financing of Monty Python, appeared on Saturday Night Live. In the opening minutes of the episode, he could be seen muttering to Lorne Michaels in a corridor of the NBC building, asking him if he could have the cheque for $3,000 and being told he could only have his $750 share.

  ‘I’ve come all this way,’ Harrison pretended to protest. ‘It’s $3,000. That was the deal.’

  ‘How do you think I feel?’ spluttered Michaels. ‘I feel terrible about it. But it was just one of those mix-ups.’

  All frivolities aside, only a year after they’d sat together laughing at the SNL appeal, in their increasingly strained and infrequent telephone conversations Paul and John were once more growing painfully estranged. April 1977 found Paul and Linda in New York, staying at the Stanhope Hotel across the park from the Dakota, in town to do some business and catch some Broadway shows. McCartney called Lennon up, even though he felt that, from his former partner’s point of view, there was ‘so much suspicion’.

  Paul remembers he started up the conversation by saying, ‘Hey, I’d really like to see you.’

  ‘What for?’ Lennon replied. ‘What the fuck d’you want, man?’

  Paul later confessed that at this stage John still made him nervous, even after all the years and their times of apparent brotherly closeness. ‘I actually used to have some very frightening phone calls with him,’ McCartney admitted. Paul told John what he’d been up to – eating pizza with the kids, reading them fairy tales.

  ‘You’re all pizza and fairy tales,’ Lennon retorted bizarrely.

  Another time, John raged at Paul in an accent that was becoming more Americanised, and reminiscent of a bald-headed, lollipop-sucking TV detective who was big in 1976.

  ‘Yeah? Yeah? Whadda ya want?’ snarled John, answering the call.

  McCartney was suddenly sick of this ‘vitriolic’ Lennon.

  ‘Oh, fuck off, Kojak,’ he barked, and slammed the phone down.

  Did you feel a sense of vindication after the 1976 tour?

  Well, yeah. That really was the kind of pay-off tour. I remember that being what I saw as the turnaround where Wings were now, like, very successful. We had the American tour and ‘Silly Love Songs’ was a big hit. The great thing happened, which was always a fun thing that used to happen with The Beatles, was you’d put a record out and you’d start playing it live and no one would know it. And it’d be, ‘Hold your nerve, boys, we’re OK, just keep playing it.’ And by the end of that tour, it was the big hit. It was really lovely, that. The nice thing that was happening on that tour, because of the level, was there were a lot of things that were reminiscent of the Beatles days.

  11

  Float On

  It could hardly have sounded more idyllic. Wings were six weeks into the sessions for their sixth album, in the grey London of February 1977, when Geoff Emerick began regaling them with tales of his recent recording expedition to Hawaii. The seasoned sound engineer started filling their heads with sunshine, just when they were stuck back in the all too familiar environs of Abbey Road, digging themselves into a rut.

  Two months later, with McCartney having decided to indulge a rock-star whim, Wings landed in the US Virgin Islands. During the intervening weeks, an apparently simple if potentially troublesome plan had been formulated. In yet another bid to take flight to another location and free up the recording process, the band were to make an album aboard a yacht – its punning working title, Water Wings.

  The original idea came from Denny Laine, who had a passion for boats. In the early 1970s, he’d lived upon Searchlight, a barge moored on the Thames between Shepperton and Chertsey, the vessel later sold to Viv Stanshall of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Recently, he’d treated himself to a 40-foot cabin cruiser he named the Louis Philippe, which he kept in the harbour at Rye, near Paul’s house, and sailed up and down the English south coast, sometimes with McCartney aboard.

  But the real spark of inspiration had come to Laine when he visited Rod Stewart, recording on the Record Plant’s floating studio in the Pacific waters off LA. ‘I’ve always loved boats and thought it might be an interesting way to record an album,’ said the guitarist, although he wasn’t entirely convinced that McCartney would buy into the idea, having had such trouble in Lagos when deciding to go off-road with Band On The Run. ‘To be honest,’ Laine admitted, ‘I was surprised when Paul said we should give it a try.’ But having just completed the intensive mixing sessions for Wings Over America and gone straight into the making of the next studio album, McCartney was looking for a break from the routine. He viewed this Caribbean jaunt as ‘an experiment to see if we could work better in a holiday atmosphere’.

  An advance party of five techs, including Emerick, John Hammel and assistant engineer Mark Vigars, was sent out to the Virgin Islands at the end of April to oversee the setting-up of the studio. Upon their arrival on St Thomas, they began kitting out a charter yacht named the Fair Carol as a waterborne recording facility. It proved not to be the easiest of tasks.

  The boat was 100 feet long, but narrow. When its captain saw the amount of equipment the team were hoping to install, he freaked. The heavy mixing desk and washing-machine-proportioned 24-track tape machine were bad enough, before factoring in the weighty amps, the cumbersome Mellotron and so on. In the end, an ergonomic plan was agreed upon, involving the gear being lined up on either side of the boat’s lounge-turned-live room and thus equally balanced, in order to avoid difficulties in the water. Carpenters were brought in to build a structure on the open deck to house a control room.

  On 30 April 1977, the Fair Carol set out for Francis Bay, on the neighbouring island of St John, in anticipation of the arrival of the McCartney family, the band and MPL’s Alan Crowder and Brian Brolly. Completing the Wings flotilla was a converted minesweeper called the Samala, providing the band and crew with accommodation and catering (simple English grub such as steak and kidney pie), and a trimaran with a huge living space and lower-deck bedrooms, named the El Toro, that was to be home to the McCartneys.

  The daily routine was a suitably leisurely one: rise around nine, breakfast at ten, followed by a 50-yard commute to the Fair Carol in a motorised rubber dinghy. Record until lunchtime, laze around in the afternoon and then work into the evening, until it was time for dinner and cocktails on the Samala. Unsurp
risingly, this low-gear approach suited Paul: ‘I like to record and not have to feel like it’s too much work. I hate to think, I’m going to work now . . . I’m going to grind out some music.’ Of course, Jimmy McCulloch was much enamoured of this lifestyle that entirely zoned in on music-making and getting high. ‘You don’t have the gas man coming in or mail that you have to act on,’ he pointed out.

  The party would anchor the three boats in bays or harbours at St Croix, St John or St Thomas. Then, whenever the mood took their fancy, they would up and sail away to a new location. As time went on, the motor dinghies were abandoned altogether and they’d just jump off one boat and swim to another. In the manner of a rock-star stag party, they had corny white T-shirts made up, bannering their names in black lettering, along with the legend ‘M.Y. [motor yacht] Samala, Virgin Islands, May 77’. For all involved, this working holiday was an entirely liberating experience. ‘No one wore shoes the whole time,’ noted visiting photographer Henry Diltz.

  ‘The mornings were really beautiful in the bay,’ wrote Alan Crowder in his diary, ‘with jumping fish called “Jumping Jacks”, laughing seagulls, pelicans and very large birds called frigates.’

  Initially, Paul worried about the actual realities of recording on the ocean waves. Day one saw the group take baby steps, reviewing the tapes from Abbey Road and jamming. ‘The big problem with recording on a boat,’ Paul said, ‘was that maybe once we got out there, we might find that salt water had gone through the machines and the equipment, or that they just wouldn’t work.’ In the end, to his relief, the sessions progressed remarkably smoothly: ‘We didn’t have any problems with salt water or sharks attacking us.’

  They conducted one slightly dippy experiment, attempting to record a jam while the boat was in motion. Of course, given the engine noise, it sounded terrible. ‘It was silly and fun, and I don’t think it was very good music,’ says Paul. But, still, in this environment Wings were stretching out in unexpected ways – instead of hammering out old chestnuts such as ‘Lucille’ or ‘Twenty Flight Rock’ in their musical downtime, they might pick their way through Irving Berlin’s ‘Easter Parade’.

  In the afternoons, the McCartney girls would lounge in a hammock, or swing from ropes before freefalling into the blue water. Mary and Stella pestered their father to take turns throwing them over the side of the boat. There was a mini-piano on the Samala that Paul played as the girls danced around the cabin. Absent from school once again, the kids were tutored, though in this environment it took a lot of effort to drag them out of the sun in order to concentrate on their studies.

  The musicians would idly snorkel in the water, spotting sea urchins and starfish and small, harmless barracudas. One day Denny spied a dolphin’s fin moving through the waves and shouted, ‘Shark!’, terrifying a swimming Joe English. On another occasion, Paul sat on the stern deck of the Fair Carol recording an acoustic guitar part as another of the curious creatures circled the boat, surfacing and diving.

  Come evening, everyone sat on the deck of the Samala drinking rum, the boat twinkling with fairy lights. Bats swooped around in the moonlight, trying to catch flying fish. There was much merriment as the more spirited participants took turns, Paul remembers, ‘leaping from top decks into uncharted waters and stuff. I had a couple too many one night and nearly broke something jumping from one boat to another.’

  He escaped with a bruised leg and cut knee. But it was clear that Wings weren’t entirely seaworthy, and soon there were other mishaps. McCulloch was limping around after sustaining a mysterious injury, while Denny, ever the sailor, took off in a one-man Sunfish sailboat to explore the coves around St John. ‘I got lost for five hours,’ he admits. Upon his return, he had to be taken to Caneel Bay on the island and treated by a doctor for severe sunburn. Meanwhile, the injury count kept rising: Geoff Emerick managed to electrocute himself in the foot, and Alan Crowder slipped down a set of stairs and broke his heel, returning from hospital hobbling around on a crutch that made him fittingly resemble Long John Silver.

  All of the wives and girlfriends except Linda having been excluded from the trip, and left back home in Britain and the States, the musicians were soon talking like a bunch of randy sailors. ‘The conversation turns to women every other word,’ said Joe English. ‘If the word isn’t women, it’s girls.’ A sulky Jo Jo Patrie blamed the ban on an insecure and pregnant Linda. ‘I think she was intimidated by the girls perhaps wearing a bikini around Paul,’ she huffed. ‘Jimmy’s girlfriend was the [Playboy] Playmate for February 1976, so we would have both gone down there looking pretty terrific.’

  To blow off steam, and in a further display of jet-set extravagance, McCartney had an MPL employee fly over from London with a videotape of the 1977 Liverpool v. Manchester United FA Cup Final (United triumphed 2–1). In the moonlit early hours of the morning following the screening, there were races in the dinghies as calls of ‘Pursuit, pursuit!’ rang out, along with the more fate-tempting enquiry, ‘Who’s next for the medicos?’

  Dropping anchor in the harbour at St John one night, the band cranked up and jammed at full volume. Unknown to them, there was a ban on amplified music in the area after 10 p.m. McCartney remembers discovering that the rules were so strict that even the use of transistor radios was forbidden. And here were Wings, banging away through a PA. ‘We had a whole thing going,’ he says. ‘You could hear it for miles.’ The noise quickly attracted the attentions of rangers from the national park which covered 60 per cent of the island. Once aboard the rock-star-annexed fleet, they began snooping around, sticking their noses into ashtrays that inevitably contained joint roaches. In the end, Wings luckily escaped with a $15 fine for disrupting the tropical peace. But as the rangers left, the group defiantly struck up again as they sailed around to the nearby Watermelon Bay.

  This kind of behaviour perhaps inevitably drew more in the way of unwanted attention. Soon after, doubtless tipped off by the St John rangers, three US Customs officials made a surprise visit to the boats and, incredibly, left without finding any evidence of soft-drug use. The incident did, however, bring to a head a growing disagreement between McCartney and the captain of the El Toro, who had smelled marijuana smoke on the boat on the night the band had arrived, and threatened to report them to the authorities. Now, after this latest development, he turned menacing.

  ‘He was a little sort of heavier than the other captains,’ says McCartney. ‘He took it a little more seriously. We had an argument with him, and I said, “Y’know, we don’t need all this aggro.”’ The owners of another boat located in the harbour, the Wanderlust, had already offered the use of the catamaran to the McCartneys, and so, before they ended up in trouble again, they took this opportunity to literally jump ship. Paul wrote a song about the experience, giving it the title ‘Wanderlust’ and referring in the lyric to a captain out to make his mark and warning of a bust. The craft seemed ‘a symbol of freedom to me . . . breaking away from oppression . . . let’s get out of here.’

  On 22 May, a letter was sent to Alan Crowder from Peter Baker, the agent who arranged the charter of the boats. It read: ‘Dear Alan, As you know the yachts Fair Carol, Samala and El Toro were recently visited by US Customs officials.

  ‘I must emphasise to you and the group that the possession or use of mariahuana [sic] is illegal in the Virgin Islands. And that includes possession or use onboard a boat in territorial waters.

  ‘Please make sure that no drugs, illegal drugs or narcotics of course are taken on board or used on board any of the three yachts now on charter to you and the group. Apart from anything else, illegal actions are specifically excluded by the charter agreement and could give us valid grounds for advising the owner to conclude the charter.’

  In a rebellious mood, the band asked photographer Henry Diltz to take a picture of the letter, ornamented with a pack of Bambu rolling papers and the butt of a spliff.

  The band returned to the UK re-energised, their heads buzzing with thoughts of other unusual locations t
hey might record in. They talked about putting a studio on a train and travelling across Canada. ‘Next year, darling,’ Paul jested, ‘I was thinking of hiring a string of cable cars in the Bavarian Alps.’

  Back home, however, the music scene was changing, with the dawning of punk having made the soft rock of bands like Wings sound outdated virtually overnight. McCartney, perhaps to his credit, stuck to his guns musically, even if he recognised it might find him being labelled a dinosaur. ‘The hard nuts of the music business, the critics, are gonna hate me because I’m not writing about acne,’ he moaned. Still, this extreme shift in musical fashion, he stressed, now made The Beatles seem as if they were from another age entirely, even if it had only been seven years since they’d broken up. No one, he harshly argued, could ‘think of The Beatles as a current group, no matter which way you looked at it’.

  In private, Paul and Linda joked about going punk, giving themselves the suitably snotty nicknames Noxious Fumes and Vile Lin. Writer and broadcaster Paul Gambaccini, visiting the recording sessions in the Virgin Islands, had been surprised to hear Linda singing The Damned’s ‘Neat Neat Neat’ to herself one day aboard the Fair Carol. It turned out that Heather, now fourteen, was into punk. Paul – no stranger to the compelling powers of primal rock’n’roll after the days of his youth in Hamburg – noticed a remarkable transformation in his daughter after she had gone to see The Stranglers. ‘She came back a changed person, over the moon, just loved it,’ he said.

  At Abbey Road, on his return from the Caribbean, McCartney even knocked off a comedy punk song, as a jokey gift to Heather, entitled ‘Boil Crisis’. He revealed to one journalist the opening lines of the piss-taking lyric: ‘One night in the life of a kid named Sid, he scored with a broad in a pyramid.’ McCartney realised, of course, that he couldn’t put the song out, no matter how tongue-in-cheek it was intended to be. ‘If I release it,’ he rightly pointed out, ‘people will only slag me of.’ Instead, his typically whimsical, typically eccentric response was to go in entirely the opposite direction, with a song in the traditional Scottish folk style extolling the beauty of the south-western tip of the Kintyre peninsula.