Wings’ continuing struggle to be taken seriously was further illustrated that same year, 1972, when Paul agreed to provide a title song for the latest James Bond film, Live and Let Die. Having written the song, he went into the studio on his own to record it with Wings, using the Beatles’ old producer, George Martin, to score and produce it. A justifiably excited Martin then played the result to the Bond film’s American co-producers Harry Salzman and Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. “Great demo,” they enthused. “Now…who are we going to get to make the record?” It took all Martin’s powers of persuasion to convince them that Paul McCartney’s imprimatur could take Bond to a new, younger market and that they shouldn’t call up Shirley Bassey or Lulu. “Live and Let Die” became a Top Ten single for Wings and was rated the best Bond theme since John Barry’s original one for Dr. No in 1962.
This breakthrough was consolidated by their 1973 album Band on the Run, whose packaging was both an oblique allusion to their spell as highway-wandering outsiders and a throwback to Sgt. Pepper in-jokiness. The cover showed a melodramatically slinking posse of cloaked “fugitives” including the Hollywood actor James Coburn, the television interviewer Michael Parkinson, and the gourmet-soon-to-be-Liberal-MP Clement Freud. Two tracks from the album, its title song and “Jet”—a number likewise hinting at bonds triumphantly burst and the accelerator now pressed down flat—each became huge-selling singles.
From here on, Wings would compete with David Bowie, Elton John, T-Rex, and Queen as the surest crowd-pullers of 1970s glitter rock. Their 1976 American tour sold out every venue, and found no chat-show hosts snickering now. For Paul it was an especially sweet triumph, coming as it did exactly ten years after the Beatles’ farewell concert in San Francisco.
Although Allen Klein had retained managerial control of John, George, and Ringo until 1973 (as he did of the Rolling Stones until 1975), Paul had the further satisfaction of seeing “the Robin Hood of Pop” finally go down with an arrow in his back. In 1977, two years after Klein finally ended all connections with the Beatles, he was charged on six counts of income tax evasion by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Thanks mainly to incriminating testimony from his old associate, the scary Pete Bennett, he was convicted of failing to declare income made from the illicit sale of promo Beatles albums. He was fined five thousand dollars and sent to prison for two months.
From here on, the new brand of McCartney songs rolled forth in the new, faintly mid-Atlantic McCartney voice that had Linda’s insubstantial harmony clinging permanently to its underside like barnacles to a ship’s keel. They were always catchy, always pleasant, always empty of real content and lacking that extra effort and edge that used to come from John peering over his shoulder.
The honed perfection of a lyric like “Eleanor Rigby” or “Yesterday” was replaced by sloppy first drafts of half-thoughts: “Silly Love Songs,” “Listen to What the Man Said,” or “Let ’Em In,” the latter merely a rambling name check—reminiscent of John’s on “Give Peace a Chance”—from “Martin Luther” (King) and “Phil and Don” (Everly) to McCartney family members like “brother Michael” and Auntie Jin. Clunky rhymes got through that John would have mocked to the skies (“The county judge / held a grudge”). The relentless journey to the middle of the road that had begun with “When I’m Sixty-Four” took another less-than-giant step when he agreed that Wings should record the theme music for television’s tackiest soap opera, Crossroads. To Beatle-Paul fans (now being fast overtaken by Wings-Paul ones) his Crossroads instrumental seemed the nadir—but they were soon to be proved wrong.
In 1977, inspired by the tract of water near his Argyllshire farm, and gratefully recalling its healing properties during his post-Beatles depression, he wrote a ballad entitled “Mull of Kintyre.” Recorded at dirgelike tempo, with full bagpipe accompaniment, it seemed to have all the appeal of Fort William on a wet afternoon. Reviewers in the domestic pop press (who then still aspired to a degree of literacy) were unanimous in calling it the dreariest, blandest solo McCartney production yet. It stayed at number one in the U.K. for nine weeks, sold two million copies, and was to remain Britain’s top-selling single until Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” in 1984.
With Wings now triumphantly spread, Paul set up a publishing company, MPL (McCartney Productions Ltd). The organization was as small and low-key as Apple had been diffuse and flamboyant, operating from one unshowy office in London’s Soho Square and another in New York. The New York end was run by Linda’s brother John, with frequent recourse to the legal expertise of her father, Lee—the very management team, in fact, that Paul had once proposed should run the Beatles.
The new company was not long in pulling off a major publishing coup. In 1975, the song catalog of Buddy Holly, the Beatles’ first great idol and inspiration, was put up for sale by Holly’s former manager, Norman Petty. For a knockdown price of less than one million dollars, MPL snapped up the rights to Holly’s music in the United States and Canada. So moved was Paul to have become the custodian of “That’ll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue,” and all the rest that he decreed an annual “Buddy Holly Week” of Holly-related concerts and events that was to be faithfully observed for some years afterward. Norman Petty himself came over from New Mexico to inaugurate the first Buddy Holly Week; at the celebration lunch, he presented Paul with the cufflinks Holly had been wearing at his death in a plane crash in February 1959.
That was just the beginning for MPL, whose body may have been small but whose mouth quickly proved as large and ever open as that of an angler fish. Over the following years, often acting on advice from Lee Eastman, it gobbled up the publishing for a succession of hit stage shows, including A Chorus Line, Grease, Annie, and Hello, Dolly!, as well as for innumerable standards and even TV theme music, notably that for Lucille Ball’s 1950s comedy show, I Love Lucy.
Paul had always fought shy of the rock star’s lifestyle. Now, as his new band rocked the world, as he found his wealth growing far beyond any he had ever known as a Beatle, his personal life became proportionally more modest. By the mid-seventies he and Linda and their growing brood had left London, keeping on his old St. John’s Wood mansion as a pied-à-terre but settling permanently in a small house near Rye, Sussex. Given that those were far safer, less media-intrusive times, it was still an extraordinarily unpretentious and accessible roost for a multimillionaire ex-Beatle. It had neither security fences nor patrolling guard dogs; for many years, indeed, the entrance to its front drive did not even have gates. “It wasn’t much more than a hole in the hedge,” remembers one McCartney fan who trekked down for a look. “I used to think how many cars passed that gate each day without ever knowing Paul was there.”
The interior was equally unshowy, save for Paul’s growing collection of modern art. Ever the autodidact, he had developed a passion for twentieth-century American painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning (the latter, fortuitously, a client of Lee Eastman’s). The knack for cartooning that he himself had had since school days now developed into full-blown painting, though as yet for purely recreational purposes.
His house might look open and accessible, but Paul guarded its privacy as fiercely as if it were surrounded by razor wire and searchlights. Most people, and almost all journalists, thought he lived in the rather larger and more opulent mill house nearby that he’d turned into a recording studio. Even some of his closest professional colleagues never got to see inside his real home. A public relations man who worked closely with him during the late seventies remembers being kept firmly at arm’s length in this way. When they needed to discuss something the PR man would drive down from London, wait in his car outside the house, and Paul would emerge and talk to him there.
After Mary in 1969, Linda bore two more children: Stella (born in 1971) and James (Paul’s baptismal name, born in 1977). Together with Linda’s daughter Heather, they grew up in an atmosphere of absolute parental love and security, with a father who could not have been more hands-on. Unlike most r
ock-star kids, however, none was in the least spoiled: all four were born in National Health maternity wards, attended local state schools, and were firmly inculcated with the old-fashioned Liverpudlian virtues of politeness, considerateness, and respect that their grandfather, Jim McCartney, had unknowingly bequeathed them.
Linda immersed herself in family and country life, proving to be a devoted mother and an increasingly skillful cook (witness that rather patronizing album track, “Cook of the House”). Under her influence, Paul became both a vegetarian and an animal rights enthusiast, proselytizing to the extent of hanging GO VEGGIE banners above the stage at Wings concerts—so fueling the worst fears of Beatle-Paul fans who’d wondered what “she” would do to him next.
From their Sussex neighbours, the couple won esteem for their refusal to come on like rock ’n’ roll royalty and their obvious love and respect for the surrounding countryside. The only waves they made in the community came from their fierce opposition to the local hunt—and flat refusal to allow it to cross their land. When the district’s only NHS hospital was threatened with closure, Paul stepped in and donated enough money to keep it going. Despite her crowded new domestic life, Linda persisted with her photography, snapping her husband, children, animals, and surroundings at every opportunity and putting together a Christmas calendar made from the best of her year’s shots.
At some moment in the mid-seventies, British pop journalists ceased referring to Wings’ front man as “Paul” and instead dubbed him “Macca.” Though merely a contraction of “McCartney,” vaguely evoking both his Irish and Liverpool working-class heritage, it perfectly fitted the new and very different persona that came more clearly into definition with each seven-league leap of solo success. Whereas Paul, in Beatles times, had suggested almost saintly softness and charm, Macca suggested something altogether tougher and more synthetic; a perhaps-not-too-distant cousin to Formica. Whereas Paul had been adept at concealing his prodigious vanity from the world, Macca sometimes let it show as helplessly as a “flasher” in a raincoat on Clapham Common. Whereas Paul had steered a largely trouble-free path through the minefields of pop stardom, Macca at times would seem almost hell-bent on blundering into the most obvious trip wires.
His and Linda’s devotion to family values did not prevent them from still indulging the emblematic habit of sixties flower children. They used marijuana, both at home and while traveling with Wings. And, alas, there was now no magic shield to protect pot-smoking ex-Beatles from retribution.
John Lennon has gone down in history as the band’s most reckless drug user; in fact, Paul in the post-Beatles years would be busted more times, and more spectacularly, than John ever was. It happened twice in 1972 for cannabis possession—first in Sweden, then on the McCartneys’ Scottish farm. Another bust came in 1984 while they were vacationing in Barbados; the following day, when they and their children arrived back at Heathrow Airport, further cannabis was found in Linda’s luggage.
But worst by far was the Tokyo bust of January 1980, an episode almost suggesting that the new Macca-Paul was bent on a subconscious course of hara-kiri. In the whole addle-brained history of pop stars and forbidden substances, it’s hard to find anyone else who has acted so stupidly or paid so scary a price.
His reputation at that moment, ironically, was at an all-time high. A month earlier, he had organized a series of London concerts, headlined by Wings, to aid refugees in Kampuchea, formerly Cambodia—a gesture of altruism still comparatively rare among pop superstars that in effect prepared the ground for Bob Geldof and Live Aid four years later. Hence that breathless moment of almost Beatles reunion, with George and Ringo reportedly willing to appear onstage with Paul if it would send more milk and penicillin to the Kampuchean refugees, but John flatly deflating the whole idea and remaining firm even against pleas from the UN’s secretary-general.
Wings then departed on a world tour, of which the high point was to be their first-ever performances in Japan. Despite Paul’s huge fan base there, he had been repeatedly denied a Japanese visa as a result of his 1972 drug busts. Now, thanks to intense diplomatic and entrepreneurial lobbying, not to mention his current high standing with the UN, he was to be allowed in at last.
The celebratory atmosphere of the visit was to be short-lived. When Paul arrived at Tokyo airport, customs officers found 219 grams of marijuana in a toiletries bag placed on top of the clothes in his suitcase. He was arrested, charged with possession—an offense carrying a maximum seven-year sentence—and then thrown into prison. Only after nine days of further intense diplomatic activity did the authorities release and instantly deport him.
He arrived back in Britain more chastened than his public had ever seen him, pale, hollow-eyed, and visibly shaken by prison conditions that he compared, with a ghost of his old flippancy, to The Bridge on the River Kwai. About the offense itself he said nothing, so adding further fuel to a rumor that the marijuana had actually belonged to Linda and that he’d taken the rap for her, just as Mick Jagger had for Marianne Faithfull in the famous “Mars bar” bust of 1967.
The other members of Wings were understandably outraged at the worldwide notoriety their leader had brought down on their heads. After Paul, the band’s main instrumental linchpin had been Denny Laine, an insouciant character who always seemed able to ride the Macca bossiness and egotism. But now even Laine had had enough and quit the band without notice—so making its breakup inevitable—afterward writing a song, “Japanese Tears,” that attacked Paul in terms almost as bitter as John’s “How Do You Sleep?”
After this traumatic and demeaning episode there would be no more glimpses of the real McCartney for a long time to come. Even the shock of John’s murder, eight months later, produced no public sign of the devastation that he was suffering. “Yeah, it’s a drag, isn’t it?” he said to the besieging media pack as off-handedly as if it were something no more serious than a record slipping out of the Top Ten.
Words often come out wrongly at moments of anguish. No one could possibly blame him for not producing a polished sound bite to express what a huge part of his life Mark David Chapman’s bullets had blown away. Just the same, there was something vital missing from his public response, just as there was from George Harrison’s. The people whose greatest gift next to music had been the gift of the gab, who had always known just the right thing to say at any given moment, now astonished the grieving world with their gaucherie and gracelessness. More tellingly, neither appeared to think the tragedy sufficiently important to rearrange their lives for. Of the three remaining ex-Beatles, only Ringo immediately dropped everything and flew to New York as a public gesture of support for John’s family.
From here on, Paul would seem intent on proving he didn’t need Wings any more than he had the Beatles. And so his public seemed to reassure him. In 1989 and again in 1993, he undertook world tours, accompanied by Linda and an unnamed backing band, and dispensing with most of Wings’ flashy glam-rock effects. Both tours combined brought him an ecstatic audience numbering around 2,500,000; on a single night in Rio de Janeiro during the first, he played to a crowd of 184,000.
No one better symbolized the dawning era of brotherhood and cooperation among rock stars—or was more adept at turning it to his personal advantage. During the early eighties, he recorded duets with two major black performers, in each of which he managed to express deference and respect to his covocalist while at the same time shamelessly hogging the mike. With the former Motown prodigy Stevie Wonder in 1982 he recorded “Ebony and Ivory,” a plea for racial harmony with rhymes (“piano keyboard” and “Oh, Lord” for instance) that one would hardly have expected from the writer of “Eleanor Rigby.” With Michael Jackson—soon to be as big to the eighties as the Beatles had been to the sixties—he recorded “The Girl Is Mine” (1982) and “Say Say Say” (1983).
Since the Family Way and Black Dyke Mills Band days people had been urging him to try his hand at writing classical music. In the early nineties, seemingly with no new p
op worlds left to conquer, he decided the time had come. He may have had no formal training in classical theory or scoring—but he was Paul McCartney. The result was Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio, drawing on recognizably the same childhood echoes as had “Penny Lane” and “Eleanor Rigby.” It received its world premiere at Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral in 1991, performed by a full symphony orchestra and chorus conducted by Carl Davis, who shared composing credit with Paul. Dame Kiri Te Kanawa headed a solo quartet that included Sally Burgess, Jerry Hadley, and Willard White. Though deserving no epithet much stronger than “pleasant,” the Liverpool Oratorio was received with as much critical rapture as a long-lost work by Bach or Handel: It went on to play in London at the Royal Festival Hall and in New York at Carnegie Hall, and in other venues.
Not everything he touched, however, was to turn instantly to the gold of million-selling records. In 1984, MPL had moved into feature films with Give My Regards to Broad Street, a nine-million-dollar project inspired by the imminent closure of London’s Broad Street railway station. As the lamely punning title (on Give My Regards to Broadway) suggested, it was Paul’s pet project; like The Magical Mystery Tour seventeen years earlier, it revealed his fatal tendency not to think things through properly but believe he could just wing it on McCartney Pied-Piper magic. He himself was said to have largely written the script, which concerned a famous pop star’s picaresque quest for some lost demo tapes, but was above all a device for putting Paul McCartney, soft-focused to mid-sixties youth and prettiness, in the dead center of almost every frame. As in Mystery Tour, various accomplished actors and performers wandered in and out of shot, obviously wondering what the hell it was all about but still tickled beyond measure to be working in Beatle Heaven.
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