Paul McCartney (32 page)

Thus, well before any talk of gurus or spiritual guides among the other Beatles, Paul and Jane sought an audience with Bertrand Russell, Britain’s greatest twentieth-century philosopher and a founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The nonagenarian Russell listened to their concerns, then delivered advice of great wisdom: they should enjoy every minute to the full for as long as they could.

Their domestic life at Cavendish, amid the Magrittes and James Bond gadgets and ‘working-class posh’, was unpretentious in the extreme. Jane was an excellent cook and, in that pre-feminist era, accepted her role was to prepare meals and otherwise care for the man of the house. Several years before Paul’s much-publicised renunciation of meat, the cuisine was largely if not entirely vegetarian.

She was likewise a gracious hostess when his relations came down from Merseyside to stay. A special red carpet was always rolled out for his beloved Auntie Gin, the matriarch of the McCartney clan. When Gin’s visit coincided with the annual tennis championships at Wimbledon, Paul paid a small fortune to get her prime seats on Centre Court. But she preferred to stay home and watch the matches on his miraculous colour TV.

Jim McCartney was a frequent visitor, with his new wife Angie and his newly-adopted small daughter Ruth. Jane was especially kind and attentive to Ruth, teaching her to cook, sew and crochet. ‘The two of them were always taking me on outings, like to Hamleys toyshop,’ Ruth says. ‘However relieved they may have been when it came time to give me back to my mum, they never showed it.’

Despite Jim’s enormous pride in his son’s new home, Ruth recalls, he could seem a little out of his depth there. ‘One Christmas when we were visiting, Jane had commissioned family trees for Paul and herself. The Ashers dated back to the reign of King James, but the McCartneys only did to some late nineteenth century, dirt-poor farmer in Ireland.’

Jane was no Stepford wife, however, and there could be tensions when her independent-mindedness and plain-spokenness ran up against the reality of who her boyfriend really was. Modest and unaffected though Paul might seem, he was an enormous star, courted by the whole world and with a manager and support team dedicated to gratifying his every whim. Even at home, he generally had someone on standby to take care of whatever came into his head–one of the Beatles’ two roadies, Neil Aspinall or Mal Evans, or Tony Bramwell from the NEMS office. And whenever the sacred four congregated, to rehearse or record, the same northern-chauvinist rule applied as ever: ‘No birds’.

At Wimpole Street, he and Jane had kept their social lives mainly separate. At Cavendish, she naturally wanted to entertain her theatre friends, and the mix of luvvies and rockers could sometimes be awkward. One evening when she had some fellow actors to dinner, Paul arrived home with John, who–whether the result of drink or pot or just plain Lennonness–was at his most maliciously provocative. When one of the actresses at the table nervously requested an ashtray, he knelt beside her and facetiously offered one of his nostrils for the purpose. Jane, with her usual sangfroid, simply extended a foot and pushed him over.

At the end of 1965, Jane had become a lead player in the Bristol Old Vic theatre company, which took her away for weeks, sometimes months at a time. With her safely 200 miles away in the West Country, and no paparazzi yet to worry about, Paul could revert to being a singleton. While he sat in clubs, beautiful young women on the dance-floor would turn away from their partners and start miming a strip-tease just for him. His sexual antenna as keen as his cultural one, he could always tell in advance which one it would be.

The coast was also clear for pot-smoking, which usually happened in his top-floor music room, to keep the fumes away from Mr and Mrs Kelly. It was there that he claimed to have turned on Mick Jagger for the very first time. Nice to think of pop’s foremost good boy sending its foremost bad boy thus off the rails.

In August 1966, at Candlestick Park, San Francisco, the Beatles gave their last-ever live concert from a conventional stage to a conventional audience. The four had been on the major league concert-circuit for only three years: an amazingly brief time compared with the Rolling Stones, who would still be performing as septuagenarians. But the wonder of it was that they hadn’t quit long before then.

The breaking-point was a summer-long Far East and American tour which revealed how drastically the world had changed in those three years–and also how pitifully inadequate was the protection they took with them on the road. In Tokyo, they received death threats from Japanese nationalists who objected to the martial arts-sanctified Budokan Hall being used for a pop concert. In the Philippines, they were roughed up by police and airport staff after unwittingly ‘insulting’ the president, Ferdinand Marcos, by missing a photo-op with his narcissistic first lady, Imelda.

Then, in August, came the American tour whose advance publicity was the so-called ‘butcher’ album cover and John’s observation that Christianity was fated to ‘vanish’ and the Beatles were ‘probably more popular than Jesus now’.

The butcher cover enclosed a for-America-only compilation, The Beatles–Yesterday and Today, and showed the foursome looking like soulful art students no longer, but wearing white overalls and playing with bloody joints of meat, strings of raw sausages and dismembered plastic dolls (actually not such a far-fetched image, since George had once been a butcher’s delivery boy and the Quarrymen had performed at an abattoir).

Their American label, Capitol, at first saw nothing amiss with this alleged ‘pop art experiment’; only when people started gagging over the first store-deliveries were 75,000 copies hastily recalled for another picture to be pasted over them. Paul had favoured the drastic image-change as much as the others–even if it was linked to the most beguiling of his songs–and resented the censorship as much as they did.

John’s ‘more popular than Jesus’ comment threatened to cause an actual bloodbath. It had, in fact, been made months earlier, in the London Evening Standard, without creating much comment, let alone controversy. Reprinted now in the American teen magazine Datebook, it caused outrage throughout the South’s Bible Belt. Where Beatles shows had once provoked harmless rapture, they now provoked denunciatory sermons, boycotts, bonfires of their records and promises of vengeance by the Christian fundamentalist and racist Ku Klux Klan. In a moment of horrible prophecy, John said that they might as well pin a target on him there and then.

Long before this, playing live had become a joyless and sterile business. Thanks to the unceasing, mindless screams that assailed them on every continent, they hadn’t been able to hear themselves onstage since late 1963. They could hit wrong notes, forget the simplest words (as even Paul did in ‘A Hard Day’s Night’) and nobody would notice. At their historic Shea Stadium show, they’d been so out of tune and out of time that they later had to re-record or overdub the songs for its film documentary. A band that used to keep going all night in Hamburg was now onstage barely 15 minutes, and tried to reduce even that by galloping through the six or seven songs on the playlist.

The millions who so envied their collective public life little dreamed what it was really like on the inside. John would later sum it up as ‘madness from morning to night with not one moment’s peace… living with each other in a room for four years… being kicked, beaten up, walked into walls, pushed…’

Modern rock star egos may rival the nastier Roman emperors’, but being a Beatle under Brian Epstein’s aegis above all meant staying smiley and co-operative in the face of no matter what monstrous demand, discomfort or even danger. It meant uncomplainingly huddling on the back of a flatbed truck in the teeth of a Hong Kong monsoon, or preparing for a Barcelona show in a matadors’ infirmary, complete with mortuary slabs. It meant being nice to endless relays of boring, bombastic local dignitaries, officious police chiefs and dumbstruck dumb-cluck journalists. It meant the front row of every arena consisting of children in wheelchairs, who would afterwards be brought backstage to touch them, as if the Liverpool lads had become endowed with the healing-power of Lourdes.

Both John and George had long since wearied of all this, but Paul seemed to thrive on it. When they were trapped in hotels by shrieking crowds, he often donned a disguise, including a false beard or moustache, slipped through the police-cordons and walked around, observing the craziness with the dispassion of some benign anthropologist. And whatever his private feelings, that look of angelic amiability never left his face. The band’s press officer, Derek Taylor, remembered him looking through an aircraft window at some girls who’d invaded the tarmac, smiling and waving while simultaneously muttering ‘Get them out of here’ through lips as rigid as a ventriloquist’s.

He hadn’t lost his appetite for performing as the others had–nor would he ever. But he, too, accepted that the live shows had become intolerable and agreed that the recording studio offered infinitely more possibilities. As Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting had grown more ambitious, so their producer, George Martin, had given them increasing freedom at Abbey Road, the former control-room autocrat using all his classical music training to put John’s or Paul’s Midas-touch whims into practice. Much of Rubber Soul therefore consisted of tracks impossible for them to play onstage in their usual guitar-bass-drums format.

Since then, their acolytes-turned-challengers across the Atlantic had given fresh impetus to their ambition in the studio. After hearing Rubber Soul, the Beach Boys held a spontaneous prayer-meeting to ask the Almighty’s help in making an album even half as good. And the Almighty had facilitated the creation of Pet Sounds, on which the cool, blowsy harmonic genius of Brian Wilson reached its apotheosis.

The Beatles’ riposte to Pet Sounds was their Revolver album, released in the summer of 1966, between their on-the-road ordeals in the Far East and America. Swinging London in full swing, England footballers victorious in the World Cup and unbroken glorious sunshine together produced a national mood of euphoria and self-congratulation. And, although there was a superabundance of great pop around (the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’, the Kinks’ ‘Sunny Afternoon’, the Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Summer in the City’, the Mamas and Papas’ ‘Monday Monday’), Revolver, above all, provided the soundtrack.

It was hailed, without undue surprise, as the Beatles’ biggest creative leap forward to date. But even more notable was Paul’s personal creative leap within it. His ‘Good Day Sunshine’ and ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ both perfectly caught the moment: slick, soul-influenced anthems for the newly-popular discotheques, soaked in the atmosphere of London in that mythic season, its hot pavements, its wasp-striped minidresses, the mace-shaped, shimmering Post Office Tower symbolising how life for its young seemed to grow measurably better every day.

‘Yellow Submarine’, on the other hand, came out of nowhere; like ‘Yesterday’, Paul had thought of it in the zone between sleeping and waking when his mind took trips that needed no acid. Ostensibly a children’s song, to fill Ringo’s one-vocal-per-album quota, it was recorded like a latter-day Goon Show, with zany voices and maritime sound-effects like hooters, whistles and bells. At the end, the Beatles put down their instruments, took off their headphones and danced the conga, led by roadie Mal Evans banging a bass drum. So the studio could be more fun that the stage had ever been.

Paul’s spectacular Revolver songs were not prompted by bursting confidence, as was generally assumed, but by the insecurity from which no one ever imagined he could suffer.

As he so often did, he’d been wondering what would happen when he reached the inconceivable age of 30; by which time the whole Beatles thing would presumably be over and all he’d have left would be songwriting. Picturing himself in middle-age, smoking a pipe and wearing a leather-elbowed tweed jacket–exactly like his father still did–he set himself to write the ‘mature’ kind of song he’d need to then if he didn’t want to starve. And ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was the result.

Where inspiration strikes can be as interesting as why F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote much of his New York Jazz-age fable The Great Gatsby on the French Riviera, and James Joyce some of Dubliners while a hard-up language-teacher in Italy. So now a 24-year-old pop star in his St John’s Wood mansion, in between nightclubbing and parties, imagined a lonely old woman, picking up rice from a church-floor after a wedding, and a threadbare priest as the only mourner at her funeral.

The name Eleanor Rigby was carved on a gravestone in the churchyard of St Peter’s, Woolton, where Paul had first met John and where they’d often hung out as Quarrymen. But Paul has always been adamant that was never consciously in his mind. Originally he meant to call his melancholy church-sweeper Daisy Hawkins, and for a time sang the nonsense syllables ‘Ola Na Tungee’ when demo-ing the melody, like ‘scrambled eggs’ with ‘Yesterday’. By his account, the Eleanor came from Eleanor Bron, the British comedy actress who’d appeared in Help! and with whom John had become infatuated. Then, on a visit to Bristol to see Jane in a play at the Old Vic, he’d passed the shop-front of a wine-importers named Rigby & Evans.

Personal to him though the vision was–suffused with the Irishness of his ancestors and the Catholicism into which he’d been born, although never practised–it evolved with traditional Beatle togetherness. Only the first verse was written in confessional solitude: the remainder took shape at John’s house in Weybridge, with input from him, George, Ringo and even John’s old school crony Pete Shotton. Paul had planned to call the melancholy priest Father McCartney but, at Shotton’s suggestion, substituted ‘McKenzie’ lest it be seen as a portrait of his dad, pathetically ‘darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there’–a line supplied by Ringo. From George came the ‘all the lonely people’ refrain, which broadened the Joycean short story into a lament for the elderly and neglected everywhere.

At different stages, Paul tried it out on Donovan (who later remembered lyrics completely different from the final ones), on William S. Burroughs (who praised their conciseness, far from Naked Lunch though they were) and on his piano-teacher from the Guildhall School (who was indifferent).