Paul McCartney (61 page)

It reached number five in the UK and ten in America, but was the unwisest possible prelude to appearing before Campbeltown Sheriff Court.

Paul’s trial, on 8 March 1973, brought the world’s media to Kintyre and caused telescopic camera lenses to be trained for the first time from the slopes above High Park Farm. But the outcome was better than he’d dared to hope.

Just before the case came to court, his barrister, John McCluskey QC–a future Solicitor-General for Scotland–spotted procedural errors in two of the three charges against him. McCluskey and solicitor Len Murray sought a private meeting with Campbeltown’s Procurator Fiscal, or prosecutor, Iain Stewart, who conceded both errors and agreed to accept a not guilty plea on two of the charges in question if Paul would plead guilty to the third. The McCartney legal team could not but feel a twinge of sympathy for the Procurator as he lamented that he’d practised law for 30 years in obscurity and now that the eyes of the world were about to be on him, he’d botched his case.

For his court-appearance, Paul exchanged the persona of local sheep-farmer for that of international superstar, flying up from London with Linda in a private jet. At Machrihanish airport, they were met by Murray and McCluskey and driven in the solicitor’s Jaguar to Campbeltown’s granite Victorian courthouse. Paul was told that two of the charges would be dropped if he admitted the third one and (according to Murray) replied ‘Yes, let’s go with that and get it over with’ while Linda ‘sat quietly, sipping an orange juice’.

The case lasted barely 25 minutes. In mitigation, McCluskey told Sheriff Donald J. McDairmid that his client had had ‘an interest in horticulture for many years’–causing an involuntary spasm of mirth among the assembled journalists–and that fans often sent him gifts of seeds by post, which he planted in his greenhouse without necessarily knowing what they were. Those five spikey-leaved culprits were just such an innocent modern version of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’.

McCluskey added that the matter was already potentially damaging to Paul since America’s immigration authorities refused admission to drug-offenders on principle even where the offence was, as in this case, purely technical.

Sheriff McDairmid’s summing-up suggested a swingeing penalty. ‘I take into account that the seeds were sent to you as a gift,’ he told Paul, ‘but I also take into account that you are a public figure of considerable interest to young people and I must deal with you accordingly.’ A fine of just £100 was then imposed. As if pleading for some penniless vagrant hauled up for urinating in public, his counsel requested time for him to pay off the £100, and the court granted a month.

Outside the courthouse, Paul gave an impromptu press conference with Linda clinging to his arm and jokily wearing John McCluskey’s bowler hat. As many a hack noted, she was ‘in high spirits’–whether assisted by seeds received in the post would never be known–and seemed to be treating the occasion with less than due seriousness.

A totally serious Paul was at his diplomatic best as he paid tribute to the Sheriff as ‘a great guy’ and said he bore his prosecutors no ill will. ‘You have to be careful, like [with] Prohibition in the olden days… I think the law should be changed. I don’t think cannabis is as dangerous as drink. But I’m dead against hard drugs, though.’

His case would have received greater media attention but for the conflict for which his solution had been ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’. That same day, an IRA bomb exploded at London’s Old Bailey law courts, killing one person and injuring 125. The following morning’s front pages were full of blood-soaked lawyers and court officials rather than cannabis-cultivating pop stars.

But one exchange with a BBC reporter was horribly prophetic of a similar, far less lucky experience, seven years in the future:

PAUL: ‘Well, I’m glad to have got off like this y’know. I’m glad it wasn’t jail.’

BBC man: ‘Did you think it might have been?’

PAUL: ‘I thought it might have been, but I would have been OK as long as I could have taken my guitar in with me.’

‘Screw you, I’ll make an album you’ll wish you’d been on’

On 16 April 1973, America’s ABC TV network broadcast a one-hour special entitled James Paul McCartney. Its aim was to restore a public image dented by two recent drugs-busts, two singles that had been the subject of broadcasting bans and a third that many radio stations had refused to play; it also acted as a substitute for a getting-to-know-Wings tour. Unimpressed that Paul’s Scottish drug offence had been adjudged merely technical, the US Immigration Service had revoked his visa.

The special’s British makers were Associated Television, the same organisation which had bought up Lennon and McCartney’s back catalogue with Northern Songs four years earlier. As much as Paul might hanker for an hour’s prime-time exposure on ATV’s national network and syndication to American ABC, the company’s chairman, now Sir Lew Grade, was ordinarily the last person for whom he’d want to work.

That he did so now was a result of his determination to make Linda his musical equal. Although he and John had lost the copyrights in their entire Beatles oeuvre, Northern Songs continued to have them under exclusive contract as composers and to expect further Lennon–McCartney works yielding the same rich rewards as in the past. Instead, Paul was providing songs credited jointly to Linda and himself, of which Northern could therefore claim only 50 per cent.

The result was a lawsuit from Northern’s US subsidiary Maclen, claiming back $1 million in royalties. Maclen (i.e. McCartney–Lennon) had originally been set up as a conduit for Paul’s music with John; he was thus being sued by a company bearing half his own surname. In the wake of his High Court victory, more tortuous litigation threatened, with an outcome by no means as assured. Then Sir Lew, that consummate deal-maker, offered a solution: he’d drop the lawsuit if Paul would make the TV special (and also write theme music for an ATV drama series, The Zoo Gang).

As part of the peace settlement, Paul’s company, McCartney Music, entered into a seven-year co-publishing agreement with ATV Music for the songs he wrote with Linda. In return, a number of his post-Beatles song-copyrights, which had automatically gone to Northern Songs, would revert to McCartney Music at the expiry of the agreement in 1980.

Normally in television specials dedicated to a single entertainer, the star brings on guests to share duets or take part in comedy sketches. But James Paul McCartney dispensed with this formula: the whole hour was purely Paul, assisted by Linda and Wings, in film-and studio-sequences aimed at pleasing absolutely everyone.

So here he was with Wings playing ‘Big Barn Bed’ in front of a bank of TV monitors, then by himself perched on a stool, stroking a left-hand guitar and humming ‘Blackbird’ as Linda knelt in front of him with her camera, adding the occasional diffident harmony. Here he was now out of doors, defiantly reprising ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ with Wings, a largeish flock of sheep nudging his piano and Linda in a Victorian gown and picture-hat, seated on a swing and playing a tambourine.

Here he was now indoors again, playing ‘My Love’ from Red Rose Speedway, another ode to Linda, like ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, so far beyond his usual Wingspan that the dream-voices which had whispered ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Let It Be’ into his ear might have returned.

In an early example of pop video, here was ‘Uncle Albert’ (minus the ‘Admiral Halsey’ section) with Paul as a mustachioed business executive, attended by Linda as a bespectacled PA, ringing up a whole harem of Uncle Alberts. Cut to a tribute to his roots: a filmed sequence of Liverpool docks and terraced streets and a pub reunion of the extensive McCartney clan with Paul leading a sing-song of old favourites–his no less than theirs–like ‘April Showers’ and ‘California Here I Come’. Here were the show’s only guest stars, his dad and his two favourite aunts, Gin and Millie.

‘Are there any celebrities here?’ another aunt asked him, showing how in Liverpool even the biggest star can never feel too big-headed.

‘Gerry Marsden’s here,’ Paul answered without a blink.

Next came a big-production pastiche of a 1930s Hollywood musical with Paul, mustachioed again, leading a Busby Berkeley tap-routine in a pink tail suit; a CinemaScope version of ‘Your Mother Should Know’ in Magical Mystery Tour. ‘Learn to tap-dance’ had been advice given to the Beatles, and most Sixties pop names, as insurance against the day when their music blew over, but no one else had followed it so diligently.

Nineteen-thirties camp gave way to scenes from the new James Bond film, Live and Let Die, and Wings performing its title song with special effects untroubled by any health and safety considerations. At the end, Paul’s grand piano was made to explode, with the unforeseen result of knocking guitarist Henry McCullough flat on his back and raining chips of blazing wood on the studio audience.

Only one part of the extravaganza featured songs from the Beatles years. A selection of ordinary Britons in the street, shoppers, van-drivers, mums with small children and the like, sang half-remembered, mostly out-of-tune versions of ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’. It proved their universality but also belittled them, relegating them to the same pub-singalong past as ‘April Showers’ and ‘You Are My Sunshine’.

The reviews were worse than for any of Paul’s solo albums to date. Melody Maker voiced a general sentiment in calling the special ‘overblown and silly’. The most extreme hatchet-job appeared in New York Sunday News under the byline of Lillian Roxon, who’d once been a close friend of Linda’s but felt she’d been dropped when Paul came along. Roxon particularly hated the pub-singalong sequence, which Linda hadn’t wanted Paul to do, and in which she’d certainly looked ill-at-ease among the pints of ale and overloaded ashtrays. The Roxon review portrayed Paul in the bosom of his family as ‘sweaty, pudgy and slack-mouthed’ and Linda as ‘catatonic with horror at having to mingle with ordinary people… disdainful if not downright bored… her teeth relentlessly clamped in a Scarsdale lockjaw… incredibly cold and arrogant’.

In May, Paul took Wings on their first UK tour, to promote the Red Rose Speedway album and the single ‘Live and Let Die’ (not included on it) which was to be released to coincide with the Bond film’s London premiere. On the tour, as on the album, their billing now became ‘Paul McCartney and Wings’, in case anyone out there still didn’t get who their front man was.

Everything possible was done to kill any Beatle echoes and suggest the cutting-edge of contemporary rock. Before setting out, Wings made a one-off appearance at London’s trendiest new venue, the Hard Rock Cafe, in aid of the drugs charity Release. There Paul saw a young band named Brinsley Schwarz, who’d weathered an over-hyped launch to reveal genuine talent, notably in vocalist Nick Lowe. Realising how they would enhance the image he wanted for Wings, he hired them as a support act.

The tour was Britain’s first close look at the woman who’d presumed to take John Lennon’s place. At that time, females in rock bands were still a rarity, female keyboard-players still more so, and wives playing in their husband’s bands totally unknown. No one who saw Linda onstage with Wings doubted she was there under the falsest of pretences and at her own egotistical insistence. And unfortunately her quiet, oblique charm failed to work outside a radius of about three feet. Although Paul introduced her to audiences in homey style as ‘Our Lin’, she came across as aloof, unsmiling, even resentful at having to share him with so many others.

Everywhere Wings went, she was criticised and mocked with a bile that once had been reserved for Yoko Ono. Pop reviewers–in these days largely male and unfettered by feminism–poured scorn on her wispy vocals and the careful way her limitations as a keyboard-player were camouflaged by Wings’ real musicians.

Like Paul, she now sported the ubiquitous early-Seventies ‘mullet’ hairstyle of spiky topknot and long, dangly bits at the back. Added to her blonde hair, high forehead and prominent cheekbones, it gave her somewhat the look of David Bowie’s alter ego, Ziggy Stardust. Glam Rock ethos was outraged by her fondness for lumpy quilted jackets and Argyll socks in unmatching tartans, and her admission that she didn’t shave her legs or armpits. A cruel chauvinistic riddle went around: ‘What do you call a dog with Wings? Linda McCartney.’

In her rare interviews, she was far from ‘cold and arrogant’, but disarmingly honest about her musical shortcomings. ‘I think [the criticism] was justified. I didn’t have any training and I was still learning piano when we started. Now I do know chords and I have a feel for music and I really love it, so I don’t think they’ll get me so much.’ Some hopes.

On 18 May, Wings reached Liverpool and played a sold-out show at the Empire Theatre. By now, the city’s once-booming docks had grown deathly quiet, great transatlantic liners no longer glided up the Mersey (bringing American rock ‘n’ roll among their cargoes) and Jim McCartney’s beloved cotton trade had all but unravelled in the face of cut-price competition from the Far East.

The Cavern club, where Paul had sweated out his musical apprenticeship, was scheduled to close down a few days after his Empire show. The dank vault, on whose matchwood stage pure magic had been born, would then be bulldozed as part of construction work on the new Merseyrail metro system. Although many of its old habitués protested (Paul not among them), there was no effort to save what in years to come would have been a precious-beyond-price heritage site. Liverpool seemed to be suffering the same amnesia about the Beatles as did the Beatles themselves.

But if Paul could dismiss them from his thoughts, the rest of the world had more trouble doing so. It was the reason why, after three years and a string of hit singles and albums, his solo career still wasn’t regarded as a success. Too many people were waiting for him to see sense and get back with John, George and Ringo. They little guessed that he himself still remained unsure he’d done the right thing in going it alone.

Publicly, he took every opportunity to stress what a weight off his mind–and soul–the Beatles’ break-up had been. ‘I take life much more simply,’ he told a Leicester radio station during the UK tour. ‘I wake up each morning and I think “Ah, I’m alive. Great! What do we do today?”’