Paul McCartney (63 page)

One day, in mid-vocal, he suddenly turned pale and began to gasp for breath. Stumbling outside for air, he received the full blast of African midday heat and collapsed unconscious into Linda’s arms. ‘I laid him on the ground,’ she later recalled. ‘I thought he was dead.’ Rushed to hospital in the studio manager’s car, he was found only to have suffered a ‘bronchial spasm’ due to excessive smoking of the conventional sort.

Nigeria’s own pop music in 1973 was teemingly creative, though as yet little known outside the African continent. Its pre-eminent figure, Fela Ransome Kuti, combined the role of performer, composer and broadcaster with that of political activist and fierce opponent of the Gowon regime. He had lately exchanged his ‘slave-name’ Ransome for Anikulapo (‘he who carries death in his pouch’) and declared the commune of musicians and followers he’d founded in central Lagos an independent republic named Kalakuta.

Kuti also operated Lagos’s foremost music club, the Shrine, where he appeared with his band, Africa 70. Paul persuaded Linda and Denny Laine to accompany him to the Shrine, expecting to be feted the way he was in clubs everywhere. Instead, some of the house musicians began questioning him with a palpable lack of hero-worship about the Wharf Road recording sessions. The next day, Kuti went on the radio to accuse him of ‘stealing’ Nigerian music and culture.

The situation was potentially every bit as unpleasant as that encounter with the five muggers. Paul’s typically diplomatic solution was to invite Kuti to the studio to listen to what Wings had in the can so far. After doing so, ‘He who carries death in his pouch’ conceded there was no trace of stolen Nigerian culture.

An equally tricky musical encounter was with Ginger Baker, formerly drummer with Cream–and rock’s most famous ‘wild man’–who’d emigrated to Nigeria and set up a recording studio in partnership with Fela Kuti. Denny Laine had once played with Ginger Baker’s band, Air Force, and Jo Jo Laine had also crossed his path, leading him to observe later that ‘no sane man would ever go near her’.

Baker was known to be deeply offended because Wings weren’t using his ARC studio. To forestall possible trouble (which with him tended to take extreme physical forms), Paul agreed to record one track, ‘Picasso’s Last Words’, at ARC. The passing of the twentieth century’s greatest artist was thus commemorated in hillbilly style as the monsoon lashed the roof and a red-bearded drummer, famous for launching sticks like guided missiles, provided the softest percussion of his life with a can full of pebbles.

The McCartneys said goodbye to their Nigerian colleagues and friends by hosting a beach barbecue–still no sign of militant vegetarianism–then returned to London to finish off the album at George Martin’s AIR studios with orchestral arrangements by Tony Visconti. Waiting for Paul at Cavendish was a letter from EMI’s group director, Len Wood, saying that on no account should he think of going to Lagos because of an outbreak of cholera.

His idea of himself and Linda as refugees or escapees crystallised in the album’s title, Band on the Run. One could argue that actually two-thirds of the band had gone on the run from them. However, they had indubitably broken out of the confines of normal recording and made a courageous journey through unfriendly territory with disaster often snapping, bloodhound-like, at their heels.

And despite all the problems and technical limitations, the end result was the one Paul had sought. In Lagos, he’d found a new style for Wings that put his transition from the Sixties to the Seventies beyond any doubt. The album’s title track and the one that followed it, ‘Jet’, both had a sound big, glossy and grandiose enough for the Glam Rock era, perfect to be performed in giant arenas, set off by video-screens and flashing lights as seas of punching forearms kept time.

His overall aim seemed to be a concept album like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, where the Beatles had adopted musical alter egos whose recital unfolded an epic saga. Band on the Run’s cover had a feel of Pepper’s with its role-playing principals and supporting cast of camp icons. Paul, Linda and Denny Laine were shown in convict garb, caught in a prison spotlight together with six celebrity co-escapees: chat show host Michael Parkinson, singer Kenny Lynch, Liverpool boxer John Conteh, movie actors James Coburn and Christopher Lee, and chef and Liberal MP Clement Freud.

In reality, Band on the Run was no Sgt. Pepper for the Seventies. The title song seemed to start telling a story, but soon dissolved into cartoony surrealism, its ‘Jailer Man’ joining forces with a ‘Sailor Sam’ evidently left on the beach since ‘Yellow Submarine’. The remainder consisted of snapshots from Paul’s home life, not one mentioning a band or a need to escape.

‘Jet’, despite having all the drive and euphoria of a mass jailbreak, was simply the name of his Labrador dog. ‘Let Me Roll It’ was a send-up of, or homage to, John and the Plastic Ono Band. ‘Mamunia’ commemorated the grand hotel in Marrakesh where Lord Grade had offered the deal leading to the James Paul McCartney TV special. ‘No Words’ was the first song Denny Laine had written for Wings, though (shades of Lennon–McCartney!) he’d needed Paul to help him finish it. ‘Helen Wheels’,
i.e.
Hell on wheels, was what Paul called his Land Rover in Scotland.

In another nod to Sgt. Pepper, overture numbers were reprised in softer, nostalgic versions at the end, ‘Picasso’s Last Words’ morphing from country song to dramatic orchestral piece, then French radio broadcast and finally pub sing-song. Keeping faith with Fela Kuti to the last, there was not the smallest murmur of Nigeria.

Band on the Run was released in December 1973, to reviews as ecstatic as those of Paul’s previous albums’ had been dismissive. All the major rock critics who’d previously considered him a spent force now competed to praise him to the skies. Those who’d poured most scorn on his musical partnership with Linda were most vocal in applauding and empathising with it. In Rolling Stone, Jon Landau described it as ‘a carefully composed, intricately designed personal statement that will make it impossible to classify McCartney as a mere stylist again’.

Best of all was the comparison with the two fellow Beatles whose solo work had up to then been rated far above Paul’s. Indeed, the qualities usually cited as marks of his inferiority were the very ones singled out by Landau for special praise–his ‘healthy propensity for playfulness and nonsense’, as against John’s and George’s ‘high-minded and overbearing seriousness’.

Paradoxically, the album made a slower chart ascent than any of its predecessors, taking seven months to reach number one in the UK–but then staying in the charts for 124 weeks. In America it reached number one on three separate occasions, eventually going triple platinum. It would be the bestselling album in Britain in 1974 and by the end of that year would have sold six million copies worldwide. The two singles taken from it also became hits, ‘Band on the Run’ reaching number one in the US and selling a million while ‘Jet’ peaked at seven both there and in the UK.

So, after three years of work, worry and self-doubt, Paul finally had everything he wanted. And did it satisfy him?

‘An old estranged fiancé of mine called Paul’

With the Seventies’ halfway point in sight, there were still periodic rumours of the Beatles getting back together. These were invariably based on the thinnest of evidence: George and Ringo had attended the same film premiere or Paul been seen entering a lawyer’s office John had just left. Yet they never failed to create a hen-house flutter in media around the world. All the multifarious ‘new Beatles’, from Slade, T. Rex and the Jackson 5 to the Partridge Family, the Bay City Rollers and the Osmonds, seemingly couldn’t stop the pining for the old ones.

Between Lennon and McCartney, if there was not yet exactly peace there was at least quiet. After the release of John’s Imagine album in 1971, he and Yoko had left Tittenhurst Park and moved to New York, ostensibly seeking sanctuary from the relentless abuse and mockery they’d suffered in Britain. Instead, they’d become figureheads for the extreme leftist politics which now permeated American rock culture and were, if anything, more conspicuous and controversial than before.

Since John’s unreasoning rant in ‘How Do You Sleep?’ his anger against Paul had cooled. Nowadays he no longer bit the heads off people, like his American assistant, Dan Richter, who urged him to seek some kind of reconciliation. ‘I kept saying, “You guys had your divorce, so put it behind you,”’ Richter remembers. ‘“You did so much wonderful stuff together… you should at least be talking again.”’

By 1972, they were. Early that year, Paul visited John at the small apartment in the West Village where he and Yoko held court, often in bed, to a constant stream of political activists, journalists and street-performers, handing out money and support like a pared-down Apple. The two agreed that slagging one another off, on albums or through the music press, was stupid and childish.

After that, whenever Paul visited New York he’d usually telephone John, who by then had moved with Yoko to a Gothic apartment building called the Dakota on Central Park West. But, as he later recalled, he never knew what to expect; John would sometimes be friendly, sometimes hostile, sometimes ‘very frightening’. As ever, Yoko’s voice would be audible in the background, and he’d hang up thinking, ‘Thank God they’re not in my life any more.’

Once when he called, the deep Scouse voice he’d known since he was a teenager started going ‘Yeah? Yeah? Whaddaya want?’ like a natural-born New Yorker. To Paul, it sounded as bogus as the bald Greek cop in the TV series who went around sucking lollipops. ‘Oh, fuck off, Kojak!’ he retorted, and slammed the phone down.

The softening of John’s attitude towards Paul had much to do with his hardening one towards the manager who had caused their final, fatal rift. He was beginning to wonder if Paul hadn’t been right about Allen Klein.

For both George and John, disenchantment with their one-time financial saviour had begun to set in during 1971’s two-part Concert for Bangladesh, which Klein had helped organise and which had seen George and Ringo perform together, albeit in a phalanx of fellow superstars like Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan. John had been invited to take part but had declined for the same reason as Paul: each was afraid that the other would also walk onstage, so turning the event into the Beatles reunion the whole world kept plaguing them for.

However, while avoiding that ghastly possibility himself, John had been deeply offended because Yoko wasn’t asked to appear on her own, and blamed Klein for the snub. George, for his part, had developed serious misgivings over Klein’s handling of the concerts and their accompanying triple album and film, specifically just how much of the $8–10 million proceeds had actually reached the famine and flood victims of Bangladesh.

On 2 April 1973, Klein’s ABKCO company issued a statement announcing the severance of all links between himself, his three ex-Beatle clients and Apple. John confirmed that he, George and Ringo had ‘separated ourselves’ from Klein, adding the closest to a public apology their old bandmate would ever receive: ‘Let’s say possibly Paul’s suspicions were right and the time was right.’

A major opportunity for a Lennon–McCartney rapprochement arose that spring when Ringo recorded his eponymous third album in Los Angeles. Both John and George contributed to the sessions, in company with Billy Preston, Klaus Voormann and T. Rex’s Marc Bolan. Paul, too, agreed to take part with Linda, but by that time was banned from the US for his Scottish drug conviction, so had to do his track separately in London. Nonetheless, the Ringo album sparked the strongest Beatles reunion rumour yet.

While Paul was excluded from America, John had effectively become a prisoner there. Thanks to his political activities in New York, in particular his friendship with the radical demagogues Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, he had been placed under surveillance by both the FBI and the CIA, and was fighting efforts to deport him by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He dared not leave the country for fear of not being allowed to return.

Nor was persecution by the US government his only problem. After seven years of spending every minute of every day with him, Yoko had begun to weary of his haunting insecurity, obsessive jealousy and unending, sexually-tinged obsession with his long-dead mother. The breaking-point came at a party where he had noisy casual sex with a young woman while Yoko was in the next room. So in September 1973 she kicked him out of the Dakota, packing him off to LA with a 22-year-old Chinese-American assistant named May Pang to act as both his PA and bedfellow.

The idea was that Yoko should be as sexually liberated as John. Instead, she returned to London and, surprisingly, turned up at Paul’s door, as he later recalled: ‘a little diminutive, sad figure in black’. She had never confided in him before, still less in Linda, but now told them she already missed John and wanted a reconciliation.

Paul, by rights, should have felt little concern for the relationship which had started the Beatles on the downward slope. Still, he offered to play Cupid and deliver a message from Yoko the next time he saw John, although with his present visa situation there was no telling when that might be. Yoko then set out the conditions John had to observe if they were to start over: ‘He would have to come back to New York. He can’t live with me immediately. He’d have to court me, he’d have to ask me out again. He’d have to send me flowers.’

In the end, John spent 14 months in LA on what he afterwards called his lost weekend, boozing and taking drugs in blithe disregard of his FBI ‘tails’ and his parlous immigration-status, egged on by Ringo, Keith Moon of the Who and the alcoholic singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson. One night he was thrown out of the super-chic Troubadour club for drunkenly heckling the cabaret; on another, he took his seat in the packed VIP section with a Kotex sanitary-towel stuck to his forehead.

Even in his most unhinged moods, however, he kept to the pact he’d made with Paul and wrote no more lyrics like ‘How Do You Sleep?’ He let it be known he’d enjoyed the James Paul McCartney TV special, although its pub sing-song sequence made him ‘squirm a bit’. He was even nicer about Band on the Run, whose ‘Let Me Roll It’ track sounded so Lennon-esque, there were rumours that he’d actually played on it. It was, he said, ‘a great album’, though he stopped short of mentioning Linda. ‘Wings keep changing all the time. It doesn’t matter who’s playing. You can call them Wings but it’s Paul McCartney’s music and it’s good stuff.’