Paul McCartney (64 page)

In the spring of 1974, Paul’s American visa was restored to him for a probationary period of a year. He was thus able to go to LA in March for the Oscars ceremony, where ‘Live and Let Die’ had been nominated for Best Original Song. He had become bearded once again, now sporting a thick turned-down moustache with a dark blob on his chin like Frank Zappa.

John at the time was supposed to be making an album of rock ‘n’ roll oldies–the kind that had first brought Paul and him together–with Phil Spector as producer. But the project had lapsed after the combustibly paranoid Spector fired a handgun in the studio, then absconded with the tapes of everything recorded so far. John therefore turned to producing an album by his hell-raising crony Harry Nilsson, with the unlikely title of Pussy Cats.

‘Live and Let Die’ didn’t win an Oscar, losing out to Barbra Streisand’s ‘The Way We Were’, written by another husband-and-wife team, Alan and Marilyn Bergman, with music by Marvin Hamlisch. The Bergmans’ tearful lyrics were soon to take on extra meaning for Paul: ‘Memories may be beautiful and yet/ What’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget’.

On the evening of 28 March, he and Linda paid a spur-of-the-moment visit to Burbank Studios, where John was working on Pussy Cats with Nilsson, the Rolling Stones’ saxophonist Bobby Keys and guitarist Jesse Ed Davis. Ringo, too, had been playing on the album, but happened not to be there at that moment; otherwise, another Beatles-back-together story would doubtless have burned up the wires.

Cocaine was heavily in evidence and May Pang, John’s Yoko-appointed girlfriend, who largely bore the brunt of his excesses, feared the worst when the unexpected visitors appeared. Instead, Pang would later recall, he and Paul started chatting as if there’d never been a cross word between them. The atmosphere was so benign that a jam session soon started, with John and Nilsson on vocals, Linda on keyboards, Paul playing the absent Ringo’s drums and Pang beating a tambourine. The supporting line-up of Bobby Keys on sax and Jesse Ed Davis on guitar might have seemed unimprovable, but it wasn’t. Stevie Wonder, Motown Records’ boy prodigy, who happened to be working next door, came in to play keyboards along with Linda.

And this room full of virtuosity created… nothing. Everyone was too overwhelmed by the momentous melodic reunion they were witnessing. ‘There were about 50 people playing,’ John later recalled, ‘and they were just watching me and Paul.’

The jam session eventually saw the light as a bootleg album whose title, A Toot and a Snore in ’74, pretty much describes it. John’s speaking voice predominates, slurred by ‘toots’ of cocaine and griping monotonously about the microphones. There’s a version of Little Richard’s ‘Lucille’, far inferior to the one the boy Beatles used to play in Hamburg while all of them were paralytic. Then John goes into Ben E. King’s ‘Stand By Me’, announcing ‘McCartney’s doin’ harmony on drums’. But they can only sing in counterpoint to each other: their matchless sweet-and-sour fusion has gone.

That Sunday, 31 March, Paul and Linda were invited to the beach house in Santa Monica where President John F. Kennedy had once taken his mistresses, including Marilyn Monroe, and which John was now sharing, at some cost to its fabric, with Ringo, Nilsson, Klaus Voormann and Keith Moon. Though it was early afternoon when the McCartneys arrived, he still hadn’t got up. ‘He was a teenager again,’ Paul would remember. ‘He was being his old Liverpool self, just a wild, wild boy.’

While the visitors waited, they were offered something called ‘elephant tranquilliser’ by Nilsson, then sat by the pool chatting to Moon who, when not destroying hotel suites, was the most urbanely charming of companions. When John finally surfaced he seemed to be ‘in a mellow mood’, so at a suitable moment Paul took him to one side and relayed Yoko’s message from the year before, which was essentially ‘She loves you’.

Throughout the Beatles’ performing years they had had a perfect, unalterable line-up. But finding a merely workable one for Wings, with its peculiar blend of the familial and autocratic, was proving harder than Paul ever anticipated.

Having winged it, as it were, as a trio on Band on the Run, he set about recruiting a lead guitar to replace Henry McCullough and a drummer to replace Denny Seiwell. McCullough had originally been recommended by Wings’ roadie Ian Horn, and in a bizarre coincidence Horn now steered Paul to a guitarist named McCulloch, though now Scottish instead of Irish. This was 20-year-old, Glasgow-born Jimmy McCulloch, who’d played on Thunderclap Newman’s ‘Something in the Air’ aged only 15, then graduated to Stone the Crows after their lead guitar accidentally electrocuted himself onstage.

The elfinly pretty McCulloch was first hired to play on Mike McCartney’s solo album, McGear, produced by Paul, and acquitted himself so impressively that an invitation to join Wings soon followed. With extraordinary candour he warned his new chief he could be subject to mood swings, but was taken on nonetheless.

Auditions for the drummer’s spot took place at a London theatre, the Albery, and attracted some 50 applicants. Among them was Mitch Mitchell, formerly of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, who hadn’t found a satisfactory niche since Hendrix’s tragic death in 1970. Mitchell’s playing was spectacular but it turned out that if he joined Wings, he’d expect to be treated like a star. There was, of course, room for only one of those.

The job finally went to 31-year-old Geoff Britton, a tough-looking Londoner who’d previously been with a black-leather rock ‘n’ roll outfit called the Wild Angels. Despite that Gene Vincent (and early Beatles) image, Britton did not drink, smoke or use drugs, and was a member of Great Britain’s amateur karate team. His entry-ticket to Wings was a ferocious technique, using thicker sticks than ever Ginger Baker could handle. ‘He has a Black Belt,’ Paul said when introducing him to the press. ‘I feel that with those credentials he’ll be able to lick the band into shape.’

In June 1974, the new line-up set off for six weeks’ intensive licking into shape, though not by Geoff Britton, in America’s country music capital, Nashville, Tennessee. Paul had always loved country–it had been the inspiration for one of his earliest songs, ‘In Spite of All the Danger’–and its latter fusion with rock, through bands like the Eagles and Poco, was another dimension he wanted to give Wings Mk. 2. As usual, the children went, too.

It happened that his father-in-law Lee Eastman’s other music clients included Kevin Killen, a leading Nashville engineer and producer. Killen agreed to act as host and fixer for Wings and arranged for them to stay on a farm belonging to songwriter Curly Putman, Jr. (author of maudlin country classics like ‘Green Green Grass of Home’ and ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E.’) in rural Wilson County.

The elite of Nashville’s musical community opened their arms to Paul. At the Putman farm, he was visited by the great Roy Orbison, whose drowning-out on a 1963 tour had been one of the earliest signs of Beatlemania. He met the country ‘picking’ virtuoso Chet Atkins and pianist Floyd Cramer, whose ‘On the Rebound’ had thrilled him with its cross-handed chords in 1961. He and Linda were received by country’s reigning king and queen, Johnny Cash and June Carter, a husband-and-wife performing act to which nobody ever objected.

Top of his list of places to visit was the Grand Ole Opry, otherwise known as the Ryman Auditorium, a chapel-like hall in downtown Nashville where most of the country music greats had gotten their first break. To his disappointment, the Opry had now been replaced by a modern entertainment complex called Opryland, but his host/fixer Kevin Killen assured him there were still great things to be seen there.

Naively, Killen did not arrange VIP access in advance but simply turned up at Opryland with Paul, his wife, children and band, and bought tickets at the gate. When the staid country fans saw who it was, they reacted as hysterically as any old-time Beatlemaniacs. Killen was deeply impressed by the measured way Paul ushered the whole party through the crush. ‘When I was a Beatle, I learned that if you stay calm, you’re OK,’ he said, ‘but if you bolt and run, they’ll tear you apart.’

After the show, Killen suggested they hang out at his house, stopping on the way to pick up a supply of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It proved a heroic exercise in Southern hospitality, for Paul and Linda made no effort to restrain five-year-old Mary and three-year-old Stella as they used their host’s pristine white leather sofas as a trampoline and streaked the walls with their greasy fingers.

As soon as politeness allowed, Killen suggested a sightseeing drive around Nashville. He was just setting his security-alarm when Stella realised she’d left her shoes behind, ran back inside the house and careered into a plate-glass door. The bottom half shattered and the top half slid down, badly cutting her on the arms and legs. Linda staunched the blood with towels and she was rushed to the hospital in nearby Donelson. ‘Later on, I told Paul a couple dozen people died at the hospital that night,’ Killen would recall. ‘Because all the doctors were watching you.’

Much as Paul loved country music, Nashville’s greatest allure was its part in the birth of rock ‘n’ roll. As a thirty-second birthday present, Linda bought him the stand-up bass used by Bill Black when Elvis Presley recorded ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ at the city’s RCA studios. Playing pool in a bar one night, he bumped into Waylon Jennings, who’d almost taken the same charter flight that killed Buddy Holly in 1959.

He and Linda also wrote both sides of a new single which Wings recorded at Soundstop Studios on Music Row. The A-side, ‘Junior’s Farm’, was suggested by Curly Putman, with a nod to Dylan’s ‘Maggie’s Farm’, but actually was a rousing rocker that would be Paul’s last-ever appearance on Apple (and a US number three by the end of the year). However, the B-side, ‘Sally G.’, composed in a local bar, was pure country, extolling ‘the friendly state of Tennessee’ and featuring two of Nashville’s most renowned session musicians, Johnny Gimble on fiddle and Lloyd Green on pedal steel.

Unfortunately, the new line-up’s immersion in ‘Music City USA’ had not welded them together as Paul had intended. Geoff Britton, it had become plain, was a different animal from the others with his mouthy Cockney manner, his devotion to physical fitness and distaste for alcohol, cigarettes and pot. A visceral rock drummer, he found himself struggling with quasi-symphonic Wings numbers like ‘Band on the Run’ and ‘Live and Let Die’, especially on the ‘poxy’ kit that had been provided for him. And his devotion to karate was continually mocked by his exertion-averse bandmates. ‘Are you gonna play those drums or chop ’em in two?’ Denny Laine liked to quip.

Least of all had Britton bonded with his fellow new recruit, the ten-years-younger Jimmy McCulloch, whose slightness and prettiness belied a large appetite for everything the drummer considered unhealthy, as well as a true Glaswegian acid tongue. One day in the studio–when, according to Britton, ‘everyone else was stoned’–he and McCulloch almost came to blows after the latter made a remark about Linda’s musicianship that reduced her to tears. Paul blamed Britton for the fracas and said he needed to ‘reassess the situation’, which Britton interpreted as being fired and angrily walked out. The miniature Ringo-moment passed, however, and he was persuaded to return the next day.

The mood swings about which McCulloch had warned Paul were also kicking in with a vengeance. Some mornings, the boy-wonder guitarist would be sweetness itself, creating what he thought ‘some of the best music I’ve ever laid down in my life’; on others, hung-over from booze or grass, he’d be dour and scowly, muttering about Britton and Linda and the sloppiness of Denny Laine’s tuning. Once, in response to a minor quibble about his playing, he picked up an empty bottle and hurled it through the control room glass.

The two new recruits had expected their Nashville stay to include the signing of long-term contracts with Wings. Instead, they learned that Paul wanted them only on a piecemeal basis, paying them per recording session or stage performance. All his persuasiveness was needed to convince them the arrangement would be to their advantage, allowing them to play in other bands (something forbidden to Wings Mk. 1) and so potentially earn far more than mere staffers.

Denny Laine didn’t particularly want a contract, having signed too many injudicious ones in the past. But after six weeks, even his usual blind willingness to follow Paul’s lead was starting to waver. ‘At one point, I thought “I don’t know what we’ve come here for. We should be at home, gigging,”’ he recalls. Weary of acting as a buffer between his band-boss and the fractious recruits, he, too, talked about quitting, though never seriously, he insists. ‘It’s not like these things had never been said before… You’re walking out, but the next minute you can be walking back.’

In mid-July, the expedition came to a premature end when Jimmy McCulloch was charged with drink driving. Had the case reached court, it doubtless would have uncovered the fact that Wings were in America without work permits, so putting Paul’s probationary visa in jeopardy. However, Kevin Killen was able to get the charges dropped on condition McCulloch left ‘the friendly state of Tennessee’ forthwith.

Word of the problems in Nashville, in particular the Britton/McCulloch issue, had already leaked back to Britain. When Paul arrived home on 17 July, it was to find a New Musical Express story headlined ‘WINGS UPHEAVAL’ and suggesting they were breaking up over their two newest members’ terms of employment.

Through his PR, Tony Brainsby, he issued an immediate ‘clarification’: ‘Wings members are free to pursue their own musical careers. This will enable them to develop working relationships free of contractual ties. Wings will have a fluid concept, which will be adapted to suit current and future projects.’ The NME also republished Brainsby’s rebuttal of its scoop, expressed rather less diplomatically: ‘It is wrong to say that Wings are no more because Wings are Paul and Linda McCartney.’

Having rehearsed the new line-up, Paul now needed to know how they’d look together onstage. He therefore decided to have a film made of them in rehearsal, using the new medium of videotape. To direct, he turned to David Litchfield, a graphic designer/editor then running a small art magazine called The Image–later co-founder, with David Bailey, of Ritz, London’s answer to Andy Warhol’s Interview.