Shout! (85 page)

From time to time he allows us to see how, even if you are as huge and rich and loaded with honors as Sir Paul McCartney, you can still be plagued by insecurities that no ocean of adulation can drown; old grudges and frustrations that poison the most golden triumph; little niggles that just never go away. Despite all that being a Beatle bestowed on him, he plainly continues to feel he received less than his proper share, in terms of both money and credit. In the mid-eighties he went to the band’s old record company, EMI, and demanded a larger share of their collective royalties than that paid to his two fellow survivors and John’s estate. George, Ringo, and Yoko joined forces to sue him and the matter was settled quietly out of court.

Someone else who had written a ballad like “Yesterday” and lived to see it challenge Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as the world’s most covered song might well feel only pride and satisfaction in that achievement. But not Paul. In 2000, while the hardcover edition of the
Beatles Anthology
was in preparation, he asked Yoko if the credits for “Yesterday” could be changed from “Lennon-McCartney” to “McCartneyLennon” since he had written it without any input from John. He even claimed John’s precedence on the credit meant the Lennon estate had received a greater share of the song’s royalties.

Yoko’s refusal to consider the idea put the Beatles-watching community, for once, unequivocally on her side, for it was an elemental part of Beatles history, and of their ineluctable charm, that songs were historically credited to “Lennon-McCartney,” whichever of them had been the dominant or exclusive composer. The two had always been absolute creative equals no matter whose name came first; indeed, on the Beatles’ first album and early hit singles like “From Me to You,” their byline had appeared as “McCartney-Lennon.” If John received an undeserved half-credit for Paul songs like “Yesterday” and “Let It Be,” then so did Paul for John songs like “Norwegian Wood” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

He had already received one chance to rearrange the credit to his liking when several of his Beatles songs were featured on the
Wings Over America
album in 1976. Another came in 2002 with the live album of his latest American tour, which included “Yesterday,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and “Hey Jude.” On the Wings album he had simply reversed the credit; this time, as if to ram the point home, it read “composed by Paul McCartney and John Lennon.” Even longtime McCartney fans expressed themselves dumbfounded by the pettiness of it. “He just can’t bear anyone to think he didn’t write ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Let It Be’ on his own,” observed one. “And it was also a sign he doesn’t care any more who knows his real feelings about Yoko.”

Yoko had never publicly spoken a word against him, and had gone along with many of his schemes—such as his plan to reissue the
Let It Be
album in its intended raw state without the Phil Spector overdub that so offended him in 1970. But with his unilateral rewriting of the Lennon-McCartney credit, word came out of the Dakota that Yoko had had enough and was considering legal action against him. He responded with a seven-hundred-word statement claiming that the Lennon-McCartney formula had been agreed to by John and Brian Epstein behind his back, but with the half promise it might be changed sometime in the future. He also said that Yoko had initially agreed to let him rearrange the credit, but then had changed her mind.

The statement almost descended to inarticulacy in Paul’s simultaneous determination to get his way, yet still keep the smile on his face. “This isn’t anything I’m going to lose any sleep over, nor is it anything that will cause litigation, but it seems harmless to me after more than 30 years of it being the other way round for people like Yoko who have benefited and continued to benefit from my past efforts to be a little generous and to not have a problem with this suggestion of how to simply map out for those who do not know who wrote which of the songs.” The inclusion in his stage show of a tribute song to John—allegedly written just after John’s death—did little to moderate the widespread negative reaction. Even his fellow survivor, the normally tractable Ringo, expressed puzzlement and faint disgust: “I think the way he did it was underhanded. I thought he should have done it officially with Yoko…. It was the wrong way to go about it.” The furor eventually persuaded Paul against any further interference with the credit.

The whole episode illustrated the extent to which, a generation after
John’s death, Paul still feels driven to compete with him, still hankers for the dividend of love and esteem that John drew from their partnership. It has never ceased to rankle that from their earliest Beatles days John was typecast as the arty, avant-garde, intellectual one while he himself was considered merely the nice one. Every interview he ever gives fulminates against this gross misconception, stressing what difficult books and art he used to relish in those days, how he helped Barry Miles and John Dunbar put the trendsetting Indica Gallery together, how he was at the sixties’ cutting edge in London while John was being a Nowhere Man in the Weybridge stockbroker belt.

In recent times, the focus of his ambition, perhaps even more than music, has been showing us how wrong we were all those years ago. Together with his songwriting, John won lasting fame as a poet and an artist. Damn it then, Paul will prove himself to be an artist and a poet of a hundred times the size. And if you are Paul McCartney, with unlimited fame and funds and nothing on your horizon but yes-men, you can do it.

His collected poems,
Blackbird Singing
, appeared in 2000, heralded by mobbed book signings and appearances at literary festivals, and greeted by plaudits from established poets such as Adrian Mitchell and Paul Muldoon. The poems dated back to 1965, with the most recent batch written during Linda’s final illness. A few had the simple directness of his best song lyrics, seasoned by the wisdom of personal loss. But others demonstrated how an unfinished thought or half-coined phrase that may get by in a song lyric shrieks pure embarrassment from the printed page. “Tears are not tears,” ran the most widely quoted lines, “They’re balls of laughter dipped in salt.”

His painting—long a private hobby and beneficial therapy—has been the subject of even more determined hype. In his authorized biography,
Many Years From Now
, an entire section was devoted to his views on Art, his formative influences as a painter, even the kinds of paints, canvases, and brushes he favors.

The 2001 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition included a blobby-blue and red Paul McCartney abstract in a kind of rock ’n’ roll corner also featuring work by David Bowie, Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, and the late Ian Dury. A year later, he had his first solo exhibition at Liver-pool’s Walker Art Gallery. Once again, no critic quite had nerve enough to spell out the differences between an amateur and a professional,
though a glance at the Stuart Sutcliffe painting owned by the same gallery would have made the point well enough.

Echoes of John continue to turn up in McCartney music seemingly light years away from the Beatles. The title of his
Flaming Pie
album, for instance, was a quotation from John’s long ago
Mersey Beat
article, “A Short Diversion on the Dubious History of Beatles” (“It came in a vision—a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them ‘From this day on you are Beatles’”). Paul’s appropriation of the quote caused extreme dismay to even hard-core Beatles loyalists. “He’s achieved everything he possibly could as Paul McCartney,” said one. “Why couldn’t he leave that last little bit of John alone?”

For a long time he was reluctant to discuss the Beatles years, saying things like “Yeah, they were a good little band” with the same brand of studied understatement Earl Mountbatten used when he described being viceroy of India as “great fun.” Now the story is a central part of every show and interview he gives, always in carefully sanitized form, with himself the focus of every scene. So familiar and formulaic have his anecdotes become that his fans refer to them by number. “Paul did number 21 and 37 on Parkinson last week,” they will report to each other, or, “There was quite a good version of number 14 on Radio 2 on Saturday.”

As a sexagenarian he remains enviably slim and youthful, though the still-abundant hair is now dyed (as Heather has confirmed) and the pixie face has begun to wilt around the jawline, turning him more each day into a facsimile of his father, Jim. His manner remains that of an ebullient boy next door, gazing on the limitless excitement and promise of Beatledom for the very first time, raising both thumbs into the air and chortling,
“Great!
” Indeed, he turned down a Lifetime Achievement award in the 2002 Brits, the biggest U.K. music awards of the year, because he said it would imply he was now old and past it, with all his best work behind him.

He spent most of 2002 on an American tour, filling major arenas across the continent and featuring more than ever previously “studio only” versions of Beatles songs such as “Blackbird,” “Hello, Goodbye,” and “It’s Getting Better.” The tour, by then subtitled “Back in the World,” moved on to become his first journey through the U.K. for ten years, then on to Europe to venues including the Colosseum in Rome. It also included “Here Today,” his tribute to John, and a version of “Something,” played on George’s beloved ukulele.

Before the tour, he had issued his American concert promoters a twelve-page list of backstage demands recalling the egomaniacal 1970s, when top groups would demand Napoleon brandy, can-can dancers in their dressing room, or dishes of M&M’s consisting only of red ones. Though Paul’s requirements could be classified as matters of conscience, stemming from his vegetarianism and animal rights beliefs, they still took superstar imperiousness into a new and surreal realm. The stretch limos provided for him must not have leather seats. The soft furniture in his hotel suites and dressing rooms must not have covers of real—or even artificial—animal skin. Not only must Sir Paul himself never be served with meat or meat by-products, but they also were banned from all the tour’s production offices and backstage areas. The flowers in his dressing room must come only from “reputable florists,” must include at least one arrangement of pale pink and white roses and another of Casablanca lilies as well as the star’s own favorite freesias, and should avoid “weedy” things and pot plants with too visible trunks.

In February 2002, he became potentially the world’s highest-paid entertainer when he was offered four million dollars to play in Las Vegas for a single night. The city was facing heavy losses after cancellation of the world heavyweight title fight between Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis: In the whole wide world of twenty-first-century entertainment, there seemed only one comparable heavyweight, one name guaranteed to pay out the mega jackpot.

And did it make him happy? Who knows?

TWENTY-TWO

“IT DON’T COME EASY”

I
n December 1969, Eric Clapton set off on a British and European tour with his American protégés, the folk-rock duo Delaney and Bonnie. Among their backing group—billed simply as their “Friends”—was a rhythm guitarist whose bushy beard, wide-brimmed Stetson hat, and buckskin jacket gave him a more than passing resemblance to Buffalo Bill Cody. He seemed anxious to avoid attention, keeping always to the back of the stage, playing only essential chords on his state-of-the-art red guitar. Among the crowds who cheered for “the Great God Clapton” each night, few even recognized his shy, shrinking stage companion as George Harrison.

These were days long before rock superstars made elaborately modest “surprise” guest appearances in their friends’ shows. Asking George out on tour was a pure act of kindness on Clapton’s part, to take his best friend’s mind off the turmoil within the Beatles and encourage his first steps in the solo career that now seemed inevitable.

So George, very reluctantly and nervously at first, joined the tour, traveling with Clapton and Co. at the back of their bus, staying at drab railway hotels, and each night, in Birmingham or Newcastle upon Tyne, becoming a little more used to facing a live audience once again. Most therapeutically of all, perhaps, in these far northern climes, Clapton proved to be far more instantly recognizable than he. One lunch-time, as the two sat together in a motorway café near Sheffield, a passing waitress stared suspiciously at Clapton, then turned to George. “He
is
famous, isn’t he?” she queried. “Oh, yeah,” George replied in his deadpan monotone. “That’s the world’s most famous guitarist…Bert Weedon.”

After a few days of sharing Clapton’s juvenile high spirits—food fights with the late-night hotel buffets, races with windup toys on their dressing-room floor—the gaunt, bearded face was beginning to look noticeably more cheerful. The buckskinned figure at the back of the stage was almost grooving, even reaching for single-string licks during the medley of rock ’n’ roll classics that closed each show. “I’d forgotten
what a gas it is to play live,” he told Clapton gratefully. “That Little Richard medley is in E, isn’t it?”

George may have been little more than a bystander, with Ringo, in the central battle for the soul of the Beatles, but he had still been deeply affected by the months of feuding and intriguing, the wearisome board meetings and tense recording sessions, and the final, unavoidable compulsion to side with one of his two former closest friends in outvoting and marginalizing the other. As he admitted in “Here Comes the Sun,” “It’s been a long, cold, lonely winter…It seems like years since it’s been clear.”

John and Paul each had a wife to go to when the group was no more. But George had no such anchor to his existence. His six-year marriage to the bewitching former model, Patti Boyd, was already running into trouble, largely the result of his serial infidelities and northern male arrogance. “He could be just horrible to Patti,” remembers one of their friends. “George would say he was hungry, so Patti would make a wonderful meal… then he’d turn round and say he didn’t want it.” Patti, who genuinely loved him, stayed with him in the misguided belief that he might still one day change back into the lighthearted charmer who had wooed her on the set of
A Hard Day’s Night;
he stayed with her mainly from inertia, and because he had other, more pressing problems to deal with than that of changing his woman.