Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (36 page)

‘Viv [Stanshall] was down the Speakeasy with Paul. I think they used to drop into the personas of country gents, sort of thing, “Another one, dear boy? ” “I don’t mind if I do”,’ recalls Bonzo member Neil Innes, explaining how Paul came to help the band record their one top ten hit. ‘Viv was saying, “We’ve got to do this bloody single, but the producer won’t give us time to do anything.” So Paul said, “Well, I’ll come and produce it.”’ The Bonzos were working at Chappell Studio in Bond Street on a song titled ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’, which Paul effortlessly transformed into
Top of the Pops
material in one session. ‘I’d like to go on record as saying the record would have been nothing like [as successful] without Paul’s touch,’ says Innes.

Larry was sort of doing on the drums
a-boom-chick, boom-chick, boom-chick
, and Paul said, ‘Yeah, that’s all right, we’ll do it like that, but give it a
boom-dat-boom boom bap
with the
boom-chick, boom-chick,
’ which gave it a feel. Then he snatches up Viv’s ukulele and starts leaning into the microphone, Nashville-style, to fade it, live fade and fade out,
rinky-dinky-dinky-dinky-dinky-dink
, and the whole thing is taking off. And it’s totally down to Paul.

As they were working, the wife of the band’s manager sidled up to Paul and asked, ‘What’s that you’ve got there - a poor man’s violin?’

‘No, it’s a rich man’s ukulele,’ McCartney rejoined, showing his quick wit.

‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’, produced by Apollo C. Vermouth (contrarily, the Bonzos didn’t want to advertise the fact Paul had produced it), went to number five in the UK in November 1968. Paul’s brother Mike, and his mates in the Scaffold, were at number one at the time with another nonsense song, ‘Lily the Pink’. It was the Christmas number one.

Before celebrating the holidays, Paul flew to Portugal with Linda and Heather to visit Hunter Davies, whose authorised Beatles biography had recently been published. Davies owned a holiday villa on the Algarve, where Paul and Linda and Heather stayed for ten days, during which time, despite some ‘frosty moments’ between them, as Davies observed, the couple decided to marry. Lin was after all carrying Paul’s child, which meant wedding bells where he came from, and once Paul had made up his mind he enjoyed the ritual of phoning Lee Eastman in New York to formally ask his permission, which the patriarch granted, having adjusted his view of Paul for the better in the short time he’d known him. His daughter’s marriage to the Beatle would become a business union between McCartney and Eastman & Eastman, which would advise and guide Paul to their lasting mutual benefit. As a result, Lee’s relationship with Linda was transformed. ‘She became the star of the family,’ says Philip Sprayregen.

Despite Paul and Linda’s happy news, Christmas 1968 wore a grim aspect. On 15 December, the Beatles’ lawyer David Jacobs, who’d suffered a nervous breakdown in recent weeks, apparently caused by financial worries, hanged himself at his Sussex home. The death and inquest generated lurid publicity. Then the Hell’s Angels roared into town. George Harrison was to blame. Having met members of the San Francisco chapter of the biker gang in California, he had foolishly invited them to look in at Apple if they were passing through London, never thinking they would. Now came news that they were on their way. George sent a memo to staff. ‘They may look as though they are going to do you in,’ he wrote worryingly, ‘but are very straight and do good things, so don’t fear and up-tight them.’ Shortly thereafter two terrifying characters, Billy Tumbleweed and Frisco Pete, rumbled down Savile Row on their Harleys, having had the hogs flown to London at great expense (to the Beatles), and proceeded to occupy the band’s elegant townhouse for the holidays.

The Angels were in time for the Apple Christmas party, a lavish affair arranged primarily for the benefit of Beatles’ children. The highlight was a luncheon featuring what was claimed to be the Largest Turkey in England. This monster took a very long time to cook, testing Frisco Pete’s patience. When the bird was finally borne into the dining room the famished Angel fell on it, tearing the carcass apart with his bare hands, appalling the Beatles people gathered. In years gone by, the Beatles had sent out fun Christmas records wishing their fans a Merry Crimbo (sic) and a Happy New Year. This year Mr and Mrs Christmas - as John and Yoko were at the Xmas party - had attempted to put out an avant-garde recording that incorporated the dying heartbeat of their baby, which John had recorded in the womb using a stethoscope just before Yoko miscarried in October.
³⁵
While all this madness was going on, a thief managed to slip into the building and strip the lead off the roof.

The Beatles’ winter of discontent, as George Harrison described it, began in earnest two days into the new year when the band, plus Yoko and a recording team, assembled on a sound stage at Twickenham to realise Paul’s new
grand projet
. The Beatles were to ‘get back’ to their roots by rehearsing, then performing a new set of songs live on stage, possibly a Roman amphitheatre in Africa, which they hoped would be warm this time of the year, the process of rehearsing for and then giving the show filmed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg as a movie/TV special to promote the album. It was a typically high-concept McCartney idea, a good one, too, with great commercial potential, except the others weren’t keen.

Assembling his production team, Paul called Glyn Johns, a freelance record producer who’d been working regularly with the Rolling Stones.

It was quite amusing, actually. I remember very distinctly taking the call and him saying, ‘This is Paul McCartney,’ and I thought it was Mick Jagger taking the piss, talking to me in a Liverpudlian accent … I said something like, ‘Stop fucking about, what do you want?’ Because I worked with [Mick] all the time at the time. But it was Paul. So that was a bit embarrassing.

Despite this awkward start, Johns was hired as recording engineer on the project, becoming the Beatles’
de facto
producer, which leads to the pertinent question:
Where was George Martin?

Having fallen out to some extent with their producer during the making of the
White Album
the Beatles had decided they didn’t want George Martin working with them closely this time, Lennon telling Martin rudely that they didn’t want any of his ‘production shit’ on this new album. ‘We want this to be an honest album,’ he said, a slap in the face Martin took as gracefully as was possible. He dropped into the sessions, but did not produce as he had done previously, which surprised Glyn Johns. ‘I was shocked to find that George wasn’t there, and I was equally shocked to find they were asking me about ideas for arrangements, or whatever else, which I didn’t think I was there for at all,’ says Johns, who hadn’t been properly briefed by Paul - one of McCartney’s failings. He liked to wing it, and expected others to do the same.

No one ever said, ‘Oh, George isn’t doing this, you are.’ The word ‘producer’ was never used. I found it a little bit awkward when George did come. George actually did take me to one side and very kindly said, you know, you’re not to worry; don’t be concerned or feel awkward about this. It’s perfectly all right. So he made me feel OK about it, which was very, very nice of him, because I did feel a bit sort of awkward.

Apart from when they were in their own homes, or in hotel rooms, the most privacy the Beatles ever enjoyed was when they were working with George Martin at Abbey Road. Now they were expected to make music with a virtual stranger while being filmed by a large crew of other strangers on a charmless sound stage outside London, and it was all Paul’s idea. ‘You had the slight sense that Paul was the driver of the bus, but that some of the others might want to get off at the next stop,’ observes Michael Lindsay-Hogg diplomatically.

Paul tends to be what we call these days ‘proactive’. He goes out and if something’s not working he tried to make it work, he’s a very forceful character, forceful and, in his own way, quite a dominating character to do with what he wants, [and] one of his great qualities is a kind of enthusiasm. He said, ‘Yeah, let’s do this. Let’s not do nothing. Let’s do something. Let’s do this.’

It wasn’t long before the driven McCartney clashed with his less committed band mates. This happened most seriously with George Harrison when, on 10 January 1969, Paul tried to tell his friend how to play guitar on ‘Two of Us’, a song often interpreted as being about Paul and John, but which McCartney says referred to him and Linda. After repeated attempts to get it right, Paul told George wearily: ‘We’ve just gone around like for an hour with nothin’ … the riffs …’

‘There’s no riffs,’ replied Harrison.

‘But it’s not together, so it’s not sounding together.’

‘So we go on playing until we …’

‘Or we can stop and say, “It’s not together …”’ Sounding like a school teacher addressing a recalcitrant child, the teacher Paul may have become if he’d followed the career his mother envisaged, McCartney told Harrison: ‘See, if we can get it simpler and
then
complicate it where it needs complication. But it’s complicated in the bit …’ George bristled, saying he was just playing the chords, and muttered about Paul being unreasonable. ‘You know I’m not saying that,’ Paul defended himself. ‘I’m trying to help, you know, but I always hear myself annoying you, and I’m trying to …’

‘You’re not annoying me …’

‘But you know what I mean …’

‘You take it the wrong way …’

‘I’m not trying to say that. I’m not trying to say that. You’re doing it again as though I’m trying to say that. [Like] we said the other day, you know, I’m not trying to get ya,’ said Paul, referring to the ‘Hey Jude’ sessions during which he’d asked George not to play so much guitar, which still rankled with Harrison. ‘I really am trying to just say, Look lads, the band, you know, shall we try it like this?’

‘Well, I don’t mind. I’ll play whatever you want me to play, or I won’t play at all if you don’t want to me to play,’ George replied with the patience of a yogi. ‘Whatever it is that’ll please you, I’ll do it …’

All this was captured on film. ‘That particular day’s rehearsal was slightly fractious anyway, and when you see [the film] you’ll notice that the shot of Paul is down on him from above, and the shot of George is over Paul’s shoulder,’ explains Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who continued shooting knowing the Beatles had final say on what was used, but being careful to keep his distance. ‘It’s a fairly fuzzy camera look, and that’s because I felt [a] row was going to break out amongst some of them, and I wanted to pull the cameras away from them so they wouldn’t be inhibited.’

Michael and his crew were eventually asked to leave, so the Beatles could continue their argument in private. The upshot was that George walked out of the sessions, going home to write his song ‘Wah Wah’. He had been unhappy at work for some time, ‘bringing home bad vibes’, as Pattie Harrison says. Now he’d followed Ritchie’s lead. The roots of this particular problem were deep in George’s relationship with Paul and John, dating back to when Georgie carried the older boys’ guitar cases, always condescended to because he was that bit younger. Stupid. Despite all the time that had passed, and all they had done together, things hadn’t changed. ‘He didn’t like the feeling that John and Paul were more dominating. They were older. They’d been older all the time,’ observes Lindsay-Hogg. ‘I think he felt under the thumb of the other two and I think the other two saw him the way they’d seen him when he was 15 years old. He was talented but he had to be - I always felt - kept down a bit.’ John, Paul and Ritchie held a crisis meeting, whereby John suggested they might hire Eric Clapton to replace George. Paul
assumed
John was joking. Then they all went over to Esher to tell George they loved him and needed him, and he agreed to come back on the understanding they leave Twickenham, which he hated, give up the idea of a live performance, and continue their work at Savile Row.

For the past few months Magic Alex had been working on a new recording studio for the basement of the Apple building, an advanced multi-track facility that would make EMI’s Abbey Road look antique. When the Beatles came back from Twickenham, this bespoke studio facility proved useless. Alex’s idea of a 16-track system was, ridiculously, to equip the studio with 16 individual speakers, whereas any junior engineer could have told him only two were needed for stereo; he’d also built the studio in a room where the boiler was located, meaning the Beatles had to turn the heating off to avoid it being heard on their recordings; and they couldn’t use the control room anyway because Alex had neglected to cut holes through the wall for the cables; while the recording console looked to Glyn Johns’s eyes like something from
Buck Rogers
. ‘It was just hysterical,’ says Johns.

Unfortunately, George Harrison, who I think was probably the main team leader as far as the studio was concerned, George was rather upset that I refused to have anything to do with this load of shit. It was just like the king without his clothes, they’d just been taken - completely and utterly. It was just a joke! An absolute joke. And George wouldn’t let go of the fact that he thought Alex was a good guy. Anyway, George wasn’t best pleased when I threw it all out. So we borrowed a bunch of gear from Abbey Road and carried on.

Once these technical difficulties were resolved, everybody relaxed. The new basement studio was at least cosy, with a fireplace and thick apple-green carpets extending throughout the building. There was a staffed kitchen next door to serve them with snacks, and four floors of mates upstairs to hang out with. George suggested that keyboard player Billy Preston sit in with them, Billy being an old pal from Hamburg, when he’d played in Little Richard’s band, and the presence of a guest had a civilising influence on the band, as did a visit from Linda and Heather See, a blonde moppet of a child wearing a fringy Western jacket. ‘Hello Heather!’ John called out with avuncular gruffness when she entered the room. Uncle Ringo let Heather have a bash on his drums, clutching his ears in alarm as she did so, which made her laugh. As Daddy led the boys through covers of old favourites, including ‘Besame Mucho’ and ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’, Heather danced around and around until she fell over giddy, the Beatles smiling at each other over their instruments, everybody now in a much better mood.