Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (24 page)

Like his partner, John enjoying pontificating, and religion held his interest at the moment. ‘Christianity will go,’ he predicted portentously. ‘It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be proved right.’ Paul had expressed similar irreligious sentiments to Maureen, saying he leaned towards atheism, but Paul would never have been so injudicious as to say: ‘We’re more popular than Jesus now,’ as John did in his interview. ‘I don’t know which will go first - rock ’n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary.’

Whereas British readers took John’s comments as no more than an opinionated young man sounding off, when Maureen’s interviews were reprinted in the American teen magazine
Datebook
American readers were hugely offended, the USA being a far more religious country than Britain. Alarming reports reached an already overwrought Brian Epstein that US radio stations were banning Beatles records because of what John had said, while their erstwhile fans were staging ceremonial burnings of the albums. The Ku Klux Klan was promising ominous ‘surprises’ for the Beatles when they came over for their tour. It was therefore in a state of high anxiety that the Beatles flew into Chicago in August.

Though they had enjoyed the United States in the past, the Beatles didn’t feel entirely comfortable in America now. George was scared of flying and disliked the long continental flights they had to take in order to tour the US, while the excessive reactions of American fans were disconcerting. The prevalence of guns in everyday life also struck the Beatles as strange and unnerving, as it did all British visitors, with Americans seeming to be a more volatile, violent people, especially in light of recent race riots and assassinations. Paul was fascinated with the assassination of President Kennedy in particular, reading everything he could about the Dallas shooting, and frightening himself into thinking he might be a target for a marksman. ‘Paul was always terrified of being shot,’ says Peter Brown. ‘So he was very nervous on stage.’ As to what John had said to Maureen Cleave about Jesus, that had made everything more tense and difficult. Paul didn’t blame John. None of the band members did. They took the view that John’s comments had been taken out of context in America. But they all had to deal with the fallout.

John attempted to diffuse the situation as soon as they arrived in the United States by facing the media at the band’s Chicago hotel. He apologised if his comments had been misconstrued, indicating that he was a Christian (which was more than Paul was prepared to say), and didn’t have any ‘un-Christian thoughts’. The Beatles gave their first concert the next day at Chicago’s International Amphitheatre, Paul scanning the bleachers at this and every subsequent show for a sniper. Though no shots rang out, there were other more banal indications that America’s love affair with the band might be waning. Most obviously there were unsold seats in Detroit the next day, also in New York where the band played a return engagement at Shea Stadium on 23 August. Sid Bernstein, who was once again the promoter, looked up from the baseball diamond to see a whole block of empty seats during the show.
²⁴
Interestingly, standing in the press box shooting pictures was Paul’s future wife Linda Eastman, who had just embarked on a career as a rock ’n’ roll photographer.

The tour concluded in California, where the Beatles played firstly to a vast crowd at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles on 28 August, an event that descended into a near-riot as fans swarmed over their limousine, threatening to crush it as they tried to leave the gig. The limo driver took shelter under a grandstand behind a high fence, which fans attacked, beaten back by cops with billy clubs. In return, the rioting concert-goers started hurling missiles at the police. ‘Meanwhile the Beatles, virtually imprisoned beneath the grandstand by fans stampeding from one spot to another in the vast outdoor stadium, made good their escape by armoured car at the opposite end of the field,’ wrote a news reporter of the warlike scene. The next day, the Beatles flew north to San Francisco for their final show.

The fact that Brian Epstein didn’t accompany his boys to San Francisco, electing to stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel with his American business partner Nat Weiss, showed he wasn’t his old self. Since Manila, Brian had been trying to adjust to the idea that the Beatles wouldn’t tour again, wondering where this left him. A large part of his life these past four years had been occupied arranging publicity opportunities and concert bookings for the boys. He’d never been much involved in the other side of their career, making records. That was something they did with George Martin.

As he pondered an empty future, Brian was joined at the Beverly Hills Hotel by a young hustler from Ohio, whom Brian had met the previous year. Their relationship had turned sour on that first occasion when the boy attempted to blackmail him. ‘I think Brian gave him $3,000 [£1,960] to get rid of him,’ says Weiss, dismayed to see the lad back at Brian’s side at the swimming pool and hardly surprised to find that, when they returned to their respective rooms, their briefcases were missing, apparently stolen by the young man, who was nowhere to be found. Brian’s case contained contracts, cash and amphetamine tablets, which he was using so heavily he was becoming addicted. Peter Brown says Epstein also had compromising personal letters and pictures in his case, and the hustler tried to blackmail Brian again with these documents. Weiss disagrees, saying there was nothing incriminating in Brian’s attaché case, and doesn’t recall any blackmail this time around, but concedes that Brian was very upset by the theft. ‘Whenever someone steals from you, you feel diminished and ripped off, and it certainly hurts your ego, [especially] if it’s someone you trusted and liked. That’s what really bothered him,’ says Weiss, who engaged a private detective to recover their property, which he did successfully. At the end of the day Brian wanted the affair hushed up. ‘He didn’t want any notoriety because of the Beatles being on tour.’

Meanwhile, the Beatles had reached San Francisco to play Candlestick Park, a baseball stadium outside the city. Although it was late summer, Monday 29 August turned out to be one of those unseasonal Bay Area days when cold air and fog rolls in from the ocean, making it feel like winter. Paul apologised for the weather from the stage, which was set up on the diamond as it had been at Shea, with the additional protection of being ringed with a wire fence, so they were effectively playing in a cage again.

Knowing it was the last show, Paul asked Tony Barrow to tape the concert. Tony did the best he could, but it was a futile exercise with the PA equipment as it was and the fans howling. The boys could just about make themselves heard when they performed boot stompers like ‘Long Tall Sally’, but when they attempted more subtle new songs, including ‘Paperback Writer’, with its harmonised intro, the nuances blew away on the wind. ‘All you heard was screaming and these flash light bulbs [were] going off everywhere,’ recalls Bay Area musician Marty Balin, who’d recently formed what would become an influential new band, Jefferson Airplane. ‘It was bright as day, and you could not hear a note they played.’ So it was, in a squall of white noise and white light, that Paul retired from his life as a touring Beatle.

9

LINDA

TIME FOR A NUMBER OF THINGS

After their last gruelling concert tour, the Beatles took time off to pursue independent projects. John went to Spain to act in Richard Lester’s film
How I Won the War
; Ringo kept him company. George travelled to India to study the sitar with his new friend, Ravi Shankar. Says the Indian musician, who was already an established star with an international reputation:

When I met all the four Beatles for the first time, I found young handsome Paul very charming; Ringo very funny and warm; and John reserved and restrained. However, George and I clicked immediately. I was impressed by his genuine attraction for my music, as well as our ancient Vedic philosophy. Before meeting me, George had already heard my LP recordings and live concert and had used the sitar on ‘Norwegian Wood’. Being a classical musician, it did not appeal much to me at that time, but later on I felt more comfortable with it.

With his band mates away, Paul decided to take a continental holiday, disguised as a nobody. Fooling around in the props department at Twickenham Film Studios, where the Beatles had filmed interiors for their first two movies, Paul had found that, by wearing a stick-on moustache, false glasses and an old coat, he could walk past even his fellow Beatles without being recognised. Jane was busy with her stage work - about to appear in
The Winter’s Tale
, followed by playing Juliet in Bristol-so Paul took off on his own, driving his Aston Martin to Lydd Airport on the Kent coast, an area which would come to play an important part in his life, putting the Aston on a cargo plane, and hopping over to France where, looking not unlike the moustachioed Alfred Jarry, he motored off into the countryside, shooting an extended home movie as he went.

After a few days Paul reached Bordeaux, where he visited a discotheque in disguise only to be refused admission, something he had never previously experienced. ‘So I thought, Sod this, I might as well go back to the hotel and come as him!’ Paul later told Barry Miles. ‘So I came back as a normal Beatle, and was welcomed with open arms.’ The experience reminded Paul of the advantages of fame. Bob Dylan once remarked astutely that most musicians become pop stars because they want fame and money, but soon realise it’s the money they really want. McCartney was unusual in that he enjoyed his wealth
and
his fame. Having posed briefly as a nobody, he never wanted to be a nobody again. ‘It made me remember why we all wanted to get famous.’ Paul met up with Mal Evans and drove down to Spain, intending to meet John and Ringo, but they had already gone home, so Paul flew on to Nairobi, where he enjoyed a brief safari holiday with Jane.

On the flight home to England Paul put his mind to what the Beatles might do next. Tired of touring, he thought it would be interesting to invent a persona for the band to inhabit, and make a special record in that persona that could almost serve as a substitute for live shows. In the first flush of flower power, bands with elaborate names had become commonplace: Big Brother and the Holding Company in the USA, for example, the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band in England. Fiddling with airline sachets of salt and pepper on the plane home from Africa, Paul came up with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Before plunging into the phantasmagoria of the
Sgt. Pepper
album, Paul worked with George Martin on a score for the movie
The Family Way
. In Paul’s mind there was no conflict between breaking new ground musically and making music, like this, to order. ‘If you are blessed with the ability to write music, you can turn your hand to various forms. I’ve always admired people for whom it’s a craft - the great songwriting partners of the past, such as Rodgers and Hammerstein,’ Paul has said of his reason for scoring
The Family Way
. The film was a Boulting Brothers production about a cinema projectionist (played by Hywell Bennett) who cannot consummate his marriage to his virgin bride (Hayley Mills) because he feels inhibited living at home with his parents. Audiences may have imagined they were in for a challenging kitchen-sink drama when they bought tickets in 1966 for a film about sex set in the urban north, but
The Family Way
was a stilted, old-fashioned picture depicting an England seemingly aeons behind swinging London.

Thinking of his dad, and grandfather, and their love of traditional brass band music, Paul decided to create a brass band theme for the movie. As would subsequently be the case whenever Paul departed from straight pop music to ‘write’ for musicians who work from a score, he had to collaborate with an amanuensis, in this case George Martin, because Paul himself was unable to read or write music notation. The essential tune would always be Paul’s, but what he gave his amanuensis was often very brief, a simple phrase he would hum or play on the guitar or piano. It was for the other person to develop this idea into a score, with Paul making comments as the work progressed. George Martin had to pester Paul for the briefest scrap of a tune to start
The Family Way
. ‘I said, “If you don’t give me one, I’m going to write one of my own.” That did the trick. He gave me a sweet little fragment of a waltz tune … and with that I was able to complete the score.’ As a result Paul won an Ivor Novello Award for Best Instrumental Theme. It was his eleventh Ivor Novello, amazingly, and he was not yet 25.

SHE’S LEAVING HOME

Since setting up home together in Cavendish Avenue, a house they now inhabited as common-law husband and wife, Paul and Jane had become increasingly aware of their differences. Paul lived for his music and, after spending the afternoon writing upstairs in his music room, or round the corner at EMI on Abbey Road, he liked to go clubbing, often bringing a gang of musicians and other bohemians back to Cavendish late at night. Jane didn’t like clubs. She’d only ever had a polite interest in pop, and was not into drugs. She had her own circle of theatrical friends who didn’t mesh with Paul’s crowd. There were awkward evenings at Cavendish when Paul and Jane tried to mix their friends. The couple were most simpatico on those rare quiet evenings when neither had an engagement, Jane would cook and they’d sit together watching telly, as they did on 16 November 1966 when the BBC broadcast the drama
Cathy Come Home
, in which unemployment leads to a young mother losing her home and ultimately her child. Soft-hearted Jane asked Paul if they couldn’t do something to help people like Cathy, living as they did in their big house. They could give a girl a room. Paul said that if they took one in, they’d soon have others ringing up.

On the inauspicious date of Friday 13 January 1967, Jane flew to the United States with the Bristol Old Vic for a four-and-a-half-month theatrical tour. Paul was not at Heathrow to see her off. ‘The trouble is I don’t think Jane really wanted to leave me,’ the star complained to a reporter from the
Daily Sketch
who called at Cavendish to ask what was going on. ‘She signed for the trip about mid-year when it seemed a good idea, but when it came to the crunch it didn’t seem such a good idea. Anyway she’s gone and I’m sitting by myself.’ Even if Paul had been a man who liked his own company, which he wasn’t, there was no way he was going to spend four and a half months alone. He was going to have his mates round, pick girls up, drink, take drugs, leave his clothes where he dropped them and the dishes unwashed. He was going to enjoy the bachelor life. ‘The thing is with Paul he was never a bachelor,’ says Tony Bramwell, with a touch of exaggeration, for there had been Hamburg, but even then Paul was engaged to Dot. ‘From when he became a Beatle he was with Jane, [so] he’d never had that existence of being free.’

With Jane away, Paul also threw himself into work with the Beatles at Abbey Road, where many elements came together to enable the band to take another leap forward in their musical journey. Without concert commitments, the Beatles had limitless time to devote to their work now; their musical and intellectual ideas had expanded greatly; and, importantly, George Martin was increasingly involved as their arranger and enabler. At a time when other artists in Britain and the US were creating increasingly sophisticated music, not least the Beach Boys with their
Pet Sounds
album, the Beatles also felt pricked to show they were still number one. It was time to transmute from a grub-like pop act into a butterfly by recording the seminal rock album,
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
.

The band had started work before Jane’s departure, in late November 1966, cutting John’s ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. The John who returned from his film-making sabbatical in Spain looked radically different to the fat-faced Beatle of
Help!
Having had his hair cut short for
How I Won the War
, lost weight, and taken to wearing National Health Service ‘granny’ glasses, John had transformed himself into a professorial figure, one who was increasingly strung out on acid, his new song being a psychedelic look back on his Liverpool childhood, the tune named after the children’s home Strawberry Field (sic) which stood in walled grounds near Aunt Mimi’s Woolton house, a ‘secret garden’ he’d roamed around as a boy. Although Paul played the haunting keyboard introduction, on a mellotron programmed with flutes, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was unmistakably John’s song, maybe his greatest composition, his vocal sending a shiver down the spine as he sang the wise and penetrating lyric, ‘Living is easy with eyes closed/Misunderstanding all you see’. Like Dylan, Lennon had the knack of writing couplets, like this, that seem to contain an essential truth. Paul was rarely such a philosopher. He glides along the surface of life in his songs, as he did to some extent on the next number the Beatles recorded, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’. Although this is one of Paul’s best songs, and one that deals with a profound subject, old age, Paul sidestepped the darker issues involved - ill-health, loneliness, regret and fear of death - to create a jaunty number featuring old-age pensioners whom one could imagine throwing their sticks away and dancing to that cottage on the Isle of Wight. Like so much of Paul McCartney’s work, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ is therefore an attractive song with a facile lyric. The song may ask a challenging question - ‘Will you stand by me when I’m old?’ - but the listener has no doubt the answer will be a cheery, ‘Yes, of course I will, silly.’

‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ both came out of the composers’ Liverpool childhood, Paul creating the latter as a boy at Forthlin Road, only now putting lyrics to the tune. He looked homeward again with ‘Penny Lane’, a song he’d had kicking around for a year or so before the Beatles set to work on it in December 1966. Although the previous comments apply regarding lyrics, with ‘Penny Lane’ having a typically sunny sentiment, this time the words are better. Recalling the view from the top deck of the No. 86 bus, as he used to travel from Mather Avenue to the Liverpool Institute, past the circular bus and tram stop at the corner of Smithdown Road and Penny Lane, Paul was writing about a place he knew intimately, and already viewed nostalgically. Here was the landscape of his Liverpool childhood laid out as in a pleasant dream; the buildings, streets, shops and everyday characters he had grown up with:

Penny Lane there is a barber showing photographs
Of every head he’s had the pleasure to know.
And all the people that come and go
Stop and say hello.

John used to get his hair cut in Bioletti’s, which still exists, under new ownership, opposite Lloyd’s Bank on the corner. Paul observed it all beautifully, a cheerfully ordinary English high street arrayed under ‘blue suburban skies’, a lovely, poetic phrase. As has often been observed, there is a hint of psychedelia in the banker in the rain without his mac, the fireman with a portrait of the Queen in his pocket, but these images could just as easily be explained away as everyday English eccentricity. Sex was here, too, as it is throughout the Beatles’ work. The phrase ‘finger pies’ is a reference to heavy petting.

As with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, George Martin’s arrangement of ‘Penny Lane’ was immaculate, the producer working long hours with the boys to create the equivalent of classical tone-poems. ‘Penny Lane’ was brightened with a piccolo trumpet, which Paul requested after watching a performance of Bach’s second
Brandenburg Concerto
on television. George Martin hired the very trumpet player Paul had heard, David Mason, to play on ‘Penny Lane’. ‘Paul sat at the piano and played what he wanted on the track,
Can I play this? Can I do that?
And then George wrote it down,’ says Mason.

We went on like that for about three hours until they got what they wanted, because Paul was quite limited in his chord sequences and things. I mean he wasn’t the greatest of pianists. He could play what he wanted to on the piano, and when he got what he thought it was going to sound like I played it a bit and then [he asked]
Can he play it a bit higher?
or
Can you play so and so?

Many rock musicians attempted to combine their music with classical instrumentation in the years ahead, often sounding pretentious. With George Martin’s help, the Beatles melded pop and classical forms successfully to create music that is natural, honest and enduringly pleasing, and whatever shortcomings we might identify in McCartney’s
oeuvre
there is no lovelier song in the Beatles’ canon than his ‘Penny Lane’.

Like so many of his songs, Paul composed ‘Penny Lane’ on his little garret piano, which had been moved from Wimpole Street to the music room at Cavendish Avenue, and which, towards the end of 1966, was to be transformed by the trendy art group BEV. Comprising three young artists from the North of England - Douglas Binder, Dudley Edwards and David Vaughan - BEV was named from the first letters of their surnames. While sharing a London flat the men started painting their furniture in bright colours, inspired by the work of fairground artist FG Fowl. The furniture proved very popular. Macy’s became a US stockist and socialite Tara Browne commissioned the group to customise his Cobra sports car. ‘Tara, said: “You should meet my friend Paul. He’d probably like your work,”’ recalls Dudley Edwards. A meeting was arranged and, at Paul’s request, the group painted his piano with lightning bolts of red, yellow, blue and purple-creating one of the iconic musical instruments of the psychedelic era - returning the piano in time for Paul to complete
Sgt. Pepper
. McCartney paid them generously - their agreed fee plus a substantial tip - gainsaying what became an unwarranted reputation for meanness. As the story of McCartney’s life continues, we shall read numerous examples of the star being very generous with his money.