Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (43 page)

So it was that the following lunchtime Paul McCartney got back on stage in Nottingham University Hall to play for a live paying audience for the first time since Candlestick Park. In a clear return to the start of his professional career he opened with a Little Richard cover, ‘Lucille’, after which it was mostly unknown territory. For Paul wasn’t going to play any Beatles songs, and Wings were a new band without much of a repertoire. ‘We haven’t got too many numbers yet,’ McCartney told the students, much as he and John must have apologised to the patrons of the Indra when the jejune Beatles first went to Hamburg. ‘We’re just checking things out.’ The kids yelled that they didn’t mind. Even so Wings could only play four original songs, including ‘Wild Life’. The show was padded with Elvis covers, some jamming and more Little Richard, Paul closing with ‘Long Tall Sally’.

Back in the van, Wings divvied up the takings, mostly in coins and one pound notes. ‘Paul would go, “Here we go, one for you, one for you, one for you …”’ recalls Seiwell, adding with some bitterness: ‘It was probably the most money I ever made touring with Paul and it was nothing, you know.’

The next night they played Goodridge College in York, followed by a string of university towns including Hull, Newcastle and Leeds. At each show, Wings performed ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’, which usually went down well with the students, but was banned by the BBC from its radio network for being too political, with Paul roundly criticised in the normally pro-McCartney national press for taking a simplistic stance on Northern Ireland. In response, he took out an advertisement in the
Sun
newspaper urging the public to buy the record and make up their own mind. While many did purchase the single, the radio ban hindered sales, and ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ rose no higher than number 16 in the UK charts. When Wings passed through the university town of Lancaster, Linda aired her views on the issue for
Melody Maker
, saying: ‘Look, in Ireland the IRA was forced into existence by the fact that Britain took over the country more than 800 years ago, or whenever it was. Therefore if the British got out of Ireland there’d be no need for the IRA …’ In response, a reader from Ulster wrote to the paper asking, if the McCartneys were so committed to the province, why didn’t they come over and play in Ulster? Over the next few years Wings played all over the world, but they never gave a show in Northern Ireland. Perhaps Paul considered the province to be too dangerous.

Linda’s musicianship proved as feeble as her political history. On one occasion, when Paul counted the band into ‘Wild Life’, he was met by silence from his left. Looking over, he saw his keyboardist wife mouthing back that she’d forgotten the chords! The audience didn’t care, and neither did Paul. He was having a ball, while the guys in the band learned to accept Linda as an enthusiastic amateur, appreciating the family vibe a husband and wife playing together engendered.

Despite what Denny Laine hoped for, Wings was not ‘a rough and tumble rock/blues-type’ band. It was a Mom and Pop act. Backstage you were liable to find Mary and Heather McCartney drawing pictures while baby sister Stella (known as Stelly in the family) slept in a make-shift cot in a drawer. When Paul and Linda decided they needed a Wings fan club, they devised the jokey Wings Fun Club, seemingly pitched at children Heather’s age rather than adults. Most significantly, the band’s next single-despite the fact Paul was always talking about wanting to shake off his soft-centred image - was an arrangement of the children’s nursery rhyme ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, because Mary McCartney had a pet lamb in Kintyre. Wings put the record out in May, as big a contrast to ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ as could be imagined. Some commentators suggested it was meant sarcastically, as if Paul was telling the BBC: ‘You won’t play serious music, so we’ll give you nursery rhymes.’ But it was really about indulging the kids. Denny Laine felt very uncomfortable. ‘If it was going to be going in that direction, and no other direction, I would not have liked it at all.’ One can imagine how Laine felt when Paul had Wings mime to the song on the
Basil Brush Show
.

Most rock stars would be too concerned with their image to contemplate singing a nursery rhyme on a kids’ TV show hosted by a fox glove puppet, but Paul had been so successful for so long that he seemed immured from such considerations. It was as if he believed the public would like him whatever he did, and if they didn’t, so what? He was rich enough to do as he pleased. It was in this spirit that the McCartneys indulged their interests, however whimsical or childish. Linda was soppy about animals and, under her influence, Paul became animal-mad too, the couple and their children looking upon the entire animal kingdom as if it were of a piece with
The Wonderful World of Disney
. Apart from working on the putative
Rupert the Bear
cartoon, and performing on the
Basil Brush Show
, the McCartneys now decided they should make an anthropomorphic Disney-type film about ‘a family of cartoon mice living underneath the stage when we were performing’, as Denny Seiwell recalls. Wings did some work on this at Elstree Film Studios, though the picture never saw the light of day. ‘There was a lot of that kind of stuff going on.’

Being a parent had evidently changed Paul. Family life was now all important, and when he took Wings out on a European tour in the summer of 1972 there was a strong family feel to the enterprise. The band travelled in a brightly coloured double-decker bus, painted with the legend WINGS OVER EUROPE, the open top deck laid out with bean bags and mattresses for the McCartneys, their band and the kids to lounge about on. While the bus was no doubt huge fun for the wee McCartneys, it was a slow and inefficient way to navigate the continent. ‘It only went 35 mph, so people would go whizzing by us on the motorways and see this gang of hippies in this bus. It was quite nice, but it didn’t make a lot of sense,’ remembers Seiwell, who also recalls that Linda suffered a severe attack of stage fright prior to their first-night show at Châteauvallon, a cultural centre near Marseille in the South of France. ‘She was crying on my shoulder, she was scared.’ Audiences were so thrilled to see a Beatle they hardly paid any attention to Paul’s wife, and McCartney’s confidence carried the night, as it always would.

The idea of this European tour was to play small venues in mostly out-of-the-way places to get the band some road experience before they attempted anything more ambitious. So the Wings double-decker trundled up through France into Germany, then into Switzerland where, fatefully, Denny Laine met Joanne ‘Jo Jo’ Patrie. Jo Jo was a vivacious American model turned groupie whom Linda McCartney suspected of having her true sights set on Paul, which turned out to be correct. ‘She was basically trying to go through me to get to Paul,’ concedes Laine, who discovered Jo Jo had sent Paul love letters as a teenage Beatles fan. ‘I didn’t know this to start with. I found out later.’ Paul and Linda treated Denny’s new girlfriend disdainfully, which offended both Denny and Jo Jo as they grew closer together, becoming a regular couple, having children and ultimately getting married. ‘I find it insulting that Linda looked on Jo Jo as a groupie. Linda was one of the biggest groupies on the face of the Earth if you want to put labels on people,’ Denny said in an angry interview in the 1980s. ‘Jo Jo was a groupie-nobody is denying that. But what is a groupie? Just a chick that likes musicians.’ These days Laine sees things slightly differently. ‘They tried to get on with Jo Jo,’ he says of Paul and Lin, ‘but she was a lot of work. What can I say?’

Almost all the adults on the Wings double-decker smoked grass, Paul having been an avid pot smoker since meeting Bob Dylan in 1964. For a long tour they needed a regular supply. Rather than risk taking drugs through customs, the band had dope posted to them from England. One parcel was addressed to Denny Seiwell care of the Gothenburg Park Hotel, where Wings arrived on 10 August to play a show at the nearby Scandinavian Hall. While the roadies set up their equipment, the McCartneys took a limousine to the hotel to collect Denny’s parcel, which contained five and a half ounces of prime marijuana. Unbeknownst to the McCartneys, the Swedish police had been alerted and were watching the drop. As the band came off stage that night, Paul, Linda and Denny Seiwell were seized by Swedish detectives. ‘It was just me at first-then I hear Paul and Linda … They were being brought in, too, screaming bloody murder,’ says Seiwell, who was arrested because his name was on the package; Paul and Linda were nicked because they picked it up. Also dragged down to the station was Paul’s secretary.

The McCartneys initially denied the drugs were theirs, then admitted it, according to the police: ‘They said they had made arrangements to have drugs posted to them each day they played in different countries …’ Paul, Linda and Denny Seiwell were ordered to pay a fine/good behaviour bond totalling £1,000 ($1,530), and allowed to go on their way. ‘They said, “Tell your rock ’n’ roll friends not to bring marijuana into Sweden, because we’ll find it and they’ll be arrested,”’ says Seiwell. ‘It was lame. It was really no big deal. If I remember correctly we had some marijuana a day later!’ It
was
a big deal, though. The drug conviction meant Paul was now unable to take Wings to the United States and Japan, as he had planned. The Gothenburg bust also seemed to show the McCartneys to have an arrogant attitude towards the law, while there was really no need to get into this sort of trouble. Many rock stars use drugs routinely on tour, but do so with enough discretion to avoid arrest. Paul had blundered into this situation through his cack-handed arrangements, and would make similar mistakes again and again during the course of his career.

Another chronic problem with post-Beatles Paul was the way he paid his musicians. When the Wings Over Europe tour concluded in Berlin on 24 August 1972 his sidemen found themselves more or less broke. During the tour the band had been booked into the same luxury hotels as the McCartneys. Bed and breakfast was paid for, but room service and bar bills were not covered, and the boys ended up spending most of their wages on extras. ‘When the whole thing was over,’ complains Seiwell, who was increasingly concerned about the way the band was being treated, ‘it cost us money. Sold out every concert and when it was all over the band got paid nothing for 28 cities and two and a half months of a European tour. We got nothing. Because the expenses were so high.’ The money was only part of the problem. As bad was the superior attitude Paul and Lin showed on occasion. Seiwell again:

There were times when we were a family. We really bonded as a family, the five of us, musically and socially with the wives and the kids. Everybody was a family. And then there were times when it was - this is really hard to say - but there were times when it just was about them, and we did not matter whatsoever.

The McCartneys were back in London when news reached Cavendish Avenue that Paul was in trouble again with the police, this time in Scotland. In the aftermath of the Gothenburg bust, Detective Constable Norman McPhee of the Campbeltown police had found marijuana growing in a greenhouse at High Park Farm. The story given to the press was that DC McPhee had been on a routine crime prevention tour of the area when he spotted the plants, recognising the leaf shape he had been taught to look out for on a recent drug-awareness course. The truth was that the police had been tipped off, according to Paul’s Scottish lawyer Len Murray, meaning Paul wasn’t as popular in Kintyre as he thought he was. In any event, Paul was summoned to appear before the sheriff’s court in Campbeltown to face charges under the Misuse of Drugs Act. ‘And of course that was really quite serious. Growing cannabis was viewed a great deal more seriously in those days,’ says Murray, who organised Paul’s defence when the case came to court in the spring of 1973.

Paul’s reaction to these busts remained one of defiance, so much so that Wings released what might loosely be termed their second protest song, ‘Hi, Hi, Hi’, only loosely because while it could be interpreted as a celebration of getting high on grass the song was also a paean to sexual intercourse. The man who had written so eloquently of blue suburban skies and the love you make being equal to the love you take was now singing of giving his baby his ‘sweet banana’ and doing it to her ‘like a rabbit’ all night long! Released at the end of the year as a single, with a reggae number, ‘C Moon’, on the flip side, this truly stupid song was promptly banned by the BBC for its sexual content. It reached number five in the UK charts, anyway, number ten in the USA. On the grounds of taste, it shouldn’t have been released at all. ‘What it was supposed to be getting at was a “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” kind of thing, trying to be sexual, but I thought it was a bit kind of lightweight,’ says Laine. ‘You know what, I think Paul’s always had a bit of a problem of wanting to be a little bit tougher than he is, and sometimes he’ll write a song to try and show that side of him.’

The following spring Paul and Lin flew by private plane to RAF Machrihanish in Kintyre, where they met their lawyer Len Murray and John McCluskey QC, the advocate hired to represent them in court on drugs charges. For once, the McCartneys didn’t have their children with them and, freed from parental responsibility for the day, Linda had seemingly enjoyed a joint on the flight. ‘She was stoned out of her mind,’ notes an unimpressed Murray, ‘
stoned out of her mind
.’ A giggling Linda borrowed John McCluskey’s bowler hat and wore it throughout the day, as though laughing at the proceedings. Paul was in a more sober frame of mind, knowing the problems a drugs conviction could cause him. There was immediate good news, though. Before leaving the airport, Paul’s legal team explained to the star that they had persuaded the Prosecutor to drop two charges of possession, owing to a technical problem with the way the case had been brought, agreeing in return that Paul would plead guilty to the lesser charge of cultivation. This was good for Paul, who had been set to plead guilty to all three charges. The legal conference at an end, the lawyers drove Paul and Linda to Campbeltown’s court house, which was surrounded by journalists and cameramen. ‘We had to fight our way through, saying nothing,’ says Murray. ‘Linda enjoyed it all. She was obviously in her element having all this attention.’