Paul McCartney (72 page)

Later, as champagne and other stimulants flowed, Paul, George and Ringo got up onstage with Clapton for a jam session that included a couple of Sgt. Pepper songs done karaoke-style. Denny Laine later described their performance as ‘absolute rubbish’ and said it was lucky no one had made a tape.

Back to the Egg was released in Britain on 8 June 1979, with a colossal publicity budget behind it. For the press launch at Abbey Road, Studio 2 was draped in black to suggest the inside of a frying pan and the guests sat at tables under parasols resembling fried eggs.

A minute-long TV commercial, transmitted in prime time, eulogised ‘a timeless rock ‘n’ roll flight through twelve superbly produced songs on an album that really is perfect’. With it came seven different promotional videos, mostly shot at Lympne Castle, to be shown individually on pop music programmes, then combined in a half-hour special. The sequence for ‘Winter Rose’ had entailed spraying white foam over a large tract of the castle’s beautifully-manicured grounds, which left it as brown as the Serengeti afterwards.

The album reached number six in Britain and eight in America, where it sold more than a million. But as a return on Columbia’s investment it was considered a failure, compounded when none of its four singles even made the Top 20 on either side of the Atlantic. Its most successful track was the Rockestra theme, which later won the first-ever Grammy for a pop instrumental. For most critics, Paul’s attempt to give Wings an edgy modernity was an embarrassing mismatch; ‘McCartneyesque whimsy on punk steroids’ jeered one reviewer.

His morale received a boost in August when Allen Klein stood trial in New York for tax evasion and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment (with all but two months suspended) plus a $5000 fine. The triviality of the charge was in stark contrast to the millions that had passed through Klein’s hands with the Beatles and Rolling Stones. He had neglected to declare a few illicit dollars made by selling what should have been free promotional copies of The Concert for Bangladesh album.

Paul, however, refused to gloat. ‘I feel sorry for [Klein] now. I was caught in his net once and that panicked me. I really wanted to do everything to get him. I was contemplating going to where he lives and walking outside his house with placards. I was really crazy at that time… but it all turned out OK.’

The Clash’s new single, ‘London Calling’, bellowed that ‘phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust’, but in the case of Beatlemania’s chief inspiration it had a hollow ring. The 1979 edition of the Guinness Book of Records listed Paul McCartney as ‘the most successful composer of all time’, for having written or co-written 43 songs that sold a million records or more, and accounted for 100 million sales in singles and the same number of albums.

The great and good of London’s music business gathered at the Savoy Hotel to see him receive an award of a rhodium-plated disc from the book’s co-founder, Norris McWhirter. He replied to their applause with a double thumbs-up–a gesture of infallible cheery optimism that was replacing a violin-shaped bass as his trademark.

At the end of November, Wings Mk. 6 received their first outing with a two-week UK tour, but playing mostly theatres rather than the arenas the previous line-up had been used to. The opening shows were in Liverpool, not at the Empire Theatre but the more intimate Royal Court. On the first night, Paul reserved front-stall seats for a large contingent of his relatives led by Auntie Gin of ‘Let ’Em In’ fame. His two new sidemen could not believe how jittery he was about playing to his own family.

There was an additional free matinee for his old school, Liverpool Institute, both the boys and the girls from their once out-of-bounds enclave across the road. The headmaster in Paul’s time, J.R. (‘the Baz’) Edwards, had since retired and been succeeded by the former geography teacher, B.L. (‘Blip’) Parker. But whereas the Baz had led the onslaught on rock ‘n’ roll, Blip came to the show with his pupils and cheered and clapped as loudly as anyone.

Holley and Juber were both outstanding musicians who got along well with each other and seemed unconcerned by the band’s tricky internal politics. Yet while Paul gave his all onstage, as ever, there was a noticeable lack of afterglow. Steve Holley recalls these early signs of waning enthusiasm for the whole Wings project, though he didn’t recognise them as such. ‘We’d come offstage and I’d say, “Wasn’t that great?” Paul would just go, “Yeah, it was OK.” At the time, I just thought “Hey, what do I know? This guy played with the Beatles.”’

After a sold-out week at the Hammersmith Odeon, the final two dates were in Scotland, reflecting Paul’s new persona as a latter-day Robbie Burns. At the Glasgow Apollo on 17 December, the Campbeltown pipers were waiting in a side-alley and, during ‘Mull of Kintyre’, clattered up the fire escape for a surprise march-on.

And to seal the recovery, he was back in the UK singles charts. Following the lead of John and Yoko in 1971, he had released a Christmas song, under his own name and in ‘mad professor’ mode, playing bass, guitar, keyboards, drums and percussion. Compared with the sombre, admonitory ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’, his ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ was as insubstantial as tinsel, yet it reached number six and would be played throughout the holiday season for evermore, generating an estimated $15 million and inspiring numerous covers.

As Britain gave way to pre-Christmas hysteria, the news media were full of the crisis in Cambodia, now renamed Kampuchea, where thousands of refugees were trying to escape the country’s homicidal ruler, Pol Pot, and disease and starvation were endemic. Fresh off the road, Paul was contacted by no less a figure than the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim. To aid the UN’s Kampuchean relief effort, Waldheim asked if he’d give a benefit concert taking advantage of the so-called season of goodwill. Despite the absurdly short notice, he agreed at once.

The initial plan for a one-off Wings gig quickly developed into the British rock community’s first-ever display of collective social conscience. Under Paul’s aegis, there would be four Concerts for Kampuchea at the Hammersmith Odeon, starting on the day after Christmas and featuring an impressive mix of old and new talent: Queen, the Who, the Specials, the Pretenders, the Clash, Ian Dury and the Blockheads and Elvis Costello.

At once, rumours began circulating that the final concert on 29 December, headlined by Wings, might finally bring the Beatles back onstage together. George and Ringo agreed to take part on condition that they’d be playing with other musicians as well as Paul. But although John was now free to break his exile in New York, he would have nothing to do with the project, refusing to change his mind even after a personal plea from Kurt Waldheim. Then when the media learned of George’s and Ringo’s involvement, both of them pulled out.

As it was, Paul closed the final show with Wings and his 30 Rockestra sidemen, all–except the reliably-bolshie Pete Townshend–resplendent in silver tail suits and top hats. A rumour persisted that John had relented and was secretly watching the show from the side. During Wings’ set, a little clockwork robot walked onstage, set off by some japester among the road crew. ‘It’s not John Lennon,’ Paul quipped to the audience.

He thus ended the year, and the decade, on a top note of public esteem and personal dignity. And 1980 already looked full of promise. McCartney Productions Ltd had a new managing director, a go-getting young Australian named Steve Shrimpton, formerly the head of EMI Music Australia. As defined by his predecessor, Brian Brolly, Shrimpton’s role combined running the office at 1 Soho Square with all the duties of a personal manager, save, in any way, shape or form, trying to tell Paul what to do.

The New Year was to bring Shrimpton’s first major test–a far greater one than he could ever have foreseen. After months of patient diplomacy by Japanese concert promoters Udo Music, their government had agreed to lift the ban on Paul for his 1973 drug conviction, which had prevented Wings 2’s intended visit in 1975. He was to be allowed back into the country before the end of his seven-year exclusion, for a two-week tour with Wings 6, starting on 16 January.

Eleven shows were scheduled, including several at Tokyo’s Budokan Hall, where the Beatles had appeared in 1966 during the chaotic Far East tour that had helped finally sicken them of live performances. Wings’ record-sales were massive in Japan and after the long wait to see Paul in the flesh there was huge excitement among his fans there, with all the 100,000 tickets already sold.

The Japanese tour was to take Steve Holley and Laurence Juber another step above previous Wings sidemen. As a mark of Paul’s appreciation for their work over the previous year, they would each receive a small percentage of the profits. ‘The trouble was,’ Juber reflects wryly, ‘there weren’t going to be any profits from the Japanese tour.’

A precondition of the tour had been that Paul signed an affidavit saying he no longer used cannabis; nevertheless, he and his musicians clearly could expect rigorous attention from Japanese customs on their arrival. Wings’ sidemen and the accompanying horn section were sternly warned by Alan Crowder not to take any illegal substances with them and to check their suitcases, their pockets, even under their fingernails for any incriminating fragments.

Before they departed, there was a final run-through at Peasmarsh, with a film camera running as usual. ‘Hello, people of Japan,’ Paul greeted his waiting audience light-heartedly. ‘This is Paul McCartney here… we’re just rehearsing.’ He then cued ‘Got to Get You into My Life’, singing words soon to come horribly true: ‘I was alone, I took a ride, I didn’t know what I would find there…’

The tour party that arrived at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport on the afternoon of 16 January 1980 was split into two contingents on separate flights. One came from London with the band and road crew, the other from New York with Paul, Linda and their children, plus lead guitarist Laurence Juber who’d been taking a pre-tour break in Los Angeles. Since both planes were scheduled to land at around the same time, the party were to meet up at the airport and be bussed to their hotel together.

When the band and roadies disembarked from the London flight, they were surprised not to receive the strenuous going-over from customs officials they’d been warned to expect. Drummer Steve Holley and his wife, Sharon, were with Denny Laine, who had feared being targeted because of the drugs-bust on his own record (when he’d taken the rap for Jo Jo). Everybody went through without a problem, however, and climbed aboard the tour bus outside to wait for the McCartney contingent.

Paul’s Pan Am flight from New York touched down about half an hour later. There was a brief VIP moment outside the Arrivals entrance as he posed for TV cameras, holding his toddler son, James, in his arms and cheerily saying ‘Hello, Tokyo’. It would be his last experience of VIP-ness for some time.

Laurence Juber, who’d been on the same flight, was standing beside him at the moment which Juber says ‘will be seared on my memory for ever’. During what struck the guitarist as only a ‘cursory’ search of Paul’s luggage, the surgical-gloved customs officer lifted up a jacket to reveal a transparent plastic bag containing a large wedge of what was clearly marijuana.

‘When the fellow pulled it out of the suitcase, he looked more embarrassed than me,’ Paul would later remember. ‘I think he just wanted to put it back and forget the whole thing.’ Instead, the officer ploughed on, discovering a further, smaller amount of the same substance in a toilet-bag.

With that, Juber says, ‘alarms started going off, doors opened and people came running from every direction’. Both he and Paul were marched away to separate side rooms for questioning. Juber’s interrogators were specially interested in a Les Paul guitar he’d bought in New York, which they suspected of harbouring further drugs. Only after proving it was ‘clean’ by dismantling it with a screwdriver was he released.

‘I went and got on the bus, and we all sat there for a while, hoping the whole thing might blow over and Paul would come out and join us,’ he recalls. ‘Then Alan Crowder [the tour-manager] told us there was still a problem and we were to go ahead to the hotel.’

This was the splendiferous Hotel Okura, coincidentally the place where John and Yoko stayed on visits to Yoko’s Tokyo family. An entire floor had been reserved for the Wings party and Paul and Linda were to have the Presidential Suite, which the Lennons always occupied–though for Paul, somewhat different accommodation lay ahead.

Having checked in, Steve and Sharon Holley retired to rest after their 18-hour flight. Holley was woken by a phone call from Linda. ‘She was screaming that Paul had been arrested and locked up. Thinking it was a joke, I said, “Yeah, nice one, Linda. See you downstairs in the restaurant.” Then when we went down, the elevator-doors opened on a lobby full of TV lights and photographers.’

Paul, meanwhile, was alone and had taken a ride to Metropolitan Police Headquarters in central Tokyo, not knowing what he’d find there. It proved to be five hours of gruelling interrogation by a group of drug squad officers with only a smattering of English between them. The total weight of the marijuana in his case was 7.7 ounces, enough to suggest it was meant for more than just personal use and invite charges of smuggling or even peddling. He protested that he’d got it from some friends, solely for his own use, and signed a confession, drafted by his interrogators, that ‘I brought some hemp for my smoking’.

Nevertheless, despite the immensity of his fame and the major national event that Wings’ tour represented, prosecution proceedings were set in motion. A person facing such charges in Europe or America could expect to be given bail, but Japan had no such system; pending a further investigation of the evidence against him, he would be held in custody.

Rather than checking into the Hotel Okura’s Presidential Suite, he was taken to a holding wing which, ironically, shared a building with one of the radio stations that had earlier reported Wings’ arrival. After handing over all his personal effects, including his wedding ring, he was shown to a tiny, bare cell with a thin mat in place of a bed.