Paul McCartney (74 page)

Paul has never really explained what made him forget all the warnings he’d been given and pack those two hunks of hemp, not even at the bottom of his suitcase but near the top. ‘How could Linda, who was so much smarter than me, let me do it?’ he reflected in a TV interview with his daughter Mary in 2000. ‘I must have said, “Oh baby, don’t worry, it’ll be all right.” There are times in your life when you think to yourself “OK, you’re an idiot” and that’s one of them. I was an idiot.’

But the truth was that he’d always taken reckless chances with drugs, and got away with it so often that he may well have thought himself invulnerable. And Linda was widely suspected of abetting him; indeed, after the Tokyo bust rumour had it the stuff had actually been found in her bag and Paul had taken the blame.

For the media-hordes awaiting him in Amsterdam, then London, he had a ready explanation. He’d been caught off-guard as a result of his pre-tour stay in New York, where pot-smoking was now so widespread and overt as to seem virtually decriminalised. The large residue of the stuff he’d enjoyed there being ‘too good to flush down the toilet’, he’d packed it ‘still [with] the American attitude that cannabis isn’t all that bad’.

He blamed no one but himself, made light of his experiences in the Japanese penal system (‘It wasn’t exactly The Bridge on the River Kwai’) and slipped in a little proselytising for the legalise-pot lobby he’d supported since the mid-Sixties. To help while away the time in his cell, he said, he’d made a mental list of all the dangerous drugs that were legal. ‘Society thinks alcohol is terrific, yet it kills. Cigarettes can kill. What about all those little old ladies on Valium? They are worse than marijuana. Think of aspirin’s danger to the stomach.’

Nonetheless, he promised he’d learned his lesson, offering a sizeable hostage to fortune in an interview with the Sun headlined ‘I’LL NEVER SMOKE POT AGAIN, SAYS PAUL’.

In Britain, the chorus of ‘How could he be so silly?’ was all the more virulent because his children had been involved. One censure that stung particularly came from ‘Blip’ Parker, headmaster of his old school, Liverpool Institute, to whose pupils he’d given a free show before turning Tokyo-wards. ‘It is hard enough nowadays to keep youngsters away from drugs without having people they look up to involved in something like this,’ said Blip–and who could disagree?

Paul would even ask himself whether, at some subconscious level, he had known just what he was doing. His enthusiasm for Wings had waned to such an extent–so he reasoned–that possibly he seized this chance to sabotage the Japanese tour in a way calculated to damage the band beyond repair. ‘It was almost,’ he told Mary, ‘as if I wanted to get busted.’

For Laurence Juber and Steve Holley, it was a bitter blow after having been Wingsmen such a short time. As well as losing their promised percentage of the Japanese gigs, they felt cheated of the opportunity to show what they could contribute as musicians. ‘We’d only done about 22 Wings appearances, on the UK tour and at the Concert for Kampuchea,’ Holley says. ‘That’s not really enough time for a new line-up to settle down together. By the time we went to Japan, we were just starting to sound like something.’

Paul on his side felt they and Denny Laine had deserted him in his hour of need, unaware that they’d been ordered to leave Tokyo by the tour’s managers. It rankled especially that Laine had flown directly to the MIDEM music festival in the South of France to negotiate himself a solo album.

Although no formal break-up was announced–yet–recrimination and disunity pulsed in the air. Urgently needing money for income tax arrears, Laine put together a band with his wife, Jo Jo, on vocals and Steve Holley, and went out on tour. His album, when it came out in December, would bring a faint, but unignorable, echo of John’s ‘How Do You Sleep?’ diatribe, in 1971. The title, a reference to young women weeping inconsolably for a no-show ‘Paur’, was Japanese Tears.

Paul, meantime, had been assembling a solo album since mid-1979, a sign of growing boredom with Wings that he’d carefully kept under wraps. This was released in May 1980 as McCartney II and–like McCartney, a decade earlier–consisted of himself singing and playing everything with Linda his only backup. Not at all harmed by his recent notoriety, it reached number one in Britain and three in America.

McCartney II’s most popular track proved to be a buoyantly trite electronic dance tune called ‘Coming Up’ which became a British number two. It had featured in Wings’ stage show during the pre-Japan UK tour and for the American market Columbia preferred to release their live version, recorded in Glasgow in November 1979. When it reached number one, Paul was miffed that his studio version hadn’t been used and, instead, Wings seemed to be getting a new lease of life.

On his return home, he had recorded a video message to be shown on Japanese television, apologising to his tearful fans for his ‘mistake’ and giving a thumbs-up to his former guards. He had also written a 20,000-word account of his ordeal–a considerable feat for someone conditioned to turning out song-lyrics a couple of dozen words long in a few minutes–which sold more copies than the biggest bestselling author.

In fact, he’d always wanted to write a book–like John back in the Beatle years–but never thought he had it in him. He titled it Japanese Jailbird, had one copy privately printed for himself, then locked the manuscript away, intending to give it to his children when they grew older and sought an explanation of the traumatic scenes they’d witnessed. ‘One day when we’re old and my son’s a great big 30-year-old… I’ll be able to say, “There you are. Read that.”’

However, the McCartney II album raised doubts about just how seriously he viewed the episode and how contrite he really was. Linda’s cover picture showed him in head shot wearing a white T-shirt, like a prison ID but with a jokey ‘ouch’ expression. And one of the tracks, a synthesiser instrumental, was called ‘Frozen Jap’. Although few Westerners then had any problem with ‘Jap’, it felt less like a thumbs-up than a thumbed nose.

The track actually dated from summer 1979, well before the Japanese nightmare: Paul had meant his instrumental to suggest the iconic traditional scene of snow on Mount Fuji, and ‘Frozen Jap’ was just a rough working title that had stuck. On albums exported to the Far East, it was changed to ‘Frozen Japanese’. But, as he admitted, his late hosts still thought it ‘an incredible slur’. The fans whose response to his trouble had been anything but ‘frozen’ doubtless most of all.

At any event, here he was safely back at Peasmarsh with Linda and the children, surrounded by protecting woods and waterfalls, lulled by the comfortable whinny of horses in their heated paddock. And after all he’d been through, what else could 1980 possibly throw at him?

‘It put everyone in a daze for the rest of their life’

John’s fight against deportation from America had ended in 1975 when the US Court of Appeals ruled that his single drug conviction, in London seven years earlier, had been unfair and he thus posed no threat to the nation’s moral fabric. Accordingly, a halt was called to his surveillance by the FBI and harassment by the immigration service and a year later he received the green card that granted him permanent residence.

On his thirty-fifth birthday, 9 October 1975, Yoko gave birth to a son, Sean Taro. His recording contract with EMI/Capitol having expired, John decided to retire from music and devote himself to raising Sean while Yoko looked after their business affairs. The former radical sloganeer, junkie, drunk and hell-raiser took on the role of house-husband at their seventh-floor apartment in the Dakota Building, gave up drugs, alcohol and cigarettes and learned how to change nappies, cook, even bake bread.

He did not become a recluse, as would later be widely believed, but was often seen in Central Park or around the secure-seeming Upper West Side. He continued to have ideas for songs and make demos on his determinedly archaic home equipment. And, careless and chaotic though he’d always seemed, he was as meticulous as Paul in preserving relics of his past. A corner room of the apartment contained every piece of clothing he’d ever worn onstage and off, right back to his Quarry Bank school blazer, hanging on rows of circular racks like some ghostly boutique.

A salutary moment for John was the death of Elvis Presley in 1977, aged only 42. ‘The King’ by then was a pathetic figure, bloated by prescription drugs and junk food and trapped on a treadmill of kitsch cabaret shows in Las Vegas. John had feared ending up in a similar predicament, so had no doubt that getting out of the rock rat-race had saved his life.

His contacts with his fellow ex-Beatles–‘the in-laws’, Yoko drily termed them–became more and more infrequent as George and Ringo pursued dwindling solo careers and Paul’s soared into the stratosphere with Wings. Paul made the most effort to stay in touch; when passing through New York, as he often did, he’d speak to John on the phone or sometimes just show up with Linda at the Dakota.

Nowadays, John’s uncertain temper often came from the pressures of childcare, something which he’d never known with his first son, Julian–and which Paul had taken in his stride three times over. ‘Look, do you mind ringin’ first?’ he once grumbled to his unexpected visitor. ‘I’ve just had a hard day with the baby. I’m worn out and you’re walkin’ in with a damned guitar.’

Other encounters were perfectly pleasant: if the two no longer had the rapport that used to illuminate their music, their presence together still made magic. One night, they went with Yoko and Linda to Elaine’s, the East 88th Street restaurant beloved of literary VIPs like Woody Allen, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer. Its usually ferocious patronne, Elaine Kaufman, was so captivated that when they could find nothing they fancied on the menu, she allowed them to send out for pizza.

At regular intervals, yet another American promoter would publicly offer still more millions of dollars for a single Beatles reunion concert. In 1976, the producer of the satirical TV show Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels, appeared on-screen with his own tongue-in-cheek bid of $3000 for three songs performed live on his programme. All four ex-Beatles happened to be in the country at the time and John and Paul were watching the show together at the Dakota. They were on the point of calling a cab to the SNL studios and collecting the money, but then decided they were too tired.

Yet despite John’s conviction of having grown up at last, his old juvenile competitiveness with Paul remained as keen as ever. It galled him, for instance, that whenever he walked into the Plaza Hotel’s Palm Court to have tea, the string quartet struck up ‘Yesterday’, which, despite its Lennon–McCartney credit, he’d had no hand whatsoever in writing.

He listened to every new Wings album and single, initially to check for more concealed insults to Yoko and himself, but then often with approval–even admiration–and watched the band’s repeated ascents of the American charts with unconcealed envy. That envy peaked in 1978, when Paul received $22.5 million for signing with CBS Records. ‘I’ll never have that kind of money,’ John lamented to Yoko. ‘We haven’t got Daddy Eastman behind us the way he has.’

Yoko, who came from a great financial dynasty (her great-grandfather had been the Emperor of Japan’s personal banker), undertook to make an equal amount within two years, and did so by skilful investment in real estate and herds of valuable Holstein dairy cattle.

Ironically, an idea Paul had had in 1967 was to bring vastly bigger sums into the Beatles’ collective coffers although, sadly, John would not be around to see it. Personal computers were becoming noticeable in the world and in 1978 it emerged that a young electronics whizz-kid in California named Steve Jobs had named his new computer company Apple. A hardcore Beatles fan, Jobs later admitted he’d taken the name from the company which they’d created, and which Paul had named after his favourite Magritte painting.

Apple Corps was still very much alive, if only as a conduit for the four’s residual earnings, and its managing director, the faithful Neil Aspinall, immediately filed suit for infringement of copyright. A settlement was reached which allowed Jobs to continue using the Apple name on condition his computers had no musical content–a notion which then seemed impossible.

There were times when John talked to Yoko about Paul with almost parental pride as one of the two great discoveries he’d made–the other being her. In one of his last television appearances before ‘retiring’, he was asked which Beatles tracks he thought likeliest to stand the test of time. The two he named were both Paul’s: ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Hey Jude’.

Often, however, his rampaging insecurity would keep him awake into the small hours, sitting in the Dakota apartment’s huge white kitchen with his three pet cats, brooding about the multitude of cover versions his old partner’s songs generated. ‘They always cover Paul’s songs,’ he’d say wistfully to Yoko. ‘They never cover mine.’ She would try to reassure him, as work like ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, ‘A Day in the Life’ and ‘I Am the Walrus’ apparently could not: ‘You’re a good songwriter. It’s not just June-with-spoon that you write.’

When Paul stopped off in New York with Linda en route to Japan, he had phoned the Dakota to see if they could come over, but been told by Yoko (by now heavily reliant on astrologers) that it wasn’t a good time.

John followed the Tokyo drama on television, as amazed as everyone by Paul’s carelessness–though sure it betrayed a secret longing to be thought ‘a bad boy’. ‘If he really needed weed, surely there’s enough people who can carry it for him. You’re a Beatle, boy–a Beatle! Your face is in every corner of the planet. How could you be so stupid?’

Later, after it had been eclipsed by an infinitely larger tragedy, there was an attempt to blame the bust on Yoko. According to her former assistant, Fred Seaman, she was incensed that Paul and Linda had booked the Hotel Okura’s Presidential Suite–thus spoiling John’s and her ‘hotel karma’–and had used high-level connections in Tokyo to arrange the search of Paul’s bag. Yoko herself denied it and, despite their often rocky relationship over the years, Paul has never given the story any credence.