#Mpls Music | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

menlove · 3 days ago

Text

"Life After the Bastards: 30 Years On, Macca Tells All"

"Blamed for the break-up for the biggest band in history, Paul McCartney downsized rapidly to cultivate a successful pop smallholding. Yet a bountiful solo career was always dominated by two famous partners, he tells Paul Du Noyer."

i said i'd do this ages ago and then the horrors happened, but this is a written up version of an interview by paul du noyer with paul mccartney from mojo's july 2001 issue.

sidenote: this seems to be the source for the claim that john thought "dear boy" was about him, which is why i bought the magazine because i haven't been able to find a digitized version of the interview and wanted to get the context. but it's a very fascinating interview just in general so it's definitely worth a read!

Wings were a band who seldom felt the feathery end of the critic's quill, but this year we're seeing Paul McCartney's biggest effort so far to rehabilitate the second most popular group he ever belonged to. He's released a double-CD and a documentary, both called Wingspan, that tell the story as he would like it told. And you soon realise that there's more than a muso's pride at stake in this project. "The great thing is," he says, "it vindicates Linda. I know she wanted to do the Wingspan thing. She knew if it was laid out correctly, people would get the idea. With all the slagging off she got, like the famous tape at Knebworth..." (This illicit cassette, from the mixing desk of a live show at the outdoor venue, was for years a dependable source of satirical mirth in music business circles; Linda McCartney's off-key vocals circumnavigate the chorus notes of Hey Jude, while anonymous engineers hoot cruelly.)

"The truth was," her loyal widower continues, "she was doing this (he stands, raises his hands to clap above his head). She was being the big cheerleader: 'Hey Jude, naah-naah-na.' But you don't see the visual, you just here this out-of-tune voice, and I know she always wanted the record put straight. And this does. You see her playing. You hear her singing beautifully. And you see what she was to the group. You see why she had to be in the group. She becomes the ballsiest member of it..."

He settles back on the sofa, here in the Soho office of his MPL company. Around his neck is a slim pink tie of the kind that Elvis used to wear. On his feet are trainers that look less like a gesture to trendiness than a concession to comfort. Just behind him is the Art Deco statuette that appears on a couple of Wings LP sleeves. The other great thing about the Wingspan film, he says,was being interviewed by his daughter Mary. (That's her face you can see, peeping out from Dad's jacket on the cover of the first solo LP, 31 years ago.) "I'd never had such a long natter with her, as doing this. And I used to say to my kids, You're the only ones who never ask me about The Beatles. Their friends would come round and say, 'What was it like being in The Beatles?' I'd go (adopts pompous old git voice), Well, let me tell you... And my kids would all go out the room: 'Oh bloody hell, he's off...' That's how kids are, they don't want to hear about that shit. But their friends would, so I'd chunder on..."

In fact he chunders on about The Beatles a lot more than you might expect. Or about one Beatle in particular, at least. The World's Most Famous Living Liverpudlian is anything but reticent when it comes to the World's Most Famous Dead Liverpudlian. It's quite contrary of him, because for the first 20 years after the group split up, he showed a stubborn reluctance to discuss the subject with his interviewers. They wanted to ask about John Lennon; he wanted to discuss Back To The Egg... Then came a reconciliation with his past that culminated in the Anthology exercise, when the moratorium on Beatle-talk was entirely lifted. And now, in 2001, when the promotional agenda has switched back to Wings, you almost have to coax him off the subject of John Lennon. Is it just force of habit, or maybe the need to exorcise some kind of long-nosed, bespectacled, sharp-tongued ghost inside his head?

Taste restrains Paul from claiming any posthumous victories over John, though it's no secret that he still has some differences with Yoko that are as wide as the Atlantic that normally separates them. But he can't resist smiling at the irony of Lennon spending his last few years championing the sort of domestic cosiness that was once a derided part of the McCartney stereotype.

"Yeah, it's lovely. But you're right to say they were stereotypes. Everyone thought John was the hard, working class hero. As you know, if you look at his house, he was actually the middle class one, from Woolton. We were the scruffs. He had the full Works Of Winston Churchill: nobody any of us knew had that. A set of encyclopedias was the most that anyone in our class had. But he had The Works Of Winston Churchill, and he'd read 'em, I think.

"There were so many stereotypes of John. And I love the fact that in the end- it's one of the great blessings of my life, seeing as he got shot- that during the last year, we made it up. Thank God for that. I would be just so fucked up now, if I'd still been arguing with him and that had happened. I was thinking about it just the other day. It was cool that I'd started ringing him. We'd had a bread strike over here and I rang him and I was saying, What are you doing? He says, 'I'm breaking some bread.' Oh! Me too! Imagine, with the stereotypes, John and Paul talking about baking bread. He'd just had Sean, and he was talking about just padding round the apartment in his dressing gown, putting the cat out and changing the baby.

"And I'd been doing all of that, and as you say, I'd been stereotyped for it. It was really warm to be able to talk to him that ordinarily, finally. It was like we'd got back to where we'd been when we were kids. It was like we could actually talk about stuff that didn't matter, but somehow it did matter..."

Back in 1970 neither John nor Paul, nor George or Ringo, would find The Beatles an easy beast to walk away from. Paul and Ringo seem to be at peace with it now; John would probably have become so; George never has. Besides the legal wranglings and the personal rancour that persisted between them for a while, there was the unique problem of getting used to living in a world that you no longer ruled.

Pop in the 1960s was like a pyramid. At the top obviously, were The Beatles. Around them and just below, were Dylan, the Stones, the deposed King Elvis, and so on down to the broad base of innumerable also-rans. But pop in the 1970s was more like range of mountain peaks, topped by anyone from Elton John to the Sex Pistols. There was also no unified hierarchy any more, and there hasn't been one since. McCartney can't have found the new world order an easy proposition. But he overcame his doubts the same way that he overcame his blacker periods in The Beatles. In other words, he worked.

It's one of those first post-mop top albums that we discuss in detail today. McCartney (1970) and Ram (1971) were curiously anti-climatic in their day. The first was home-grown, small-scale, contentedly modest, like a record made for his private diversion. The second was sprawling and eccentric, full of unfinished tunes and nonsense rhymes. This was an era when former Beatles were still expected to return from the mountain bearing tables of stone (which Lennon and Harrison certainly attempted to do), not these gaudy, giggling indulgences. Three decades later, McCartney and Ram have endured far better than anyone expected.

It's typical of McCartney, though, that he's still insecure about their worth. He has a peculiar, wrong-end-of-the-telescope way of assessing his talent. He tries to talk up McCartney by telling you that "Dave Stewart really likes it", or boasts that a hippy van driver once yelled across the LA traffic, "Ram! Great album dude!" Recently his girlfriend Heather Mills put it this way: "He is a genius but doesn't realise it, which is delightful."

Towards the end of The Beatles you were dying to get back to playing live in a band, weren't you? But your first move is to go the opposite way and do a totally solo album.

Yeah. I couldn't have another band because I wasn't sure The Beatles had actually broken up. It was on the cusp: we hadn't broken up when I started it, so it was just me doing some solo stuff. And then we had broken up, but things hung on. It basically started from John's decision to leave the band, which came when I said I think we should get back together and do some little gigs. And he said, "Well I think you're daft and I wasn't going to tell you until after we signed the Capitol deal but I'm leaving the band." (Mimes an axe falling) That was, like, The Moment The Beatles Broke Up. But it wasn't in the open until a few months later, when I issued the McCartney album and did this press release with it, which virtually had the announcement. I finally blew the whistle on it. And John was annoyed, even though he hadn't said anything. It turns out, he told me later, that he wanted to be the one who announced it. He was jealous that I beat him to it. But I felt that three or four months was enough to wait around. Either we were just going to fuck about for another year, or we had to actually say to people, "You know what? About three or four months ago we actually broke up." So that was how that happened.

So in your head, The Beatles were still together when you were making McCartney. Whereas the outside world heard it as "What Paul did after leaving The Beatles." I think it seemed a strangely low-key record, as a result.

No. It was on the cusp. There were a lot of funny things around at the time. Allen Klein: he was the one I wanted to sue to get out of it all. But everyone said, "He's not party to any of the agreements, he's just an outside guy. So you'll have to sue The Beatles." So I got into this terrifying thing of having to sue them, scared more than anything of the fact that, as you say, people would just see this album come out, hear my announcement and then hear I was suing The Beatles, without knowing any of the context. So I knew I was in for problems. And I tired my best in the press to say, "Oh, blah blah blah, it was Allen Klein, blah blah." So it was a shitty time for me. The only option was to either let him take it all, and the guys just swim along with him, or fight it. He said I was fine, "Don't worry, McCartney loves me" and all of this. And I knew I was hating the bastard. But to get out of him I had to sue the guys. And, as you know, Liverpool, the mates, no matter how much we were arguing, it's one thing you don't ever want to have to do. So I knew the perception of me would, like, be deadened from there on in. And I suppose in many ways I've been fighting that for 20 years. But it was a clear choice: do that and possibly save it all- or even lose it and pay the lawyers' bills, which was not a terrific option- or just let Klein take it all. 'Cos the others were just with him, gung ho. So I took the option of suing him and had to live with that perception, including: "This is what Paul's done as his first move after leaving The Beatles." Which was actually the nicest bit of the perception: I did an album after The Beatles, so what? The worst thing for me was, I sued my best mates. But the thing is, looking back on it, they now say "Thank you, you got us out of it, we wouldn't have Apple, there'd be no Anthology, no I record, it'd all be in someone else's pocket now." It was the right thing to do, but I knew I was walking into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Very scary, but it was one of those moments in your life when you have to do it.

And, of course, we were hearing McCartney just after Abbey Road, which was at the opposite extreme.

Very produced, yeah.

Despite the problems going on around it, McCartney sounds a pretty cheerful affair.

Yeah, it was, because of Linda. I was just starting with Linda and in my mind the album was my escape from it all. I'd get home, new baby, that joy... any readers who've got a new baby, it transforms your life. I hadn't had a baby before, though we had Heather from Linda's first marriage. Home was a great solace for me, and making this record was "Yeah, this is what I love to do." The rest, outside, was shit, but coming inside it was like a little cocoon. So I either made the album all at home or went down to a little studio in Willesden. Lin and the baby in the control room. Young married life is a very special time. And I always liked doing things on my own. I was the kid in Liverpool who sort of went on a bus to the next stop, to Penny Lane, and got off and just looked around: "Who lives there?" I still like that, it's in my personality to just go somewhere and watch people. Last night I took the Tube home. We went to the theatre, couldn't get a taxi anywhere in the West End. I really get a charge off that. George never used to. His dad was a bus driver. I'd say to him, even when we were famous, I love getting on a bus. He'd say (astonished), "The bus? Why? You've got a car!" But you're just looking at people. And now of course, with fame, they're looking at me a bit.

There's one or two on the Tube last night, cracking up laughing. Guy in a baseball cap, decides he's got to cool himself out, pull it together, gets off at the same stop: "All right mate? Good luck!" So that's where the record got its happiness. And when the time came to release it, I finally had to deal with Mammon, which was Apple. Ring them up and say, "Er, can I have a release date?" Neil [Aspinall] gave me a date. I was kind of boycotting Apple, and Suddenly Mammon decided to change my release date for (adopts sarcastic tone) the massive Let It Be album. And I'm, "You fucking bastards! I've got a release date worked out! How can you do this?" I can't remember what happened, but I certainly shouted loud enough. So it was Rage Against The Machine, me against them. That's why it was a good album for me, and it's pretty funky, some of the little pieces like Momma Miss America have a great sound on them. I was like a professor in his laboratory. Very simple, as basic as you can get, a joy to make. (Scans the tracklist) Teddy Boy was good, I'd tried to make that with The Beatles but no one was having much patience with me. Maybe I'm Amazed was about the biggest song on it. And Kreen-Akrore was about an Amazon tribe I'd seen, who were fighting for survival, I went into the studio and recorded the sound of a bow and arrow going past the mike. Even now that album has an interesting sound. Very analogue, very direct.

The next album, Ram, is famous for its supposed attacks on John and Yoko, isn't it?

Well, Too Many People was a bit of a dig at John, because he was digging at me. We were digging at each other in the press. Not harsh, but pissed off with each other, basically.

Have I misheard, or does it really start with the words "Piss off"?

Yeah. Piss off, cake. Like, a piece of cake becomes a piss off cake. And it's nothing, it's so harmless really, just little digs. But the first line is about "too many people preaching practices". I felt John and Yoko were telling everyone what to do. And I felt we didn't need to be told what to do. The whole tenor of the Beatles thing had been, like, each to his own. Freedom. Suddenly it was, "You should do this." It was just a bit the wagging finger, and I was pissed off with it. So that one got to be athing about them. Once you start, the ball starts rolling. There was a picture that we had for Hallowe'en of the two of us in silly masks that we picked up at a kids' shop in New York. I'm Wimpey out of Popeye, and Linda was another character which looked a bit Oriental. We heard later that they thought that was a dig at them, but it actually wasn't. So when John did a piss-take [in a postcard given away with his Imagine LP], he held a pig instead of the ram. This wasn't posed. Me and Linda decided to catalogue all our sheep, so there's a photograph of me holding every bloody sheep in the flock. Over 100 of them. I was supposed to be cropped out.

Is that where the title came from?

I remember driving up to Liverpool at some point and deciding that Ram would be a good title for an album, then the picture came, and you can "ram" a door down, and a "ram" is a male, like a stag. It just seemed like a good word. Monkberry Moon Delight I liked, so much so that it's in my poetry book. "My long-haired lady." Very '70s. Ram On is a cute little thing on a ukelele, 'cos I used to carry one around with me in the back of New York taxis just to always have music with me. They thought I was a freak, those taxi-drivers. Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey was an epic thing, a Number 1 in America, surprisingly enough. I like the bit that breaks in: "Admiral Halsey notified me, da-da-da, had a cup of tea and a butter pie." It's a bit surreal, but I was in a very free mood. I like all of that. It must have freaked a few people, 'cos it was quite daft. Back Seat Of My Car is very romantic: "We can make it to Mexico City." That's a really teenage song, with the stereotypical parent who doesn't agree, and the two lovers are going to take on the world: "We believe that we can't be wrong." I always like the underdog.

I think John might have taken Dear Boy as an attack on him.

Dear Boy wasn't getting at John. Dear Boy was actually a song to Linda's ex-husband. "I guess you never knew what you had missed." I never told him that, which was lucky, because he's since committed suicide. And it was a comment about him, 'cos I did think, "Gosh, you know, she's so amazing, I suppose you didn't get it.

The LP sounds like you had more tunes lying around than songs to use them in. A lot of the tracks are like medleys of different ideas.

Yeah, Long Haired Lady goes off a bit, Back Seat Of My Car goes off a bit, Big Barn Bed comes off Ram On, that's right.

No writer's block at that point, then?

No, I've been very lucky about writer's block, touch wood. It occurred to me the other day that me and John never sat down on, what was it, 295 songs me and John wrote? And on those 295 occasions, we never came away without a song, which is fucking phenomenal. The only time we nearly did, was Golden Rings, which became Drive My Car. It was "duh-duh duh-duh golden rings..." Um, this is not gonna compute. Finally, we had a ciggie and a cup of tea and our humour came back and Drive My Car came out of that. Some people analyse songwriting. I've never known about it. It's fingers crossed, every time I sit down to do it. I just dive right in and hope for the best, and it seems to work.

Were you feeling in competition with the other ex-Beatles, now?

Yeah, we were all in competition. Which was a weird thing, trying to avoid each other's release dates, like we'd avoided the Stones' release dates in The Beatles. When John or George released an album, I'd check it out, to see where he was up to. I think the truth, as a lot of people have said, is that we were missing each other. We missed the collaborative thing, of John saying, "Don't do that" or "Do that". Sparking each other off. For a while I was certainly very conscious of it. The only good thing was that I had been writing without John for a while, towards the end of The Beatles, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been. It was still a pretty big shock just not to be hanging out with these guys. 'Cos I'd hung out with them since I was 17.

Even when you were not writing together, on later Beatles records, there must have been a stage in the process where the others listened to your songs, and vetoed them or otherwise.

Exactly. John brought me Glass Onion. I remember him out in the garden in St John's wood saying, "What do you think of this?" We would just run it past each other, like you would run it past a mate or a producer. And he actually asked me, "D'you think I should put in this line about the Walrus was Paul?" I said, Oh yeah! It's brilliant. I just generally tended to agree with his stuff, and he tended to agree with mine- like in Hey Jude, i was going to knock out that line about "The movement you need is on your shoulder." He said, "You're not, that's the best line in it." So, often it wasn't negative but bolstering each other up. I might go through the whole studio experience thinking, This line's not right. But the minute he'd signed off on it, I thought, This line is ace! Similarly with him and Glass Onion. It was the strength of unity.

It's always striking that, of the four solo Beatles, George and Ringo got off to the strongest starts.

Yeah, George's All Things Must Pass. As he said, it was just like a diarrhea, he must have held it in for so long. And he had Phil [Spector] and a lot of really good people. And George was just so pissed off with us. I mean, all that anger just came out. Which is a good thing for an album, the "I'll show you" factor, which I had later in Band On The Run, when two of the members left the night before. So George and Ringo did get off to very good starts. John and I took it a bit hard, but all in all throughout the years we all did pretty well as single acts.

You formed a band for Ram, but it's not yet Wings.

Not yet, no. Denny Seiwell turns out to be in the band. Hugh McCracken who plays on a lot of it, who was nearly in the band. He came to Scotland to rehearse, but he was such a New York guy that he didn't really like to be away from America, and I can see that. New York is such a satisfying town, you can walk one block and get anything, whereas you can't do that in the Mull of Kintyre...

The first official line-up of Wings, which makes Wild Life, includes Denny Laine.

Denny came from The Moody Blues. I'd seen him when were out on tour with The Beatles and we'd played with them. My enduring memory is of one night up in somewhere like Edinburgh on tour, we'd had a few drinks and we decided that The Moody Blues would play The Beatles at snooker on this very beautiful, full-sized snooker table. Instead of being sensible and playing one at a time against each other, in a kind of league, they all got on one end of the table and we all got on the other, and I'm afraid the table got trashed. Oh shit. So I knew Denny, I knew we could get on personally and I liked his voice, particularly from Go Now, which I championed. I remember taking that around the BBC in its early days and saying, "Have you heard Go Now by The Moody Blues? It's my favourite record of the moment." And those producers would take notice of us. I was also used to having another lead voice in the group with me, so Denny became that.

And this time there's a friendlier song for John.

Dear Friend was to do with John, a bit of longing about John. Let's have a glass of wine and forget about it. A making up song.

Finally you do what The Beatles wouldn't agree to do, and get back on the road.

It seemed to me that for a band it's essential. We'd given it up in '67 with Sgt. Pepper when our new decree was, "The record will go on tour and we won't. We'll make a great record and send that out instead." But what happened after that was, we made some good records, but missed the stimulus of going out on tour. We missed seeing the whites of their eyes and getting a reality check: "They liked that one, they didn't like that one." And we hadn't done it for so long that my choice was, Either give up music, or continue to make it. I wanted The Beatles to go out as a live band, therefore I ought to go out as a live band. So we got a band and hatched the plan of going out on the university tour. Didn't want a big supergroup, a Blind Faith-style thing. I wanted to try and learn the whole thing again, hopefully learn some new things, rather than just repeat The Beatles things, which had all been done, and been about as successful as anyone in the world was ever gonna be.

But you took the informality to extremes, not even booking hotels.

No gigs or hotels or anything. Looking back, I can't believe we did that. We had the van, the dogs, the kids, and it was just madness. It was like I'd never been in The Beatles, I couldn't rely on any of that fame as a crutch. We went up to these universities, and fate had it that a lot of them were having exams. We didn't ring them up and ask if they'd be ready for us. And the other thing was we walked into power cuts: it was the time of the Great British Three Day Week. My image now is of trying to find our way around the dark North with a torch. Is anyone in? Like trying to find a gig in a mine. But we found a couple. Nottingham was one. Lancaster we played. Newcastle City Hall. Durham. When we did find places it was really cool. The students had a good time.

And you had the unfamiliar experience of handling money again.

Yeah, it had all been cheques and accounts and stuff, bank statements. And suddenly it was 50p on the door. So we came away with these bags of coins, which reminded me of Peter Sellers in Tom Thumb: One for you, two for me... We just counted them out in the van afterwards. Good experience, going through all those hardships, and it got us together as a band.

But that line-up wasn't to last, and nor did any Wings line-up. Why?

I've never actually thought about it. I know it happened but I've always blanked it. Probably, in my mind, a band is a democratic unit. Everyone has an equal vote, and in The Beatles for 10 years that had been the case. So if Ringo didn't like one of our songs, which wasn't often, Ringo could veto a Lennon & McCartney song. That meant everyone felt good about themselves. But in Wings that wasn't the case. I was the ex-Beatle. So I saw myself as the leader of the group, which I'd never been in The Beatles. There wasn't a leader in The Beatles. People had said that John was, and later people had said that I was, but neither of us ever acknowledged it. It wasn't the deal. People would ask, "Who's the leader of the group?" We'd say there wasn't one. I think once or twice in Hamburg, in the early days, John said, "I am." But we got pissed off, so it became a democracy. But Wings wasn't. It wasn't a dictatorship, but we weren't all equal.

By the '70s there was suddenly lots of other big acts: Led Zeppelin, T. Rex, Bowie, Pink Floyd, even The Osmonds in their way, or Abba. Was it difficult, as a Beatle, to adjust to the new landscape?

I knew it was going to be difficult. There was this thing of Follow The Beatles. You found yourself just one of the acts in the Hit Parade, rather than the undisputed leaders. But I knew by starting the group from scratch that we had to work our way up So anyone like Zeppelin or Bowie who'd been building during the '60s and had now arrived, naturally took precedence. You just had to understand that there are people bigger than you. And it gave us a benchmark. We thought, "We'll be as big as you one day." It was very weird for me, starting all over again. But it wasn't the world's worst thing. It was quite sobering, really. It's good to be knocked off your perch. There was a lot of that with Wings. Not only was I doing things for myself with the band, I was personally doing things for myself, living up in Scotland, mowing the field with my tractor. In The Beatles, the office used to buy your Christmas tree for you. Now I was buying my own Christmas tree. I enjoyed that . It's unhealthy to think you're the big cheese all the time. Within The Beatles, we each reminded each other that we weren't. But I think there is a big risk with stardom. I'd ring up a restaurant and say, Have you got a table? "Sorry sir, we're full booked." It's Paul McCartney here. "Oh! Certainly, Mr McCartney!" I've never been comfortable with it.

It seemed like you were uncomfortable with The Beatles' legacy for most of your time with Wings.

The thing about Wings was we bought into the myth that it could never be as good as The Beatles. I knew it was the world's most difficult thing to bite off. Everything we did was in the shadow of The Beatles, which had recently been this phenomenal band. So we did everything with quite a lot of paranoia. And it's only on looking back, that I think we did a lot of great work. You look at '76, we have this big, big tour, and at first everyone wants to know, "Is this gonna be a Beatles reunion? It's rumored that McCartney blah-blah-blah, George Harrison and Ringo Starr are going to join him on-stage, and John Lennon blah-blah-blah." So it was rumoured The Beatles were going to re-form. Even in our most successful year they were taking our success off us. It was, "Well maybe The Beatles will re-form, that would be good." But the great thing was that three weeks into the tour it was suddenly, "Who cares?" It doesn't matter. This is a great band. And at the end of it we go and set some big world record. So that's good to see. We did this thing that we set out to do. And we needn't have worried.

#paul mccartney #the beatles #wings #mclennon #this whole interview was super fascinating tbh....#like all the insane paul & john quotes aside it's just very interesting #i lost it at the story about the beatles vs the moody blues game of snooker lmfao #also saying here I don't think this is nearly enough to say john thought dear boy was about him #I think the interviewer maybe meant too many people bc that's what they were talking about before #did briefly go 'I should email this guy' and then I sat there like girl it's NOT that much of a mystery put it down

143 notes · View notes

gardenschedule · 11 months ago

Text

Paul trying and sometimes failing to be chill about Yoko

“I told John on the phone the other day that at the beginning of last year I was annoyed with him. I was jealous because of Yoko, and afraid about the break-up of a great musical partnership.”

1970, Paul to Ray Connolly in the Evening Standard

I’d been able to accept Yoko in the studio, sitting on a blanket in front of my amp. I’d worked hard to come to terms with that. But then when we broke up and everyone was now flailing around, John turned nasty. I don’t really understand why. Maybe because we grew up in Liverpool, where it was always good to get in the first punch of a fight.

The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present

"It just became impossible for me to work with Yoko sitting there watching us," says Paul. "I wanted to write simple things like 'I love you girl' and every time I knew she was listening I felt I had to come out with someone clever and avant garde! "I'm not blaming Yoko -- I'm blaming me. It was no more John's fault for falling in love with Yoko than it was mine for falling in love with Linda. It just meant that we didn't work together anymore. We tried but it didn't work."

Paul McCartney, in his first magazine interview since the split, tells FLIP's Keith Altham... "THE BEATLES ARE FINISHED!"

We didn’t accept Yoko totally, but like I say, how many groups do you know, these days [who would]? I mean, it’s a joke. It’s like Spinal Tap! I mean, it’s Spinal Tap! A joke!

September, 1986 (MPL Communications, London)

And in John’s thing, you know, when as – you obviously know – he was going through a lot of pain when he said a lot of that stuff. And he felt that we were, um, being kind of vindictive towards him and Yoko. In actual fact I just answered a question on an American TV thing – I think we were quite good, looking back on it, and knowing people in life. Many people would’ve just downed tools with a situation like that and just have said: “Look man, she’s not sitting on our amps while we’re making a film.” I mean, that wouldn’t be unheard of. I mean, Sean Penn... do you know what I mean? Most people would just say, “We’re not having this person here. Don’t care how much you love her.”

But we were actually quite supportive. Not supportive enough, you know; it would have been nice to have been really supportive because then we could look back and say, “Weren’t we really terrific?” But looking back on it, I think we were okay. We were never really that mean to them. But I think a lot of the time John suspected meanness where it wasn’t really there.

September, 1986 (MPL Communications, London)

I’ve already mentioned how in September 1969 we were in a meeting and talking about future plans, and John said, ‘Well, I’m not doing it. I’m leaving. Bye.’ In the ensuing moments, he was giggling and saying how this felt really thrilling, like telling someone you’re going to divorce them and then laughing. At the time, obviously, that was wildly hurtful. Talk about a knockout blow. You’re lying on the canvas, and he’s giggling and telling you how good it feels to have just knocked you out. It took a while, but I suppose I eventually got with the programme. This was my best mate from my youth, the collaborator with whom I’d done some of the best work of the twentieth century (he said, modestly). If he fell in love with this woman, what did that have to do with me? Not only did I have to let him do it, but I had to admire him for doing it. That was the position I eventually reached. There was nothing else I could do but be cool with it.

Paul McCartney, on “Get Back”. In The Lyrics (2021).

MANSFIELD: But, you know, [after John showed me the pictures of himself and Yoko nude for the album cover of Two Virgins], I asked Paul about this. And this, to me, is indicative of their relationship, maybe as much as anything I [had] ever heard. I said, “Paul, you know, what do you think about this?” And Paul says, “I don’t know.” He said, “I don’t really agree with John. But I just am going to figure that John’s ahead of me on this, and that someday I’ll understand and I’ll catch up. So, you know, I’m okay.” ROSEN: And what did that reaction tell you about their relationship? MANSFIELD: That it was an extremely deep relationship.

Ken Mansfield (record label executive and Apple Records U.S. manager), interview w/ James Rosen for Fox News. (December 4th-5th, 2007)

John and Yoko had to visit Sir Joseph Lockwood of EMI with the nude photos to ensure that he would allow their use and there wouldn’t be any censorship problems. Although he personally didn’t like the album or photographs, Paul accompanied the two of them to their meeting. Sir Joseph thought that the fans would be outraged and the Beatles’ reputation would be damaged, but Yoko told him: ‘It’s art.’ Lockwood said: ‘Well, I should find some better bodies to put on the cover than your two. They’re not very attractive. Paul McCartney would look better naked than you.”

The Paul McCartney Encyclopedia by Bill Harry. (also... rekt lmao)

So that – I think, in order to kind of say to Yoko, “Look, my life is now yours,” he had to say things like, “The Beatles were bastards, we were total jerks, we never wrote anything good…” Which I think was rubbish, basically. And as I say, you have to realize that some of that time he was on heroin – so he’s not going to be just talking absolutely lucidly all the time, there. Some of the times, he was having other sorts of problems…

1989, Paul

And I think we would all have continued the Beatles, but Yoko came along, John fell wildly in love with her, he needed a big, big change in his life and he got it! He came to live in New York, he kind of threw over all his English [pause] contacts and everything. And, you know, can’t blame him! If that’s what he wants to do in his life! So we had to kind of, fade into the background to allow them to have their relationship. What were we gonna do, ringin’ him up? ‘Hey John, you know, hey, come and see me! Leave Yoko!’ No, that obviously never gonna happen. [pause] See, you had to let him do what he wanted, and he- he did you know… And he enjoyed it.

Paul McCartney on John’s early 70′s attacks as a sign of his feelings towards him. Interviewed by Bob Costa, 1991.

“. . . I mean, I think really what it was, really all that happened was that John fell in love. With Yoko. And so, with such a powerful alliance like that, it was difficult for him to still be seeing me. It was as if I was another girlfriend, almost. Our relationship was a strong relationship. And if he was to start a new relationship, he had to put this other one away. And I understood that. I mean, I couldn’t stand in the way of someone who’d fallen in love. You can’t say, “Who’s this?” You can’t really do that. If I was a girl, maybe I could go out and… But you know I mean in this case I just sort of said, right – I mean, I didn’t say anything, but I could see that was the way it was going to go, and that Yoko would be very sort of powerful for him. So um, we all had to get out the way.”

Paul McCartney, interview with German tv program Exclusiv, April 1985.

PAUL: ‘Cause she’s very much to do with it from John’s angle, that’s the thing, you know. And I – the thing is that I – there’s— Again, like, there’s always only two answers. One is to fight it, and fight her, and try and get The Beatles back to four people without Yoko, and sort of ask her to sit down at the board meetings. Or else, the other thing is to just realize that she’s there, you know. And he’s not gonna sort of – split with her, just for our sakes.

Twickenham, January 13th, 1969

PAUL: Yeah, see, that’s the thing. The only one time we’ve actually done it, she’s agreed. She really is alright. It’s like, it’s the thought of her being there when some of— [faltering] And then you don’t talk to John, so then he doesn’t talk to you, you know. And it’s like, you can screw it up just as much because she’s there, as – as John’s relying on her because she’s there. So that’s the thing. You know, but I mean, like, you’ll notice, if John – if you’re onto a beam with John about something, then he really isn’t, you know, he really won’t let Yoko talk about it. Because he knows when you’re on a beam, and he knows about it, and you’ll – you can talk straighter to him.

Twickenham, January 13th, 1969

‘All new wives don’t like their husband’s old friends or cronies,’ he replies. ‘I don’t think [Yoko] liked Paul. I think Paul was ready to like Yoko. Maybe she saw Paul as a threat. It was a partnership. The partnership should have been John and Yoko, not John and Paul. I am not saying it was a deliberate process, but it was a natural process. John had a new partner: she. Yoko Ono. It was going to be John and Yoko’s songs and not Paul and John’s songs.’

Don Short (newsman), c/o Sandra Shevey, The Other Side of Lennon.(1990)

As the meeting was drawing to a weary close, John, not this day with Yoko, who hadn’t seemed particularly connected with what was going on, said he wanted to play us a tape he and Yoko had made. He got up and put the cassette into the tape machine and stood beside it as we listened. The soft murmuring voices did not at first signal their purpose. It was a man and a woman but hard to hear, the microphone having been at a distance. I wondered if the lack of clarity was the point. Were we even meant to understand what was going on, was it a kind of artwork where we would not be able to put the voices into a context, and was context important? I felt perhaps this was something John and Yoko were examining. But then, after a few minutes, it became clear. John and Yoko were making love, with endearments, giggles, heavy breathing, both real and satirical, and the occasional more direct sounds of pleasure reaching for climax, all recorded by the faraway microphone. But there was something innocent about it too, as though they were engaged in a sweet serious game. John clicked the off button and turned again to look toward the table, his eyebrows quizzical above his round glasses, seemingly genuinely curious about what reaction his little tape would elicit. However often they’d shared small rooms in Hamburg, whatever they knew of each other’s love and sex lives, this tape seemed to have stopped the other three cold. Perhaps it touched a reserve of residual Northern reticence. After a palpable silence, Paul said, “Well, that’s an interesting one.” The others muttered something and the meeting was over. It occured to me as I was walking down the stairs that what we’d heard could have been an expression of 1960s freedom and openness but was it more likely that it was as if a gauntlet had been thrown down? “You need to understand that this is where she and I are now. I don’t want to hold your hand anymore.”

Michael Lindsay-Hogg (filmmaker), Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond. (2011)

“Paul, in his usual way, tried to be the nice guy and was open-minded about John’s weird choice,” says Brown. “He invited them to stay at [his house in] Cavendish Avenue for a while.” The day after Cynthia’s return, they moved into the second-floor guest bedroom and made themselves at home. “But the problem was that Yoko wasn’t a very warm person—not even able to say thank you in response to anything Paul did for them. And he went miles out of his way to make them feel welcome, being a nice guy. So that didn’t last very long.”

The Beatles – Bob Spitz

PMcC: I always had the impression that Klein had got them to go with him because he was the only one who was ever sympathetic to Yoko. Klein saw the Yoko connection and told Yoko that he would do a lot for her. Give Yoko a lot. And that was basically what John and Yoko wanted, recognition for Yoko. We found her sitting on our amps, and like a football team, an all-male thing, you really don’t like to see a chick in the middle of the team. It’s a disturbing thing, they think it throws them off the game or whatever it was, and these were the reasons that I thought, Well, this is crazy, we’re gonna have Yoko in the group next.

SG: She was giving you advice in the studio?

PMcC: Well, she was definitely turning up. Looking at it now, I feel a bit sorry for her because, if only I had been able to understand what the situation was and think, wait a minute, here’s a girl who’s not had enough attention. I can now not make this into a major crisis and just sort of say, “Sure, what harm is she doing on the amps?” I know they would have really loved me. You know, we didn’t like Yoko at first, and people did call her ugly and stuff, and that must be hard for someone who loves someone and is so passionately in love with them, but I still can’t—I’m still trying to see his point of view. What was the point of all that?

All You Need is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines (thank you @tavolgisvist!)

Examples of failure to be chill:

PAUL: But it’s just funny to sort of realise that after this is all over, you’ll be off in a black bag somewhere – on the Albert Hall, you know. JOHN: Yes. PAUL: And sort of doing shows and stuff, and you know, digging— JOHN: Yeah, but I— PAUL: —digging that thing of it.

January 25th, 1969 (Apple Studios, London)

Yoko had evidently approached Paul McCartney about appearing in the film, as the Beatles' road manager Mal Evans penned in his diary: "PAUL HAS APPOINTMENT WITH JAPANESE LADY WHO WANTS TO PHOTOGRAPH HIS BOTTOM." Presumably Paul declined, and one must wonder if the same invitation might have been extended to John.

Chip Madinger, Lennonology Volume 1: Strange Days Indeed. (2015) (note: unforgivable rudeness on Paul's part to both Yoko and all of us who would have benefited from him featuring in "Bottoms")

“I was in India meditating about the album, when it suddenly hit me. I wrote Yoko telling her that I planned to have her in the nude on the cover. She was quite surprised, but nowhere near as much as George and Paul. “Paul gave me long lectures about it, and said ‘Is there really any need for this? ‘It took me five months to persuade them.

NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS, JUNE 7, 1969

He wasn’t happy. But the big things that were driving him mad were beyond me. He kept on working and writing, but when John came over, all he could talk about was how much he loved Yoko. That disturbed Paul. In spite of John’s obvious happiness, Paul stifled his jealousy with not-very-cute bursts of racist crap.

Francie Schwartz - Body Count

John & Yoko's perspective:

It’s the same. You can quote Paul, it’s probably in the papers, he said it many times at first he hated Yoko and then he got to like her. But, it’s too late for me. I’m for Yoko. Why should she take that kind of shit from those people? They were writing about her looking miserable in the Let It Be film, but you sit through 60 sessions with the most bigheaded, up-tight people on earth and see what its fuckin’ like and be insulted — just because you love someone — and George, shit, insulted her right to her face in the Apple office at the beginning, just being ‘straight-forward,’ you know that game of ‘I’m going to be up front,’ because this is what we’ve heard and Dylan and a few people said she’d got a lousy name in New York, and you give off bad vibes. That’s what George said to her! And we both sat through it. I didn’t hit him, I don’t know why.

I was always hoping that they would come around. I couldn’t believe it, and they all sat there with their wives, like a fucking jury and judged us and the only thing I did was write that piece (Rolling Stone, April 16th, 1970) about ��some of our beast friends” in my usual way — because I was never honest enough, I always had to write in that gobbly-gook — and that’s what they did to us.

Ringo was all right, so was Maureen, but the other two really gave it to us. I’ll never forgive them, I don’t care what fuckin’ shit about Hare Krishna and God and Paul with his “Well, I’ve changed me mind.” I can’t forgive ’em for that, really. Although I can’t help still loving them either.

John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Interview, Part One

JOHN: But I understand how they felt, because if it had been Paul or George and Ringo that had fallen in love with somebody and gotten totally involved, suddenly… It wasn’t like, you know, somebody – George coming in and saying, “I’m going to work with Eric Clapton in a band now, and screw you.” It wasn’t that kind of thing at all. It was just suddenly this involvement.

December 6th, 1980: Andy Peebles talks to John and Yoko

“Lennon stated that “there’s some underlying thing about Yoko in [Get Back]”, saying that McCartney looked at Yoko Ono in the studio every time he sang “Get back to where you once belonged””

David Sheff, All We are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono

TRYNKA: ‘The Ballad of John And Yoko’, with Paul playing drums and bass, seemed like Paul’s tribute to you. Was that the case? YOKO: Yeah. I thought that was beautiful. Paul was trying to be diplomatic about the situation, try to make it well... He meant well. There were other instances where he’d do things that were meant well.

Yoko Ono, interview w/ Paul Trynka for MOJO. (May, 2003)

YOKO: Even now, I just read that Paul said, “I understand that he wants to be with her, but why does he have to be with her all the time?” JOHN: Yoko, do you still have to carry that cross? That was years ago. YOKO: No, no, no. He said it recently. I mean, what happened with John is that I sort of went to bed with this guy that I liked and suddenly the next morning I see these three guys standing there with resentful eyes. SHEFF: Do you think that kind of attitude from people was also jealousy? JOHN: It’s a kind of jealousy. People can’t stand people being in love. They absolutely can’t stand it. They want to pull you down in the hole they’re in.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono, interview w/ David Sheff for Playboy. (September, 1980)

‘He wanted me to be part of the group,’ Yoko says. ‘He created the group, so he thought the others should accept that. I didn’t particularly want to be part of them… I couldn’t see how I would fit in, but John was certain I would. He kept saying, ‘They’re very sensitive … Paul is into Stockhausen… They can do your thing…’ He thought the other Beatles would go for it; he was trying to persuade me.’”

Philip Norman’s 2008 biography Lennon

After the initial embarrassment, that how Paul is being very nice to me, he’s nice and a very, str- on the level, straight, sense, like wherever there’s something like happening at the Apple, he explains to me, as if I should know. And also whenever there’s something like they need a light man, or something like that he asks me if I know of anybody, things like that. And like I can see that he’s just now suddenly changing his attitude, like his being, he’s treating me with respect, not because it’s me, but because I belong to John. I hope that’s what it is because that would be nice. And I feel like he’s my younger brother or something like that. I’m sure that if he had been a woman or something, he would have been a great threat, because there’s something definitely very strong with me, John, and Paul.

Revolution Chaos Tape – Yoko Ono, June 4, 1968

"The line [the walrus was Paul] was put in partly because I was feeling guilty because I was with Yoko and I was leaving Paul. It's a very perverse way of saying to Paul: 'here, have this crumb, this illusion, this stroke - because I'm leaving.'" -John

Playboy, 1980

JOHN: And throwing in the line “the Walrus was Paul” just to confuse everybody a bit more. And because I felt slightly guilty because I’d got Yoko, and he’d got nothing, and I was gonna quit. [laughs; bleak] And so I thought ‘Walrus’ has now become [in] meaning, “I am the one.” It didn’t mean that in the song, originally. It just meant I’m the – it could have been I’m the – “I’m The Fox Terrier,” you know. I mean, it’s just a bit of poetry.

August, 1980: John talks to Playboy writer David Sheff about ‘Glass Onion’.

“Still, the real reason that people disliked Yoko was because she ordered them about and sent them on errands in a particularly rude way; she was brought up with servants, and that’s how she treated the staff of Apple. George found it particularly galling that she never gave the Beatles their definite article. He told me, ‘She would say, “Beatles do this” and “Beatles do that”, and we would say, “Uh, it’s the Beatles actually, love.” She’d look at you and say, “Beatles do this.”’ And he laughed and shrugged his shoulders. Whether Yoko was ever aware of the disruption her presence caused to the Beatles’ working practices I don’t know. Some people thought she was so involved in her own work and self-interest that she didn’t notice; others thought that it was a deliberate ploy to separate John off from the others.”

Barry Miles, The Zapple Diaries. (2015)

#the beatles #paul mccartney #john lennon #mclennon #he could only play nice for so long #the bag thing pissed him off too much

137 notes · View notes