The McCartney Legacy, Volume 2 Quotes

“In his cell, Paul was unable to sleep, even after the sleepless 14-hour flight and the enervating events of the day. His instinct to defy those who told him “you can’t do that” had been strong since childhood, but over the past decade the phrase “you can’t tell us what to do” had turned into a game for the McCartneys. Despite multiple brushes with the law between 1972 and 1976, their desire to push boundaries for kicks remained undiminished. And they had been lucky: fame often wrapped the couple in a protective blanket that guarded them from consequences that normal people feared.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“When Wings toured Britain, Europe, Australia and North America between 1972 and 1976, Paul made a point of setting aside hefty rehearsal periods and working until the arrangements were tight and the performances were polished. But in October 1979, with a British tour set to begin at the end of November, Wings had barely rehearsed. And the British tour was just the start of what promised to be an extended touring period, with a visit to Japan planned for January pending the approval of the band’s visas—still a matter of concern, given the Japanese government’s refusal to allow Wings into the country in 1975 because of Paul’s earlier pot busts. Now, barely a month before their British tour was set to open, Wings did not even have a setlist. Paul had been able to suppress his feeling of discontent with Wings—not its current incarnation, particularly, but the idea of fronting a permanent band—while he was working on his solo project, and through all the activity in the weeks that followed. The question now was whether he could rekindle his love for the concept. The fact is, leading a band had been more of a slog than he bargained for, and the natural chemistry he had with the Beatles—developed as they grew from adolescent amateurs into stage-tested adults—had been impossible to replicate with a group of experienced players. He had been so desperate to have a band, after the Beatles broke up, that he approached it naively, believing it could be a band of equals. It took the departure of Henry McCullough and Denny Seiwell—the implosion of Wings Mark I—for him to realize that this was implausible. As the only marketable star in the band, it would never be equal, and more crucially, equality was not something he was suited for: he always had a clear idea of what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it, and he was unwilling to brook any opposition. When Jimmy McCulloch, Geoff Britton and then Joe English joined the band, they were younger and the power relationships were clearer. But in Wings Mark II, Paul found himself having to sort out his young charges’ personal problems, and while he was generally there for them, the combined role of musician and guidance counselor grew tiresome. Laurence Juber and Steve Holley were excellent players and entirely professional, but Back to the Egg had not won critical accolades, and there were some in Paul’s circle who thought Juber and Holley lacked their predecessors’ rock and roll rawness.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“In America, ‘Getting Closer’ did slightly better. The anonymous reviewer for Billboard found the song to be “an uplifting rocker” and praised McCartney’s vocals, as well as lyrics and instrumental hooks that were “subtle but effective.”44 The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 64 on June 16 and remained ten weeks. It took until July 28 to hit its peak, No. 20, a spot it held for a fortnight. At Lympne Castle, meanwhile, Wings were filling reels of tape with jamming, and Paul was bringing in new material. One of his new tunes was ‘Ebony and Ivory,’ a song he had started after a row with Linda at High Park in the summer of 1978, but that looked at relationships more globally, using the keyboard as a metaphor for racial harmony: “Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony, side by side on my piano, keyboard, oh Lord, why don’t we?”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“To retain the distribution rights for Paul’s music worldwide and in the United Kingdom, EMI agreed to increase the royalties McCartney received on the Beatles’ back catalog. Lennon, Harrison and Starr were kept in the dark about McCartney’s royalty uplift.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“Rough mixes of both ‘Goodnight Tonight’ and ‘Daytime Nighttime Suffering’ were made on January 23, and after listening to them overnight, Paul decided he could sing ‘Goodnight Tonight’ better, so on January 24, he rerecorded the lead vocal. Now Paul began tussling, internally, with whether either of the new songs should be the single. “We sat around for years—well, it seemed like years—discussing it,” he told Paul Gambaccini a few months later. “You know, the normal soul-searching you go through. And we decided, ‘No, it isn’t right, we won’t put it out.’ So we scrapped the whole thing. And about a week later, I played the record again. I thought, ‘That’s crazy, we’ve made it—it’s stupid, why not put it out? Just because people are going to pan it?’ I liked it, and other people had taken it home and played it to people at parties. So we decided to do it.”12”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“That setup yielded an accident that Paul decided to leave in the track. “At one point,” Steve recalled, “the elevator opened, and Linda came out with baby James in her arms, and he actually went, ‘aaaah.’ And that’s on the recording—you can hear it if you listen carefully, it’s right over one of the stops where there’s a little drum break,”8 about two minutes in.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“On Friday, January 12, Wings met in MPL’s boardroom to map out their immediate future. It was an unlikely scene, for a rock band. “We all sat around one of those big boardroom tables with notepads and glasses of water,” Laurence recalls, “and we talked about what the next step was going to be.”2 The next step, Paul told them, was to release a single. “What did the Beatles do when they needed a single?” someone asked. “We’d write one over the weekend,” Paul replied. Steve remembered Paul proposing a full-band contest. “I remember him saying, ‘I challenge you all to go home and write your best effort, and we’ll review them all on Monday. And whoever’s written the best song is the one we record.’ I honestly don’t remember what I did, but I know I put something together and Denny put something together, and Laurence, and we all came in and one by one played what we had. And then I remember Paul saying, ‘Well, I wrote this,’ and that was ‘Daytime Nighttime Suffering.’ And we all collectively went, ‘Ahh, okay. Well, let’s record that one then!’”3 Linda offered a closer look at Paul’s side of the competition. “He’s actually incredible,” she enthused to Ray Connolly four months later. “On Friday he decided he needed a new single, on Saturday and Sunday he messed around the house writing it, on Monday he explained to the group how it should go, on Tuesday we recorded it. He just never stops. Ideas seem to come to him all the time.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“With Brown advising on the technical side, Paul took Thomas’s advice and hired a film crew to make the reproduction exact, his only proviso being that they use real wood and other materials, rather than the inexpensive facsimiles they might use for a film set. But the reproduction was to be exact, down to the cigarette burns on the engineering console. One of Linda’s photographs, showing the view of the studio as the producers and engineers would see it, would be blown up to the size of the control room window.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“They began a new version of ‘Baby’s Request’ the next day. The song has been likened to ‘Honey Pie,’ a pastiche in a 1930’s pop style, but there is a difference. While ‘Honey Pie’ was a sly parody of the style, ‘Baby’s Request’ is a straightforward adaptation of the style’s hallmarks, commissioned by a vocal group that specialized in it. It also suited one side of Paul’s compositional sensibility at the moment: except for the overt punk-influenced tracks, a growing number of his recent compositions used a harmonic language more germane to jazz than rock. In ‘Baby’s Request,’ augmented chords, and chords with added sevenths and ninths are plentiful and support a gentle, eminently croonable melody.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“He popped in to say hello to Paul,” Chris Thomas remembered, “and as usual, we played some songs, and we played him ‘Arrow Through Me.’ And Pete went, ‘That is fantastic. Absolutely bloody brilliant!’ He loved it. And he said, ‘It’s a stroke of genius not to have a bass on it.’ And the basic track was great; there wasn’t anything to do to it. Pete went home, and Paul put a bass on it!”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“As Chris Thomas saw it, the simplicity of the ‘Rockestra Theme’ largely guaranteed that the session would be a success. “It is very simple,” he said of the tune, “and it was important to keep it very simple. Because you’ve got a doubling-up of drums—you can’t have one guy doing one fill and another doing another, it would be like kicking a drum kit down the stairs.25 It had to be structured, that’s the point—it had to be done like an orchestra.”26”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“The arrow imagery evokes Cupid’s arrow, but with a darker turn: “Ooh baby, you couldn’t have done a worse thing to me / If you’d have taken an arrow and run it right through me.” Its most striking aspect is that it sounds as though it was built around a bass guitar riff, but that full, rounded bass tone is actually a Fender Rhodes electric piano. Paul recorded the piano track and a rough vocal with Steve drumming, and then, at Chris Thomas’s suggestion, Steve added a second snare part, recorded at half speed—a trick from the Beatle days—so that when played back at normal speed the drum is pitched an octave higher and has an unusual timbre.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“I think that Denny was part of the rock ’n’ roll-folk-R&B axis of the band,” Laurence suggested, “and you get it right from the get-go, even with ‘Go Now,’ which is an R&B song that Denny brought into a kind of an English consciousness. And then you add Denny’s folkiness to it; he’s like a soul-folk musician. So I think that Denny was a part of the balance of the band, you know, as much as Linda was bringing her New York rock ’n’ roll sensibility to things. And Paul could be influenced by that. Even Denny’s voice modulates Paul’s voice in a way that John Lennon would modulate Paul’s voice. You need that extra dimension sometimes just for variety, and in the context of the band. And I think that was an important factor. It wasn’t like we were just hired to be Paul’s backup musicians; we were encouraged to have a band consciousness. And I think that Denny was our kind of anchor within that.”35”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“The band spent much of June 29 jamming and playing through ‘To You,’ the song Paul wanted to record once the studio was set up and tested. If having two new band members wasn’t enough of a wild card for Paul, there was also his decision to bring Chris Thomas in to co-produce. Paul had mixed feelings about producers, George Martin excepted. It was handy having another pair of trusted and experienced ears in the studio, and in theory having someone who would challenge you could yield a better album. But Paul was secure enough in his ideas that challenges were often batted away. “I don’t care what you think, this is what we’re going to do.” The few times Paul tried working with a producer, post-Beatles, had ended in grief. Jim Guercio, brought in to help get Ram over the line, lasted only a few days. Glyn Johns left the sessions for Red Rose Speedway early, complaining that Wings were unfocused.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“I woke up,” Paul recalled, “and I could remember dreaming that the Rolling Stones were onstage doing this amazing number called ‘No Values.’ It was a song I pictured them doing and it suited them down to the ground.20 And then I woke up and thought, ‘What’s that one?’ and they had never recorded it.”21 After discovering that ‘No Values’ was not a Jagger-Richards original, but rather something he had dreamt up, Paul noted the chord progression for a later date.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“Paul had written out the arrangement—every note that he thought the individual string lines should be,” Trench said. “And he’d written them out as ‘G, G octave, F-sharp’ or whatever—the names of the notes, because he didn’t write or read music notation. I had no problem with that, but it was enormous—I think it was on sheets of A2 paper [16.5 by 23.4 inches]. He handed it to me and said, ‘Now you go and make it better,’ which meant ‘Now you transcribe it into musical notation and amend it as you see fit.’ He was quite easy about that, but the arrangement is very much his concept.”3”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“We were at Soho Square and I told them that I’d made the decision to go back home and leave the band,”10 said Joe. “McCartney once wrote this song [with the line] ‘happiness is a homeland’* and I reminded him of that. I told him, ‘The US is my homeland. I miss the US. I miss my family. I’d had enough of the hype and big glamour.’ I mean, you can sit there and fool yourself all you want. But when you work with McCartney, the people are there for one reason. And it wasn’t to hear me. I told Paul that. I said, ‘They’re here for you and I’ve got to get on my own feet before I stay too many years.’ He saw this wild and crazy look in my eyes and told me to go home, mellow out for a month and think about it. But I never went back.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“Paul turns up and he says, ‘Ah, great. You obviously want to hear the results of your labor.’ And he played ‘Mull of Kintyre,’ which I thought was awful. Just fucking dreadful. So he played it again. And again. And again—he must have played it about 14 times. I said, ‘No, I give in, I like it!’ And he said, ‘I know you don’t. But I’ll tell you, this is going to be the biggest hit record of all time.’ “Then he pulled out of the back pocket of his Levi’s another cassette tape and slammed it in. It was ‘Girls’ School,’ which is a rock and roll number. And he said, ‘That’s for you—that’s my way of saying thank you for doing the job.’ I thought it was a really sweet gesture.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“In the morning, Denny walked from his caravan to the farmhouse to grab some breakfast, saw the wreckage Jimmy had left, and hoofed it up to High Park to warn Paul about the mess, adding “it’s nothing to do with me.” The other caravan dwellers slowly discovered the scene. No one had any doubts about who caused it. “Damage had been done to the cottage, and this became apparent to me when we went up for breakfast,” Tim Summerhayes related. “I know that Paul had become involved and he was coming down to the cottage.” Summerhayes returned to his caravan. “It seemed fitting that I should not be there. I don’t know what was said, but I never saw Jimmy again.”39 One witness who remained, however, reported that Paul went into Jimmy’s room, pulled him out of bed and ordered him to pack up and get off his property, adding that if he came near Paul again, Paul would kill him.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“Not the perfect place for a studio,” he told Thomas, noting that it was under the flight path to Machrihanish airport. “But that’s what you’re going to do.” “What, a studio here?” “Yeah,” Paul responded, “this is the studio. I want a mezzanine with a solid wall in front of the mezzanine so that if you’re down here, you can just see the tips of the violin bows when they play a top C.” “How high is that?” Thomas asked. “I don’t know, work it out,” Paul told Thomas, and then led him to the next room—the milking area—and said, “This is going to be the control room. You don’t have to worry about [the equipment], because that’s all going to be coming up from London in a lorry. But the windows have to be double or triple glazed, and each glass panel has to be at a different angle so that the sound doesn’t go through, and I want soundproofed double doors. And the farmhouse has to be completely redone for human habitation, because that’s where the band is going to stay, and the technicians.” Thomas looked over at the farmhouse and began organizing his thoughts about what would be necessary, and how to approach it, when Paul added one more requirement. “Oh, by the way,” he said, “you’ve got a month.” “What?” Thomas and Whitmore asked in unison. “Yeah, yeah, you’re fine,” Paul said. “People are very willing to work quite hard up here. Use everybody local you can, because there’s so much unemployment up in Campbeltown.” But why, Thomas wondered, must the studio be ready in a month? “Because this record I’ve got in mind is going to be the biggest seller of all time, and we all know that’s down to Christmas,” Paul told him. He then explained the timeline, working backward from the release. “EMI need a month to press and distribute it, and I need a week to record it, so therefore you’ve got this bit, which is a month.”34”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“The captain was threatening us that he was gonna keep turning the generators off, so I had to take him into a corner and talk to him very discretely, ‘Now, come on, Cap,’”50 was how Paul later remembered the lecture. But at the time he was incensed. “The captain of the boat that we were on was a little, sort of, heavier than the other captains—you know, he sort of took it a little more seriously—and at some stage we had an argument with him, and I sort of said, ‘You know, we don’t need all this aggro and stuff,’ and we wanted to get off onto this other boat that happened to be in the harbor.”51 The other boat was Wanderlust, and Paul cooled off by spending a few hours there with his guitar. Unwinding after his altercation with Captain Carlo, Paul wrote a song, taking the name of the boat as its title and alluding to the argument in the opening verse: “Light out wanderlust / Head us out to sea / Captain says there’ll be a bust / This one’s not for me.” “It became like a symbol of freedom to me, this catamaran, as it was, called Wanderlust. . . . After this hassling that this other fellow had given us, to get on this boat was like freedom, you know? So the song for me is actually just carrying on the idea. You know, just head us out to sea and take us away from all these headaches, and just wanderlust kind of free.” 52”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“It took us forever to get those Wings Over America tapes ready for the live album,” Joe English revealed. “The keyboard had the most [overdubs], Denny the second most, and then most of the vocal harmonies. Paul had to do a few lead vocals because of a bad mic or something, but most of the harmonies were out of tune. It was an abnormal amount of overdubs.”51”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“Paul, on the other hand, was entirely supportive when, on the same day as the Buddy Holly bash at the Orangery, Judge Richard Owen, a musically trained opera-composing jurist in New York, found Harrison guilty of plagiarizing the refrain of the Chiffons’ hit ‘He’s So Fine’ in ‘My Sweet Lord.’ “We pinched ideas from records all the time,” Paul asserted. “There’s nothing immoral or dishonest about it because the imitation’s only a way of getting started. In my mind ‘Hey Jude’ is a nick from the Drifters. It doesn’t sound like them or anything, but I know the verse, with those two chords repeating over and over, came when I was fooling around playing ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’ on the guitar. There’s no mystery involved. Plenty of people who don’t know anything about music can do it.”29”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“An album of Paul’s music was selected as the first rock album to be released officially by Melodiya. Technically, the album chosen for release was Band on the Run, but because the title track was replaced with ‘Silly Love Songs,’ the album was renamed ПОЛ МАККАРТНИ+Ансамбль (Wings)—Paul McCartney + Ensemble (Wings). The release, EMI cautioned Paul, would not make him appreciably more wealthy: as classical musicians who toured in Russia already knew, fees and royalties were paid in rubles, which were not freely exchangeable for Western currency. Classical players found that they were best off spending their fees in Russia and returning to the West with fur coats, vodka or other Russian goods.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“Linda is a nice chick and I really like her,” Joe English said in a dyspeptic moment, “but let’s face it, she can’t play, and she can’t sing. And Denny Laine can sing, but he tends to sing off-key.”17”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“On May 5, Wings flew to Teterboro Airport, in New Jersey, from which they were driven to their second home base, in Manhattan. Paul and Linda spent the evening with Linda’s friend, Danny Fields. Danny had stepped away from his editing and publicity careers and become co-manager, with Linda Stein, of the Ramones, one of the bright lights of the new punk movement. Fields told Paul that the Ramones had taken their name from a bit of Beatles lore—specifically, the stage name Paul used, Paul Ramon, when the Beatles toured Scotland in May 1960 backing the singer Johnny Gentle. “He was, like, ‘You’re kidding!’” Fields recalled. “And I said, ‘No, they really did.’ I don’t think he really believed me.”31 A few weeks later, when Fields visited Paul and”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“Having a private plane at the band’s disposal made another unusual element of Paul’s tour planning possible. Instead of booking hotels in every city where there was a show, MPL arranged the tour almost like a military operation, establishing a handful of bases around the United States, to which the band could return on their private plane after each concert. This was not just a matter of efficiency. An unstated benefit was that getting the band onto the jet and back to base after each show would limit the musicians’ post-show barhopping and tail chasing (and, consequently, turning up late or drunk the next day). As on earlier legs, MPL rented a handful of recent films, including Moses, Dog Day Afternoon and Next Stop and Greenwich Village, to keep the band entertained during their downtime.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“Well, that’s a very big offer,” Paul said, lightly scratching the side of his nose—a movement that was quickly becoming one of his tells, indicating that he was about to give an answer that was more diplomatic than candid.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“I was fond of Jim McCartney and knew him well, but Paul didn’t even tell me he was dead,” Denny said. “I was stunned. I knew his mother had died when he was 14 but he had never mentioned a word to me about his father. . . . When Paul dropped that bombshell, I felt utterly deflated. Paul loved his dad—there’s no doubt about that. But death scares him, and he didn’t go to the funeral because he couldn’t handle it. It wasn’t lack of love that kept him away—he didn’t want to cry in public. He wants to appear like he’s got his act together whenever anyone is around. That’s the kind of person he is.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80

“The first matter of business was backing vocals for ‘Cook of the House,’ and once that was complete, Paul saw an opportunity to further democratize Wings. Denny now had two vocals, and Jimmy and Linda had one each. That left Joe, and it was not lost on Paul that the lonely protagonist in ‘Must Do Something About It’ had a lot in common with the drummer.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974 – 80