The McCartney Legacy, Volume 1 Quotes

“The take of ‘Let It Be’ they were filling out was recorded on January 31, 1969, and uniquely among the January recordings, it had already received a postproduction touch-up—a guitar solo, recorded by George on April 30. Glyn Johns used that version for his Get Back sequence, and that, combined with the new recording of ‘I Me Mine,’ and the planned refurbishing of ‘Across the Universe’ meant that the “no overdubs” rule for the album was truly abandoned. The overdubs undertaken on January 4 were extensive and included Linda’s debut on a Beatles recording, singing backing vocals with George. “It was supposed to be me and Mary Hopkin,” Linda recalled, “but she’d gone home.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“But over the course of the session, which ran from 2:30 p.m. to 12:15 a.m., they also discussed John’s departure and the group’s future, as Paul remembered. “I sat around wondering what I was going to do, and whether I was just going to be an ex-legend. I asked George and Ringo if they thought we might get back together again and they said we might, but we’d have to give John a bit more time. The time kept passing and I decided I wasn’t going to sit around and do nothing.”3”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“There was no easy solution for ‘I Me Mine,’ so Paul, George and Ringo—John was in Denmark—gathered at EMI Studio Two to record the song on January 3, 1970. It was the first time the three had worked together since John’s September 16 bombshell, and George noted John’s absence with deadpan comic obliqueness in an introduction to one of the takes. George: You all will have read that Dave Dee’s no longer with us. But Mick and Tich and I would like to carry on the good work that’s always gone down in No. 2.* Paul: What Dozy says goes for me and Tich.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“Paul’s approach was positively lackadaisical when compared to a performer like James Brown, who was known to impose fines on his players for wrong notes or deviations from the arrangements. But this was alien to the freewheeling rock band aesthetic that Paul thought he wanted when he formed Wings. In”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“Henry was right to observe that two players left Wings, and Paul hadn’t asked why. But Paul hadn’t asked why because he knew the answer. The dispute that led to McCullough’s departure mirrored fights he’d had with Harrison over what to play and how to play it, as well as Lennon’s complaint, in that painful Rolling Stone interview, about Paul treating them as sidemen. He was, once again, accused by his bandmates of being a control freak.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“Wings had become a formidable live band, in which Seiwell’s fluid drumming and Henry’s sleek lead playing were crucial. Paul was dying to tour Australia and America, huge markets for both the Beatles and himself, but he held off until Wings were ready. At the end of the British tour, they were. And then they were gone, just as he was about to record a hit album to take on tour.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“And Denny Laine, just weeks after the LP was released, had developed a sour view of the project, and Wings generally. “I look on Band on the Run as definitely their [Paul and Linda’s] album,” he complained to Disc’s Caroline Boucher, while promoting Ahh . . . Laine!, finally released on December 7. “We’re not a group anymore. I’m one of the three, or I’m an individual. If it was Wings I’d feel more a part of it. But it’s not my songs and I’d like to feel more involved and contribute as much as they do.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“But the experience was also fulfilling: Paul’s new album had the variety that was his hallmark, with ballads and rockers, acoustic tracks, and high-energy electric cuts. But most importantly, where each of his post-Beatles releases had tracks that Paul knew were throwaways—throwaways that he liked, or that struck him as having a personality that earned them a place on an album, but throwaways all the same—Band on the Run had an energizing consistency, track for track.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“For Paul, the suit against Klein could not have been richer: Lennon and company were now arguing that their May 1969 contract with Klein—the contract they tried to strong-arm Paul into signing at Olympic Studios—should be considered invalid “because they did not understand the nature and effect of it.”13 They argued, too, that an amendment to that contract should be rendered invalid on the same grounds, plus misrepresentation, by Klein, of its meaning.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“Ça ne fait rien”4 (or “It does not matter,” more loosely translated as “Don’t worry, we’ll sort it”). Paul and Linda heard Richards’s comment as “San Ferry Anne,” a phrase they adopted to mean “don’t worry,” and true to form, McCartney began toying with the phrase as the title for a new song.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“38 Paul was still thinking of singles and albums as he did during the Beatles’ days, and as many British groups (and record labels) did in the 1960s—as separate releases, with no crossover. With few exceptions, when the Beatles released a song as a single, it was removed from consideration as an album track. They explained this as a value-for-money issue: fans who already bought a single should not have to buy those tracks again on the next LP. It was different in the United States. Singles were considered teasers for albums. Record executives like Coury considered albums more marketable when they had hits on them, and American consumers considered it a convenience to have the songs they knew as singles on albums as well. In the Beatles’ case, because Capitol LPs typically included 12 songs, compared with”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“The final credit, common to the British and American releases was, “And Paul would love to thank Linda and Linda would love to thank Paul and thanx Denny”—not quite the wording one would expect from musicians trying to project a group image.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“Tony Visconti took issue with this vague listing, which offers no hint that he wrote and conducted the orchestrations. And though Thorgerson (but not Powell) is included, Hipgnosis is not mentioned.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“Though illustrating a Wings LP, Arrowsmith’s cover shot also symbolized Paul’s feeling of contractual imprisonment with Apple. The seed of an idea sown by George at their July business meeting had now been captured in both song and photograph, and a veiled illustration of Paul’s desire to finally shed his legal ties with John, George, and Ringo would soon be in the hands of music fans.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“I just pulled together Paul’s ideas,” Arrowsmith said. “When you work with Paul, you know, he has very strong ideas about what he wants.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“jovial perfectionist,”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“Visconti, like most arrangers, was not used to his orchestration ideas being preempted, or dictated to him as if he were simply an assistant, hired to notate someone else’s musical lines. But there was some flexibility within McCartney’s instructions. “Some ideas he wanted me to strictly adhere to, and some were just sketches that I was asked to improve upon.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“Wanting to use someone he had not worked with before, and who could give him an up-to-date sound, he settled on Tony Visconti, a New Yorker whose work with David Bowie and Marc Bolan’s T. Rex made him one of the hotter producers on the London scene. Laine had worked with Visconti before he joined Wings; Visconti wrote the arrangements for Denny’s classical-rock hybrid, the Electric String Band. And Paul knew him slightly—he had married Mary Hopkin in 1971.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“Paul’s bass line and a wiry guitar solo from Denny finished Wings’ contributions to the track. Also polished off that day was ‘Let Me Roll It,’ which had in common with ‘Piano Thing’ a repeating instrumental riff—in this case, a bluesy, slightly distorted guitar figure—as its spine. Something like the figure that runs through Lennon’s ‘Cold Turkey,’ the ‘Let Me Roll It’ riff called for a distinctive atmosphere, which Paul and Emerick created by putting the guitar through a PA system rather than a guitar amp, giving it a bright, high-power sound.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“final syllable of Bowie’s ‘Suffragette City’—the word suffragette being, perhaps not coincidentally, among the McCartney song’s lyrics).”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“Instead, they picked up acoustic guitars and recorded the straightforwardly simple backing track—just the two guitars and a scratch vocal—for ‘Bluebird,’ a graceful tune with sweetly poetic lyric that continued the series of metaphorical avian fantasies that already included ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Single Pigeon’—subliminal echoes, perhaps, of Paul’s childhood days as a devoted reader of S. Vere Benson’s Observer’s Book of Birds.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“Two of the band members in Wings walked out in the same week for different reasons, and he never asked why,” Henry mused. “You can take from that what you want.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“The combination of cutting ties with the McCartneys and losing his father hit Denny hard. “Leaving the band was the hardest decision I ever had to make in my life,” the drummer said, “and it was one that affected my life profoundly. The years that followed were not pretty; for many, many years, they weren’t pretty. I didn’t know what to do with the situation. I had a problem with alcohol over it, which I solved. It was a very, very difficult journey for my wife and I to go through.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“Sailor Sam,” a name that would not have meant much to American listeners, although British listeners, and anyone close enough to Paul to know the details of his expanded project list, recognized Sailor Sam as a Rupert Bear character—the sailor who lived on the edge of Nutwood and took Rupert on rides in the sidecar of his motorcycle”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“Execute them tied to a pole. In other words, it was just as much to their advantage, if they were going to rob you, to kill you, because then you couldn’t recognize them in a lineup.”6 “They had an execution one day on the beach!,” remembered a dumbstruck McCartney. “They just take this guy out, tie him to an oil drum, and go, pop. And then they sell wooden souvenirs of the dead guy, little carvings. We said, ‘Er, we’re not used to this, lads.’ The next day it was a beach again—‘Hooray! Come and swim!’ Weird. It was pretty different from all we expected.”7”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“Paul had already resolved to account for Henry’s absence by overdubbing the lead guitar lines himself; Seiwell’s leaving complicated that plan only slightly, since Paul was also an able drummer. Mostly, though, the defections activated one of Paul’s strongest internal motivators—prevailing against the odds and the I told you so’s”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“Paul and Linda were deeply wounded by Seiwell’s rebellion. In Henry’s case, they knew what the problems were, and they knew he would leave eventually, having already quit once. They even, to a degree, respected him for standing up for his own artistry. But their relationship with Seiwell was not just that of band colleagues. It went back to the Ram sessions and had quickly become a real friendship.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“Inconvenience you?” Seiwell replied. “How about the last three years of my life? You took me out of a great career [in New York]. I don’t want to hear this,” and he hung up on her.72 The next day, both Vincent Romeo and Mike McGear phoned Seiwell to try to persuade him to take the next available flight to Lagos. “But I was done,” Seiwell said. Paul later offered an analytical view of McCullough’s and Seiwell’s departures, but his analysis showed that he had not quite internalized the lesson of the band’s disintegration; in fact, he remained in denial about the musical issues behind McCullough’s and Seiwell’s resignations.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“The night that we were going to Lagos, there was a car [sent by Paul] in front of my place, and I just thought, ‘You know what? I’ve got to put an end to this.’ I just said, ‘That’s it, I think I’m going to leave.’ My wife and I were both having tough times trying to keep all the plates in the air, the way things were. I’m in one of the top bands in the world, and we’re living in a dingy, one-bedroom, furnished apartment. It was just really a rat hole. The toilet had a big tank above it, where you’d pull the chain to flush it, and the [manufacturer’s] name on the toilet was Thomas Crapper and Sons. But this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. “I picked up the phone and called Paul, and I said, ‘I’m done. I can’t do this anymore.’ It was hard to do, really, extremely hard to do. And he was shocked.” An argument ensued, both Seiwell and Paul becoming increasingly incensed, until Paul slammed down the phone. Five minutes later, Seiwell’s phone rang, and as soon as he put the receiver to his ear, he heard Linda, shouting, “How dare you inconvenience us?”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73

“We were a band,” Seiwell contended. “We’d just done all this touring, we’d knit as a unit, and at the rehearsals in Scotland, everybody was giving their all. So I said to Paul, ‘Can’t we just postpone this for a month? That studio in Lagos will still be ready for you, but let’s first break in a new guitarist, so we can go down and record the album as a band.’ And he said, ‘No, I don’t want to do that. Let’s just go down, and it will be like Ram—we’ll just get the basic tracks and do overdubs.’ That didn’t sit well with me.”
― Allan Kozinn, The McCartney Legacy: Volume 1: 1969 – 73