Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Something New

 



I enjoy searching the Internet and discovering what appears to be abandoned sites that share Beatles information.   I found this funny story on a blog by someone I believe is named Mark Savas.    At one time he had a blog called The Elegant Variation .   The last entry on the blog was from 2018, so he hasn't updated it in quite some time.  In 2007 he shared this photograph and story about meeting Paul in 1981.  


You have to go back to April 1981. I'm a 16-year-old on my first solo trip to London for a week. (Different times.) I'm also a rabid Beatles fan who played Paul in a Beatles sound-alike band), so I spend most of the trip checking out London's (and later Liverpool's) Beatles sites. After visits to the CavernAbbey Road, Penny Lane, and the rest, I find myself at the Soho Square office of McCartney's MPL (McCartney Productions Limited).

Standing across the street, photographing the building, I can see the top of a head in the second-floor conference room window, and that's all I need to know that Macca is in the building. I find the nearest lamppost and shimmy up as far as I can for a better view, holding on with one hand, Kodak Instamatic Pocket 20 in the other. I snap a few shots, slide down the post – to find two Bobbies waiting for me.

Now, this is only five months after John Lennon has been murdered, so the police are naturally uncomfortable about anyone getting too close to the remaining Beatles. They're in the process of patting me down when McCartney comes down and steps out the front door.

"Oh, he's all right," he says. "I know him. You can leave him."

I'm stunned and speechless and all I can manage to do is stick my camera into the hands of one of the Bobbies and stand beside Paul. Paul chuckles and says, "Oh, they can't do that." But the officers are clearly every bit as thrilled as I am and say they're happy to. The photo they took appears below. No jokes about the hair, please.


(The autograph is there because I had the chance to interview him three years later when he came through New York on a press junket. When it was over, I gave him the photo and said, "You might not remember this, but I nearly got arrested climbing up a lamppost outside your office." He lit up at the memory, smiling as he took the photo and signed it. "Ahh, that was you. Ya drip." There are few moments in my life that compare with being affectionately called a "drip" by Sir Paul McCartney.)

It's worth noting that McCartney was holding something in his right hand, so when he took leave of me, we shook hands my right to his left – and all I could think walking away was, "I just shook the hand that wrote 'Hey Jude' ... "

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