You Get Along With Yoko? Medium Says Paul
By Duncan Fallowell
The Magazine
January 20, 1985
The crow's feet around Paul McCartney's eyes started to make it big about 10 years ago. Since then, not much has changed. His band, Wings, was finished, and Paul was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's most commercially successful composer.
It's impossible to calculate what the total turnover might be, but every tune is an oil well, and after the first $100 million, a kind of indifference sets in. His appeal has grown even broader, if that's possible. He makes his contemporaries feel young, or at least abreast of things, and he doesn't offend the old. It's very nice that he's smiling and still around with everybody dying off so fast, being shot, jumping off buildings, having heart attacks, drowning.
Where is Ringo? Where is George? Ringo made a record recently, but wouldn't release it. George keeps traveling.
Q: You travel a lot like George, don't you?
A: I don't, actually; everybody thinks I do, because you see pictures of me going through airports.
Q: That's right, being arrested for drugs.
A: I do seem to get arrested a lot, but I'm really intending to be a very law-abiding citizen.
Q: Why carry it about? Why not leave it behind?
A: Good question. But I'm over 40, and I feel silly not being allowed something I've checked out rather fully. Compared to alcohol, Valium, uppers, downers, whichever way you go, marijuana is a relatively harmless release. It's a plant that grows for a start.
Q: So is Deadly Nightshade
A: Yeah, so is tobacco. I think marijuana is less harmful than tobacco, but I'm not actually going to advocate it. I now say to any kids reading this that I advise you to do nothing, just drink water. Get by. Say hi, drink water.
Q: You get on with Yoko?
A: Medium. I introduced her to John. She originally came around to me for some charity thing, and I said, 'Well, you know, love, I got this friend called John.' I don't know why I palmed her off on him. Perhaps it was because I thought he would be more interested than I was in whatever she was talking about. Yoko's okay, really; she's very misunderstood. She's not a pin-downable person. I really can't call her irrational, because then she'd go and do something rational. Now she's suffering like all other widows, probably more.
Q: What about the Beatle days? Were you prepared for sudden success? Did you have a doctor on tour giving you injections?
A: No, no, but we heard about those doctors. It tends to be high-ranking politicians and socialites who use them. By the time we became famous, we'd put in a few years of hard, slogging work, 365 days a week. Beatlemania was just a much bigger version of what had gone on before, and we had an inbuilt savvy that came from being Liverpool boys.
Q: What was the worst time in the Beatles?
A: (with no hesitation) Toward the end when it started to fall apart and you didn't know what the hell was to happen next.
Q: Do you suffer from depression? Things like that?
A: I hardly know anyone who doesn't, but I can get out of it, which is perhaps what depression isn't, but I do get it. I had a terrible nervous period after the Beatles. I lost one of the world's good jobs, and I couldn't see what I was going to pick up. The business stuff took a toll. We really were playing Monopoly with real money.
Q: You were in there very fast with the solo album.
A: The stories that came off the split up did make me look ruthless, ambitious, not wasting time, but in actual fact, all the others were every bit as ambitious and ruthless and stuff.
Q: Are you saying you're more talented?
A: ( His hands open horizontally, the outspread thumb and little fingertip are backwards and forward a couple of times) One or two things I did right. A lot of it was luck. Some of it is just that I'm more careful than the others.
( In fact, McCartney, one of his weakest albums, came out three months before Let It Be, the last Beatles album. Although Paul was the first to go solo, he was also, paradoxically, the one who did the most after Brian Epstein's death to hold the group together. He needed the company. He needed the stage. He is the opposite of a loner. In addition to being "more careful" than the others, he has some tunes as well. Mr. Tuneful. Many good songs, that's for sure. Still, not so many lately; however, he still has the knack and the money to give the big production lift to what may be a very characterless chord sequence, so that you are distracted from the fact that the melody has somehow been around for 300 years. The thing becomes a hit in 50 countries again. When it comes to the lowest common denominator, given the highest possible treatment, the pure cellophane pop that can crush all barriers of race, age and class, Paul McCartney is a master.)
Q: What was John Lennon's special quality?
A: Balls. Mind you, and put in one word, balls as a hell of a quote, but it's incomplete. There were balls, but there was smart. The real truth is that it was balls, but smart.
Q: The media don't seem to have taken to your wife, Linda, very much. Why is that?
A: Yeah, I know what you mean. It was because I brought her into the act after the Beatles. I just had to go back to square one again —follow them? Impossible. So it was natural for me to suggest to Linda, who was my mate, that she do some backup harmonies. Then I sort of said, 'Do you want to plunk on the keyboard?' Also, we decided never to try and explain Linda
Q: She's not quite there media-wise. Is she?
A: We could have gone around doing all the talk shows and stuff and put her across, but I felt, sod it. I'm not going to get up there and say, 'Please, fans don't hate me because I married her. Awfully sorry. But she's quite nice, really, when you get to know her.'
Q: How did you get involved with Michael Jackson?
A: He telephoned me on Christmas. I was having Christmas with the kids, unwrapping presents, generally being daddy, and the phone went. I thought it was a girl fan because it sounded like that. 'Who is it?' I said in my deep, fatherly voice, 'It's Michael Jackson.' He said in a high, soft voice, 'Come on. Who is it really?' 'Oh, you don't believe me? Hey, that's great. Ha, ha, ha.'
Q: What good did the 60s do?
A: Not a lot. I say that a little bit sadly, mind you, I felt like I stepped through the minefield in the 60s.
Q: tread on any mines?
A: Overdoing drugs, mostly. Now I'm one of what many 60s people have become in the 80s, a businessman, realistic, clear thinking, pretty much.
Q: What qualities do you most admire in a man?
A: Oh God, some kind of moral courage, forthrightness, uprightness, I do like all that, I suppose. Honesty, then I know where I start.
Q: And in a woman?
A: The same honesty, yeah, real honesty, because it's a bit rare.
No comments:
Post a Comment