Side By Side (Linda 1973)

 Side by Side

By Caroline Boucher

Disc

December 1, 1973

    Linda McCartney, fortunately, is a strong woman, because, though enviable, her position is one that not many people could have taken on and coped as successfully as she has. Looking back now to March 12, 1969, Linda says she never realized quite what she was taking on and how much hatred could ensue.

     "It wasn't as if I was a teeny saying, 'Oh, wow, I married Paul McCartney.' I was independent, with a career, but suddenly people who didn't know the first thing about me started writing things about me, about what sort of person Paul had married. Everyone was suddenly saying, 'Who is she?'

     "When we were in New York making Ram, 20 kids would follow us everywhere we went, everywhere, hotel, restaurant, studio. After a while, I asked them to lay off, and one of them turned and said, 'Well, what the hell did you expect?' I hadn't expected that!"

     Since then, she suffered a great many more slings and arrows. As a musician ("How dare she take up piano in his band?" They cried.) As a songwriter: ("She can't they riposted). As a film star from the TV special, and any other excuses that cropped up. But Linda, admirably, has soldiered on, stubbornly pursuing her rather bizarre taste in clothes and hairstyle, brushing up her piano playing and her songwriting. 

    "At the beginning, people said, 'Oh, good grief, she can't play the piano, and that I wasn't good. But then I hadn't jumped up and down and said, 'Hey, Paul, let me be in your band!' I was there because he had asked me to join. And gradually, I got into it and began to enjoy it.

     "But I could remember crying my eyes out in a dressing room in Europe because I was so scared. Now I know you can get up there and have a good time. Technically, nobody has ever said, 'Do this or do that', but I know chords now, and I know the scale, and so I can work things out and write songs from there.

     "It's like my photography.  Nobody ever told me the technicalities of it, shutter speeds, all that kind of thing; I know instinctively in my head now what works when.  But I just learned by actually getting out and taking the pictures." Linda took the inside poster on the next album, and does most of her photography now with a Polaroid, one of the "cheap, £12  ones." She would still like to do assignments, but since she married Paul, people seem to have stopped regarding her as a professional photographer and stopped asking. Two of the Hendrix poster pictures and one of Warren Beatty are still being sold in a Disc poster ad most weeks. 

    "Warren told me I was the first photographer who had clicked at that right moment. It's very important that-- you can so easily miss it."

     Linda's songwriting is going well. To date, she has written three A sides, including "Seaside Woman" on the album, and the other two have yet to see the light of day. They're called "Wild Prairie" and "Oriental Night Fish." The latter is like a Shangri-La's number with lots of talk over. "Wild Prairie" turned into an 11-minute number, a sort of country and western and jazz blend.

     At the moment, Paul is banned from America because of his drug bust. This is difficult for Linda, who misses her family. And while she and the kids are quite free to go there, she doesn't really want to leave Paul behind. She's anti-Nixon because he doesn't have the interests of the people at heart. Women's Lib, on the whole, passes her by. 

    "I was always lucky. I got amazing jobs because I was a girl. I do think women should get equal pay for jobs, but I don't like the dykey bit that goes with the movement. At the moment, I don't think the women's lib women are really representing the main body of ladies; rather, like Nixon, doesn't represent what the main body of the American people feel."

     Contrary to what a lot of people might think, Linda doesn't have a house overflowing with nannies, cooks, housekeepers, etc. "I've never really thought to live rich. I didn't come from a poor home, but my dad was poor and worked his way up through Harvard Law School. I think I learned a lot from him. He's a very moral man, and my mum is very down to earth. Paul and I just wanted a very close, simple family.

     "The kids come everywhere with us, and Heather, who's 11, really loves the other two, and she can watch them for me on tour. I always put them to bed and give them their dinner, and then somebody watches them for me. I think you could be too doting, too involved. Kids should be independent. I like the wild side of life,  but you've got to have a nucleus of love and security. I'm a bit of a fatalist, really. I play life by ear."