Meet The Beatles Who Has Put Out His 15th Solo Album
By Kurt Loder
Viva Magazine
September 28, 1986
It is Monday in London, two days before the royal wedding, and Soho Square is filled with flowers, sunshine, and fresh-faced young tourists. Some loll on the grass, sharing joints; others peer up expectantly at the etched glass windows of an Art Deco-style townhouse across the street, where, in an airy third-floor office, Paul McCartney presides over the bustling affairs of MPL Communications, the company that manages the professional projects of the singer and his wife Linda.
McCartney is in from his country home in Sussex, where he has a brand-new state-of-the-art recording studio to promote his latest LP, Press to Play. It is the 15th solo album he has released since he announced the breakup of the Beatles back in 1970, and the years are beginning to tell. His hair is mostly gray these days, but he's as buoyant as ever, bubbling with enthusiasm.
After eight years of largely lackadaisical releases on Columbia, he is back with Capital, the Beatles' old label, and he seems serious about rehabilitating the somewhat tattered artistic reputation. Although he has ambitious plans for the future, McCartney cannot ignore his celebrated past and the persistent tug of his emotional undertow. Will he ever again be seen as the sweet light that illuminated the Beatles 20 years ago? The subject seems open for discussion.
Q: On your new album, there's an almost punkish song called "Angry." It's not an attitude usually associated with Paul McCartney. What are you angry about?
A. Well, the same things a lot of us are angry about.
Q: Traffic jams, stuff like that?
A: Well, there's that-- the day-to-day p____ offs. But I was thinking more about British trade unions withdrawing coal when there's old ladies dying, and we kind of just go, "Yeah. Well, the union's got a right," and Britain's attitude toward apartheid at the moment, which is just so crazy. I mean, still after all these years of Martin Luther King and everything, they're still buggering around with black and white? It's so insane. Couldn't they just wise up? But there's Maggie saying "We don't need to do sanctions." while everybody else, all the civil rights groups, are saying, "But you do"
Q: What about sensationalism in rock and roll, the alleged surfeit of sex and violence that many of the music critics seem to find these days? Do you worry that your children are being influenced by this sort of thing?
A: No, I think they're into pretty good music, actually. Simple Minds, Dire Straits, Tears for Fears, stuff like that. I've never tried to favor anything because I figured I wouldn't have liked my dad to sort of tell me to like Elvis, you know. It would have put me off a bit.
Q: Are you familiar with the PMRC in the States, the group of Washington wives who want ratings for pop records?
A: Oh, the lyrics thing? Uh, I kind of see their point. You know, I think there is a point. Like with newspapers, researchers want to censor stuff. I don't really think you ought to, but let's say a really great group emerges, and you tend to think they'll be heavy metal. Although that's probably heavy metalists to say (laughs,) and say they were advocating, I don't know, ----killing ----Satanism, and they came out with a really great album and turned a lot of people onto Satanism. There's got to be a point where you're going to say, "Look, guys, we're all for artistic freedom, but maybe we don't want to be the devil trampling along America at the moment." I mean, what would you do? I don't know.
I think censorship's very dangerous. I think, in a way, that it doesn't really hurt to have someone keeping an eye on all this stuff-it's not a bad thing to have watchdog groups. You just mustn't let them get too much power.
Q: In a more positive vein, you've actively supported other causes you believe in, such as Live Aid.
A: I'm not a great joiner, but I do support a lot of things. I supported Amnesty International for a while, and of course Live Aid obviously was a great thing.
Q: Critics may be pleased by the harder pop sounds oppressed to play. Some of the tracks have an almost experimental tilt to them.
A: The funny thing is, there was a time when I was the avant-garde one in the Beatles around the time of Sgt. Pepper's, 'cause that album was largely my influence. I thought of the idea, the concept of pretending we were another group. I was trying to get everyone in the group to be sort of farther out and do this far-out album. John was living out in Weybridge with his wife and child at the time, and I was being a bachelor in London, living on my own, going to the theater, checking out International Times, Allen Ginsberg. It was a pretty rich period.
I used to make 8mm home movies and show them one frame at a time. Flick, flick, flick, which made them last about an hour when they should only have been 10 minutes. You know, I remember showing them to Antonioni. I think he was in town filming Blow Up, and Keith Richards. We had some nice evenings, quite stoned evenings, I must admit. Just watching these movies, I still have them, and I was into Stockhausen, and I used to make a lot of home tape loops and just send them to friends for like a buzz. I remember saying to John once, "I'm gonna do an album of this and call it 'Paul McCartney Goes Too Far,' and he said, 'Yeah, you got to do it, man.' So I was the one who introduced John originally to a lot of that stuff. In fact, not many people know this, but Yoko came to my house before she met John. There was a charity thing. It was rather avant-garde, something to do with John Cage or something, and she wanted lyrics, manuscripts. I hate to tell you, but I really didn't want to give her any of my lyrics, you know, selfish or whatever, but I just didn't want to do it. So I said, "But there's a friend of mine who might want to help, my mate John."
Q. So you were the catalyst for John and Yoko's relationship?
A. Well, I don't know that, but I kind of put her on to John, and then they really hit it off. It was like a wildfire, you know. John was certainly in love, um, a little insecurely in love because he warned me off Yoko. Sort of said, "Look, no, no," because he knew I was a bit of a ladies' man; I like the girls, no doubt about that. And I said, "Yeah, okay." I mean, I wasn't about to anyway, but he didn't know that.
Q. You became involved with Linda Eastman instead. Has it been difficult to sustain such a controversial union over the last 16 years?
A: Well, we've been up, we've been down, we've been in love, we've been out of love, we've been every which way, you know. It's certainly not been as idyllic as it looks on the surface. It's a real marriage, believe me, as real as any other marriage. The bottom line is that we love each other, and what's more, we like each other. It sounds corny, but what else can I say?
Q. Thinking about you and Linda and John and Yoko inevitably recalls the end of the Beatles. After all this time, the cause of the group's breakup still seems murky. What really happened?
A. The actual story in my mind is that it was all getting a bit sticky during the White Album, and Let It Be was very sticky. George left the group then, and so did Ringo, but we managed to patch that back up. The dates are all purple haze to me, but at some point after Let It Be was finished, and about the time I was wanting to put the McCartney album out, we had a meeting at the Apple offices, and it was like, "Look, something's wrong. We've got to sort it out." I had my suggestion. I said, "What I think we ought to do is get back as a band. We get as the little unit we always were. I think we ought to hit small clubs and do a little tour." I just wanted to learn to be a band together again, cause we'd become a business group. We'd become businessmen, so that was my big suggestion. And John looked me in the eye and said, "I think you're daft. In fact, I wasn't going to tell you, but I'm leaving the group." To my recollection, those were his exact words, and our jaws dropped. And then he went on to explain that it was rather a good feeling to get that off his chest. A bit like when he told his wife about a divorce, that he'd had a sort of feeling of relief, which was very nice for him, but we didn't get much of a good feeling.
At first, we agreed not to announce it, but after three or four months, I got more and more guilty about people saying, "How's the group going?" When we sort of knew it was probably going to split up, so I did a kind of dumb move in the end. And when I look back on it, it really was. It looks very hard and cold, but I was releasing the McCartney album, and I didn't really want much press for it. So I told a guy from the office to do me a list of questions, and I'll write the answers, and we'll print it up as a pamphlet, and just stick it in with the press copies of the album. The questions were quite pointed, and it ended up sounding like I was announcing that the Beatles had broken up. John got quite mad about that. Apparently, this is one of the things he said really hurt him and cut him to the quick. Personally, I don't think it was such a bad thing to announce to the world after four months that we'd broken up. It had to come out sometime. I think maybe the manner of doing it I regret now. I wish I had been a little kinder with the other's approval, but I felt it was time.
Q: Did it sadden you to see Lennon subsequently drift off into heroin addiction?
A: Yeah, I really didn't like that. Unfortunately, he was drifting away from us by then, so none of us really knew. He never told us. We heard rumors, and we were very sad. But he embarked on a new course, which really involved anything and everything, because John was that kind of guy. He wanted to live his life to the full as he saw it. He would often say things like, "If you find yourself at the edge of a cliff and you wonder whether you should jump off or not, try jumping." And I'm afraid I would always say, "No, man, I'm not going to jump off a cliff. I don't care how good it is".
Q: But you eventually did try LSD?
A: Yeah, finally. In actual fact, it was because John had done it by mistake one evening. We turned up for a session at Abbey Road, and he thought he'd taken a pep pill, speed or whatever, to sort of wake him up for the evening. But it turned out to be acid. He had a little pill box, and he had taken the wrong pill. This was around the time of Sergeant Pepper, but we didn't get a lot done that night. John came over and said, "Geez, I'm tripping," and we all went, "Ah, okay, keep cool, lad. Now, is this a good place to be tripping?"He said, "No, not really." So I took him home, and that was my first trip that night because I figured, you know, I can't leave this guy on his own. He was all aumummum.
Q: Your apparent preference for marijuana has made many headlines over the years. Do you still indulge?
A. I don't talk about stuff like that no more. It's too crazy. Where I was lucky was with my avoidance of heroin. I went through most of the other stuff, and I had a friend in the '60s who was getting into heroin. He said to me, "Man, the thing about heroin is that it's okay as long as you've got the money to support the habit. There's no problem as long as you can pay, and you're not likely to have a problem with that, so it's cool."But something in my brain went ding. A little light went on, and I said, "No, this is wrong." So I was very lucky.
Q: After John Lennon conquered his drug problem, did the two of you finally patch up your personal relationship?
A.We were submerged in business troubles at the time. There was incredible bitterness. At one point, to get some peace in the camp, I told my lawyers I wanted to give John an indemnity he had been seeking against a certain clause in one of the Apple contracts. I said, "Somebody's got to make the first move. I'd love to be the voice of reason here." I happened to be on my way to the Caribbean, so passing through New York, I rang John up. But there was so much suspicion, even though I came bearing the olive branch. I said, "Hey, I'd like to see you," and he said, "What for? What do you really want?" It was very difficult. That was about the strength of our relationship then, very very bitter, and we didn't get over that for a long time. But thank God, at the very end, we suddenly realized that all we had to do was not mention Apple if we phoned each other. We could talk about the kids, talk about his cats, talk about writing songs. The one paramount thing was not to mention Apple. So then the last couple of phone calls we had were getting very nice. I remember once he said to me, "Do they play me against you like they play you against me?" Because there were always people in the background pitting us against each other, and I said, "Yeah, they do. They sure do." That was a couple of months before he.... It's still weird even to say before he died. I still can't come to terms with that. I still don't believe it. It's like you know those dreams you have where he's still alive, and then you wake up and go, "Oh," it isn't pleasant
. A lot of the accusations John made in public were slightly wild. I mean, maybe we should have taken to Yoko a little better. I often do feel not too clever about not taking to her because we didn't get on too well. She was very different from anything we encountered. A lot of people still find her a little difficult to take. I figure, well, he loved her, so it's nothing to do with me. I should respect her through him, and I felt that I tried to do that, but we were being so set against each other that his unreasonably bitterness was almost inevitable. I think it's such a pity he felt that way, but the bottom line is we loved each other, and I'm glad to be getting back to some semblance of sanity with George and Ringo now. We can meet and hug and say we love each other, you know.
Q. Might the three of you ever record together again?
A. I don't know. I'd like to, but it's a touchy affair. I think all of us, rather than get the world's press on our backs, would rather just play that aspect down for now. But I'd like to.
We were talking about doing a Beatles movie a couple of years ago, slinging in home movies and old outtakes, adding narration, the definitive Beatles story. We are going to call it the Long and Winding Road. We asked Dick Lester to direct it, but he said: "No one would be interested." Two months later, the Complete Beatles came out on video, and it's still in the video charts. So Dick was wrong. There's quite a big market, and we have all the Let It Be outtakes, and I have a beautiful piece of footage from that Dezo Hoffman photo session with the Beatles on the beach in old-fashioned bathing suits. It's fabulous because John is doing this beautiful Charleston, which his mother taught him how to do. I'd still like to do that movie.
Q: Whatever may happen, will you be leaving the gray in your hair? It looks very distinguished
. A: Yeah, I'm leaving that. When you're past 40, the game is up. You know, my wife actually likes it. Ringo told me off about it, though. He reckoned I have to color it. I think he's kind of gaging himself by how old I look. Like I make him feel old if I look a bit old, but what the hell, you know? This is life. We're all getting older every second. My main thing is just to try and enjoy it, and I'm very surprised to find that more often than not, I really do.
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