Paul, Linda Enrapture Huge Throng (Tuscon 1976)

Paul with his birthday cake and gift baskets backstage in Tuscon

 

Paul, Linda Enrapture Huge Throng

By Larry Fleischman

Tuscon Citizen

July 21, 1976

    At 7:15pm Friday night, they opened the doors to the Community Center Arena for the Wings Over America concert, and 11,000 people came bouncing through. They came in shouting, having stood outside in the heat for several hours. Some had fainted. Inside the arena, meanwhile, the band went through its soundcheck, and local VIPs basked in the cool air conditioning, trying not to look overwhelmed by what was happening that night. 

    When the fans came in, they slid across the empty arena floor and crammed against the wood blockers a few feet from the stage. One wheeled his friend across in a wheelchair, standing on the back to gain speed like an Eskimo out for a sleigh ride. 

    They had come to see and hear Paul McCartney. After the concert, several young women stood on the lip of the stage, trying to send him notes and presents. One local jeweler had made Paul a gold pendant for his birthday. It cost $300, the jeweler said, but he didn't seem to mind. He had seen Paul McCartney.

     Paul and Linda were sitting in a little dressing room. One side of the room was filled with flowers, cakes, and hors d'oeuvres. A telegram "from your fans in Phoenix, who couldn't make the show" was presented to Paul, and he seemed genuinely glad to receive it. 

    When the reporters were led into the room, there was no sign of their traditional cynicism. It took McCartney and his wife to get things going by saying how much they liked Tucson. Linda said they had been planning to spend some time in town with friends, but never got a chance (she once attended the University of Arizona). Paul said he had never been to Tucson, noting that "Get Back", with its famous reference to the city, had come out of a Beatles jam session, "and the fact that I had met Linda."  "Jojo," Linda said, "had just been a name."

     The conversation turned to talk of the Beatles. When asked whether it took him a long time to get used to being a Beatle, McCartney said, "It takes forever. You never get used to it. You start a little group and you think, 'What should we call ourselves?' Every group knows the feeling."

     Paul has a way of handling people that indicates he is honestly concerned with the individual he happens to be talking to. It is a neat thing, especially around reporters who are sometimes treated less than civilly by big stars. 

    One thing McCartney disagreed with was the need critics feel for analyzing his music, for comparing the music he makes with Wings with the music he made with the Beatles. "When the Beatles first came out, it was called the 'Merseybeat'." McCartney recalled, "We didn't say that, we didn't call it that, some fellow did, and everybody listened to him. I've had to live with that for years; it was really just some bit of music.

     "Some fellows on guitar, bass, and drums, a little bit of a show. Get out there, do it. If they liked it, great.

     "I hate anything besides that myself, talking about it, analyzing it. I just enjoy it."

George in round glasses

June 19, 1986
 

Prince Trust Rehearsal

June 20, 1986



 

It's all about that Peace and Love

 June 18. 2011 -  Liverpool 

Paul's Birthday party

 June 18, 1976

Can you imagine going to a birthday party and watching Paul McCartney hit a piñata blindfolded?  Paul's birthday party 50 years ago was quite a fun time for those who were there, according to these photographs.  

I hope his birthday today is just as joyful.  Happy birthday Paul!!!! 

Dairy Farm to be Home for Beatle (1966)

 

Yes, I know the photos don't go with the story but they were the best I had.

Dairy Farm to be Home for Beatle

Associated Press

June 18, 1966

Beatle Paul McCartney, who will be 24 today, wants to get away from it all, so he's going to buy a farm with his girlfriend, the pretty 19-year-old actress Jane Asher. He flew to a remote area of Scotland to look at a 183-acre dairy farm. After roaming the property for about an hour, the couple sat down to a meal of bacon and eggs with Farmer John Brown and his wife, Janet. A spokesman for the Beatles said "Paul hopes to buy the farm soon, and to move in before the end of this year. To farm has been a lifelong ambition of his," said the spokesman, "and he'd like to  go far where he can get away from it all."

Privates on Parade

 

Holiday Meal

 

Expensive Beatle Gag Misses Mark (1966)

 Expensive Beatle Gag Misses Mark

By Pete Johnson

The Los Angeles Times

June 20, 1966

     Capitol Records would gladly have paid a fortune for a machine to rip records out of their covers and put them in new wrappers last week. Re-jacketing nearly a million albums requires an awful lot of manual labor. What happened? A printing mistake? No, a little joke, which left the record company's executives grinning rather grimly. 

    In recent years, album covers as interesting as their content have materialized through imaginative layouts, artwork, photography, and superb printing techniques. Designers exploiting their imaginations to the limits have made the far-out far-in. 

    Well, there is this rock and roll group called The Beatles, who have had 10 singles selling more than a million copies and nine gold albums on Capitol. So, when they cough, the Capitol Tower in Hollywood vibrates sympathetically. 

    A photograph was sent from London to grace their new album Yesterday and Today with the word that this was the cover the Beatles wanted. Picture the Beatles, each widely grinning, wearing stained white butcher smocks, their figures draped with dismembered doll torsos and assorted cuts of meat, all captured in living color. Capitol muttered "no" several dozen times when the picture reached them, but they couldn't say no too firmly. And Brian Epstein and his four charges prevailed.

     About a million copies of the album were pressed at the factory, and nearly as many album covers had been run off. Then the Beatles organization decided to withdraw the covers from the market and substitute a milder form of art. 

    A sampling of public opinion in the United States said the record company had shown that the portrait, intended as pop art satire, was subject to misinterpretation. Misinterpretation is a mild description of what would have probably ensued when the 13-year-olds began trotting into kitchens to show their  mothers what their photogenic idols were up to. 

    The record company and Epstein would have been deluged with a wrathful chorus. "How can the Beatles associate themselves with infantside?"  They will have all the teenagers killing off their tiny siblings.

     Though saved from this piece of gallows humor, the public's projection from offbeat Beatles jokes is far from through. The Beatles' latest single, 'Paperback Writer', has odd echo effects bouncing around at the end of verses as a parody of other records with more resonance than singing. The flip side of the release, 'Rain', has a final verse made up of the words of the first verse recited nonsensically backward in a playful slap at the profoundly jag, which has lately seized popular music.  And a side previously released in England, "Drive My Car," has a chorus consisting of a series of comic high-pitched vocal beeps.

George in a taxi