Back at EMI

 October 2, 1971 

70s couple in Italy

 September 24, 1976 

Paul and John Took Over His Beat (1986)

 

Paul and John Took Over His Beat

By Billy Sloan

Daily Record

September 23, 1986

    Buddy Holly never knew what effect his appearance on Sunday Night at the London Palladium had on two young lads from Liverpool. The American singer's performance on the famous TV variety show in 1958 left teenage school pals John Lennon and Paul McCartney absolutely mesmerized, and this was the spur which made Lennon and McCartney form the Beatles and change the course of popular music.

     The memory is revealed by superstar McCartney on a new video called "The Real Buddy Holly Story," released this month to mark the 50th anniversary of the singer's birth in Lubbock, Texas, on September 7, 1936.  The former Beatle owns the rights to Holly's catalog of songs. Over the past five years, he has worked tirelessly to promote the speckled star who died tragically in a plane crash in 1959 at age 22. 

    McCartney insisted on narrating Holly's story personally because he's such a fan, and the video reveals some amazing recollections of those early Beatles days. Paul said, "I remember seeing Buddy on the Palladium Show. That was a big occasion for us. We watched his fingers to see how he played the chords and the solos.

     "The very first songs John and I wrote were inspired by him. We used to bunk off school to do it. We got 'Love Me Do ' out of that.

     "There were these guys like Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard, really good-looking fellows. But then Buddy Holly came along, and he wore glasses, and John, who normally wore specs but took them off on stage, started wearing them again, and suddenly he could see the world."

     Inspired by the Crickets, John and Paul copied the name by originally calling themselves the Beetles. They later changed the second E to an A to make it sound more trendy. 

    Holly was born Charles Harden Holly, and began singing and playing as a teenager at local high school hops. His first record was a song called "Love Me," which was released in 1956, and the singer, a prolific songwriter, soon notched up a string of hits, including such classics as "Peggy Sue," "Oh Boy," "That'll Be the Day," "Rave On," and "Heartbeat."

     In fact, the Beatles' first-ever recording in a tiny Liverpool studio was a rough-and-ready version of "That'll Be the Day." Recently, more than a quarter of a century later, Paul McCartney was named an honorary citizen of Holly's hometown.

Flowers in Vience

September 22, 1976 
 

Wings Over Yugoslavia

 September 21, 1976 

Germany interview

 September 18, 1991 -  Hamburg, Germany 

Hello Vienna

 

September 18, 1976 

Red Rose Wings

 

I think this a great photo of early Wings.  I bet they all wore black and red to promote Red Rose Speedway and purposely sat on the red chairs, but they look so cool!  Why does Denny S. have "Red Rose Speedway" (is that a sticker?) on his boot?  Check out Linda's heels!  

Paul McCartney Seeks New Image (1971)

 Paul McCartney Seeks New Image

By Judith Simmons

El Paso Herald Post

September 18, 1971

    The group watching the blaring roundabout in the Blackpool amusement park could have been any family on holiday, but the chap in the old jeans and white T-shirt was Paul McCartney, and the woman in a green maternity smock holding his arm was his wife Linda. She is expecting a baby in the autumn.

     With them were Linda's blonde daughter by her previous marriage, Heather, seven, and Paul and Linda's daughter Mary, who will be two this month. Mary has her mother's fair coloring and the large blue-gray, guileless eyes, which helped her father become the most loved of the four Beatles.

     Paul reminisced on the scene and the events of the holiday. "It was nice to be in Blackpool, having a bit of pleasure. We found a good little hotel where we weren't recognized. We got chucked out of a restaurant. We were told we could not be served because we were not properly dressed. Linda told the chap he was a fool, and we left."

     The caution he acquired with the group's breakup is apparently shed now. At 28, he is building a life and career with Linda, who is the same age. They are recording and composing together. Linda, like Paul, now sees experience in terms of song. He said, "This Blackpool trip gave me an idea for a song. I'm composing a tune in the raucous rhythm of the roundabout."

     The new band, the McCartneys' guitarist Denny Laine and drummer Denny Seiwell, often rehearse at the McCartneys' isolated farmhouse home in West Scotland. Paul is fanatical that no one should interrupt him. He said, "I made my name as a musician-composer, and I have got to have a place where I can concentrate on that side of my work without other aspects of my life intruding. We are trying to make a life the way we want it, be what we want to be, not what other people want us to be.

     "I don't want my children automatically striking poses when they see a photographer. Get the message. If people think I'm a crabby old thing, it's too bad. 

    "Three years ago, we stopped playing Beatles. The relationship between me and the others today is good, but I want to shed my Beatles contract."

     And Paul's idea for the future? "I've got lots of plans. For one thing, I have film rights in Rupert the Bear, and I shall be starting on that. I want to have the old kind of band, not to do it big, but just make music, play little places. Just play around. 

    "People on the group scene, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Moody Blues, all started just as music makers, but a whole big scene grew out of it, and we lost our personal privacy. I want to get it back. I hope it works that way. Well, anyway, we'll try."

The birth of Stella and the name "Wings"

 September 13, 1971 

Party for Denny's New Single

 September 9, 1976

Not Your Average Millionaires (1981)

The McCartney family in 1981 

 

Not Your Average Millionaires

By David Lewin

The Toronto Star

September 6, 1981

    Mr. and Mrs. Paul McCartney are a nice average couple with rather more than average achievements. They have four kids, three houses, and enough money in the bank to buy and sell your average millionaire 40 times over.

     At 39, McCartney is worth, to be precise, $40 million, and another couple of million rolls in like the sea every year.  Mr. McCartney writes songs. He is the most successful music maker in history. 100 million LPs sold. 100 million singles. Mrs. McCartney takes photographs, is a key member of her husband's group Wings, and makes cartoon films. She is also a mother, bringing up a family of young children who will inherit the vast family fortune.

     Paul and Linda McCartney are both aware of the problems that such an inheritance can bring. Their children are aged between 18 and three and a half. The youngest is a boy, James Louis. The other three are girls: Heather, 18, from Linda's first marriage; Mary, 11; and Stella, 9. The children have one bedroom, but not each, just between them in the four-room cottage on the farm in Sussex, which is their main home. 

    Paul McCartney said, "We may have to build a third bedroom now because our youngest is a boy, but we have deliberately kept them in one room because I want a close family, just as I had when I was growing up in Liverpool. I don't want a mansion where I have to telephone from the East Wing to make an appointment to see my kids in the West Wing. 

    "Of course, they are going to get a lot of money, but Linda and I are trying as much as possible to make their growing up an ordinary one. We don't have a chauffeur, and I drive my youngest kids to the local primary school. We don't send them to be privately educated, and they get 50 cents pocket money a week, just about enough to buy a packet of crisps.

     "When people come and visit us in the country, they tend to drive past our cottage the first time because they're looking for a bigger house. They think ours must belong to the gardener. The children go out visiting sometimes and come home and say,  'Daddy, our friend's parents must be rich. You should see how big a house they have got.'"

     The McCartney approach to money is typified by a recent trip they made to the south of France. They flew to Nice as tourists. Then they chartered a private jet to get back in time to have dinner with the family. "Money should make you free," said Linda McCartney. "So we don't waste it, but we use it when it is necessary."

     Linda McCartney was wearing a white jacket, a pair of faded blue jeans and yellow socks; her millions self-evidently don't go on clothes. "The jacket I got free from a film I appeared in," she said. "The socks are the most expensive item. They cost $2. The jeans cost less. They aren't designer-made."

     Paul McCartney wore a gray jacket, gray socks, and white trousers; he would be the despair of any boutique owner.

     I asked him whether having so much money blunted ambition. He thought for a moment and said, "Probably. Well, really, the answer has to be 'Yes, it does.' When we started, the Beatles used to say, 'Let's write a house,' then we'd say 'Let's write a car,' and finally it was 'Let's write a swimming pool.' But when you have got your houses and your cars and your swimming pool, there isn't much else to write. For me, music is a hobby, as the actress said to the bishop. 

    "I like it, so I'll go on doing it. If I stopped, I'd do woodwork. My goals now? Oh, happiness, the kids, stuff like that."

     Whatever happens, the royalties from his music will keep right on rolling in. "But we have no trust fund for the children," said Linda McCartney. "That would put too much pressure on them. Of course, they have expectations, but the important thing is for them to get their value structure right and not use the money as a crutch. It is difficult, but it can be done if we keep things as ordinary as possible."

     The McCartneys are different in temperament. Linda McCartney said, "We are opposites in fact. I am not intellectual. Paul is. I am the calming influence. In fact, I'm rather dull, falling asleep sometimes right after supper.  Paul stimulates me. I wait. He moves.

     "Of course, we have rows because at first, when we were married, I had an identity problem. Paul's life was the Beatles, and when they broke up, I had to make a new life for myself in England."

     Paul said, "There were moments when our marriage might not have worked. I'm not the charming Paul of my public image, and if someone knocks something I have written, which I think should be a masterpiece, I can be shattered."

     How do they resolve their fights? "In bed," said Paul. His wife hit him. Then she said, "My domain is the house. I don't mean doing the housework, but having it my way at home. Paul's domain is his work. Super stardom doesn't turn me on. Really, I'm very ordinary. I hope that doesn't hold Paul back. I want the marriage to last."

     It has for 12 years, the longest of any of the Beatles. Paul McCartney looked at his wife and said, "I can see us both growing old gracefully, but Linda won't be alone. I'll be around, and with her too."

Smooch

 

Paul's Buddy Holly cosplay

September 7, 1981 
 

The First Buddy Holly Party

 

Pa

September 7, 1976 

The famous couple

 

September 3, 1986

The Liberation of Paul McCartney (1971)

 The Top of Pop

By Lillian Roxon

Daily News

September 5, 1971

    Poor Paul McCartney. One year the prettiest face in rock and roll. This year, the man everyone loves to hate. Everyone's at him. His old friend and workmate John Lennon has a nasty song about him in his new album. His old girlfriend and housemate Fran Schwartz has 20 pages about him in her just-finished and still very hush-hush book. His most devoted fans get into fights with him, and now Rock Liberation has chosen him as its next big target.

     Rock Liberation? Oh yes! If you think women's liberation is heavy, wait till Rock Lib gets really steamed up this fall. It was Rock Lib that staged that big party in the street outside Bob Dylan's house on his birthday this summer. Not that he was there or anything, but he sure as hell heard about it. And the next thing we know, there he was, liberated as all get out, up on stage at the Bangladesh concert with George Harrison, singing all his old songs and pouring money into the pockets of the poor and needy. Incredible.

     Maybe Rock Lib has nothing to do with it at all, but you can't blame them for feeling encouraged. So flushed with success, they have now turned to Paul, not early enough to get him to Madison Square Garden, alas, but still. 

    In what must have been more than a casual coincidence, the day the Liberators chose to shake up the former Beatle was also the day the women of New York chose for their second annual mass march up Fifth Avenue. What I think the rock people were trying to tell us was that they are all kinds of oppression, and that it is probably better to be born female than to have to listen to another Paul McCartney solo effort. 

    In any case, there they all were at 79th and Park, where the McCartneys sometimes stay when in town, waving placards and making speeches designed to goad Paul like Dylan back into the land of the living. It was no use telling them it's not nice to parade noisily outside people's homes, and that besides Paul is getting a band together with the talented and beautiful Denny Laine.

    It was no use pointing out that anyone truly interested in liberating rock might do better to use that energy promoting new, fresh artists instead of trying to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to old ones. It was no use because Rock Lib does have a point. Paul has been snotty and isolated. If musical aristocrats like Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts could come out of their isolation to back Howlin Wolf in one of the most magnificent and important albums of the year, the London Hall and Wolf Sessions, then it's hard to see what Paul has been trying to prove all alone there in Scotland. The sooner he's liberated, if you ask me, the better

McCartney Tight Lipped About His New Quartet (1971)

 McCartney Tight-Lipped About his New Quartet

By Drew Johnstone

London Express

August 20, 1971

(Campbeltown, Scotland) Beatle Paul McCartney remained tight-lipped this week about the group that he and his wife Linda plan to launch on the pop scene later this year. Paul, who is staying with his wife at their Scottish farmhouse near here, revealed this won't be a media group like the Beatles. "We're out to provide good music, and we're not caring whether the public likes it as big a way as they did the music of the Beatles."

     In a three-minute interview, while he paused with his seven-month pregnant wife as they walked to a stream in a field alongside their hillside hideaway, Paul said, "I'm still keeping the wraps on the group for the time being. I will say that the group, which I hope will make its appearance in the winter, will be out to provide nothing else but good music. It's not a planned thing. It's just a case of good musicians getting together for their own personal kicks; the Beatles are finished, and I'm not planning to revive their type of music with this group."

 McCartney refused to be drawn when asked about two American musicians, Dennis Siewell and Hugh McCracken, both from New York, who arrived in Campbelltown less than two months ago and bought a cottage near his farmhouse. Siewell, who plays the drums, and McCracken, a guitarist, arrived in the town with their wives and stayed for a month at the Argyle Arms Hotel.

     Later, they were seen on numerous occasions with McCartney and his wife. McCartney refused to reveal whether they had been rehearsing together, at either his farmhouse or the American's cottage, less than a half mile away; all McCartney would say was, "There will be four of us in the group. Linda and I will be responsible for the vocals. That's all I want to say about the group at this moment."

Press to Play

 

August 22, 1986

Paul and the fam in Holland

 August 19, 1976