McCartney: He's at Ease at Last (1986)

 McCartney:  He's at Ease at Last

By: Robert Hilburn

The Los Angeles Times

August 26, 1986

    Paul McCartney has just finished explaining that six of the ten songs on his new Capitol album were co-written by English musician Eric Stewart when a reporter at the ex-Beatles press conference here raised a question. "Of all the people that you've collaborated with on songs," she asked, "people like Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson in recent times. Who did you enjoy working with most? Who was the one person who stands out?"

     McCartney quickly replied, "John Lennon." The answer caught the 11 journalists in the room by surprise. Surely the questioner was referring to post-Beatles collaborators, but the fact that McCartney extended the question to include Lennon was touching. So were his additional good-natured comments about Lennon. "The boy was good, talented. It's got to be him."

     After years of being resentful and later uneasy about dealing with Beatles questions, McCartney, 44 seems at ease with the issue. He acknowledges the virtual impossibility of his making music that will match the influence and celebration of the old days, and he seems to take comfort in all he, John, George, and Ringo once contributed to pop culture. He didn't even mind when a young fan who had learned McCartney would be visiting the local office of his public relations representative approached him for an autograph as McCartney stepped from the elevator after the press conference. The fan handed him not a McCartney solo album, but a poster for the Beatles' film  A Hard Day's Night. McCartney easily took the boy's pen and signed the poster, smiling, and he noticed that Ringo Starr had already signed it. "Well, you've got a collector's item there," McCartney said as he handed the pen back to the fan.

     McCartney and his wife Linda were then driven by limo to Radio City Music Hall, where he met for more than an hour with disc jockeys and more writers. Tables were set up for everyone, and there was lots of food on a buffet table, but few people sat down or bothered with the food. Most were busy getting McCartney's autograph or having pictures taken with him. "Most of the time everybody is really cool at affairs like this," said one man about 40, who was standing apart from the crush of people around the guest of honor. "But look at them-they're falling all over themselves. It's funny what seeing a Beatle does to people." Moments later, the man joined the crush as the photographer took yet another souvenir. 

    Sitting on a couch in an office before the press conference last Friday, McCartney appeared in especially good spirits as he stirred a cup of freshly made tea. There's a lot of gray in his hair and several lines across his face, but he's still able to flash that disarming choir boy smile. "I accept it (the lingering Beatle's fascination) now,"he said quite matter-of-factly. "It must be a little like Charlie Chaplin never escaping the little tramp figure. The whole thing is kinda inevitable, I guess. People just want to talk about the Beatles, but you know what is funny now? I want to talk about them too."

     McCartney took a sip of tea, then finished the thought. "Some people say 'Don't talk too much about the Beatles. Talk about your new album.' But I don't mind. I think what happened for a while, the reason I didn't want to talk about the Beatles, is that we all felt like we'd just gone through a divorce, and it was painful to keep discussing it.

     "But also, I was very defensive about my own work. It was so hard trying to live up to the expectations that surrounded the Beatles, so I became supercritical with Wings, the records, the tours. I never felt the songs were good enough."

     Many Beatles fans would argue that McCartney's evaluation of his post-Beatles work wasn't all that inaccurate. For every noteworthy album like Band on the Run, Venus and Mars, or Tug of War, he has released something so listless that you may wonder why a man of his reputation and wealth would even put it out. McCartney wasn't offended by the question. "Yes, you'd think I'd be more careful, but you need some distance before you can really see the quality of a record," He explained. "You can't be objective at the time you finish it. You're too close. Take Back to the Egg, which is kind of a minor record. At the time, I probably thought it was a good record. 

    "The situation is, if you've made a record, you put it out. It doesn't matter how big you are or how little you are. You do your bit, and you put it out. I'm not that precious with it. For instance, the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson is supposed to have burned the tapes of some of his music because he hated it so much. I'd rather do it the way I do it than be so critical. I know there are lots of people who say that 'You owe it to yourself, you owe it to us to always make sure it's the finest quality', but I didn't promise a rose garden type of thing. It's not my whole thing to be that safe."

     However, McCartney does seem particularly pleased with the new album Press to Play, co-produced by Hugh Padgham, who has worked with Phil Collins and the Police. There's a friskiness about several of the tracks that seems to match his current mood. The album, which marks McCartney's return to Capitol Records, should be in stores this week. A CD version with three bonus tracks is due next week.

     About the decision to write with Eric Stewart, formerly a member of the British rock group 10 CC, McCartney said, "Eric is a friend, which is often the starting point for me. I could see how people might think you'd scour the world to find the finest writer, but songwriting has more to do with chemistry. He had been around to dinner a few times, and I asked if he'd like to work with me on some songs. My thoughts had started to stray back a little to the Beatles' recordings, when one of my favorite ways to write was for John and I to sit opposite each other with guitars and try to work out a song; you'd actually write at each other so you can see the reaction when something is good. "

    McCartney said the thing that bothers him the most about the media interest in the Beatles is the tendency to play up anything that smacks of a feud between him and Lennon. He said he tried to make his love for Lennon as plain as possible in "Here Today", a song from Tug of War that McCartney wrote shortly after Lennon's death. 

    And what about the remaining Beatles getting together? "I don't know, really," he said during the press conference. "The Beatles thing is always in a kind of state of flux; it always depends on whether we are getting along well or not. At present, we are kind of friends again, which is nice. The problem is all these business problems. The minute someone talks about business, someone hits the ceiling. So what we do is forbid that subject."

Ringo Starr Doubly Sells Self to Actress (1981)

 

Ringo Starr Doubly Sells Self to Actress

By Robert Hilburn

LA Times - Washington Post

April 19, 1981

    The Hollywood actress Barbara Bach's dismay was understandable when she learned that Ringo Starr would be her co-star in the film comedy Caveman. Like most screen beauties, Bach considered herself restricted by her sex symbol image. She hoped a key role in a hit comedy would change that.

     Bach had high hopes for Up the Academy, the comedy she did a while back with director Robert Downey, but the film was far from a smash, so the actress, best known as James Bond's sexy colleague in  The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), next turned to Caveman.

     She liked the idea of a prehistoric comedy where the characters had to act out their intentions, aided only by a 15-word language. Besides, producers Lawrence Turman and David Foster promised they would sign a major comedy actor to play her leading man.

     "I was thinking of someone along the lines of Dudley Moore,"  Bach said, sitting in the huge den of a rented Beverly Hills home. "It was a real demanding part, because the actor would have to use so much pantomime. When they phoned and said they had signed Ringo Starr, I thought, 'Oh, boy. What have I got myself into?' It sounded to me like we were in trouble."

     Bach blushed as she told the story because she was seated next to Starr, the bearded ex-Beatle who was now her fiancé. She added quickly that she only knew Ringo by his image when filming began last year on Caveman, and that he soon demonstrated on the set that he was a "real professional."

     Starr smiled. He is used to having people misjudge him. 17 years after "I Want to Hold Your Hand", he is still known as the happy-go-lucky clown.

     About his image, he said, "I've had to deal with it for so long, and I had to either try to understand it or go around depressed because it was always being hurled in my face. I've come to accept the fact that people don't turn loose of the first image you give them. They don't realize that a person changes. To millions of people, I'll always be remembered as the dummy. It's the same reason Paul will always be the charming one, and John was known for his rapier wit, and George was the mystic. 

    "That's why I'm excited about this movie. In the past, I've been guilty of letting people use me for marquee value, and there were scenes in the films you let go because you wanted to get home or whatever, but there's nothing in this film that I'm ashamed of. I'm hoping people will now realize this dummy can also act."

     Each of the Beatles has spoken about the difficult adjustment after the breakup of the most spectacularly successful pop group in history, but Starr faced the stiffest career challenge because he was neither a songwriter nor an experienced vocalist. He had little potential as a record maker. "I sat in the garden at home for a year after the split because it was hard for me to get started on my own," Starr said. "The others had something to fall back on, but I was starting from scratch. I didn't know what to do."

     He eventually recorded an album of pop standards and a country album, but neither sold well. His fortune changed in 1971 when he had a top 10 single with "It Don't Come Easy." Then came Ringo, an album with producer Richard Perry that went to number one. Star's LP sales dipped after the mid-70s, but he demonstrated he could hold his own when given viable material.

     The drummer's film career moved up and down through such movies as Candy, The Magic Christian, and a spaghetti western called Blind Man. Things picked up in 1974 when he landed a small but meaty part in That'll Be the Day, a stark, unsentimental look at a young would-be musician (played by David Essex) in pre-Beatles England. A hit in Britain, the film was a flop commercially in the United States, except with critics, a few of whom suggested that Starr deserved an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. 

    "That was a real important step for me," Starr said, speaking with the ease that always caused interviewers to describe him as the most affable Beatle. "It gave me the most scope. I had a chance to go from one attitude to another. It also gave me confidence." Despite a vow to be more careful about future roles, Star ended up with novelty bits in two films, Litztomania and Sextett, that he never even bothered to see. 

    Caveman was by far his biggest challenge. "What attracted me was the fact there were only 15 words in it," he explained.  "That meant I'd have a lot of opportunity to use mime. I think I'm better at that than going through 25 pages of dialogue. Also, I like the story. I'm this sort of weak thing at the start of the film, and I end up as the hero. It's sort of brain winning out over brawn."

     Besides Bach, Starr is joined in the United Artists release by Dennis Quaid, Shelley Long, Avery Schreiber, and six-foot-eight Oakland Raiders football star John Matuszak. 

    Was it love at first sight? "Oh, no," Starr shrugged. "Everyone in the cast would go out to dinner and spend time together, but nothing went on. It wasn't until just before we left Mexico that Barbara and I really said 'hello', but we've been together ever since."

Easy, Stimulating Man to be With (1980)

 

Easy, Stimulating Man to Be With

By Robert Hilburn

Los Angeles Times

December 14, 1980

    With the Beatles, John Lennon helped stretch rock and roll from its infancy into an art form. Yet it's Lennon, the man whom I'll miss more than Lennon, the rock and roll star. That's not a shot at his music, but a tribute to the warmth of the man. 

    Few people I've met in rock are as easy or as stimulating to be around. The quality of his albums fell after the brilliant Imagine in 1971, but the former Beatle never lost the graciousness or enthusiasm that made him such a delightful host. 

    Perhaps the most comforting thought that can be passed on to fans saddened by his death is this: if you had been able to meet Lennon, you wouldn't have been disappointed. He was a person of profound commitment and integrity. In an age of tarnished heroes, he remained remarkably true to his ideals. Beneath the hoopla over the Beatles and superstardom, Lennon was usually unaffected. He was a man who could be equally thrilled by the simple pleasures of the rock and roll music that he'd heard as a youth and by the promise of peace and love, not a Utopian fantasy for Lennon but a legitimate, if elusive, social goal. 

     Relations between journalists and performers are often strained. Strained interviews are frequently coldly professional exercises that force together artists who need publicity to sell themselves and writers who need information to attract readers. This form of exchange rarely results in genuine human contact. Often, there's little said when the tape recorder is turned off.

     An added problem is that many rock personalities are dull, vain, and deceitful. Lennon was an exception; much like his music, he was engaging, open, and appreciative. It's frequently possible to draw striking parallels between a performer's attitude in an interview and his musical output. David Bowie and Mick Jagger, for example, are as elusive and manipulative when confronted by a journalist as they are when teasing audiences from the stage.

    Bowie was so sophisticated about the press that when he found out I was going to use an early 70s interview for an English publication as well as in the  Los Angeles Times, he said, "Oh, I'd better give you something for the boys back home." After a pause, Bowie announced, "I'm interested in politics. I think I want to run for Prime Minister someday." I placed those remarks at the end of my article, and the editors in London pulled them to the top. The headline read, "Bowie wants to be PM."

     Paul McCartney, a conservative music maker, is also so cautious at times in interviews that you sense him editing his thoughts to see how they'll read in print. 

    In the several times I spoke with him, Lennon was filled with the wit, candor, and imagination that mark his most probing songs, and he was aware that being an ex-Beatle could lend him an intimidating presence. He seemed to go out of his way to make people feel at home. Nothing was off the record, and he let the conversation go wherever you wanted to take it, whatever the subject. He attacked it with a draining intensity, as in his music, he wanted to dig as deeply as possible.

     Despite his graciousness during interviews and visits in Los Angeles in the early 70s, I felt a little apprehensive in October when I came here to interview him for the first time in five years. While I was sitting in Yoko Ono's office at the Dakota Building, Lennon burst in holding a copy of Donna Summer's single "The Wanderer", saying to me, "You've got to hear this. She's singing just like Elvis. Listen to that tape echo on her voice. It's like 1958 all over again."

     There was no need for a formal reintroduction. He picked up where we'd left off, and it was as if we'd been apart for like five minutes, rather than five years. Unlike McCartney, Lennon would only interrupt himself when he felt he was becoming stuffy. Once, during a half-hearted, less-than-convincing defense of his notorious drunken behavior at a West Hollywood nightclub, he cut himself short. "I just wish I had a new record coming out. All the publicity would have helped."

     Lennon loved to have his music played on the radio and move up the charts, but he didn't need constant reinforcement of his celebrity status. When most visiting top-level rock figures go out in Los Angeles, they invariably order a limousine. They also enjoy it when someone in the entourage lets the restaurant owner know that they'll be favoring the establishment with their presence; they enjoy the stir that usually creates-- flattery, a special table and special wine. 

    When Lennon and I went out to dinner late one night in Beverly Hills, we went to the restaurant, unannounced, in my car; there was no fuss, and he didn't seem to miss it. 

    He never lost touch with his child-like side. During one especially long mixing session in the New York recording studio in October, he disappeared into a nearby lounge area every few hours with some musicians. You'd suspect a drug break, but it didn't seem likely. In Lennon's case, he and Yoko had been on a strict macrobiotic diet for years. Curious, I followed him on his third trip and saw him reach into a refrigerator and gobble something down. After he returned to the studio, I walked over to the refrigerator to see his diet supplement: a stack of King-size Hershey bars.

     Lennon's candor sometimes came across as harshness. When I asked him about some of his scathing remarks about his former Beatle-mates, he said, "That's why I am the one who others understood what I was saying, because they had to deal with me since they were 16. So I didn't really surprise them. It just surprised everyone else. But I couldn't not be what I am."

     In Yoko Ono, he found someone who was as forceful and direct as he was. When she made what he felt was too much noise while he was answering a question in an interview, he snapped, "Yoko, could you do that somewhere else?" Later, when he came into an interview room and started being playful, she barked, "John, this isn't the time for that. Can't you see, I'm talking?"

     To anyone unfamiliar with them, their actions seemed insensitive, but this give-and-take is what both Lennon and Ono seemed to thrive on. 

     On the last day of my four-day visit with the Lennons in October, both spoke deeply of their need for each other. Lennon acknowledged that she was even more important to him than his music. "She's my other half," he said. "I'm always scared that she will die or something, and I won't be prepared, because I wasn't prepared for losing my mother when I was a teenager. I'm terrified of that deep down all the time. I need her so much. How will I survive when Yoko is gone?"

Lennon Felt Reborn Only to Die After All (1980)

This is what Robert is remembering in this article-- that is him in the background 

John is being given a birthday card, as Robert mentions. 

 

Lennon Felt Reborn Only to Die After All

By Robert Hilburn 

Los Angeles Times

December 14, 1980 

     On the way out of his New York apartment building one evening in October, John Lennon paused in the lobby to ask the doorman if there was much of a crowd outside. The ex-Beatle was accustomed to fans waiting for hours to see him. "Not too many tonight", the doorman replied, "It's kind of chilly out there."

     Still, a half dozen people rushed toward Lennon when he and wife, Yoko Ono, stepped from the building and began walking to their nearby limousine. They were up on Lennon so quickly that I was startled. One was shoving an envelope into his hand, another was handing him a belated birthday gift. Another just touching his arm. Lennon stopped, signed a couple of photographs, and chatted briefly before slipping into the car. 

    More fans were waiting when the car arrived a few minutes later at the recording studio where the Lennons were finishing their new album. Those fans quickly surrounded the couple. Without bodyguards, they were helpless if somebody wanted to harm them.

     Didn't he worry about his and Yoko's safety? Lennon shook his head and said, matter-of-factly, "They don't mean any harm. They're just fans. They just want to let you know they care. Besides, what are you going to do? You can't spend all your life hiding from people. You've got to get out and live, don't you?"

    When Lennon stepped from the limousine for the final time Monday night, he just figured he would be with the crowd for a few seconds, as he had been so many times before. Again, he was returning from the recording studio, but bullets hit him in the chest, stunning the rock world once more. At 40, John Lennon was dead, murdered. 

    The added tragedy of Lennon's death is that it came at a time when he believed that he had rallied against the rock excesses that had threatened his life in the mid-70s. He spoke of being renewed and full of life and optimism.

     Depressed by a separation from Yoko and the pressures of living up to public expectations, he had spent nearly 18 months in Los Angeles on a "lost weekend" of drugs and alcohol. "I think I was suicidal on some kind of subconscious level," He told me last month. "The goal was to obliterate the mind so that I wouldn't be conscious. I didn't want to see or feel anything. Part of me can't believe I would self-destruct, the youthful part that feels invincible, yet another part realizes I could have died with Yoko's help."

     Lennon pulled himself out of that depression, patched up his life during a five-year self-imposed exile, and excluded himself from recordings and public appearances, resurfacing last month with the new album and single. He looked forward to touring and more recording. 

    When I last spoke to him on the phone three weeks ago, he was excited by the acceptance of the record. The single "Starting Over" was already in the top 10. "It's still a thrill to hear your record on the radio," he said. "It sort of finally makes the music real to me. Even though I've heard the songs a million times by now in the studio. It also makes me feel good to hear the way the disc jockeys are responding to it when they play the song; the DJs don't have to say anything, but they've been saying all sorts of wonderful things that make me feel like they really like it. Yoko and I are excited that we are going right back into the studio to begin working on the next album. I feel just like a kid again!"

     "So this is a good time for you?"

     "The best."

     Lennon, as a Beatle or an individual, was to much of his generation what Elvis Presley was to an earlier one, a man who not only inspired and entertained with his music, but also comforted. Lennon seemed like an ally, someone who understood and made things appear a bit clearer and manageable

    . Understandably, perhaps Presley was Lennon's own biggest pop hero. I noticed several of Elvis's records on the jukebox in Lennon and Yoko's apartment in the Dakota Building. "Lots of other people were important to me," he explained last month. "I loved Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and Fats Domino, all the classic guys from the '50s, but Elvis had it all. He had the looks, the image, the voice, everything.

     "Everybody tried to contact me when he died, but I was still doing my Greta Garbo disappearing act. I nearly opened my mouth and said something, but I was in the mountains in Japan, and that helped me maintain my silence. 

    "It's hard for me to speak about death. I have had so much death around me. My mother was killed in an auto accident. Stuart Sutcliffe died of a brain tumor. So did Len Gray, another guy in one of our groups. Buddy Holly died when I was in art school. They all affected me, but I can't find a way to put the feelings into words. It's just like you lose a piece of yourself each time it happens."

Love Was Always There

 Love Was Always There 

By:  Robert Hilburn

The Toronto Star

February 18, 1981

    Two months after the death of John Lennon, drummer-actor Ringo Starr still finds it hard to talk publicly about what the loss of the fellow ex-Beatle means to him. Sitting in the den of his rented Beverly Hills house before leaving for recording in Montserrat and then a brief vacation, Starr replied to a question about Lennon by saying, "I lost a great friend, and the world lost a great human being, and the music industry lost a great musician, and that's really all I want to say."

     Like others touched by the Beatles, Starr, the only member of the Fab Four to visit Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, after the December 8 murder, has been appalled by the commercialism of the rock star's death. When someone brought in yet another Lennon tribute magazine during the interview, he snapped, "The whole thing drives me mad. They've got buttons and pins and dolls and badges. It's all bull."

     Part of his reluctance to talk about Lenon's death seems to be an instinctive desire not to contribute further to the circus of emotions. But the bearded musician also appeared sensitive about revealing such deeply personal feelings. The interview was scheduled to discuss Starr's new album, You Can't Fight Lightning and the movie Caveman, both due in April. The film a Lawrence Turnman- David Foster production directed by Carl Gottlieb is a prehistoric comedy which co stars Barbara Bach, who is Starr's fiance. It is the ex-Beatles' first starring role after bits and pieces in films such as Candy, Listozmania, and  That'll Be the Day.

     He's hopeful that it will finally establish him as a genuine actor, and not just a novelty marquis bait. The album, which will be released by Portrait Records, is  Starr's first in more than two years, and he believes that it is his best since Ringo in 1974.  He is joined on the LP by several friends who wrote and or produced individual tracks, besides Harry Nilsson, Steven Sills, and Ron Wood. The guests include two members of his old gang: Paul McCartney and George Harrison. Lennon, too, had agreed to contribute a song or two. The two, Starr said, had planned to go into the studio in January. One of the Lennon songs was  to have been a toast to the fact that they had both turned 40 last year. Its title, "Life Begins at 40."

     After talking at length about the film and the album, then posing for accompanying photographs, Starr settled into a chair for a more informal conversation. Inevitably, Lennon's name came up again, this time, a more relaxed Starr opened up a bit.

     Asked if the outpouring of emotion after his friend's death surprised him. Star said, "No, the four of us were well loved, but I think John was especially loved. He'd give his heart away. I think people sensed that about him, even though he had this reputation as a cynic and a rapier wit, a lot of people even seemed frightened of him. I could never understand that, because he was the kindest man I ever met. He wouldn't take any crap off you, but he was so gentle."

     Starr said that he and Bach spent the day after Thanksgiving in New York with the Lennons. "We had such a great day," he recalled. "John and Yoko came over to our hotel, and he was so up. He was running around asking, 'Where's the guitar? Where's the piano?' He was into doing the tracks for me, and we had such a great time.  It was one of those times when you really felt close. 

    "We didn't get together very often because he was in New York and I'm either out here or England or at Monte Carlo, but the love was always there. Forget all that stuff you read about the four of us fighting. It was just the classic line about brothers who call each other names, but don't you do it.  We had rows because we were four different people, but underneath it was always the great love."

     Although he hadn't seen Harrison and McCartney since Lennon's death, Starr said he has spoken to them. "We were all pretty down, as you can imagine. The first week, I wouldn't talk to anyone. I didn't even answer the phone. A lot of friends didn't even call because they knew everyone else would be calling. But you knew people were and felt for you. 

    "We were in the Bahamas when we learned that he had been shot. I just hired a plane and flew to New York. I knew there was nothing I could do. I just wanted to see Yoko. They were so close. They were like one person with two identities, in a way. So it was like she had lost half of her soul. I saw her, I said, 'Yoko, I know how you feel'. And she said, 'No, you don't.'  I knew it was true, and it made me so sad. 

    Does Starr, who is expected to go into the studio in Montserrat with McCartney, who is working there on his own album, regret that the four never got together after the 1970 breakup for a reunion album or concert?

     "No, I have no regrets about that," he said. "We always said we wouldn't do it. We never thought of it, even when we got together to help each other on our own projects. I played on George's albums and on John's early albums; they all came out for me when I did the first solo album, but that was because we were friends and friends help each other.

     "Now we'll probably keep hearing about the three of us getting together for a charity or benefit, a benefit in John's memory, or something, but I think our answer will be the same. We won't be pushed into it."