The McCartney Legacy review: what Paul really got up to in the Wings years
Another Christmas, another McCartney book for the sturdier stocking. A year ago the world’s Fabologists were given Paul McCartney: The Lyrics, a two-volume memoir-cum-compendium modestly retailing at 75 quid. For those who get off on cuddlesome proximity to the Cute Beatle, which is a lot of us, it had plenty to recommend it.
Yet for all the intimacy, it was a self-portrait: Sir Paul, with a little help from Paul Muldoon, as he chooses to be presented. The other McCartney, the driven managerial bossyboots glimpsed in Peter Jackson’s Get Back trilogy, is the darker star of another story.
To put it reductively, the stage McCartney’s thumb only ever goes up; the studio McCartney’s thumb also goes down. George Harrison told us about this alt-Macca, a lesser-spotted perfectionist who can be tougher, even crueller than the public-facing brand.
So discovered Henry McCullough, the heavy-drinking blues guitarist from Northern Ireland whom McCartney recruited to Wings in 1971. The chief memento of McCullough’s two years in the band is the sobbing solo on “My Love”, when – for once – he was permitted to improvise. Eventually, he could take no more orders.
“You’ll f------ do this,” McCartney shouted as they rehearsed on the Kintyre peninsula. “We’ll see about that, you c---,” replied McCullough, downing his Les Paul guitar and quitting. Wings were due in Lagos to record Band on the Run. “How dare you inconvenience us?” screamed Linda. (He wasn’t the only one on the run from the band: American drummer Denny Seiwell also resigned, pleading low pay.)
This and other such nuggets surface in The McCartney Legacy, Volume 1. Or rather resurface. McCullough’s story was first told in a quiet book called Irish Folk, Trad & Blues: A Secret History (2004). It’s only one of many hundreds of sources that Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair have panned, exhaustively, to piece together a post-Beatles biography of McCartney.
Vol 1 begins in the summer of 1969. Having trained a microscope on pretty much every day-by-day event in the McCartneys’ existence, it hits the pause button four years and 670 pages later, with the cathartic release of Band on the Run, debatably the greatest album by a solo Beatle. “To be continued…” it concludes, though it’s hard to imagine they can keep it up much beyond the demise of Wings and the murder of John Lennon.
The as-it-happened approach follows in the footsteps of the forensic Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn, but even fervent Wings loyalists such as myself may wonder if they merit the same treatment (“the band the Beatles could have been,” said Alan Partridge). Still, there are big pluses. The Beatles’ break-up happens in stop-motion clarity – McCartney suing his bandmates to escape the clutches of Apple and Allen Klein, all those potshots fired from one trench to the other.
It explains how a traumatised McCartney, self-medicating with marijuana and making albums alone, with his wife, then with a new band, could never escape the question on everyone’s lips: so, Paul, when will the Beatles reform? Even fellow Fabs slagged off his efforts. “I just feel he’s let me down,” sighed Ringo of the 1971 Paul-and-Linda album Ram. “To be kind to Paul, I’ll just say that – it’s not very good,” said George of Wings’ Wild Life. “You’re all pizzas and fairy tales,” sneered John. “What a great album title!” retorted Paul, who simply aspired to write “songy songs that the milkman can whistle”.
Then there is Linda. Her musical duties were thrust upon her by a husband who enjoyed harmonising with a female voice, and likened her playing to the innocence of children’s drawings. “He has no patience what-so-ever with somebody who doesn’t know,” she wailed. Bravely she endured the terror and the brickbats. Ridicule even came from within. Seiwell once asked her to move back from the microphone for balance. “How far?” she asked. “You got a car?" he joked.
As gossipy pop history, The McCartney Legacy can be riveting, with cameos for literally anyone and almost everyone, from pesky stalker fans to Dustin Hoffman, in whose presence McCartney wrote “Picasso’s Last Words (Drink to Me)” on demand. “He’s doing it!” the actor hollered to his wife. “It’s coming out!” One colourful story links Paul Dacre, then of the Express, with Stella McCartney, then in nappies. After the former produced a disobliging profile of her parents, the latter produced a stool which was mailed to him.
Sinclair got that snippet from interviewing Seiwell, whose wife also let them read her detailed diaries. “Without help,” the authors acknowledge, “we would not have been able to tell this story so accurately and vividly.” It’s not always as vivid as they suppose. The hyper-granularity has an anaesthetic effect as we trudge through lists of orchestral musicians, ingredients of meals, CVs of studio engineers, many makes and models of guitars. “On Monday, October 23, 1972, ‘Live and Let Die’ was mastered at EMI Studios and given the matrix number 7yCE.21722.” You read such a sentence and think, 007, shoot me now.
It’s obviously no picnic turning one man’s calendar into a causal narrative. The task of finding fresh ways to describe yet another recording session – and they carefully eavesdrop on every single one of them – would challenge Proust. Though outstanding researchers, these authors are not natural stylists. “His cannabis call to arms had the ears of the law burning,” they write, horribly. Such tone-deaf prose struggles to encapsulate McCartney’s genius: “Maybe I’m Amazed”, we are underwhelmingly advised, “has a notably expressive melody.” The very finest Colemanballs comes at a Clapton gig where “the starry audience included Ringo Starr”.
This long old slog is very strictly for us Wings nerds. Yet, from within the dense agglomeration of facts and quotes, names and serial numbers, and much dry legal reportage, a real McCartney does gradually emerge, in high-definition 3D and complex surround sound. And who is he? Let it be simply said that nobody could write, record and sell quite so many songy songs without, from first to last, looking after number one.
The McCartney Legacy, Vol 1, 1969-1973 is published by HarperCollins at £30. To order your copy for £25 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
