Methinks not. ;D
I don't know if you've ever heard me mention CAFE ON THE LEFT BANK, but it's one of my very favorite "unknown" Paul songs. However, I don't believe for a minute that Paul is harking back to his Paris trip with John from way back in the early Sixties. You'll have to excuse me here but it's a little pet peeve of mine I guess when Beatles Fans always try to ascribe "Beatles connections" to so many solo songs. I'd bet if you asked Paul about this song he'd just say he wanted to write something conjuring up images of that scene, and not anything to do with his trip with John.
I haven’t but I agree with you on – I’m very fond of it. And fair enough; as I say, it’s my own perspective and I’m not going to sit and here and tell you that my perspective is the only and/or definitive one. I just think that it must be an awfully big coincidence then. Some of the details from the trip match up incredibly closely and Paul’s spoken very, very fondly of that time on many occasions – it was important to him. Maybe it is just a random account about random people in France but I just think it’s more likely that he at least drew on SOME of his own experiences there.
One can also look at a nice demo on some tapes from John from 1978 ("Beyond the Sea/Blue Moon/Young Love") which starts out as John singing Brown Eyed Handsome Man, morphs into The Beatles ‘Get Back’ then goes into Blue Moon, but changing the melody and adding his own lyrics including these: "Do you remember when we were in the café on the left bank”
From the actual song, lyrics are:
Cafe on the left bank, ordinary wine
Touching all the girls with your eyes
Tiny crowd of Frenchmen round a TV shop
Watching Charles de Gaulle make a speech...
English-speaking people drinking German beer
Talking way too loud for their ears
Okay, de Gaulle actually was premier at the time the lads were there so nice accuracy there, they definitely were around the Left Bank.
From MYFN: "
They ran into Jurgen Vollner, who was living in a cheap hotel in the Latin Quarter, having moved to Paris from Hamburg to pursue a career in photography. He showed them round the city. When he pointed out L'Opera they burst out into operatic song and laughed and danced together in the streets. They were evidently having a good time. ... But Jurgen's biggest contribution was getting out his scissors. "John and Paul visited me and decided to have their hair like mine. A lot of French youth wore it that way. I gave both of them their first Beatles haircut in my hotel room on the Left Bank”.... We ended up staying the week in Paris – John was funding it all with his hundred quid. "We would walk miles from our hotel; you do in Paris. We’d go to a place near the Avenue des Anglais and we’d sit in the bars, looking good. I still have some classic photos from there. Linda loves one where I am sitting in a gendarme’s mac as a cape and John has got his glasses on askew and his trousers down revealing a bit of Y-front. The photographs are so beautiful, we’re really hamming it up. We’re looking at the camera like ‘Hey, we are artsy guys, in a café: this is us in Paris,’ and we felt like that."
Oh, no, I understand that, I do. Myself, I’m quite fond of ascribing connections to solo songs (as John seemed to be, too.
) though I agree I probably have a tendency to go too far. However, just because Paul says that doesn’t mean that’s necessarily true. As I’ve said before he speaks of Somedays are being merely a product of waiting for Linda when she was doing a cookbook thingy. That doesn’t mean that that’s its whole – it definitely seems to be a love song for Linda and touches on the difficulties they were having with her illness. Paul’ll never admit to several of his Chaos songs being about Heather and that relationship either but I’d be pretty confident placing bets that they were.
Okay, fine. But I was bringing it up in response to it being said that Paul’s songs didn’t display any kind of view or thought etc. They DO even if it’s a view or opinion that one doesn’t ascribe ‘greatness’ to, or lend importance or credence too. I for one agree that an optimistic attitude can be limiting in art but I’m glad Paul has it because I think a lot of his life would have far more difficult for him to cope with if he hasn’t had it. I think there is a correlation a lot of the time between pain and great art but I wouldn’t wish that pain to be expressed in song or life simply for my benefit so I could view that art. I’m glad that Paul is optimistic in many songs and doesn’t dwell on awful times in his life etc. However, I think Paul in real life (not in song) is plenty more realistic. He’s spoken about how he basically spent the year after Linda died just weeping whenever people came and visited, he’s talked about reading a John interview and just thinking on what a shit he was, his brother Mike has talked about how Paul totally shut down and buried himself in music when his mother died, Paul’s discussed how saddened he was as a result of Ivan’s death, George’s, Neil’s etc. He knows life isn’t always great and yet chooses to try and see the good things in life and cling to that – I see that as healthy and I’m glad for it. Even if it means Paul will never produce something as ‘artistic’ or ‘deep’ as POB.
Why is that repetition such as issue? Would it be better if Paul’s catalogue was full of songs complaining about all the loss he’s suffered, being insular and angsty and negative about his future? He’s spoken about how he likes to reach out to people in song, to try and offer comfort, and I’m glad for it.
And OF COURSE he does. John's issues with abandonment etc are often talked about (and he certainly did and I'm not underplaying them!) but Paul's own experiences with loss aren't very much, probably because he rarely outright discusses them, preferring to talk vaguely about and through them in music - he has a number of songs dealing with someone leaving him and/or him not having time to tell them what they mean to him, and keep up his happy, cheery Sir Thumbs-Aloft persona ["John and I weren't black and white, although people took John, for all aggression, to be the good guy, because he showed his warts. I've only just realized, after all this time, that people like to see warts. It makes them sympathetic. I'd always thought, in order to be liked, you had to be unwarty." - 1982].
However, it's a constant in his life with premature deaths of people he loves including his mum (1956), Brian (1967), Mal (1976), his dad (1976), John (1980), Derek Taylor (1997), Ivan Vaughan (1993), Robert Fraser - "Obviously the other Beatles were very important but the most formative art influence was Robert. There's a vacuum where he used to be.'" (1986) - Linda (1998) - cruel reminder as she died of what his mum died of, he got a therapist, basically cried for a year and didn't take his wedding ring off til the day before marrying Heather -, George (2001), Neil (2008), amongst others.
Here’s some quotes and song lyrics which I don’t think anyone could say are pure fluff, love and/or happiness and optimism.
From Mike:
Paul was far more affected by Mum's death than any of us imagined. His very character seemed to change and for a while he behaved like a hermit.... He seemed interested only in his guitar, and his music. He would play that guitar in his bedroom, in the lavatory, even when he was taking a bath... But time after time when I came home from school, I would find that Paul hadn't done his bit.
I would go looking for him and sometimes I would find him, up in his bedroom, perhaps, sitting in the dark, just strumming away on his guitar. Nothing, it seemed, mattered to him any more. He seldom went out anywhere - even with girls. He didn't bother much with any of his friends except his schoolmate George Harrison and John Lennon, who was at the art school next door. Work and work alone - his school books and his guitar - appeared to be the only thing that could help him to forget.
Bill Harry: 'a lot of people lost their patience with John' (regarding his reaction to Julia’s death.] So many young people in Liverpool has lost parent to war or disease, …and hardly anyone responded quite as violently as John. "None of us had gone into this big, self-pitying thing. "The feeling was--just get on with it." But Paul seemed to have limitless patience for John…the mutual feelings of loss--and the rawness of John's wound--gave them a connection that was vital. It was, Paul said later,"a special bond for us, something of ours, a special thing." To see the others' eyes, even as they were silently nodding their heads to Elvis' "All Shook Up"….was to glimpse the soul of someone who knew how those songs,could help fill the worse kind of silence. 'We could look at each other," Paul said, "And know.’ "
He was just very, very quiet, and upset. ‘I’m never going to fall out with anybody again in my life’, he said. (Denny Laine on John's death)
The phone rang. I picked it up. ‘Can I speak to Paul McCartney?’ asked a woman. ‘He’s busy at the moment. Who’s calling?’ ‘It’s Yoko.’ Joe knew instinctively it really was John’s widow, rather than a hoax. He told everybody to clear the room. ’And Paul took the call.
I just closed the door and he was crying – he’d lost his best friend. (Joes Reddington)
During the session Paul fell into a lugubrious mood. He said, ‘I’ve just realized that John has gone. John’s gone. He’s dead and he is not coming back.’
And he looked completely dismayed, like shocked at something that had just hit him. I said, ‘Well, it’s been a few weeks now.’ He said, ‘I know, Eric, but I’ve just REALIZED.’ (Eric Stewart)
Quote from Paul:
I remember one horrible day me and my brother going to the hospital. They must have known she was dying.
It turned out to be our last visit and it was terrible because there was blood on the sheets somewhere and seeing that, and your mother, it was like 'Holy cow!' And of course she was very brave, and would cry after we'd gone, though I think she cried on that visit. But we didn't really know what was happening. We were shielded from it all by our aunties and by our dad and everything.
That became a very big bond between John and me, because he lost his mum early on, too.
We both had this emotional turmoil which we had to deal with and, being teenagers, we had to deal with it very quickly. We both understood that something had happened that you couldn't talk about - but we could laugh about it, because each of us had gone through it. It wasn't OK for anyone else. We could both laugh at death - but only on the surface. John went through hell, but young people don't show grief - they'd rather not.
Occasionally, once or twice in later years, it would hit in. We'd be sitting around and we'd have a cry together; not often, but it was good.I was kind of crying when I wrote it ['Here Today']. It's like a dialogue with John. One of my feelings even when he used to lay into me was that he really didn't mean it. I could always see why he was doing it. There was this spectre of me, which I understand because he had to clear the decks just like I did. In the song, John would hear me saying that and say 'Oh, piss off, you don't know me at all. We're worlds apart. You used to know me but I've changed.' But I felt I still knew him. The song is me trying to talk back to him, but
realising the futility of it because he is no longer here, even though that's a fact I can't quite believe, even to this day. The 'I love you' part was hard to say . A part of me said, 'Hold on. Wait a minute. Are you really going to do that?' I finally said, 'Yeah, I've got to. It's true.’
And then there is Here Today, the song he [Paul] wrote in the wake of John Lennon's death. "At least once a tour, that song just gets me," he says. "I'm singing it, and I think I'm OK, and
I suddenly realise it's very emotional, and John was a great mate and a very important man in my life, and I miss him, you know? It happened at the first show, in Gijon: I was doing fine, and I found myself doing a thing I've done in soundcheck, just repeating one of the lines: 'I love you, I love you, I love you.' I did that and I thought, 'That's nice - that works.'
And then I came to finish the song, to do the last verse, and it was, 'Oh **** - I've just totally lost it.'"And a quote about 'the night we cried' for good measure (fitting in with the 'wild and windy night that the rain washed away has left a pool of tears crying for the day' in 'The Long and Winding Road', methinks): "And we stayed up all night talking, talking, talking like it was going out of style. And at some point early in the morning,
I think we must have touched on some points that were really emotional, and we ended up crying, which was very unusual for us, because we members of the band and young guys, we didn't do that kind of thing. So I always remembered it as a sort of important emotional landmark"
Oh, Darling - I don't care how 'fake' people say it sounds, Paul may as well have called it 'Oh, Johnny' and been done with it. "When you told me you didn’t need me anymore / Well, you know I nearly broke down and cried."
Paul himself would never say it’s anything other than a cracking tune but Paul points out the lyric "Oh! Darling! I'll never let you down!" sounds like an answer to John's blatantly autobiographical song "Don't Let Me Down". "It's a story!" Which leads John to stating that they have to camp it up for those songs.
pizzaandfairytales.tumblr.com/post/4162308202/nicole21290-two-of-my-favourite-bits-from-theYou Never Give Me Your Money - "Oh, that magic feeling / Nowhere to go"
Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End - "Once there was a way to get back homeward / Once there was a way to get back home"
Free As A Bird - "Can we really live without each other?"
I Will - "Will I wait a lonely lifetime / If you want me to, I will"
Can You Take Me Back - "Brother, can you take me back?"
Things We Said Today - "Someday when I'm lonely / Wishing you weren't so far away / Than I will remember / Things we said today"
Yesterday - The WHOLE song. It doesn't matter how overplayed it is, this is a beautiful and terribly sad song. "Why she had to go / I don't know..."
Two Of Us - "You and I have memories / Longer than the road that stretches out ahead"
Let It Be - "And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me / Speaking words of wisdom, let it be."
The Long & Winding Road - The whole song - Paul was certainly not having the best of times in this period... "You left me standing here / A long, long time ago / Don't leave me waiting here / Lead me to your door"
Eleanor Rigby - heartbreaking. "No one was saved"
For No One - "Your day breaks, your mind aches / There will be times when all the things / She said will fill your head / You won't forget her."
You Won't See Me - "Though the days are few / They're filled with tears / And since I lost you / It feels like years"
She's Leaving Home - "Silently closing her bedroom door / Leaving the note that she hoped would say more... Daddy, our baby's gone..."
Yvonne - "She never knew how much I loved her / I never got to tell her / We never found a way / To say farewell."
Growing Up, Falling Down - "We were crying now / With the pain / We will never be here again"
This One - "Did I ever open up my heart / And let you look inside? / If I never did it / I was only waiting / For a better moment / That didn’t come."
Somebody Who Cares - "When your body is coming apart at the seams / And the whole thing’s feeling low / You’re convincing yourself that there’s nobody there / I know. I know how you feel."
Dear Friend - "Are you afraid? / Or is it true?" (the way he sings and plays in the first piano demo of this one is heartbreaking...)
No Words - (for the significance of this) "I wish you’d see / It’s only me / I love you."
- "That phrase keeps coming back to me all the time. 'It's only me.' It's became a mantra in my mind."
- "Whatever bad things John said about me, he would also slip his glasses down to the end of his nose and say, 'I love you'. That's really what I hold on to."
Best Friend - "Tell me why, why, why, do you treat me so bad, so bad? / You’re the best friend a man ever had... I wake up in the evening / I’m still screaming out / Over you, over you"
Little Lamb Dragonfly - "Dragonfly, you've been away too long / How did two rights make a wrong? / Since you've gone I never know / I go on / I miss you so in my heart"
Some People Never Know - "I’m only a person like you, love / And who in the world / Can be right all the right time? / I know I was wrong, make me right"
How Kind Of You - "I thought my faith had gone / I thought there couldn't be / A someone who was there / For me"
At The Mercy - "Sometimes I'd rather run and hide / Than stay and face the fear inside"
Friends To Go - "I've been sliding down a slippery slope, I've been climbing / Up a slowly burning rope, but the flame is getting low"
Too Much Rain - uplifting in a way but still rather sad. "Laugh when your eyes are burning / Smile when your heart is filled with pain / Sigh as you brush away your sorrow"
Riding To Vanity Fair - bitter and hurt. "I tried to be so strong / I did my best / I used the gentle touch / I've done it for so long"
Anyway - "When did I begin to fall?... If we could be closer longer, that would help me; Help me so much. / We can cure each others' sorrow. / Won't you please, please, please get in touch?"
Lonely Road - "Don't wanna let you take me down / Don't wanna get hurt second time around / Don't wanna walk that lonely road again, yeah"
From A Lover To A Friend - "How can I walk when I can't find a way... All I want is to tell me / You're going to take it away... Let me love again"
Magic - "And this is the hour / That they turn out the light / Nothing but memories / Burning so bright"
The
Interlude of Ecce Cor Meum
Somedays - "Somedays I cry / I cry for those who live in fear / Somedays I don't / I don't remember why I'm here"
Calico Skies - (especially considering what he and Linda were going through...) "Always looking for ways to love you / Never falling to fight at your side / While the angels of love protect us / From the innermost secrets we hide / I'll hold you for as long as you like / I'll hold you for the rest of my life"
Little Willow (esp. accompianed by the video) - "Life, as it happens / Nobody warns you / Willow, hold on tight"
Every Night - "Every night I just wanna go out / Get out of my head / Every day I don't wanna get up / Get out of my bed"
Junk & Singalong Junk (the tune is equally or more affecting) - "Something old and new / Memories for you and me"
My Brave Face (with E. Costello) - "Ever since you went away I've had this sentimental inclination / not to change a single thing. / As I pull the sheet back on the bed / I want to go bury my head in your pillow... Now that I'm alone again I can't stop breaking down again"
Maybe I'm Amazed (happy + sad) - "Baby, I'm a man and maybe I'm a lonely man / Who's in the middle of something / That he doesn't really understand"
Gratitude - "Well, I was lonely / I was living with a memory... I should stop loving you / Think what you put me through / But I don't want to lock my heart away"
The End of The End - the subject matter... *refuses to think about it*
Footprints - "Oh white blanket / Hiding the traces of tears she didn't see / Snow white blanket / Simply covers the memory of all that used to be / But his heart keeps aching in the same old way / He can't help feeling that she might come back someday"
Try Not To Cry - "I want to enjoy / Being alive / Don't want to leave / Before I arrive"
Treat Her Gently / Lonely Old People - "Here we sit / Two lonely old people / Eking our lives away
Call Me Back Again - "I called your house / many a night since then / But I ain't never, no no never / heard you calling me / C'mon and call me back again"
Here Today - "But as for me / I still remember how it was before / And I am holding back the tears no more / I love you"
I was just really sad, y’know, cos we’d [Paul and John] loved each other – although you wouldn’t have called it that then.
When we started to bitch at each other
I had quite a period of self doubt. I'd be thinking, 'uh oh, John was the great one, I was just stringing along.' But then I think to myself: 'Wait a minute, he wasn't a mug. He wouldn't work with me all that time if it didn't mean something to him.'
If I had known John was going to die, I would have made a lot more effort to try and get a better relationship with him. But when he started slagging me off I was not prepared to say 'Well, you're quite right', because
I'm human. My big regret was that I could have told John to listen and put my arms round him.
And so I kind of realised that, you know, that even though we had been bitching in public and stuff, we still had an affection for each other. And I was pleased to know that. And, I know Yoko later rang me up and said 'Look, you know he did love you.' And so, you know, I say you grab anything you can get. I know he did. I know he came close to a - you know, to love/hate. Any strong relationship has got that in it, I think. It is a pity.
It would be nice for everything to just be wonderful, smooth all the time. But it seems to be life isn't. I can't tell you how much it hurts to lose him. His death is a bitter, cruel blow. I really loved the guy.
'I can't quite believe it's over.
It's just a really sad feeling sometimes. Same with John, except with John's death there was all this anger too. The jerk of all jerks,' he hisses, referring to Mark Chapman, Lennon's murderer, 'to shoot someone like John Lennon.' He [Paul] shakes his head. 'And now Georgie's gone too,' he says, quietly,
'It's not a nice feeling, really. Not nice. At all.'Also not obvious is that McCartney has penned a gorgeous black-spiritual-like piece for mezzo-soprano that intones the last words spoken to John Lennon as he lay dying of gunshot wounds in the back of a New York police car -- "Do you know who you are?"
McCartney gets a bit choked up at one point when he reveals, "Not a day goes by when I don't think of John.”"The Anthology, particularly 3, tends to knock that rumour on the head. You can hear me and John having a good time. You can hear that we are enjoying each other." He [Paul] still grieves for Lennon, shot dead by a deranged gunman in 1980, saying.
"At home, at weekends or whatever, it wells up and I can't handle it. But most of the time I can just about handle it, you sort of have to get through the day."
'And it's sad, it's emotional. There's a song I do called Here Today which is specifically written for John and that sometimes catches me out. It catches me out in this film version where I realise I'm telling this man that I love him ... I'm publicly declaring this in front of all these people I don't know. 'It's a good thing to do.
I couldn't have done it when I was 18 because I would not have allowed myself to cry or go anywhere near that ... Now it's OK. I'm used to it.'
I was kind of crying when I wrote it [Here Today]. I'm sure you understand why without me going into it all. His death is something that the three of us find very difficult to talk about even to each other.
We're still looking at the painting of Linda. Why hasn't he included his most recent paintings of her in the book? "I haven't done many later paintings."
I thought he had continued painting her since she died. "They're not of Linda. They're just of turmoil." Has the pain eased? "That's the trouble.
People say time is a healer, and time heals by erasing. That is a sad fact. I love my mum, but I'm not so sure I've got a very clear picture of her face in my mind. I'm not saying I could ever forget my mum or my dad or Linda or John. In some ways you remember them more, but the details...When she died all of us in the family expected her to walk in the door, and we don't now."
He says he feels bad about the fact that it becomes more difficult to conjure up her face.
"This is life, this is guilt. If we're lucky we let ourselves off a little bit more, that's what I'm trying to do." It is surprising to hear McCartney talk of guilt. He always came across as the great, easy optimist. "I am, pretty..." And for a second he sounds thoroughly miserable.
"It was so traumatic losing Linda that I had to say, 'OK, I don't know how I'm going to get through this.'" It took him a year to feel better. He says it felt like a cyclical thing, passing through the seasons, reawakening. He still talks to Linda, looks to her for advice. "It is the weirdest thing to say because she's not here, but I think most people who've lost someone know what I'm talking about. A lot of people I know talk to Linda. Our old housekeeper Rose says, 'Good morning, Lin,' every day. I thought to myself, 'How much would she want me to grieve?' A months, two months, three months, what is a seemly amount of time? After a while I felt she'd be saying, 'That's enough, you've done enough.'"
There's a price to fame I decided to pay long ago. It was brought home to me when someone gave me a Beatles trivia game. The first question I looked at was, 'What did Paul McCartney's mother die of?' Now for me, that's my mom, who died when I was 14, and I know she died of breast cancer. But I don't need it on some fun Beatley Pursuit game, because me and my brother are the two kids it happened to.
That's really emotional shit, and that can be hurtful. I'm adult enough to know they didn't mean it that way. But when someone does mean to be nasty, I'll give them what for, and suddenly it's not cute Paul anymore."
In the week after Lennon's death, Andy Peebles (who had interviewed John just prior to his death) was contacted by George Martin. 'I got a phone call from George, who I'd never met before, asking me to come round to Air Studios in London as Paul would like to meet you," recalls Peebles. "Forgive me, Paul, if I got this wrong but what Paul wanted me to tell him was that John still loved him."
A guest at the sessions was the Beatles’ long-time friend rockabilly pioneer Carl Perkins. He played McCartney a song he had just written, entitled ‘My Old Friend’.
‘After I finished,’ he recalled, 'Paul was crying, tears were rolling down his pretty cheeks, and Linda said, ‘Carl, thank you so much.’ I said, ‘Linda, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you cry.’ She said, ‘But he’s crying, and he needed to. He hasn’t been able to really break down since that happened to John.
Well, it all goes back to losing Linda [in 1998].
When that happened, obviously, my world collapsed. We'd been fighting a battle [with Linda's breast cancer] for about a year and a half. All our efforts, every single thing, had been to beat it. And in the end, we lost the battle.
It was just staggering. Linda and I had been together for thirty years. Four kids. It was...shocking. I thought, "How the hell do I deal with this?" For about a year, I found myself crying – in all situations, anyone I met. Anyone who came over, the minute we talked about Linda, I'd say, "I'm sorry about this, I've got to cry." People had said, "Immerse yourself in work," and I said, "I don't think so."
Do you feel nostalgic for the past?
Nostalgia’s not the right word because it implies something sort of wrong. I love the past.
There are parts of the past I hate, of course. My mum died, Linda died, John died, and George died, so I can’t say I love everything about it, but I have a great affection for the past. And why shouldn’t I? I was just some kid from Liverpool, who walked around the streets with John Lennon, and wrote songs with him, and met this beautiful girl from New York, then married her and had kids with her — why shouldn’t I love the past? Mine has been good.
About the album's reflective theme, McCartney said,
"At one time, I didn't think life was a tug of war. Even when I wrote 'When I'm 64,' I had the feeling that everything was possible. The age 64 seemed as far away to me as 150. It's not until you get into your 30s that you start seeing the other side of it.
You see how your life can be affected by things that are irrational and beyond your control. You suddenly begin to realize how delicate everything is." Still, McCartney had to overcome some of his own attitudes in the making of this album [Tug of War]. "I like to convey optimism," he acknowledged. "There already seems to be so much pessimism around that you don't figure the world needs more of it. Besides, I don't like it when people around me are negative.
I know death is there but I don't like to sit around all night and talk about it. When I started making this album, though, I realized that these feelings are real, too, and that I shouldn't try to ignore them."About Linda’s death:
"I thought I might be dead by the end of the year, it would just be so unbearable. I half-prepared for that to happen. The nearest I did get to that was with grief and crying. But I thought, no, that's a slippery path. So I tried to counteract that by just going from day to day."
Did he ever feel he'd had to pay a price for what he'd been given in life? "I do. But I think we all pay that price. My particular story is just very visible and very pointed, very deep. I was up in Liverpool over the New Year with my family. And the way they are, they induce a certain kind of character in you. Which is, 'Get on with it. Be optimistic. Overcome it. Have a laff.' To some people that can look a bit fatuous, but to me it's quite deep.
Yes, all these things have happened to me, but I don't want them to break me."For McCartney, the death of a partner with whom he had been so close for so long was not just a matter of coming to terms with her absence. It meant a total redefinition of who he was. "If you're lucky enough to love someone and be in a very strong relationship with them, you grow reliant on each other because
you're half of each other's life. So when you lose them, that's the first thing: 'I've lost half of me.' That's the shock. I tried to see what came out of it, see where I was. After about a year and two months I found that I'd thought something out. I still don't know what it is. But that's what it is like when you lose someone."
After Linda’s death he said:
"How am I still here? How am I talking, eating? I just am."There were 36 phone messages waiting for freelance music writer Danny Fields when he returned to his Manhattan apartment April 19 after a weekend trip. Reporters were calling about the death of his close friend Linda McCartney, who had died two days earlier at age 56 from breast cancer that had spread to her liver. Devastated by what he heard, Fields reached for the phone.
"I called Paul right away," says Fields. "I said, 'Oh, Paul,' and his voice cracked for 10 seconds. We both started to cry. But then I couldn't stop, and he was consoling me. He said, 'Wasn't she great? Wasn't she beautiful? Wasn't she smart and together and wonderful and loving?'"
"This is total heartbreak for my family and I. Linda was, and still is, the love of my life, and the past two years we spent battling her disease have been a nightmare."When Linda died, he cried for a year, and he wrote poems for her, about her, to her. "She's still there," he says. "She always will be. But they say that time is a healer, and it is. It heals by erasure. It erases the awful feelings.
Grief is numbed and eased. Not the memories, but the pain, is rubbed out a bit. And that has to be a good thing. Otherwise you'd never be able to get on with life. My mum died when I was 14. I can't recall her face now. It's like a law of nature - a good one really. You could go mad. There are people who do that - sit in a room full of photos, remembering. Well, the poems were therapeutic for me. I could remember and forget at the same time. Remember by recording the feelings; forget by releasing the feelings." He grimaces briefly. "To some degree," he adds.McCartney's mother was a midwife and she died of cancer when he was 14. "Nobody knew what it was. I haven't seen many things of my mother's but there was a letter she wrote in a lovely script on nice Basildon Bond. She'd been to the doctor about her pains and he'd given her a couple of tablets and told her everything would be all right. 'But I know there's something wrong,' she wrote. So it was mis-diagnosed.
When she died it was very scary and painful and it made you realise that if you didn't do something about it, life could get worse.”What his life lacked, he knew well, was angst.
"Should I try to get a bit more angst? If I'm a target it's because I'm not dashing enough, not anxious enough, not crazy enough. I even have my wife in the group and embarrassing things like that. Jagger quoted that thing about domesticity being the enemy of art, but I've decided I don't care much about art. I've thought about it and I would never have wanted to be John, no - definitely no. Besides, mine's not a bad life."
"Yes, Linda's not been well the past year or so, although she's doing very well now," he says. "It's very difficult when you get that kind of situation in your life. I'm sensitive enough not to repress it all the time, and that helps you to deal with it." Dropping his guard a little further,
McCartney confesses that his music has stopped him "going round the bend". "Music has always been a consolation for me," he says. "When you get the teenage blues, the great remedy is to write a song. I wrote Ebony and Ivory after a little marital tiff with Linda. It was like 'why can't we get it together - our piano can'." So a fly on the wall at home might catch him huddled over the grand piano having a good cry? "Yes. It's an underrated aspect of songwriting. If you asked a lot of songwriters you'd find that what happens is that they have a bad day so they skulk off to hide from everyone.
Instead of lying on a psychiatrist's couch they talk to themselves in a song. I do that all the time. Half of my songs are very much me doing therapy with myself, and half of them I'm just writing about Desmond and Molly Jones."Q: Linda's death seemed to rattle the public because everyone assumed such an epic love story could never end. Was it a fairy-tale marriage?
A: That is the beautiful thing.
We were so bloody tight with each other. I lost my parents, and I loved them dearly, but losing both wasn't as difficult as losing Linda. I was unloading to a friend this morning about how difficult it was. This friend said, "Yeah, but it was so beautiful. You've got to remember that." It's true. Shoot, we didn't screw up in a major fashion, and we did love each other immensely.
Q: Did her views shape yours?
A: Very much so.
I used to worry what people thought of me. Going through the whole Beatle breakup, there were and still are a lot of strange perceptions. I used to say, "Oh gosh, maybe I should do this so people won't think that." And her view was, to put it bluntly, "Screw 'em. Who cares what they think? This is our life." It was great to have that kind of tough cookie around.
"I had a year of doing nothing," he says. "Everyone had said to me, 'You must keep busy.' I said, 'No, that's like denial.' I refused to get busy.
So I had the whole year of letting any emotion come sweeping over me. And it did. It's weird when someone that close to you dies. People say, 'Oh, my dad died, so I know exactly what you're going through.' I say, 'No, you don't.' A girlfriend of 30 years? The tightness and intimacy and stuff we went through? You don't know. It's different. Both my parents have died, and this is nothing like that. We were supposed to be on a porch in rocking chairs when we were 80. Suddenly, that's all taken away."Q. You recently told an interviewer, "I'd always thought that, in order to be liked, you had to be unwarty...I've only just realized, after all this time, that people like to see warts." Thinking of John Lennon's candor about himself, I wonder: what are some of Paul McCartney's warts?
A. Some of my warts? Oh boy...I don't particularly want to reveal them. I've got plenty.
What I meant was that John could show how human he was by vocalizing all of that. It's just my character not to vocalize that kind of stuff.Q. After John's death, Yoko said that people mistook your real feelings because you couldn't express them very easily.
A.
That's one of the things I often don't like about the way I come off. Like when John died, a reporter stuck a mike in my face and said, "What do you think?" And I said, "It's a drag." Which of course seemed a really flippant thing to say.
But later that night, I was weepin' and
a-wailin' and it all came out. I wasn't at all the little composed figure who had said, "It's a drag." But I've given up excusing myself, saying, "I'm awfully sorry, I'm not very good at this." Sod it. It's me. I'm not going to thrash myself with a soggy noodle because of who I am. You've got to think positive.
Looking distraught, McCartney went before the cameras to pay tribute to his "baby brother." Was he wanting to make amends for the flippant comment he made in 1980 when John Lennon was shot? "It was definitely to do with that, yeah. I was conscious of that.
I was just as distraught when John died, probably more so because it was a shocking murder. I knew George was going to die. I'd seen him and I knew. He had terminal cancer..." He shakes his head at the memory. "But you're right. When John died I didn't know whether to stay at home and hide or go to work. I decided to go to work, as did George Martin, and
at the studio we talked about John and cried and when I was leaving that night, in the dark, in the London traffic, I had the window slightly open and someone pushed a microphone in and asked me what I thought about John dying. I said, 'It's a drag.' I couldn't think of anything else to say. And, in print, it looked so heartless. When I saw it written down I thought, 'Jesus Christ.'"
How can he possibly feel insecure about his reputation?
"I know! That's what people say to me. Because I'm fucking human. And humans are insecure. Show me one who isn't. Henry Kissinger? Insecure. George Bush? Insecure. Bill Clinton? Very insecure." It's a curious crew to compare yourself to - the model for Dr. Strangelove, a Texan to whom English is a second language, a philanderer - but perhaps it makes sense in light of something McCartney said at the height of Lennon's war of words:
"John captured me so well. I'm a turd. I'm just nothing." Improbable though it may seem, Paul McCartney appears to have suffered periodically from low self-esteem.
Linda McCartney once said, "I don't dwell on what people say about me. I dwell on what people say about Paul, for some reason. Maybe it's because he can't handle it."Has he painted any of Linda since she died?
"No, I haven't painted too much in the past couple of years. Well, I've done one or two and they are a bit disturbing. But they would be, wouldn't they? I was disturbed."He grieved properly for Linda, he says, something he didn't do when his mother died from breast cancer.
"I certainly didn't grieve enough for my mother. There was no such thing as a psychiatrist when I lost her. You kidding? I was a 14-year-old Liverpool boy. I wouldn't have had access to one and I do now. I saw one when Linda died and he said, 'A good way to grieve is to cry one day and not cry the next, alternate days so as you don't go down one tunnel.' I took his advice." McCartney has said that in the months following Linda's death he thought he might die from grief; did he mean he considered taking his own life?
"No. I was very sad. In deep grief. But never suicidal. I'm too positive for that. After a year...It was as if the seasons had to go right through, as if I had to feel like a plant. A couple of months after the end of that cycle I began to realise I was also having other feelings, that I was emerging..."
With Linda he says their arguments were often caused by his own insecurity.
"People might be surprised to find I'm insecure. I could say, 'Hey, are you kidding? With my talent, and money?', but I'm being honest. Everyone I know is insecure in some way or other whether it's about their shape, finance, talent, marriage." Maybe he worries about death? "When the man in the sky wants me, he'll take me. I could drop dead right now of a heart attack, and I'd think, 'Well, it's time.' I don't look forward to death, but it has to come, so there's no point fearing it. As a little kid I said I'd live to 100. Now I wonder if I really want to. My insecurities are more in the area of being found out - well, not quite. I feel pretty good about my songwriting because, like it or not, I've achieved a hell of a lot, although I'm not satisfied I've done my best."
I was on the scrap heap.... It was just the feeling, the terrible disappointment of not being of any use to anyone anymore. It was a barrelling, empty feeling that just rolled across my soul.... It was bad onLinda. She had to deal with this guy who didn't particularly want to get out of bed, and, if he did, wanted to go to bed pretty soon after. He wanted to drink earlier and earlier each day and didn't really see the point in shaving, because where was he going?
In late 1969, when the differences among the Beatles proved insoluble, the band broke up (the split was made public a few months later), and McCartney suffered what he has described as a breakdown. "Withdrawal from the band," he told me. "But it wasn't just that the band had broken up. It was the circumstances under which the band had broken up. I actually had to sue them. There was no other way. I tried for months to find some other way. I tried originally to sue Allen Klein, to get him out of the picture and just sort of tidy up. But he wasn't a party to any of the agreements. And they said the only people you can sue are the other Beatles. I said, 'Well, I can't do that.'
So this then plunged me into sort of-not a depression, but a difficult, a very difficult time, where I was going to meetings and it was three against one. And that's not fun. When they're your friends. There are people still, to this day, who say, 'He sued his friends,' " he continued. "As if I did it lightly. Like it was a fun thing for me to do."
I returned to the subject of the Beatles' breakup.
"It really was hellishly tough times and I very nearly went under," he said. "I was suing my friends, I wasn't working, I was drinking in the daytime to try to sort of pretend I was 'partying,' and I wasn't. And Linda was my savior. Linda was absolutely my savior. Strong woman. She just was able to hang in there and help me hang in there." I asked if any songs had come out of this dark period. He thought for a moment, and said, " 'Maybe I'm Amazed' "-a power ballad about his need for Linda at a time in his life when, as he sings in the song, "I'm a lonely man who's in the middle of something that he doesn't really understand."
IS: But life doesn't give us the magic all the time.
PM: That's why I found myself writing "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," with the lyrics, "Bang! Bang! Maxwell's silver hammer/Came down upon his head."
From an early age I knew my mum and dad were going to die. There was no way out of that one. So you live with the two realities--lousy and great. But if I had to say whether I think life's lousy or great, I'd have to come down on the side of great.
Does he ever get bored of being portrayed as easygoing, thumbs-aloft Macca?
I suggest that his glass-half-full persona must have been manufactured as a method for coping with his extraordinary fame. He bristles slightly at the word “manufactured”. In fact, he says, it was probably a mechanism that activated itself during an adolescence overshadowed by the death of his mother. “If you knew anyone I went to school with, it was the same, you know. I was pretty optimistic.” Besides, even happy songs have a way of turning sad as the years go by. Penny Lane pauses the videotape of memory on a moment to which its author knows he can never return. Even When I’m 64 carries a poignancy that he couldn’t have foreseen when he wrote it. “You know, I think you’re getting to the philosophical core of things when you say that. Things that are happy also contain the seed of sadness.” By way of illustration, he pretends to be a brass band playing I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside. Images of Victorian ghosts in stripy bathing costumes suddenly abound. “See what I mean? One day, when we discover the meaning of life, that will somehow be contained within it – that happy is sad and sad is happy.”
LINDA: With John's thing, what could you say?
PAUL: What could you say?
LINDA: The pain is beyond words. You can never describe it, I don't care
how articulate you are.
PAUL: We just went home, we just looked at all the news on the telly, and
we sat there with all the kids, just crying all evening. Just couldn't
handle it, really.LINDA: To this day, we just cry on hearing John's songs; you can't help
it. You just cry.
I was going through a hard period. I exhibited all the symptoms of the unemployed, the redundant man. First, you don’t shave, and it’s not to grow to a groovy beard , it’s because you cannot be fucking bothered.
Anger, deep, deep anger sets in with everything, with yourself number one, and with everything in the world number two. So I didn’t shave for awhile, I didn’t get up. I’ve never been like that before.
There are lots of people who have been through worse things than that but for me this was bad news because I’d always been the kind of guy who could really pull himself together and think, Oh fuck it, but at that time I felt I’d outlived my usefulness. This was the overall feeling: that it was good while I was in The Beatles. I was useful.
I was going through a bad time, what I suspect was almost a nervous breakdown. I remember lying awake at night shaking. One night I’d been asleep and awoke and I couldn’t lift my head off the pillow. I thought, Jesus. If I don’t do this I’ll suffocate. I remember hardly having the energy to pull myself up, but with a great struggle I pulled my head up and lay on my back and thought, That was a bit near! I just couldn’t do anything... I was having dreams that Klein was a dentist. I remember telling everyone and they all laughed but I said, ‘ No, this was a fucking scary dream!’ He was giving me injections in my dreams to put me out and I was thinking Fucking hell!
It [It’s a drag] looked so callous in print.
You can’t take the print back and say, ‘Look let me just rub that print in shit and pee all over it and then cry over it for three years, then you’ll see what I mean.’.. When I got home I wept buckets, in the privacy of my own home. I controlled it all during the day, but that evening when it was on the news and all the in-depth shit, and all the pundits were coming out, trotting out all their little witticisms,
I did a lot of weeping. I remember screaming that M.C. was the jerks of all jerks; I felt so robbed and so emotional. It shocked me for months afterwards and you couldn’t talk to me about guns. Any mention of the word ‘gun’, ‘rifle’, ‘pistol’, ‘shoot’, just shocked me, sent a wave of reverberation through me like an echo of a pistol shot. You couldn’t even say ‘that was a good shot’ about a photograph, it just rang through. The very next day there was a pheasant shoot in the woods. Linda went out and talked to them...
After his death, Linda and I went round to Yoko’s and we all cried so hard, you know.So, yeah, that's our always-cheerful, eternally-hopeful, thumbs-aloft Paulie. He’s always had a tendency to avoid his own negative emotions and distances himself from them, especially in public. Sometimes this means he has come across as aloof or unmoved. I think he started to deal with his own pain a bit better after Linda’s death, actually going to therapy to work through things. As he did again during the separation from Heather. Brian once said this about Paul: [Paul] is a great one for not wanting to hear about things, and if he doesn't want to know he switches himself off, settles down in a chair, puts one booted foot across his knee and pretends to read a newspaper, having consciously made his face an impassive mask.” I think he was/is very similar with grief in public, for example.