IStella McCartney was just a young girl when, in 1980, her father, Paul, was famously busted with nearly half a pound of marijuana in Japan — but she wasn’t surprised.
“I remember [the guard] opening up that suitcase, and I remember him picking up a pillowcase worth of skunk weed,” the fashion designer recalls in her dad’s new oral history, “Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run,” (Liveright, out now). “Even a nine-year-old could have hidden skunk weed better than my parents. But they were like, ‘It was too good to leave behind.’”
Paul McCartney was busted with nearly half a pound of marijuana in his suitcase in Japan in 1980. AP
The book portrays Paul’s chaotic decade following the Beatles break up in 1970 as he struggled to figure out who he was beyond the Fab Four. Macca was often stoned — so much so that at one point, he was too far gone to meet Bob Marley. He and wife Linda formed Wings and took the band, and the kids on the road, sometimes not even bothering to book tour dates. Instead, one of the most famous musicians in the world would show up at colleges and ask if his new band could play.
At their first gig, in Nottingham in 1972, one attendee, Brian Pearson, recalls “Linda playing keyboards and singing surrounded by an entourage of babies and young children.”
The band had 11 original songs at that point for a set of about 33 minutes, remembers McCartney, who refused to play any Beatles songs.
“They wanted longer, so we repeated things,” he writes in the book, which was edited by Ted Widmer.
Amazingly, not every college they approached worked out, even for an ex-Beatle.
“After Nottingham, we decided to ring Leeds ahead, but it never came off because the fellow wanted a contract, proof of who we were, assurances. So, sod it!” McCartney recalls. “We carried on to York. They couldn’t give us the big hall, so we took the dining hall.”
His daughter, Stella McCartney, recounts the story in a new oral history. Getty Images
Attempting a show in Cardiff, they were refused because the hall there was being used for a badminton match.
In the city of Hull, McCartney got the full extent of just how deeply they were roughing it.
Staying at what Linda called “a third-rate hotel,” the entourage was approached by the night manager.
“This little bald fellow came up to us and said, ‘Does one of you people own that black and white dog?’” Wings’ drummer Denny Seiwell recalls in the book.
“Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run,” is out now.
“Paul goes, ‘Yeah, that’s my dog, Lucky. Why?’ [And the manager says], ‘Well, he shat in the hall. You’re gonna have to clean this up.’ So Paul went and cleaned it up.”
Another huge difference between being a Beatle and being in Wings was the critical reception.
Nineteen seventy-one’s “RAM,” the only album credited to Paul and Linda McCartney, was torn apart by critics.
Jon Landau, writing in Rolling Stone, dubbed it “the nadir in the decomposition of sixties rock thus far.” And England’s New Musical Express called it, “an excursion into almost unrelieved tedium” with “not one worthwhile or lasting piece of music.”
Paul and Linda McCartney hit the road with their band, sometimes not even bothering with tour dates. Getty Images
McCartney seemed to mostly disregard the pans, claiming, “I’ve learned not to care what they say,” sometimes he couldn’t ignore them.
After an English journalist wrote a horrible review of a Wings show he hadn’t actually seen, he and Linda took nasty revenge.
“Stella was a baby at the time,” Seiwell says in the book. “So Paul and Linda took one of those little plastic soap dishes from the hotel we were in and they got one of Stella’s turds, put it in the soap dish, wrapped it up and sent it to him.”
Paul’s infamous arrest came at the start of what was to be a tour around Japan for Wings. Instead, the musician got to know the inside of a cellblock.
Critics tore apart Wings, but McCartney did his best to ignore them. Getty Images
He spent nine days in a Tokyo prison. Until the very last day, he was facing the possibility of spending seven years there doing manual labor.
“It was the maddest thing in my life,” McCartney writes.
Inside, the legendary Beatle was treated like any other prisoner.
“I’d be woken up at six in the morning and I’d have to roll up my thin mattress which I’d been sleeping on, on this cold floor in an unheated cell,” McCartney writes. “I had to clean the cell with a wet cloth and wash myself in the water from the cistern at the back of the flush toilet — they let us have one bath a week.”
The band had limited material to fill out a set in the early days, but McCartney refused to play Beatles songs. Robert Ellis/ MPL Communications Ltd
He had to share a bath with a convicted murderer, keeping his clothes on for fear of being sexually assaulted.
His fellow inmates tried teaching him a few Japanese words, but the communication attempts devolved to them gleefully shouting brand names at each other.
“I would say, ‘Toyota!’ They would go, ‘Toyota! Toyota!’ And then I’d hear them laughing,” McCartney writes. “Then they’d go, ‘Rolls Royce!’ I go, ‘Rolls Royce!’ I’d hear them all applaud. You had to do something, or [you would] go mad.”
Life on the road with Wings was far less fab than being a Beatle. Clive Arrowsmith/ MPL Communications Ltd
Paul was eventually released after more than a week thanks to the efforts of Linda’s lawyer brother, John Eastman.
Aside from creative struggles and a prison stint, Paul’s post-Beatles life also involved fraught relationships with his former bandmates.
In February 1971, he had to sue them in order to dissolve their legal partnership.
Linda and Paul packed the weed that got Paul busted because “it was too good to leave behind.” Getty Images
“To this day, it’s one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make: Could I really sue The Beatles? These were my childhood friends,” he writes.
After the lawsuit — a successful attempt to separate the band from its final manager, Allen Klein, who, McCartney alleges, inflated his commissions — there was the question of how to reconcile with his estranged best friend, John Lennon.
The two had been publicly sniping at each other for years. McCartney finally lowered the temperature with 1971’s “Dear Friend,” a song from Wings that included the line, “I’m in love with a friend of mine.”
At the end of 1971, they reunited in New York. Their awkwardness quickly melted away, and the songwriting pair remembered why they had been so close.
McCartney and John Lennon (pictured with Yoko Ono) reunited at the end of 1971 after years of sparring publicly. Getty Images
“You get to talking and the vibe is right, and it’s great,” McCartney remembers.
John and Yoko present him with a gift: a bootleg record of The Beatles’ original Decca audition in 1962. The UK label had infamously passed on the band.
“It was one of those moments where you remember why you were such great friends in the first place,” he remembers. “[John] wrote on there: ‘They were a good group. Fancy turning THIS down!’”