'The Old Paul Was No Longer the New Paul'
Even if Paul McCartney had permanently hung up his instruments after the dissolution of the Beatles, he’d still be regarded as one of the best songwriters in rock history. Watch him in the invaluable eight-hour documentary Get Back, and you’ll see a meticulous 26-year-old leader who’s constantly writing, revising, rearranging, and pushing his bandmates (no slouches themselves) to elevate a song from merely perfect to immortal. So what else is there to do after reinventing pop music forever before even turning 30?
Apparently, you run away to a desolate Scottish sheep farm and plot a second chapter for the ages. As McCartney writes below in the foreword to his upcoming book, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run, a funny narrative was forming around himself and his new wife, Linda: They’d traded Swinging ’60s London for sleepy ’70s Scotland, yet the rest of the world thought Paul was simply dead. In reality, he was working on his new life. His next decade would bring on an ambitious new band, endless trips around the world, and ten albums that would grow to be, among later generations, as beloved as his previous band’s records. It would also involve headline-grabbing controversies, a stay at the Tokyo Narcotics Detention Center, and, inevitably, another musical breakup. But, of course, McCartney’s story wouldn’t end there. It’s still being written today by the man himself.
“Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash as we fell into the sun.”
The strangest rumor started floating around just as the Beatles were breaking up — that I was dead.
We had heard the rumor long before, but suddenly, in that autumn of 1969, stirred up by a DJ in America, it took on a force all its own, so that millions of fans around the world believed I was actually gone.
At one point, I turned to my new wife and asked, “Linda, how can I possibly be dead?” She smiled as she held our new baby, Mary, as aware of the power of gossip and the absurdity of these ridiculous newspaper headlines as I was. But she did point out that we had beaten a hasty retreat from London to this remote farm up in Scotland, precisely to get away from the kind of malevolent talk that was bringing the Beatles down.
Source: vulture.com
