Legacy Extended
The McCartney Legacy: Volume 2: 1974-80
Let’s remember 2022; back when there were still two Popes and Post Malone fans wondered whatever would he do with those last few patches of un-inked skin. The rush of time will do what it can to rinse all of that and more from our memories, but it will probably have little to no impact on the persistent stream of interest that’s still generated by The Beatles.
Today we’re still seeing fresh documentaries flicker to life, reissues continue to drop, and an untold number of trees being repurposed as books on the band and their members. And yet it’s still kind of astonishing to see that Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair have managed to add another 759 pages to the continuing history of Paul McCartney that they set out on just two years ago.
Their first volume ended with the half million sales of Band On The Run that helped to re-certify the Wings front man as a Pop giant. This latest installment begins with him playing midwife to his younger brother’s McGear LP, jamming with an estranged John Lennon, and then jetting off to Nashville to try and get his band roadworthy. But that last task proved more difficult than McCartney may have anticipated.
New drummer Geoff Britton was often hobbled by a wounded bass pedal foot and the young guitarist Jimmy McCulloch routinely did his best to drink his way out of the band (and at one point into jail…). All the while Paul soldiered on. He made promises in the press to outstrip Band On The Run’s success with its follow-up, was daydreaming about a number of film projects while entertaining notions that Lennon might actually materialize during his 1975 sessions in New Orleans. And somehow that only gets us to somewhere around page 252. Suddenly it’s quite easy to see why Kozinn and Sinclair needed the other 500-odd pages.
In fact, there are so many well-honed details brought to bear in “Volume 2” that you really being to feel as if you’re inside the day-to-day story that you thought you already knew so well. Then there are the dozens of pointers to unreleased material that will undoubtedly drive you to your keyboard to hunt down the rarities that they bring to life.
Now despite knowing where the authors draw things to a close, we wouldn’t want to give the impression that we’ve read the entire book at this point. There’s no great rush to finish it, particularly when we’ve got a good two to three-year wait before we get to rejoin the narrative. So unless Saint Lewisohn turns up with the second installment of his Beatles trilogy, that’s a fairly hefty gap before Fab friendly readers are treated to such well-researched and engaging fare. For now Kozinn and Sinclair have earned another two Macca thumbs up…way up.
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Interview with Allan Kozinn
Tracking Angle: There’s probably no easy way to gauge this, but is it safe to say that because of the size of your McCartney books, there’s no quenching the thirst out there for Beatle-related info?
Alan Kozinn: It seems to be the case…but there is a whole other public out there that is not fascinated with the Beatles at all and who are sort of rebelling against this too. I mean the Washington Post reviewed (our book) this weekend and their first sentence was ‘Do we really need another book about Paul McCartney?’ and they immediately said ‘Yes!’ but the fact that the question is asked and (that) it's not the first time, kind of indicates that you know there's at least what looks like saturation to people who aren't interested. But to people who are interested, and you've got some new information there there's a market for it.
TA: This volume “feels” like we’re being taken more inside the story.
AK: We tried to find as many people who were at any of these things as we could and uh you know that was why it was so great talking to the sound guys for the tour and for Nashville you know there's a guy down there named Dan Ealey Dan who is on Facebook constantly posting about his experiences there and we talked to him. He actually put us in touch with Geoff Brittain who hadn't given an interview since 1977, so that was helpful. And Geoff had kept diaries. (So) we tried to get people who were at these things to tell us everything that they remembered so that's why it might sound like we were there.
TA: Speaking of Nashville, we you at all surprised to find that Paul put up with Jimmy McCulloch’s antics as much as he did?
AK: He was probably thinking ‘This is a kid in his 20’s and I remember when I was in my 20’s, we were all a little wild,” so he tolerated it. Probably for that reason and the fact that Jimmy was such a good guitarist. But it could only go so far. If you think of the amount of mayhem that he caused…I mean he delayed the US tour by a month by breaking his finger. And while publicly they had a story about slipping in the bathroom and breaking his finger, the fact is that he really broke his finger while trashing a television in David Cassidy's hotel room in Paris. I mean that could have actually cost them a lot of money. And then finally when it came down to it in ’77, right before the ‘Mull of Kintyre’ sessions when he sort of smashed up a cabin and broke all of Linda's fresh eggs and whatever else he could find in the refrigerator, I think that finally was the last straw.
TA: There’s a comment that Paul makes to Ben Fong-Torres of Rolling Stone about how he feels the media is too focused on the rearview mirror and his Beatledom, while the fans who turn up at the show are otherwise convinced about Wings as a band. Did you guys get the sense that he really believed at various times that he could put Wings on the footing of any other band and not have his past overshadow them?
AK: It's hard to say. We can't really read his mind, but I suspect there are several places in Volume 1 and volume 2 where he's having a bad day and he's feeling depressed and if you look at what's going on around him there's no particular reason to be depressed. So it could very well be that he's having the realization of that no matter what it's never going to top The Beatles. And for someone like him who really does want to move forward with his life and his art, that would be a depressing thing to realize.
TA: There was an interesting thing about Paul contacting Gene Rodenberry of Star Trek fame to possibly write a film script for him. How hard was it to come across little nuggets like that and what did you think it said about Paul’s always pushing the envelope to do more and more work.
AK: I mean the Rodenberry thing wasn't very well known, nor was its predecessor…the Asimov (script). Somehow Adrian found out that Asimov's papers were in the Boston University library and we wrote to them. And possibly the one good thing to come out of COVID they said ‘Well you know it's COVID no one's coming in to see this but we'll make you a copy,” and they did. They sent us a PDF and it had all of Paul's correspondence with Asimov and it had Paul's original idea for the film. We've been pretty lucky, but you know we always have our eyes open for some of these passing mentions in an interview that no one's followed up on And I guess no one followed it up because nothing ever became of it. But the fact is that (Paul) is always looking for interesting things to do. Later on it becomes classical music, it becomes electronica. At the end of this book mean he's recorded McCartney II, which was a lot of experiments with electronica that he wasn't even sure whether he would be putting out when he started it. But I think he just wanted a break from the band. But he really always is looking for new challenges and sometimes they're outside of music.
TA: Geoff Britton mentioned something that was interesting about the imbalance within Wings and with Paul not having anyone around to tell him when he might be going too far. Do you think that’s largely been the case in his solo career and why tough interviews like the one you guys write about with Charles Shaar Murray of the NME rattled him a bit?
AK: The thing is that when people do tell him…(and) he's in a receptive mood, he thinks about it and reconsiders. But a lot of time often his first response is ‘Oh yeah? How many number one hits have you had?’ Unless you were a Beatle, it’s very difficult to give Paul criticism. Charles Shaar Murray was kind of in a position (to do that) because he was a critic and he’s going to say what he wants. Paul wasn’t used to that because the press coming to interview him was a little more obsequious. It's not so much that he necessarily thinks he's bullet proof, it's that he thinks that when these disputes come up, that he's right and he's going to go with (that) because generally speaking he has really good instincts.
