An interview with Paul McCartney reveals his candid thoughts on the Beatles' history, the band's breakup, his relationship with John Lennon, and the portrayal of their legacy by Rolling Stone magazine, coinciding with a new documentary about his post-Beatles band Wings.
When Sir Paul arrived, he was dressed entirely in black, looking spry and sunny. He guided me to an upstairs lounge, where we settled on a couch, a plate of chocolate chip cookies between us. For the next hour and 20 minutes, it was just Paul and me.
Man on the Run, a new documentary about McCartney’s formation of Wings in the 1970s, arrives on Prime Video February 27. Directed by Morgan Neville, it is another in a series of McCartney-approved films that burnish not only the Beatles’ legacy, but also his own. The occasion of the film—and Jann Wenner’s recent 80th birthday—is an opportune time to publish the full and unexpurgated interview I conducted with McCartney for Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, only a fraction of which made it into the book. The interview is an exegesis on McCartney’s relationship with Rolling Stone and the underground press of the 1960s, but also a deep dive into Beatles history—the breakup; the legal debacles that tore the band apart; Paul’s admiration and skepticism of Yoko Ono; his rocky relationship with John Lennon in the post-Beatles years; and the duo’s eventual reconciliation in Santa Monica in 1974. On March 25, 2015, I’d flown to England with low expectations, figuring a rock-and-roll lion of McCartney’s stature would be overly diplomatic. Instead he was candid, freewheeling, and even pointed, blaming Rolling Stone and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for crafting a revisionist history of the Beatles that cast him as the perennial also-ran to Lennon, whom the magazine venerated after his 1980 assassination—transforming Lennon into “the James Dean character,” says McCartney. Looking back, it was an opening salvo in Paul’s decade-long campaign to establish himself in popular memory as the co-equal to Lennon—foreshadowing Peter Jackson’s epic Get Back documentary and the many books, films, and exhibits that McCartney has since produced. In the interview—which Vanity Fair has published in two parts—McCartney was keen to separate myth from fact, taking issue with biopics of the band and even published histories, including the work of the foremost Beatles scholar, Mark Lewisohn. “It’s interesting because I’m a fact, not a myth,” he told me. “For me, this is fact.” Joe Hagan: The first issue of Rolling Stone came out in November 1967. John Lennon was on the cover, in a still from the film How I Won the War. What do you remember from that time? When it first came out, did it come across your radar? Paul McCartney: Yeah, sure. I mean, anything like that—head papers, anything a bit stoned—came across the radar. I think for me, the precursor was a thing called the International Times in London. This was the year before Rolling Stone, in ’66. A group of people I knew had started this paper, and it was stoner—it would have Ginsberg contributing. You could speak more freely because it wasn’t the Daily This or the Daily That. It was a forum where you knew the people thought like we did. This involved a guy named Barry Miles, who did a book on me later . I was hanging out with them because at that point, the other guys in the Beatles had sort of settled outside in the suburbs. They were all married. I wasn’t, and I was living in the city with my girlfriend, Jane Asher. So the people I hung out with and the things I did tended to be city things. Through Peter Asher—Jane’s brother—and his friends John Dunbar and Barry Miles, we had a little underground scene. The architects who helped with my house were John Dunbar’s cousins or whatever. There was a little group—architects, artists, writers, musicians—and we’d basically just sit around, pretty much getting stoned and having great conversations, as you did in those days. It was all pretty hysterical. A lot of fun. Anyway, they started a thing called Indica , which was an art gallery in Mason’s Yard in London, and I was very involved in that. I actually helped paint it—just because it was a group of friends. Nothing fancy about it. But I liked the philosophy and the books; I was kind of bookish, having just come from an English literature thing I did in my grammar school. I had the best teacher—you know, the teacher we all have if we’re lucky. This great teacher turned me on to English literature. So when I was talking to all these guys who were more literate than I was, it was still a great conversation. Very fascinating. They’d say, “Do you know Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds?” No. “Have you seen The History of Atlantis?” No. So we were all turning each other on to things, mainly Barry Miles turning me on to things. This culminated in the art side with John Dunbar’s thing at the Indica gallery. I painted it—helped them paint it—and designed their wrapping paper. Would you believe? A wallpaper design that just said “Indica” on it. I had a bunch printed up. They needed something to wrap their books in. Eventually they got busted for God knows what—I don’t think it was D.H. Lawrence—Tropic of Cancer or something. Something rude. In London, like indecency charges? Exactly. I think homosexuality was still illegal. Our manager, the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, could have been arrested right around that time. I think it started to free up with the ’60s, but you still couldn’t do certain things. So they got raided quite often. Anything that would seem indecent to a policeman—a drawing of a big cock—. But anyway, one of the things that happened out of that scene was the International Times. Then a year after, Rolling Stone came out, which was the same kind of thing but American and more of a big deal—just because America is more of a big deal. More money behind it, I guess, because I was always having to donate to International Times. But that’s kind of how John met Yoko, through the Indica gallery. She was having an exhibit there. He went to see it. They met. I’d met her before—not sure she admits to this—but I’d met her when she came round to my house in London asking for donations for John Cage’s birthday. He was about to be 70, and she wanted manuscripts from various people. I said, “Well, we don’t have manuscripts. We’re a rock-and-roll band. There’s nothing written down.” So I said we have lyric sheets. She said, “Oh, good. I’m getting together a lot of these to give to John Cage for his birthday.” I said, “Well, the only thing is, you’d have to see my friend John because I can’t give away all of these things. It’s a collaboration.” So I sort of knew her from that. I don’t know if she’s forgotten. A couple people—it was a bit of a stoner time, but I can’t believe they forgot. I don’t know. It’s a mystery of life. Another one who doesn’t remember was Bowie. He came around as David Jones to my house, playing me a record he made—an acetate. It was as David Jones, and I thought it sounded a bit like Anthony Newley. “What Kind of Fool Am I?” type of thing. I thought it was great. He was great, but I didn’t pick up on it. Now when I’ve mentioned this to David, he says he doesn’t remember. Anyway, this was the scene. International Times came up, and I think my feeling is that Jann came over, saw this, and thought, “Okay, great. I’ve got to do the American version.” I think I’ve said this to him. I think he doesn’t admit it. Well, he did come to London in the summer of ’66. I know. And there’s no way, as a newspaper guy—because he was a college newspaper guy—there’s no way he wouldn’t have seen it. If you were in on the scene, it was there. It was one of the big things. So I think I’ve mentioned this to Jann, like, “You got inspired by International Times and then you did yours.” I think he’s sort of conveniently forgotten. That was always my big theory. So I was really interested to see Rolling Stone when it came out. That was how Jann Wenner came into my . That was sort of how it started. That leads into what I was going to ask you about: your experience with the press at the time. You were part of the teen press and then the underground press. And then the national tabloids. Teen was fun, because it was just frothy. It was cute. The only thing we didn’t really like was having to tell them many times what toothpaste we used—that kind of thing. But it was fun. You could see it was for the kids, for the girls. So it was a good thing. Tabloids could be mean—harder-edged. You could get a really bad review, although, to give them their due, we didn’t get many bad reviews. But the good old stoner press? That was our friends. Finally, we had someone who thought like us. So when Jann first went to New York, he met Linda and early rock writers Danny Fields and Lillian Roxon… Where did Jann come from? He was living in Northern California; he was really a San Francisco guy. When he first came to New York, his eyes were opened. Danny Fields takes him around to Max’s Kansas City, introduces him to Linda, introduces him to pioneering rock critic Lillian Roxon, and all these early groupie characters. Rolling Stone is informed partly by his experiences meeting all these people. Well, I mean, Lillian Roxon and Danny and all these guys weren’t so much groupies. They were journalists. They were journalist-fans. They loved the music, like Jann did, but they were operating inside these teen magazines—Datebook, 16. Do you remember what you heard about Jann? Did you hear from Linda about him? What was the impression? She liked him. He’s a cool guy. He’s the guy who started Rolling Stone, and he gave her an opportunity to be the first female photographer to get a cover. She had an apartment at 83rd and Lex with loads of prints on the shelf. She wasn’t very organized, but loads of prints. Jann used to just come around and hang and flick through all these prints, and he’d say, “I’ll have that one. I’ll have that one.” She said, “Yeah, okay.” It wasn’t contractual. It was freelance and freewheeling. She’d just give him pictures if he’d use them. Her Eric Clapton photo was one of her first covers—that was the first cover by a female photographer Rolling Stone ever had. Annie Leibovitz would have been watching that. Annie went on to do the same thing years later. Linda would talk about going down to Max’s Kansas City, seeing everyone shooting up in their legs. Bridget Riley, the big Op Art painter, and Andy and all the guys would all be down there. She was kind of intrigued by that scene. That was how I came to hear of Jann as the guy who was doing Rolling Stone and who picked photos from her little apartment. A guy named Derek Taylor was handling Beatles press at the time, but sometimes you guys would just handle it directly. Jann explicitly tried to partner up with John and Yoko to use Rolling Stone as their sounding board. He was very partisan for John. He told me he’d publish anything they said. They would publish stuff John and Yoko sent him that didn’t make any sense—crazy letters. He’d be like, “I don’t even know what this is about, but there it is. It’s from John.” Yeah. In fact, I think that’s why he and I didn’t really get on. Because he was so in their camp. And I so wasn’t. When anything happened, they would discuss it with Jann, and he would be their sounding board. So I didn’t feel like he was independent enough when he was talking to me. I was talking to someone who would report back to John. No doubt about it. Which wasn’t the world’s worst thing, because I didn’t have a massive need to do anything. Well, John was using Rolling Stone to define himself outside the Beatles. They were very much hand in glove with John and Yoko. I was curious about the effect that had for you, because Jann was always trying to get you to cooperate as well. Well, I was sort of sidelined at that time, because John, when he met Yoko—that signaled the end of the Beatles. Now, looking back, I can see it more clearly. In retrospect, John was always a kind of experimental guy with a weird past—father leaving home when he was three, going to his aunt and uncle. The uncle died. The aunt was quite strict with him. We would go and see his mother—John and I would go visit her. It’s nothing like all the films. Much better, actually, the real life. But we’d go and see her. Then the mother gets run over in front of John’s house—in front of Mimi’s house—killed by an off-duty drunken policeman, was what we heard. I think it got covered up a bit. So that was John. That had always led him to be attracted to something experimental. John would say, “If you get to the edge of a cliff, jump off.” I would always be, “No, get to the edge of the cliff, take a look around. If it’s really deep and there are bad people coming, then we’ll jump.” I was much more, “Let’s wait just a second.” That’s just my personality, my upbringing. I was lucky—I had a mom and dad till I was 14. My mom died. I find with a lot of people—John’s mom, my mom, Bono’s mom, so many people—it appears to be a thing that drives people. They lose their moms kind of early, particularly boys. So John would be more that way. In , he would want to do experimental things. It was great as a collaborator—it was perfect, because we were two sides of a coin. We’d sit around writing songs, and when I’d contribute something the song needed, he would contribute the other thing the song needed. It was really great. But he was always quite edgy. So when he met Yoko, I could kind of see it, but it was disturbing because it was going to break up the Beatles. We were a pretty cool group, and I was pretty keen on them. But John was jumping off a cliff. Whereas I would say, “Let’s think about this jumping,” John would be, “No, no, no. I’m jumping. I’m out of here.” He and Yoko fitted very well. I say, in retrospect, it’s easier to accept than it was then, because she was sitting on one of the amps, and it’s like, “What the fuck is this? What’s she doing?” So that kind of drove a wedge. Later, I thought, Well, you know what? Crazy guy, wonderful guy. She fitted completely with this experimental thing, his mother thing. She really ticked a lot of the boxes. And she was obviously quite domineering, which was strange… And shrewd. To a point. She’s not that shrewd. Never mind. I have absolutely nothing against her. But along the way, my opinion differs quite strongly. In the early days of Apple, we could not get anything done, and John Eastman was like a thorn in everyone’s side. Certain people were doing coke, and there’s John , this very straight-laced New York lawyer, trying to put this thing on a good footing, which he did. Thirty years later there are notes where people on the board say, “John, thank you for hanging in there.” Because he did. He really put it all together. But at the time, it was quite crazy. The introduction of Allen Klein precipitates the band’s crumbling. I have found letters from Jann advising John about Klein. To his credit, he was telling John to dump Klein. Well, before that, Klein got the Stones. The Rolling Stones have an album called Hot Rocks that they don’t own—Klein owns it. So he was clearly this , and I could see this because I’m the guy who looks before we jump. So I could see this. But there was no telling John, because what had happened was Klein came to London, got to Derek Taylor. Derek got a meeting with John and Yoko and Klein at The Dorchester, where Klein said to Yoko, “What do you want?” That was his famous line. He would say to people, “What do you want?” Somebody would say a million dollars. “You got it.” This was his way. He’d figure out how to get it for you. Or maybe he wouldn’t, but he’d say he would. So he said to Yoko, “What do you want?” She said, “An art exhibition.” “You got it.” Then we paid for an art exhibition in Syracuse that Yoko had—the Beatles, we all paid $20,000 for this. So that’s how he got Yoko. It was always an offer of something. If you got Yoko, you pretty much got John. Then John came to us one day at a meeting and said, “I’ve got some news. I’m leaving the band.” For me, this was quite a huge shock—very traumatic, dramatic—because I thought we still had more in us. I thought we could do great things still. But that was that. That was the Klein thing. He’d come in. Then I said, “Well, I’m definitely not going with Klein.” I thought George and Ringo —I thought it’d be like a vote, maybe two against , but then the other guys went, “Well, we’re with John.” Because John was a very charismatic guy and a good leader. So it was me now, and the other three were now going with Klein. Klein said he wanted 20%. I said, “20% of the Beatles at this point? You’re kidding. Tell him 10.” They all went back to him, came back to me. “No, he says 20.” So then he became 20 on any uplifts he gets. And then we signed a new contract with Capitol, which disturbed me because we’d broken up, and I was signing a new contract. I said to the guys, “This is not what we stand for. We’re known as forthright. We tell it like it is.” But we entered a very shady little period—lots of meetings, Klein and attorneys. Very heavy. I only escaped by literally going to Scotland. That’s why Linda and I went to Scotland. That was how it was with John. So in answer to your question: Once I saw that was using Jann, it was like Allen Klein. It was somebody to facilitate things that John couldn’t do. I kind of understood that, but I was a little wary of it. This all leads toward Jann meeting John and Yoko in the spring of 1970, right around the time Let It Be came out. John went to see Let It Be with the Wenners. It was the first time they were seeing the final cut of the film, and they were in the middle of primal-scream therapy.They all wept as they watched it. In fact, Jann’s wife, Jane Schindelheim, remembered the moment when John started weeping—it was you singing “Get Back.” Then, after that, he promised John an interview, which led to the big Rolling Stone interview. Perfect timing. John was going to open up; he was opening just like a valve. What was it like for you when the big Rolling Stone interview came out? Well, I think it was—I could recognize it was a momentous interview. A great scoop for Jann and Rolling Stone, and a great thing for John. It was clearly a major piece. However, I looked through it for my name. I remember going, “‘McCartney…McCartney.’ Oh fuck.” It was—I can’t remember it now, actually. I blocked it, luckily. But it was very wounding. He was wounding everyone. He had a machine gun just spraying everyone. George Martin got it—he’d never done anything . All I’d ever done was “Yesterday.” It was all attention-seeking quotes guaranteed to hurt me. “How Do You Sleep?” and all that. Of course, I’m sitting there thinking, I’m trying to save you fuckers, and you just don’t get it. You’re about to give this Allen Klein guy all your shit. I’m about to try and save it. Now, many years later, Yoko will come to me, John, George certainly said, “Thanks, man.” But it was only “Thanks, man.” Never any more recognition than that. But yeah, it was really difficult, because the first difficult thing was to get out of Allen Klein, I had to sue the Beatles. I said, “No, no, I want to sue Allen Klein.” They said, “He’s not a party to any of the agreements. You have to sue the Beatles.” So I then went to Scotland for three months in the mist—mist in the mind, mist everywhere—and just got out of it for three months. It was like I lost three months. You don’t sue your buddies, but there’s no other way: Either I sue my buddies, and there’s maybe some chance that I’ll save it for them—because if I save it for me, I’ll save it for them. So that’s what happened. I had to go . In the end, the judge was very pro us and said Klein’s evidence was “the prattling of a second-class salesman.” He basically said, “You can get out.” Because this was another thing—my buddies were holding me to this contract. Klein had said we can't get out. “You've got a contract.” I think they’d all said, “It’s the Beatles, man. We’re friends.” But Klein said, “No, no, no. Financially, you’ll all totally suffer.” And he put it to them. I did succeed with James Taylor. Because we had James , and James freaked when he saw Klein. He and Peter Asher freaked when they saw Klein. So I said, “Okay, James wants to leave the label.” We had a meeting. Klein says, “No fucking way is he leaving.” I said, “But we’re doing this as a friendly thing. It’s an artist-to-artist thing. This is the whole genre of all this stuff we’re doing. We’re not these hard-ass business people. We’re trying to do it right. James wants to leave. I think he should leave.” Well, I had to fight for it, but he did eventually leave. James got out, but I didn’t. So I had to sue. It was hugely painful. I knew it was totally going to screw our relationships. I knew that I was the baddie. One of the real difficult things—I knew enough about public relations to know this would color me as the devil. Part 2 of McCartney’s interview can be found here.
Paul Mccartney The Beatles John Lennon Rolling Stone Documentary
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
What to watch: Paul McCartney biopic makes the right callAlso reviewed: Jessica Chastain in ‘Dreams’: Simon Rex in ‘Operation Taco Gary’s’; documentary ‘Murder in Glitterball City.’
Read more »
ScreenRant Movie Review Roundup: Scream 7, Paul McCartney: Man on the Run, The Bluff & More!Scream 7 Ghostface holding his knife about to stab
Read more »
How to watch new Paul McCartney 'Man on the Run' documentary for free: Streaming, release dateMcCartney’s post-Beatles career is explored in the new film.
Read more »
A new film follows Paul McCartney's 2nd act after The Beatles' breakupWhile previous documentaries captured the frenzy of Beatlemania, Man on the Run focuses on McCartney in the years between the band's breakup and John Lennon's death.
Read more »
Paul McCartney, Unfiltered, Part 2: “Go Back and Look at Who Wrote the Hits”In the second half of his lengthy 2015 conversation with Joe Hagan, McCartney opens up about reconciling with John Lennon, helping Lennon and Yoko Ono reconcile after a breakup, and his ex-bandmate’s sexuality: “I’d slept with John very often, but there was never anything.
Read more »
Paul McCartney on Beatles History, Rolling Stone, and New DocumentaryAn interview with Paul McCartney provides insight into the formation of Wings, Beatles history, his relationship with Rolling Stone, and his collaboration with John Lennon. This interview coincided with the release of the new documentary 'Man on the Run' and the 80th birthday of Jann Wenner.
Read more »