[rude-studio]

Paul by Gered Mankowitz

Decca Studios, 1967

[sgt-paul]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAUL MCCARTNEY! ↬  June 18th, 1942, Liverpool

❝ It’s a mystery how all this happened. People stop me in the street, and they can get very emotional. They say, ‘Your music changed my life,’ and I know what they mean – that The Beatles brought something very important to their lives. But it’s still a mystery, and I don’t mind ending up being a mystery. ❞

[sgt-paul]

last post on this subject i swear, as we are flogging a dead horse here really, but the lovely @rude-studio​‘s addition to this post (which i now can’t reblog rip)

contained the source carlin used in his book, and the ‘linda saved beatle paul from heroin’ line sounded very familiar to me and lo and behold! - we have paul reacting to this exact “soundbite” (+ he again tells the RF, sniffed it once, wasn’t for me story), which i suppose the interviewer must have taken from the title of the article, especially seeing as as this video is also from 1991.

[shimmyalong]

I didn’t have “finding out Paul regularly used heroin post break up as a coping mechanism” on my 2022 bingo card. But here we are 4 days in.

How did you react(to the break up)?

I hid in Scotland for months. I let myself go, grew a beard and started drinking heavily and snifing heroin…*record scratch* ?????

(Paul speaking Take A Break magazine 1992)

You know what really gets me about this, that he drops this nugget while speaking to Take a Break, a magazine whose readership has an average age of about 75. My granny used to read Take A Break religiously fgs. Paul has this way of slipping really deep shit into random interviews and then never mentioning it again (see his dad abusing him revealed to Howars Stern in 2001 and then never spoken of again)

(thank you to @talking-perfectly-loud and @rude-studio for providing the source for this interview)

[sgt-paul]

sorry to butt into this, but that article certainly seems like one that was put together using quotes from various random sources, which then were probably further edited and shortened (as several of them ring familiar to me, but also have this weird feeling to them; for example the answer to the question about his first “bonk” is an edited version of a quote that appears in the hunter bio..), and they just tailored the questions to whatever interview pieces they have collected. i’m obviously not familiar with this particular magazine lol, but i’m familiar with the type of content these magazines usually have in them, and this is a very common thing they do; and like you said, it would be bonkers, if paul would so casually and nonchalantly put this out in a paper like this. (and i mean, just look at the mick jagger/john answers, those ones also stand out as being pretty… odd, lmao. are “i even used to nick mick jagger’s bird” and “he was a genius and a total nutter, but he also knew how to manipulate people” direct quotes? i don’t know, but i guess this is something we should take into consideration when it comes to the heroin comment too.) so i’m pretty sure this is not a proper interview.

// i’m not saying that paul couldn’t have tried sniffing heroin around that time, but the way it’s worded in the “q&a”, a) sounds a bit a weird, and b) it could be that they’ve had some source* where he mentions trying it, but they just went ahead, worded it a bit differently, and so we ended up with a quote that makes it seem like paul admitted in a throwaway comment that he was sniffing heroin every day lol.

// which is something i personally doubt was happening, and given that it is not mentioned anywhere else really - as far as i know (apart from this one instance*. i don’t know what interview the book got the quote from, maybe it was the same that inspired the original article as well? we’ll never know - but here i read it as something that was more like a one-time thing, and not something regular), and we know that paul very much likes to emphasize just how bad he’d felt after the breakup, so i would think if this was a more relevant, significant thing, it would have come up in other places as well

// for the record - this is what he says in MYFN: I did sniff heroin with [Robert Fraser] once, but I said afterwards, ‘I’m not sure about this, man. It didn’t really do anything for me**,’ and he said, 'In that case, I won’t offer you again.’ And I didn’t take it again. (** this particular phrase also appears up in the previous book i referred to)

[rude-studio]

Putting in my two cents because I shared the info in the first place.

I very much agree that taking away from this casual mention that he had a dependency, or that it was even a regular thing, is a stretch, and the leftovers from Robert situation from the Peter Ames Carlin book is way more probable than any kind of full blown habit.

I took a look at Carlin’s source for the “heroin from a hipster friend” thing (and the quote “I was a zombie”) and it’s from an article called “Linda Saved Beatle Paul from Heroin” in the Advertiser, 9/6/91. Unfortunately I can’t find that article to see what their source is, and I don’t know anything about them as a publication.

@sgt-paul thanks for pointing out that this was maybe a cut and paste job, that’s something I hadn’t considered! Some of the answers sounded pretty off the cuff to me but I thought maybe he was just feeling feisty that day. I do like what he says about Linda, that has the ring of truth to me! :)

[rude-studio]

Paul at High Park Farm, 1971

[rude-studio]

High Park Farm, 1969.

[sgt-paul]

PAUL MCCARTNEY in the trailer of GET BACK.

[everything-aflutter]

from the New Yorker profile

[rude-studio]

January 26 1969, photo by Linda ♥️

[rude-studio]

Paul in Paris, 1961. Photo presumably by John!

[sgt-paul]

THE FOOL ON THE HILL .     recorded: September 25-27 / October 20, 1967       filmed: October 31, 1967, in Nice

PAUL: I used to know Marijke [member of “The Fool”, the Dutch design collective and band], she was a quite striking-looking girl. She used to read my fortune in Tarot cards, which was something I wasn’t too keen on because I didn’t want to draw the death card one day. I still don’t like that kind of stuff because I know my mind will dwell on it. I always steered a bit clear of all that shit, but in fact it always used to come out as the Fool. And I used to say, ‘Oh, dear!’ and she used to say, ‘No no no. The Fool’s a very good card. On the surface it looks stupid, the Fool, but in fact it’s one of the best cards, because it’s the innocent, it’s the child, it’s that reading of fool.’ So I began to like the word ‘fool’, because I began to see through the surface meaning. I wrote 'The Fool on the Hill’ out of that experience of seeing Tarot cards. (…) I think I was writing about someone like Maharishi. His detractors called him a fool. Because of his giggle he wasn’t taken too seriously. It was this idea of a fool on the hill, a guru in a cave, I was attracted to. I remember once hearing about a hermit who missed the Second World War because he’d been in a cave in Italy, and that always appealed to me. I was sitting at the piano in at my father’s house in Liverpool hitting a D 6th chord and I made up ‘Fool on the Hill’. There were some good words in it, 'perfectly still’, I liked that, and the idea that everyone thinks he’s stupid appealed to me, because they still do. Saviours or gurus are generally spat upon, so I thought for my generation I’d suggest that they weren’t as stupid as they looked. [myfn]

//

PAUL: It was during that time, A-levels time, I remember thinking, in many ways I wish I was a lorry driver, a Catholic lorry driver. Very very simple life, a firm faith and a place to go in my lorry, in my nice lorry. I realised I was more complex than that and I slightly envied that life. I envied the innocence. [myfn]

[sgt-paul]

PAUL MCCARTNEY at the gates of his home on Cavendish Avenue, in St John’s Wood, London; September 28th, 1972.

[beatle-bored]

Paul assisting in Richard Hamilton’s studio

Swingeing London 67 (f) Richard Hamilton, 1968-69

“This work is based on a photograph, taken from a newspaper, showing Mick Jagger handcuffed to the art dealer Robert Fraser following their appearance in court on drugs charges. Both were convicted.”

[rude-studio]

"Linda McCartney, working with her friend, the artist Brian Clarke, is helping to spearhead a revival of an art form that has been dormant for more than 100 years - stained-glass photography. They have been secretly working for three years on reviving the technique, which was last in vogue in the 1880s, and which Clarke has experimented with once before. They have now produced a number of stained glass photographs, including a set of portraits of Sir Paul McCartney as well as other celebrities, friends, flowers and urban landscapes.

Through a new process that they have invented, Linda McCartney's photographs are silk-screened on to mouth-blown glass. Instead of using inks, the colour comes from using ground glass mixed with iron oxide that is then fired in a kiln at 1,200C. The surface of the glass melts, the ground glass in the pigment melts and the two fuse. The pair kept the project secret for three years, says Clarke, "as we did not want what is a very difficult technique to be plagiarised before the opening of the Romont exhibition. All the techniques we that we have used are known techniques, but nobody has ever put them together like this before." Linda McCartney said yesterday: "Having enjoyed collaborating with Brian for many years on various projects, I'm very excited about this opportunity to show our latest work. As a photographer, the possibilities of this form intrigue me."" – The Independent, February 1998.

source and more works here!

[onesweetdreampodcast]

When was Paul’s Scottish Retreat period?  Paul was in Scotland, on High Park from Oct 22, 1969—Nov 17, 1969.  He and Linda were back in London, out for dinner on November 18, 1969

Following that Paul, Linda and family went to Antigua (where the cherries album cover photo was shot) and NYC before retuning to London in December and beginning to work on McCartney. 

[rude-studio]

Paul interviewed by Take A Break weekly, 1992

What turns you on about Linda?

She’s very sexy and also ballsy, forthright and a little bit crazy. She cares so much. We met in 1967 when I was leading a bachelor’s life to the full. I was on the point on collapse but she got me back to health.

When was your first bonk?

When I was 15. I think I was the first in my class. She was older and bigger than me and it was at her house. I told everybody at school the next day- I was a real squealer.

Have you ever been unfaithful to Linda?

No way. When we married we agreed not to mess around. You get tempted- but you just don’t do it. You know you’ll get your fingers burned. The very next day someone would be telling on me.

When did you last cry?

At a recent concert while I was singing Put It There. I wrote the song about my late father and thinking about him got too much for me. It’s good to shed a tear, to let them out rather than bottling them up.

Why did you get into music?

For the birds, of course! Between the ages of 18 and 28 I pulled a lot. I even used to nick Mick Jagger’s birds.

You had had bust-ups with John Lennon. Were you pals at the end?

I loved him dearly and he was a great influence in my life. He was a genius and a total nutter, but he also knew how to manipulate people.

What’s your saddest memory?

The death of my mother. Also when the Beatles split. Suddenly I felt my usefulness had gone. For the first time I didn’t have a job and I was worthless.

How did you react?

I hid in Scotland for months. I let myself go, grew a beard and started drinking heavily, and snorting heroin. I’d stay in bed all day, sometimes waking up at 3pm and thinking, “there’s no point getting up now.”

What’s your idea of paradise?

Pottering around in the woods near home, clearing a trail and building a fire. It’s like a scene from Sleeping Beauty, me in the woods at dusk, sitting near my little bonfire.

[sgt-paul]

@paulmccartney: BE COOL. GET VAX'D - Paul