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Paul McCartney met up with Judd Apatow for a 45-minute conversation following a screening of “Man on the Run” in Los Angeles Monday night, and it was very much a case of banter on the run. With Apatow at the helm, the chat
took some comical turns, as might be expected, and also some unusually revealing ones, as Apatow getting McCartney to loosen up provided some real personal asides as well as screwball dialogue. By most standards, it was probably the most irreverent interview the former Beatles has ever participated in.
Morgan Neville, the director of the Wings doc being screened, also participated in the discusssion, playing straight man and looking decided amused — if not anxious — when Apatow turned the conversation toward drugs or McCartney’s experiences with naked men in a Japanese prison. The occasion was an FYC event for “Man on the Run” being held in the Academy Museum’s Ted Mann Theater, where 275 attendees got to experience some relative intimacy with a McCartney who seemed ready to meet Apatow at his level of candor and comic asides.
“I was so excited when I heard that you were doing this (documentary) because, you know, I was born in ’67” — “as was I,” pointed out Neville — “so we grew up Wings fans. We’ve talked about it. We’re the Wings kids. We’re the people who were like, ‘Was there a band before Wings?'”
“I was born before that,” quipped McCartney, immediately getting into the spirit of things.
Asked by Apatow if he looked forward to dealing with the 10-year period between 1970-1980 in the Amazon Prime documentary that came out earlier this year (along with an accompanying book), McCartney said, “No, I like that period. Now it’s a fond memory. It was, what do you do after the Beatles? You know, the Beatles break up, that’s been your only job you’ve ever had, and then you don’t have it anymore. It’s like you got sacked. So that was Wings, trying to figure it out. And, as you can see in the film we did, well, it’s kind of madcap.”
Apatow told Neville and McCartney that he saw the film as “a slight nervous breakdown movie — right? There’s a mental health challenge. The Beatles ended; you wanted to live with sheep.”
“Yes. I do love sheep,” said McCartney. “Yeah, it’s very difficult. I’m sure any of you can imagine that. You’ve got this great job, it’s all going great, and then suddenly you haven’t got this great job and it’s not going so great. Oh, and then on top of that there was, like, this business guy, Allen Klein, who was basically stealing the Beatles, and I was the only one who thought that. The other guys thought, ‘No, we love him.'”
“Why were they so dumb?” Apatow blurted.
“Well, I’ll tell you why,” McCartney answered. “Because you’d be at a meeting with him and he’d go, ‘What do you want?’ The New York guy. And we all go, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘What do you want, a million dollars?’ ‘Oh, yeah.’ ‘Okay, you got it.'”
“I can’t believe you had Donald Trump as your manager,” Apatow kidded.
“Great similarities, yeah,” said McCartney, noting of Klein, “He just promised the earth and didn’t deliver it. But meanwhile, I could see that this was a crook. But it was me against the other guys and that was the worst thing, you know. I mean, I’d come up against the guys making music, but it was OK because you could say, ‘You know what? I know I really think this is right,’ and they’d either agree or they wouldn’t, and I’d go with their version, but it was relatively easily solved. But this this was suddenly… all the money we’d ever earned was going to go in this guy’s bank account. And I just really had to fight it, you know?”
Apatow explained the tension that ensued when “you’re suing your three best friends,” with McCartney saying “the world will go against me, number one, and I’ll go against me, and it’s not a great idea. (But) in the end that was the only way, so I had to do it.”
“And how nice was it, years later, when they were like, ‘We were wrong’?”
“It was years later, yeah,” McCartney said, then paused, and added, “But it was nice.”
Of starting a solo career, a duo career (with Linda McCartney) and then the band Wings, McCartney said, “I think just being on my own was very scary, because I’d always had the union of the group. But then I had to figure out how I would do it and make it different. That was the trick. Because I thought, ‘Well, I could just write some more kind of Beatle-y songs and get people, and we can imitate. We would be like a Beatle cover band.’ … Actually doing Beatles songs, I wouldn’t do that. Promoters would say, ‘And you’re gonna do the Beatles songs?’ And I’d say, ‘No, I’m not.’ They said, ‘Well, just do ‘Yesterday’.’ I said, ‘No, not gonna do it.’ ‘Well, so what are you gonna do?’ And that was my dilemma.
“So, you’re right,” McCartney continued. “It was kind of like a mental breakdown. I mean, I did start drinking. I was up in Scotland on my own, (with a) new little family. No one was gonna tell me off for drinking too much, so it’s like, ‘Yay, here we go. Come on, let’s go.’ And it was a lot of fun till it wasn’t, you know. … I had kids, and that turned me round. And Linda was a very smart woman, so she sort of let me do it” until he backed off of partying at home.
Musically, he said, “thinking back on it, that (WIngs) period is quite wild. It’s crazy, and I wish I could write songs like that now. Because they’re very silly. You know, someone was talking to me today about one of my songs, ‘Magneto and Titanium Man.'” That someone, as it turned out was Apatow, who said his son was obsessed with the mid-’70s track. “‘Magneto and Titanium Man,’ come on, give it up!” enthused McCartney. “There’s a title for you. And I was just reading a comic book, and there it was. I loved that, and so I just made up a story about it.”
Apatow talked about how the pre-Wings Paul-and-Linda album “Ram” “has got some very strange songs on it. ‘My dog, he’s got three legs. But he can run.’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, okay, Paul. You get me.’ When you look back, ‘Ram’ is considered this classic… But when people attacked you for it at the time, was that, like, a devastating thing when people didn’t know to enjoy that for what it was?”
“Yeah, I think so,” McCartney responded. “You know, I thought we’d got something special, and they didn’t, the critics. But critics criticize, and they criticized me. So, you know, with me with all these hopes with the young family and this ‘I’ve got it. This is a good record!’ And the worst bit is I bought into it. I listened to the critics and had sort of gone, ‘Mm, maybe they’re right. I don’t know.” And it went for years that I thought it wasn’t a very good album. And it was actually my nephew who come up to me one day to say, ‘You know my favorite album of yours? “Ram.”‘ I went, ‘What?’ And I suddenly listened to it and liked it again. But it’s definitely a period. I mean, some of the songs — ‘Mulberry Moon Delight’…”
“Why do you think that period annoyed John Lennon?” Apatow asked. “Was it a joyfulness to it while he’s doing primal scream and you’re having fun? What do you think got under his skin about it? “
“Well, I don’t know. I think maybe he expected more from me. He expected somethingdifferent from me, and I wasn’t doing that. I was just doing ‘madcap.'” That word again. “When we did the book, that was the word the publishers wanted: It’s ‘a madcap romp.'”
“Did he think he was encouraging you, you think?” Apatow asked. “Like, in his mind, by being public about criticism?” McCartney said he “wasn’t privy” to what really motivated Lennon’s pointed criticism, although he appreciated it when his former partner started to lighten up, later praising songs like “Coming Up.”
“You guys had the first musical public beef!” Apatow declared. “You don’t get enough credit that you were the first artists to attack each other in song. And you started it.”
“I did not!” McCartney countered.
“Wasn’t ‘Too Many People’ first?” Apatow wondered.
“No.”
“It was first,” disagreed Neville, smiling sheepishly.
“Was it?” said McCartney. “I didn’t think it was first. I thought he was attacking me first.”
“Maybe not in song,” Apatow said, as a consensus formed that Lennon initially put all his criticisms in interviews before eventually arriving at the devastating “How Do You Sleep,” as seen in the documentary.
“Yeah, that’s right,” said McCartney. “You know, it is just one of those things. I mean, I loved John and love him to this day and always will. And it wouldn’t matter, as it didn’t matter, what he said or did, because I’d known him since I was 15, and so he was like this mad guy I knew, and I really looked up to him. You know, when you’re, like, sort of 13 and a half or something… or when I was a little older, I was 15, he’d be, like, 16 and a half… when there’s that kind of guy who’s kind of cruel and witty and right on it, you look up to them and say, ‘Wow, he’s really cool,’ you know? And so I always thought John was very cool, and I still do. But he could be a complete idiot, over some things.”
“So like a crazy, lovely guy in the band,” said Apatow.
“Yeah, he was; he was a lovely guy,” McCartney said. “And the thing is, if you look at his life, there’s reason for him to be crazy. A lot of bad things happened to him. His father ran away from home when he was 3 or something, so he never knew his dad until we got famous and his dad came back and was working at the pub down the road near where John lived. … And John’s mom, who he idolized and I idolized, was a beautiful lady called Julia. And he wrote a song called ‘Julia,’ a fantastic song. … She was great. She was a really cool woman and, you know, when you’re kids, that kind of cool mother is really attractive. And she got run over and killed outside the house… So he’s had to deal with all of that, you know, and so he had a lot of anguish and a lot of this is why all the primal scream and everything — he had a lot of stuff to get out. And comparatively, I was very lucky… I grew up pretty secure with (his extended family), and I didn’t have any of the kind of troubles that John had until my mom died when I was about 14.”
Moving back into the Wings era, which started in 1971 after McCartney had two post-Beatles albums out, Apatow asked, “And so at one moment you just woke up one day and said, ‘I need to start a band’?”
“Yeah, we were watching Johnny Cash on TV and he’d put together a band with Carl Perkins and some country guys that we really liked. And I just thought, ‘Wow, Johnny’s just put together a band. What a great idea.’ I turned to Linda and I said, ‘Shall we start a band? Do you wanna be in it?’ And she just sort of said, ‘Yeah.’ And I knew she had no musical education, but then I thought, ‘Well, neither did we in the Beatles.’ We didn’t know anything. But we learned a couple of chords and we learned together. So that was the great thing — we climbed the steps together. And she got a lot of flack for that. I got a lot of flack for that. You know, Mick Jagger (saying), ‘Oh, what’s he doing with his old lady in the band?’ Fuck off! What’s that got to do with anything? Anyway…”
Said Apatow, “Well, as someone who’s made a lot of films with my family and my children, and Leslie (Mann), there’s a certain magic in the intimacy of creativity when you work with people you’re that close to. … But that took a lot of courage for her. I mean, you guys all went through everyone attacking Yoko Ono for being around and singing and being a part of it, and then you turn to Linda and go, ‘Hey, you wanna do what Yoko just did?’ And she’s like, ‘Yeah, that seems fun. Great idea!'”
The trio discussed some of the never-before-seen footage in “Man on the Run,” like a self-shot vintage film clip of the two McCartneys and Denny Laine singing “You Are My Sunshine” into the camera that ends the documentary. There was some lamentation, though, over the fact that there is virtually no film footage existing from the “Band on the Run” period. Linda shot plenty of photos at the time that were stolen in a holdup on the street while they were in Nigeria, never to be seen again, along with a treasure trove of McCartney demos that were also lost in the robbery.
Asked Apatow, “You think there’s some guy in Africa and his entire house is filled with all those photos? I’d look for him.”
“It’s in the film that we got held up at knife point. so they stole Linda’s camera, all the (demo) cassettes, and we always wondered… We all said, ‘I bet they recorded over them.’ You’ve gotta believe that,” after 50 years of nothing surfacing. He imagined the thieves putting the cassettes into the player, wondering, “Oh, what’s this shit?”
One question that remains debated among McCartney fans is whether Wings was ever a viable concept for a band, given his inevitable dominance, or whether trying to assemble a permanent lineup for his post-Beatles output had its own validity in helping light a fire under him, even if the idea was not destined to last. Apatow addressed that, asking if McCartney’s own point of view on it shifted — and he used some of his own experience working for a comedic giant to illustrate the dilemmas.
“What was it like for you?” he asked. “Because you’re in a band (the Beatles) and you’re not getting along with your bandmates; now you’re starting a new band, and it seems like you have some dream that it’s gonna be an equal band. It reminded me a lot of Garry Shandling, that he was always mad that the writers weren’t as good as him. So if a script wasn’t working, he knew he would have to fix it, and then he was pissed at us. And we’re like, ‘We’re not as good as you! What do you expect?’ Was there some sense of that? Like, you had a dream of how it might work, and then you realized, ‘Oh, I have to just carry this’?”
McCartney assented to that. “Yeah, there was, you know, because, well, I was, like, a Beatle, and they weren’t,” he said, to some audience chuckles. “So, yeah, I had to be the boss… I wanted, as you say, to just be some equal guy, but that didn’t work out. The minute you just tried to be equal, it meant you didn’t say what you wanted to say, and so things just fell flat, and then you’d have to go, ‘No, we should do this,’ and you realize that was your role.”
He took it back to Beatles days, when the band was truly more of a democracy, and yet a democracy with some firm leadership.
“I mean, trying to get the Beatles to make a record when they’d rather stay at home… That was a bit my role. And in fact, one day I was saying, ‘No, we should do this. This’d be a great idea,’ and I suddenly thought, ‘Oh, God, they didn’t like it.’ It was like, ‘Well, you fucker, who do you think you are?’ And I thought, ‘Whoops, I’m caught out. Yeah, I’m being too bossy. Okay, here’s what I’ll do. I won’t be bossy.’ So the next song, I just kind of sat there — not sulking, just sat there –and sort of thought, ‘Let them get on with it. Great. I’ll just be one of the boys.’ And it fell flat, and it’s like, ‘Oh, God.’ And I think Ringo turned to me and said, ‘Well, what are you doing? Come on, produce us!’ I said, ‘Oh, OK.'”
So in Wings, he noted, “yeah, a lot of that went on. And I realized in the end that, yeah, I should write it, and I should kind of produce it and say, you know, ‘I think you should do that. You should do that. I should do this, or we’ll do that, and that’ll work.’ I think I was the one who knew what would work.”
After an anecdote having to do with cocaine use in another band, Apatow asked if drugs were a big issue in Wings, but McCartney demurred at that idea. “We weren’t too bad in Wings, really. but yeah, that’s what was going on at that time, you know? I think I was lucky with the coke thing because we were doing pot. That was the great discovery.”
“You look like you love pot so much in this movie,” Apatow cracked, adding, “…you seem to be laughing at the whole concept that anyone would care.” Said McCartney, “Well, I think, because our whole generation was turned on to pot, it was a new thing. so yeah, we enjoyed it, and it found its way into things like ‘Sgt. Pepper.’ You know, just the imagination was now, ‘Whoa, we could do this’ — you know, ‘Day in the Life,’ we could have an orchestra that went…” He imitated the dischordant orchestral climax.
“You know?”
“I thought that was the acid!” Apatow protested. That seemed to leave McCartney at a bit of a loss for words, not really wanting to go there, while Apatow said, “I’m just starting my acid period.” Said McCartney, finally, “You just had to be careful not to be like some of the guys who took it too far.” “Like Morgan?” asked Apatow.
The movie suggests that the near-week McCartney spent in a Japanese jail after Wings arrived in that country for a planned tour in 1980 gave the musician the time he needed to think about whether Wings should really continue or not. (The band never did resume, although it was a slow fizzle before everyone realized it was over.)
Apatow asked if McCartney was frightened in jail, and he replied, “Yeah, I was scared because I thought it was gonna be like America, where you get raped in jail. And I wasn’t looking forward to that.”
“That would’ve been a hard ending for Morgan’s film,” Apatow noted.
But he lightened up and made friends, of a sort, during his time in the slammer. “That’s the thing about me, you know: I will make something of things. So the first couple of nights were terrible. I slept with my back to the wall. And, you know, no one was gonna rape this boy…”
“That’s a good song title,” cracked Apatow.
But McCartney said that eventually he agreed to take a communal bath with the Japanese inmates, even though they offered him a private bath, assuming that as a European he would prefer his privacy. “It really evolved from the fear to the very comfortable situation,” McCartney said. “I thought, ‘I’ve gotta do it. Why not? I mean, if they can do it.’ So yeah, I got naked and got in. You got in the shower first, and then they’re all kind of (looking at each other’s genitals, going) ‘Whoa, look at that.’ ‘Look at that.’ I’m going, ‘Yeah, but what about me?'”
“This could’ve been the entire documentary!” Apatow exclaimed. “This is part two. Morgan, you clearly made a mistake. In part two … completely different.”
“Man in a Tub,” suggested McCartney, as a title.
But the idea of a sequel then seemed to be treated seriously, at least as far as Neville was concerned. “There are many more stories,” said the filmmaker. “I mean, this film ends in 1980. So, you know, there are many other things (yet) to happen.”
For this film, Neville stood behind the choice to not have McCartney or anyone else seen on screen as part of their interviews, but heard only in voiceover, over period footage. “I feel like the film becomes present-tense then,” Neville said, “because you’re just living through it. You’re not looking back. You lose that retrospective point of view. You just kind of go on the ride, and you’re like, ‘What’s gonna happen here?’ — I mean, that’s what I wanted to channel.”
McCartney made it clear he was very much down with that, if indeed he wasn’t the instigator of that concept. “That was part of it in the beginning (when they were conceptualizing the film), is not bringing in cameras and just talking… I never like those documentaries where there’s talking heads, and you’re sort of sitting there at a recording desk or something (saying) ‘Well, I remember it. It was lovely. It was great.’ And then you cut back to this young, beautiful boy. And then cut back to me (in the present day). Grr!” he said, comically making a scary face.”
He was pleased with the results of not giving the audience that visual whiplash amid the period storytelling. “Hey. I really loved it,” McCartney told Neville, in case he hadn’t mentioned it already. “You made a great film, I think.”
