Did Paul McCartney get arrested in Japan on purpose?
“Why do I carve out these problems for myself?” That’s Paul McCartney’s question in Man On The Run, the documentary on his startlingly impressive career. At that point in time, he’s talking about an almost-near-death experience in Hawaii where he’d dived into a choppy ocean near jagged rocks and couldn’t get out. But the question prevails over his entire early post-Beatles period.
As Paul McCartney went it alone, there was a sense of total mistrust in himself. The making of McCartney, his solo debut, was crafted entirely alone because the artist wasn’t even sure if he could make music outside of the collaboration he’d always known with his bandmates – he felt as though his entire foundation had been shattered, and as a person, he needed to be built from the ground up again.
However, as he talks through the years following the band’s initial split, a pattern pops up. McCartney seems to be confronting his habit of blowing things up as a decisive way out rather than simply speaking up for himself.
He somewhat chalks the end of The Beatles up to that, as while they’d long since decided to split, McCartney was getting agitated and distressed in the period where that split wasn’t finalised or even announced. His solution? Go direct to the press with a strange self-interview full of strange little digs at the band. When that wasn’t intense enough? Sue them.
While the legal action was necessary, there was still a sense that McCartney needed to explode things in order to properly move on. He needed any idea of a Beatles reunion to be put to bed to be able to focus on looking forward, writing in his own statement, “Did you miss the other Beatles and George Martin? Was there a moment when you thought, ‘I wish Ringo were here for this break?’” with the outright answer, “No.”
So McCartney’s question returns – “Why do I carve out these problems for myself?” Yet when it comes to major life changes, it seems like the answer is to gain some kind of freedom.
Flash forward to January 1980, and the artist is restless again. The story of Wings is a story of major lows and major highs as they failed for so long, soared high and then were hit by band departures and complete exhaustion. By the start of the new decade, it was clear that things needed to change again as the McCartney family wanted to be at home more, and their bandmates were splintering off in various directions. However, musically, things were going great for the group were in one of their most successful periods, prepping for a major tour of Japan.
Then, boom – McCartney was arrested at the border. Despite knowing how intensely strict Japan was, and still is, on drugs, and despite having been warned of this repeatedly by his team, given that it had taken them around a decade to even get him a visa for the country following his 1960s cannabis arrests, McCartney still landed in Tokyo with weed stowed in his bag.
It wasn’t even just a little bit. McCartney was carrying 8 ounces of cannabis, saying years later, “I don’t know what possessed me to just stick this bloody great bag of grass in my suitcase. Thinking back on it, it almost makes me shudder.”
However, in Man On The Run, he owns up to the impulse. When reflecting on the experience of spending ten days in the Japanese prison, McCartney seems to be wondering if perhaps he packed the weed purposely to bring Wings to an end and cut their touring once and for all.
“It was almost as if I wanted to get busted,” McCartney said, before adding simply, “oops” at the revelation of being caught. As he was eventually let off without charge after over a week bored and alone in prison, he’d had plenty of time to reflect. “There are times in your life where you think ‘OK, you’re an idiot’, and that was one of them,” he said, musing on the only extended time he ever spent away from Linda, and the fear that he might be kept there for years. However, all the time, he was aware that all of this had only come down to his own foolishness when he knew the consequences all along.
“If I ever get out of here, do I really want to be doing what I’m doing?” was his concluding thought, yet it seems that, really, the act in the first place came from a fearful impulse towards that, needing to make a change but not knowing how without drastic, foolish action.
