“It was like a mindfield”: the venues that refused to let Paul McCartney play
It would have been a no-brainer for any venue to snatch up any Beatle that wanted to play after their breakup. The world was already gutted over the fact that their favourite band wasn’t going to be making any new music, but since they had left the road years before, the idea of seeing at least one of them in the flesh would have been fantastic, even if they only managed to play a handful of tunes. John Lennon had already given some spirited performances before the Fab Four were officially history, but Paul McCartney wasn’t so lucky when he first began his solo journey.
Of all the former Beatles, though, McCartney always seemed to be the one most affected by the break-up. Since he found himself having to sue the rest of the band, he quickly realised that he was going to be losing his best friends in the process, and that crippling depression was enough for him to retreat to his home before Linda McCartney ventually convinced him to give music a shot again.
McCartney was already nothing more than a couple of demos, but if you asked the critics about Macca’s first solo steps, you’d have sworn that he made one of the biggest mistakes of his career. Despite being dead wrong about the brilliance of RAM, the entire rock world seemed to turn their back on McCartney, thinking that he had become the main casualty of the band who could barely function without his mates.
Since he knew he couldn’t follow that up with another artsy masterpiece, McCartney figured the next best thing would be to get a band together. And while Wings did have a promising start with people like Denny Laine in the mix, Wild Life was even more poorly received than RAM, which is understandable since their first record was trying out what worked and what didn’t in a rehearsal space.
“We just went ’round, and with some people, we got turned away because they had exams, so they couldn’t have us.”
Paul McCartney
A lot of those tunes lend themselves well to jamming onstage, though, and the band wouldn’t be fully appreciated until they took to the road. But if they were making the rounds on the touring circuit, McCartney wanted to start at ground zero and be seen like any other upstart band was, but that didn’t make for the best deal when he began to play on college campuses for his first major shows.
The idea of having any Beatle show up at a college campus is usually a guarantee sell-out, but Macca remembered actually being sent away from a few gigs before they could play a note, saying, “It was wild, but we just went ’round, and with some people, we got turned away because they had exams, so they couldn’t have us. And at some places, there were power cuts, so it was like a minefield we were going through.”
Granted, the idea of going into a random space and expecting everyone not to freak out when a Beatle showed up was already a fantasy, so the thought of those same places having enough power to support a massive rock band was practically a pipe dream. That’s before getting into the lack of chemistry at some shows, like when Linda wouldn’t remember how to play the keyboard lines to one of the tunes, and Paul would have to come over and show her how it went.
It’s understandable that anyone would find this kind of behaviour unprofessional, but there’s something endearing about it as well. McCartney was bound to be a punching bag for anyone who was looking at him as the villain of The Beatles’ story, so playing these shows gave everyone a version of ‘The Cute Beatle’ that had something to prove. For the first time since 1962, it truly felt like him against the world again.
