The Beatles Boxed Set (12 page)
Read The Beatles Boxed Set Online
Authors: Joe Bensam
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Composers & Musicians, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #The Beatles
The
couple separated on May 17, 2006. During one interview following their
separation, Heather revealed that the breakdown of the marriage was caused by
Paul’s daughter, Stella, who was “jealous” and “evil.” Leaked documents that
would be used for the divorce hearing indicated that Heather complained that
Paul was often drunk, smoked cannabis, and once stabbed her with a broken wine
glass. She also claimed that Paul pushed her over a table and pushed her into a
bathtub when she was pregnant.
In
March 2008, after six days of hearing, Heather was finally awarded a lump sum
of £16.5 million, along with assets of £7.8 million, for a total of £24.3
million and an additional £35,000 per annum for their daughter’s nanny and
school costs.
Paul was married for the third time to
Nancy Shevell
By
November 2007, Paul was dating New Yorker Nancy Shevell, a member of the board
of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and vice president of a
family-owned transportation conglomerate that includes New England Motor
Freight. They announced their engagement on May 6, 2011 and were married on
October 9 at Old Marylebone Town Hall, the very same place of his first wedding
in 1969.
and Arrests
It
was in Hamburg when Paul first had his taste of drugs. They were required to
play long hours and had to use Preludin to maintain energy and to keep awake. Sometimes,
it was Astrid Kirchherr who supplied with it. Paul said he usually took one,
but John would take four or five.
The
Beatles’ drug use included marijuana when Bob Dylan visited them and introduced
them to the drug in 1964. Paul recalled getting “very high” and “giggling
uncontrollably.” His use of marijuana became habitual. Barry Miles, who wrote
Paul’s biography, claimed that any Beatles lyrics containing the words “high”
or “grass” were written in reference to cannabis. In addition, Paul admitted
that
Got To Get You Into My Life
was “about pot – although everyone
missed it at the time.”
Day Tripper
, on the other hand, was “about acid.”
And when the band was filming
Help!
, Paul said that he would smoke a
joint in the car on the way to the studio and that would make him forget his
lines.
Director
Dick Lester also claimed that he overheard two women trying to convince Paul to
try heroin but he refused.
Paul
also used cocaine after art dealer Robert Fraser introduced him to it. He and
his mates would take the drug during the recording of
Sgt. Pepper
album.
Paul stopped his use of cocaine because he didn’t like the empty feeling after
it wore off.
He
then tried LSD in 1966 with his friend Tara Browne and took his second “acid
trip” with John in March 1967 after a
Sgt. Pepper
studio session. He was
the first Beatle to discuss the drug publicly, admitting that “it opened my
eyes” and “made me a better, more honest, more tolerant member of society.”
Paul
also called for the legalization of cannabis, the release of all those who were
imprisoned due to possession, and research into the medical uses of marijuana.
In
1972, Paul was fined £1,000 by a Swedish court for cannabis possession and was
also fined £100 for growing marijuana plants on his farm and was convicted for
illegal cultivation. His drug convictions led to the repeated denial of a US
visa until December 1973.
Paul
was once again arrested for marijuana possession in Los Angeles in 1975. But
the worse of these arrests was in January 1980, when Wings traveled to Tokyo,
Japan, for an eleven-concert tour. Paul was going through customs when
officials found about 8 ounces of cannabis in his luggage. He was arrested and
sent to a 4-by-8 cell in a local jail where he spent ten days while the
Japanese government figured out what to do. Within 11 hours, the Wings concert
tour was cancelled.
Paul’s stash of cannabis was discovered
in his luggage by officials at Narita International Airport
Paul recalled, “It was pretty rough. Just a thin mattress on
the floor. I had to wash using water from the toilet cistern. I had to share a
bath with a bloke who was in for murder. I was afraid to take my suit off in
case I got raped. But I’d seen all those prisoner-of-war movies and I knew you
had to keep your spirits up. So I’d organize sing-alongs with other prisoners.”
Paul’s then-wife, Linda, was allowed to visit on the sixth
day; she brought him a sandwich, some clothes and some sci-fi paperbacks. On
the tenth day, Paul was released and taken directly to the airport. Knowing
that he disappointed many fans, Paul grabbed an acoustic guitar in the
departure lounge and sang for the television cameras.
Paul’s use of drugs, or run-ins with the law, didn’t end
there. In 1984, while he was in Barbados, he was arrested for possession of
marijuana and was fined $200. When he returned to England, he said, “Cannabis
is a whole lot less harmful than rum punch, whiskey, nicotine and glue, all of
which are perfectly legal … I don’t think … I was doing anyone any harm
whatsoever.”
Despite Paul’s continued use of drugs, he still remained one
of the most successful entertainers of all time. He received a star on the Hollywood
Walk of Fame on February 10, 2012 and held a Guinness World Record as “The Most
Successful Composer and Recording Artist of All Time” with 60 gold discs and
sales of more than 100 million singles, 100 million albums, and a writer’s
credit on 43 songs that sold one million copies each. Guinness furthered that
Paul McCartney is “the most successful songwriter” in UK singles chart history,
having written or co-written “188 charted records, of which 129 are different
songs. Of these records, 91 reached the Top 10 and 33 made it to No. 1. In
total, the songs have spent 1,662 weeks on the chart.”
Also, in 1986 the Guinness Book of Records Hall of Fame
presented Paul with a rhodium disk to commemorate his standing “as the most
successful musician of all-time.”
Paul McCartney was also successful in the US as a songwriter
or co-writer. He was included on 31 number one singles on the
Billboard
Hot 100; twenty of these with the Beatles and nine solo and/or with Wings, one
as a co-writer on Elton John’s cover of
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
,
and one as a co-writer of
A World Without Love
for the duo Peter and
Gordon. As of now, Paul has sold 15.5 million RIAA certified units in the US.
Paul’s single,
Yesterday,
is the most covered in
history with more than 2,200 recorded versions. BBC said, “The track is the
only one by a UK writer to have been aired more than seven million times on
American TV and radio and is third in the all-time list … [and] is the most
played song by a British writer this century in the US.”
In addition to
Yesterday
, Paul’s
Hey Jude
is
also one of the highlights in his career. It had the highest sales in the UK in
1968 and topped the US charts for nine weeks, longer than any other Beatles
hit. It became the best-selling Beatles single of all-time, with sales of more
than five million copies soon after it was released.
There was no stopping Paul McCartney’s success. Long after
the Beatles had disbanded and each Beatle had his own solo career, Paul
eclipsed all of them and achieved further success in his chosen field. One
thing still remains the same: he will continue to make music because that’s
what he wanted to do ever since he was a young lad from Liverpool. He had big
dreams that had came into fruition, and continues to
soldier on
.
From
The Beatles to The Bullets
Joe
Bensam
Platinum
Publishing
Table of Contents
Chapter 4 – The Hard Road to Fame
Chapter 5 – The Birth of
Beatlemania
John’s Obsession with the “Nutter”
Chapter 8 – Making It on His Own
Chapter 10 – An Unspeakable Tragedy
The
year 1940 was a miserable one. Adolf Hitler had just ordered the bombing of Great
Britain, and for the third month in a row, the Nazis were dropping bombs on
Liverpool in an attempt to disrupt supply lines through the city’s port system
that had direct access to the Irish Sea. The Port of Liverpool was a point of
entry for the nation’s food and fuel. By bombing Liverpool, Hitler hoped to
stave Britain and thus gain their submission.
The
first bombs wreaked their havoc in August 1940. For the next few weeks, Hitler
would drop 454 tons of explosives and 1,029 tons of incendiaries in Liverpool,
more than the Luffwaffe dropped on any other British city that month.
Liverpool’s dockyards, airfields, factories, a children’s convalescent home and
a jail were destroyed. Along with them was thousands of home destroyed, leaving
many families homeless. Most of them were from “the Bootle”, the hardest-hit
neighborhood where most of the docks’ workforce lived.