Paul McCartney didn’t know how to go on after The Beatles’ split. In an excerpt of his forthcoming book, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run, McCartney recounts how an unfounded rumor that he had died wasn’t actually that far from the truth.
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The chatter about McCartney’s death began circulating in the fall of 1969 and “took on a force all its own, so that millions of fans around the world believed I was actually gone,” the music icon wrote in an essay for The Guardian.
“But now that over a half century has passed since those truly crazy times, I’m beginning to think that the rumours were more accurate than one might have thought at the time,” McCartney wrote. “In so many ways, I was dead… A 27-year-old about-to-become-ex-Beatle, drowning in a sea of legal and personal rows that were sapping my energy, in need of a complete life makeover.”
Amid the turmoil, McCartney and his family traveled to a sheep farm in Scotland that he’d purchased three years prior.
“When I think back on it, the isolation was just what we needed. Despite the harsh conditions, the Scottish setting gave me the time to create,” he wrote. “It was becoming clear to our inner circle that something exciting was happening. The old Paul was no longer the new Paul. For the first time in years, I felt free, suddenly leading and directing my own life.”
Paul McCartney’s Life After The Beatles
The outlet also published an excerpt from McCartney’s forthcoming book. Ted Widmer edited the project, pulling together quotes over two years, some from new interviews and some from archives.
“The breakup hit like the atom bomb,” McCartney writes. “… Leaving the Beatles, or having the Beatles leave me, whichever way you look at it, was very difficult because that was my life’s job. So when it stopped, it was like, ‘Oh God, what do we do now?’”
“In truth, I didn’t have any idea,” he continues. “There were two options: either don’t do music and think of something else, or do music and figure out how you’re going to do that.”
McCartney writes that, while surrounded by both nature and his family, he managed to keep going.
“I hung on, wondering if the Beatles would ever come back together again, and hoping that John might come around and say, ‘All right, lads, I’m ready to go back to work,’” he writes. “In the meantime, I began to look for something to do. Sit me down with a guitar and let me go. That’s my job.”
He eventually got a four-track machine for the house and began writing instrumental music.
“I wasn’t trying to aim for popular success. I was just doing this because it was fun… It meant I hadn’t given up. It was some kind of continuum,” he writes. “I didn’t really think it was going to be an album. It was just me recording for the sake of it.”
Those recordings eventually became his debut solo album, McCartney. The LP, which was released in 1970, included the song “Maybe I’m Amazed.”
“I was trying to put into words how it felt to be a young married person starting a life with this lovely girl, who I didn’t really know yet, but I was getting to know her,” he writes of the track. “So there was a feeling of nervousness. Maybe I’m afraid of this thing? Which is true.”
“The whole thing is scary when you fall in love with someone. There’s two sides. Yeah, it’s blissful. But then there’s also this scary side. So that’s what I was trying to do. I just put it together,” McCartney continues. “… ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ was me being amazed and afraid at the same time of being a grownup in a marriage for the first time ever.”
Photo by Chris Walter/WireImage
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