HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAUL MCCARTNEY! ↬  June 18th, 1942, Liverpool

How did you react(to the break up)?

I hid in Scotland for months. I let myself go, grew a beard and started drinking heavily and snifing heroin…*record scratch* ?????

(Paul speaking Take A Break magazine 1992)

You know what really gets me about this, that he drops this nugget while speaking to Take a Break, a magazine whose readership has an average age of about 75. My granny used to read Take A Break religiously fgs. Paul has this way of slipping really deep shit into random interviews and then never mentioning it again (see his dad abusing him revealed to Howars Stern in 2001 and then never spoken of again)

// i’m not saying that paul couldn’t have tried sniffing heroin around that time, but the way it’s worded in the “q&a”, a) sounds a bit a weird, and b) it could be that they’ve had some source* where he mentions trying it, but they just went ahead, worded it a bit differently, and so we ended up with a quote that makes it seem like paul admitted in a throwaway comment that he was sniffing heroin every day lol.

// which is something i personally doubt was happening, and given that it is not mentioned anywhere else really - as far as i know (apart from this one instance*. i don’t know what interview the book got the quote from, maybe it was the same that inspired the original article as well? we’ll never know - but here i read it as something that was more like a one-time thing, and not something regular), and we know that paul very much likes to emphasize just how bad he’d felt after the breakup, so i would think if this was a more relevant, significant thing, it would have come up in other places as well

I very much agree that taking away from this casual mention that he had a dependency, or that it was even a regular thing, is a stretch, and the leftovers from Robert situation from the Peter Ames Carlin book is way more probable than any kind of full blown habit.

I took a look at Carlin’s source for the “heroin from a hipster friend” thing (and the quote “I was a zombie”) and it’s from an article called “Linda Saved Beatle Paul from Heroin” in the Advertiser, 9/6/91. Unfortunately I can’t find that article to see what their source is, and I don’t know anything about them as a publication.

THE FOOL ON THE HILL .     recorded: September 25-27 / October 20, 1967       filmed: October 31, 1967, in Nice

PAUL: I used to know Marijke [member of “The Fool”, the Dutch design collective and band], she was a quite striking-looking girl. She used to read my fortune in Tarot cards, which was something I wasn’t too keen on because I didn’t want to draw the death card one day. I still don’t like that kind of stuff because I know my mind will dwell on it. I always steered a bit clear of all that shit, but in fact it always used to come out as the Fool. And I used to say, ‘Oh, dear!’ and she used to say, ‘No no no. The Fool’s a very good card. On the surface it looks stupid, the Fool, but in fact it’s one of the best cards, because it’s the innocent, it’s the child, it’s that reading of fool.’ So I began to like the word ‘fool’, because I began to see through the surface meaning. I wrote 'The Fool on the Hill’ out of that experience of seeing Tarot cards. (…) I think I was writing about someone like Maharishi. His detractors called him a fool. Because of his giggle he wasn’t taken too seriously. It was this idea of a fool on the hill, a guru in a cave, I was attracted to. I remember once hearing about a hermit who missed the Second World War because he’d been in a cave in Italy, and that always appealed to me. I was sitting at the piano in at my father’s house in Liverpool hitting a D 6th chord and I made up ‘Fool on the Hill’. There were some good words in it, 'perfectly still’, I liked that, and the idea that everyone thinks he’s stupid appealed to me, because they still do. Saviours or gurus are generally spat upon, so I thought for my generation I’d suggest that they weren’t as stupid as they looked. [myfn]

//

Paul assisting in Richard Hamilton’s studio

Swingeing London 67 (f) Richard Hamilton, 1968-69

When was Paul’s Scottish Retreat period?  Paul was in Scotland, on High Park from Oct 22, 1969—Nov 17, 1969.  He and Linda were back in London, out for dinner on November 18, 1969