May 26[, 1964] [...] left yesterday at noon, by plane for London. […] When we got to the airport [LAX], the entrance to the plane was guarded by two cops. I said to myself “a bomb” [...] Now we hear that two of the Beatles were on board [John and George with Cynthia and Pattie, returning to London from Tahiti] and the authorities were terribly afraid of a mob demonstration.

[Mick Jagger] made a great impression on me. […] Mick seems almost entirely without vanity, for one thing. He hardly ever refers to his career or himself as a famous and successful person and you might be with him for hours and not know what it is he does. Also, he seems equally capable of group fun, clowning, entertaining, getting along with other people, and of entering into a serious one-to-one dialogue with anybody who wants to. He talked seriously but not at all pretentiously about Jung, and about India (he has a brother who has become a monk in the Himalayas), and about religion in general. He also seems tolerant and not bitchy. He told me with amusement that the real reason why the Beatles left the Maharishi was that he made a pass at one of them: “They’re simple north-country lads; they’re terribly uptight about all that.” Am still not sure if I believe this story. And indeed I am still not sure what I think about Mick. I would have to see him again. It can be that I was carried away—I certainly was when I suggested he should come and stay with us when next he comes to Los Angeles; we’d have the press and the police and the public on our backs for six months afterwards!

[...] [W]ent to hear the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on the 21st [of September, 1967]. Jo had heard him a few days earlier and had been terrifically impressed—partly of course because this was practically her first contact with ideas of this kind, and now she needs them. I was quite favorably impressed—I mean, I don’t think he’s an out-and-out fake. But his talk was most confusing. What he calls the Self can’t be the Atman, for you are supposed to realize it right away, as a first step, almost. And yet if it isn’t the Atman what is it? The suspect things are, his claim that “nowadays in the jet age” we can accomplish in five years what it took generations of holy men whole lifetimes to accomplish; his plugs for his schools of meditation, where all the teachers have been trained by himself—how is this possible? But he is fat and cheerful with a very attractive laugh or hiccup. He twiddles a flower, which must surely be artificial it seems so tough, all the time he is talking and he sits backed by a whole bank of flowers. Also he has an amusing mannerism of being seemingly unable to pronounce the word “relative” which he uses very frequently, with “absolute”; they come out as “relatew” and “absolew” approximately.

The audience [at the first concert in Washington DC in February 1964], despite the various parental presences, was mostly teenage, and very hot. In the seat next to me, a little girl was bouncing up and down and saying, ‘Aren’t they just great? Aren’t they just fabulous?’ ‘Yes, they are,’ I said, somewhat inadequately for her, I suppose. ‘Do you like them too, sir?’ she asked. ‘Yes, I do rather,’ I said, all too aware that she couldn’t understand what this old man was doing sitting next to her! But perhaps she was put more at ease when the boys played a song like ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, and everybody in the audience started singing with them, for then Judy and I just found ourselves standing up and screaming along with the rest. That may sound daft, but it was exactly the same screaming that adults do at football matches. And for us especially, in the midst of sixty thousand people who were all enjoying themselves to the full, identifying completely with the people who were performing, people we knew intimately, people with whom we had made all the records and every little bit of music—in that situation it was all too easy to scream, to be swept up in that tremendous current of buoyant happiness and exhilaration.

DAYTRIPPIN’: And speaking of Denny, I know it’s a rather obvious thing to say, but in doing my research for this interview, including watching a lot of videos, it really hit home for me that Denny was quite visible and a major presence in this band. I know there are reports from him that he felt like a sideman at times, but his face was out there front and center. JUBER: Absolutely. There is no question that Wings as a core group is the Paul, Linda and Denny ensemble. This is where it carries over into getting Wings into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Wings was not just Paul McCartney post-Beatles. Wings was Paul McCartney’s group post Beatles, if that makes sense. If you go see Paul now and when he does a Wings song in his set, it’s great but there is something missing. You’re not hearing Linda’s voice; you’re not hearing Denny’s voice; you’re not getting the qualities that they brought to Paul’s work. It was a tempering. I think Paul recognized that he needed a foil, without John being around. Obviously, no one could fill in for John Lennon but Denny has his own eclecticism with his g*psy/folk sensibilities with an R&B voice and rock guitar prowess. And Linda was kinda the glue. Things just worked better with Linda there in the room because she was Paul’s soulmate and the female balancing part of his creative energy. There was a dynamic that happened and, as much as Paul will perform a Wings song and you tap your foot and sing along with it and think, “What a great song,” it doesn’t sound like Wings. I do appreciate the fact that he plays some of those tunes though.

GEORGE HARRISON: Once I was on an airplane that was in an electric storm. It was hit by lightning three times, and a Boeing 707 went over the top of us, missing by inches. I thought the back end of the plane had blown off. I was on my way from Los Angeles to New York to organize the Bangladesh concert. As soon as the plane began bouncing around, I started chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa, Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa, Hare Hare/ Hare Rāma, Hare Rāma, Rāma Rāma, Hare Hare. The whole thing went on for about an hour and a half or two hours, the plane dropping hundreds of feet and bouncing all over in the storm, all the lights out and all these explosions, and everybody terrified. I ended up with my feet pressed against the seat in front, my seat belt as tight as it could be, gripping on the thing, and yelling Hare Kṛṣṇa, Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa, Hare Hare at the top of my voice. I know for me, the difference between making it and not making it was actually chanting the mantra. Peter Sellers also swore that chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa saved him from a plane crash once.

David Spinozza on working on Ram with Paul:

In 1965 [the Byrds] toured England and Paul invited us to his club, the Scotch of St James’s [sic]. He sent a limo to pick us up. He said he had been listening to our music. We were blown away. He took us for a ride through London in his Aston Martin, at great speed. He was really hip, he and John were so tight it was like one person at times. Unlike the Byrds, [where] Crosby would just leave you out to dry, the Beatles all defended each other to the hilt. If you criticised, say, George then they would all respond.

Paul then [after the Beatles’ return from their first stint in Hamburg] became in his own right, very much a songwriter and arranger. He would basically turn around and say, “We have the rough bones of it, this is how I see it, this is how I hear it.” But he would then leave it up to the rest of the band, so it wasn’t a case of, “It’s my song, I want this done and this played.” It was very much “That’s how I think it should go,” and then everybody gave input you know, but it came up with a great finished result, which stemmed from basically, you know. So in later years the Lennon and McCartney songwriting partnership, or McCartney and Lennon, whichever way they deem it, you know, didn’t surprise me. I mean the roots were already there. It was just a case of they had their platform and away they went.

Pete Best on his first impressions of Paul and the band dynamic in Hamburg:

The Beatles onstage presented a line of three singer-guitarists standing toward the front, with the drummer sitting behind and above them on a small platform flanked by guitar amplifiers. [...] Their haircuts had been regularized into shiny, bowl-shaped helmets that framed their faces and enlarged their heads, giving them an almost childlike silhouette. They were dressed identically, coiffed identically, and the three in front were all of equal height. Yet their uniformity of appearance was offset by an almost complete lack of uniformity in their individual styles of performance. On the right side of the stage stood John Lennon, facing the audience squarely, his feet planted widely apart, his body flexing up and down at the knees in a motion that suggested Elvis Presley idling in neutral. Half-blind as he was without the glasses he refused to wear onstage, John’s naturally petulant expression was compounded by an air of obliviousness as he sang, his head tilted back, squinting down his nose at the blur of lights and shapes that swam before his eyes. Across the stage from his songwriting partner, Paul McCartney bounced and hopped and twisted as if his movements were being controlled by an apprentice puppeteer, the neck of his violin-shaped bass guitar alternately jerking up and down or sweeping across the stage as he turned to face his bandmates. In contrast to John, Paul seemed to take in everything that was happening around him onstage, as reflected on his face by a constant flow of smiles, frowns of concentration, surprised laughter, and histrionic double-takes—one moment the picture of crooning sincerity with his head bowed and his eyes raised, the next moment actually shaking from head to toe with the excitement of the music. A more sober form of concentration could be seen on the face of George Harrison as he stood in the middle of the band, his guitar held perfectly level and worn high on his body. George onstage was a collection of small, poised gestures: now stepping forward to take a solo, now leaning over to share a microphone with Paul or John on the chorus harmonies. Behind the others sat Ringo, surrounded by his new American-made drum set, the front head of his bass drum displaying the name of the band in stark black lettering. Raising his sticks high, fanning his hi-hat cymbals with his arm drawn across his body, Ringo seemed to vie with the audience for the attention of the three guitarists in front of him, at times actually lifting out of his seat with the enthusiasm of his playing. And on his face, mixed in with the sidelong glances and knowing grins that linked the Beatles to one another onstage, could be glimpsed a look of absolute astonishment that the others, if they did nothing else, managed to suppress.

Paul was little seen in public during the following weeks [after the memorial service for Linda in June 1998]. To distract himself, he did some light work, hiring the up-and-coming musician Nitin Sawhney to mix a drum and bass version of ‘Fluid’, one of the tracks from the forthcoming second Fireman album. Sawhney lived and worked at the time in one room in a house in South London. Paul came over and spent the evening, chatting with the younger man about his life and interests, including the work of the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore. ‘In love all of life’s contradictions dissolve and disappear’ was a Tagore maxim Paul had quoted in the liner notes of the Pipes of Peace album. Sawhney reflected that, as a British Asian, he had the Beatles to thank for introducing him to the classical music of his ancestral homeland, via the Beatles’ association with Ravi Shankar. Paul spoke to Nitin nonchalantly about ‘the band’ and ‘John’, knowing Sawhney would know immediately what he meant. He wore his legend lightly, helping the younger man relax. ‘He immediately put me at ease by saying, “I used to live in a place like this years ago and I wrote a track in a room like this called ‘Scrambled Eggs’ and it went on to become ‘Yesterday’.” I went, “Wow!” Then he played it on my guitar, which freaked me out as well.’ Paul went away having made a new friend.

To give [“Please Please Me”] a link with “Love Me Do” (in those days the pop business liked to hear some similarity and continuity between consecutive singles) the plaintive wailing harmonica was featured again, but a perked-up version this time. After the eight or ninth take the Beatles hoped they had succeeded in satisfying their record producer. As George Martin huddled with his engineer in the control room to hear back a couple of the earlier takes, Paul shouted from the studio floor: “What shall we do now?” Facetiously, Martin yelled back: “Why don’t you do ‘Blue Moon’?” To everybody’s great amusement the Beatles bounced straight into an impromptu up-tempo version of “Blue Moon.” Some sanity returned to the session with Martin pointing out dryly that time was limited and if nobody minded too much he’d like to hear another take of “Please Please Me.”

ROCK CELLAR: What are your most vivid memories of working on the Wings album Back to the Egg? LAURENCE JUBER: There were a lot of wonderful moments in that album. One that I remember in particular which really stands out was when we were working on “Spin It On” and we had done the track and then when it was time for me to do the solo, I was sitting in the control room right next to Paul, like eye-to-eye, and he was kind of coaxing stuff out of me that I didn’t know what I could do. And it was in that moment I really understood his creativity as a record producer, not just in terms of Paul McCartney songwriter, Beatle, etc. but the fact [of] his ability to engage artistically with a musician. ROCK CELLAR: From your experiences working with him, what do you think is the most underrated thing about Paul McCartney? LAURENCE JUBER: That’s a tricky question to answer, because I think that for me, it’s kind of the totality of Paul McCartney as an artist and everything that goes into that, whether it’s his songwriting, singing, his keyboard playing, his drumming, his bass playing, his guitar playing, all the ingredients that go into Paul McCartney as an artist. For me, at any rate, it’s important not to make a distinction between Paul McCartney the Beatle and Paul McCartney beyond the Beatles. But everything that he did within the Beatles is still reflected in his solo work. In terms of the whole package, that’s really kind of the point that I want to make, is that there’s just so much there there, and that even though sometimes perhaps the sound of a record may not necessarily be something that I find fully satisfying on a sonic studio kind of level, he always gets it done. And his work ethic, I think probably more than anything else, it’s just this incessant work ethic, whether it’s the constant making of records or the constant desire to be performing, is something that helped me learn a great deal about what it meant to be an artist.

DAYTRIPPIN’: Let’s address the reputation Paul McCartney had at the time for treating members of Wings like “sidemen,” a charge that was leveled by other Wings members and played up quite a bit in the 1970s. JUBER: A sideman is typically a musician that is hired to play a role on stage and/or in the studio. For me specifically, to deliver a guitar solo, some groove and texture, a cool rhythm guitar part or whatever was appropriate. For example during the Back to the Egg period, as well as playing the obvious lead guitar stuff, I played bass guitar on “Love Awake,” slide acoustic on “After the Ball,” the Flamenco lead acoustic solo on “Goodnight Tonight.” So yes, I was a sideman, but the job assignment very much included considering myself a part of the band. I’m a bit of a chameleon stylistically and I think that I got the gig because I could play the bluesy lead stuff, but also other styles like the jazzy intro on “Baby’s Request.” What’s on the recordings represents the creative opportunities that Paul afforded me and he gave me a lot of leeway. The only times he ever told me what to specifically play was when he had a particular lick, like on “Daytime Nighttime Suffering.” Addressing the question in financial terms it was still a ‘work for hire’ and a reasonable improvement from what I was making as a studio musician. I’ve never had any complaints about the financial end of the arrangement. Early on, Paul had a bit of a reputation for not paying his bandmates well. This really goes back to when Wings first started and Paul had limited cash flow. There were financial issues because of the way the Beatles broke up and it took a while for those to be solved. Part of it was also Paul’s idea of creating Wings essentially from scratch. When the band first started, Paul told me that he [basically only] had an office and a phone, and got to work. I think he wanted to know the basic functions of the business end before he would hand it over to someone else. So basically the attitude was, “This is a small band and we’re going to get in a bus and go to a college and play at lunch time and share whatever money goes into the hat.” It’s a nice utopian kind of vision, but it became hard on the other guys as time wore on and didn’t quite fit with the fact that Paul was a still a megastar. By the time I joined the band things had changed, although the ‘esprit de corps’ was still there. In all its incarnations Wings sounded like a band, not like a solo McCartney project and I think that reflects well not only on Paul’s ability to share in the creative process, but also on the importance of Denny and Linda’s contributions, too. The other players brought their own personalities to the scene.