Linda Mccartney Quotes

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, the whole world would be vegetarian.

Paul's last words to Linda: "You're up on your beautiful Appaloosa stallion. It's a fine spring day. We're riding through the woods. The bluebells are all out, and the sky is clear-blue".

somebody had taken an old disk of McCartney and the Wings - as in the historical Beatles's McCartney - taken and run it through a Kurtzweil remixer and removed every track on the songs except the tracks of poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney singing backup and playing tambourine. ... Poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney just fucking could not sing, and having her shaky off-key little voice flushed from the cover of the whole slick multitrack corporate sound and pumped up to solo was to Gately unspeakably depressing - her voice sounding so lost, trying to hide and bury itself inside the pro backups' voices; Gately imagined Mrs. Linda McCartney - in his Staff room's wall's picture a kind of craggy-face blonde - imagined her standing there lost in the sea of her husband's pro noise, feeling low esteem and whispering off-key, not knowing quite when to shake her tambourine: C's depressing CD was past cruel, it was somehow sadistic-seeming, like drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom.

The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Oh, what a pleasure that was! Mollie Katzen's handwritten and illustrated recipes that recalled some glorious time in upstate New York when a girl with an appetite could work at a funky vegetarian restaurant and jot down some tasty favorites between shifts. That one had the Pumpkin Tureen soup that Margo had made so many times when she first got the book. She loved the cheesy onion soup served from a pumpkin with a hot dash of horseradish and rye croutons. And the Cardamom Coffee Cake, full of butter, real vanilla, and rich brown sugar, said to be a favorite at the restaurant, where Margo loved to imagine the patrons picking up extras to take back to their green, grassy, shady farmhouses dotted along winding country roads. Linda's Kitchen by Linda McCartney, Paul's first wife, the vegetarian cookbook that had initially spurred her yearlong attempt at vegetarianism (with cheese and eggs, thank you very much) right after college. Margo used to have to drag Calvin into such phases and had finally lured him in by saying that surely anything Paul would eat was good enough for them. Because of Linda's Kitchen, Margo had dived into the world of textured vegetable protein instead of meat, and tons of soups, including a very good watercress, which she never would have tried without Linda's inspiration. It had also inspired her to get a gorgeous, long marble-topped island for prep work. Sometimes she only cooked for the aesthetic pleasure of the gleaming marble topped with rustic pottery containing bright fresh veggies, chopped to perfection. Then Bistro Cooking by Patricia Wells caught her eye, and she took it down. Some pages were stuck together from previous cooking nights, but the one she turned to, the most splattered of all, was the one for Onion Soup au Gratin, the recipe that had taught her the importance of cheese quality. No mozzarella or broken string cheeses with- maybe- a little lacy Swiss thrown on. And definitely none of the "fat-free" cheese that she'd tried in order to give Calvin a rich dish without the cholesterol. No, for this to be great, you needed a good, aged, nutty Gruyère from what you couldn't help but imagine as the green grassy Alps of Switzerland, where the cows grazed lazily under a cheerful children's-book blue sky with puffy white clouds. Good Gruyère was blocked into rind-covered rounds and aged in caves before being shipped fresh to the USA with a whisper of fairy-tale clouds still lingering over it. There was a cheese shop downtown that sold the best she'd ever had. She'd tried it one afternoon when she was avoiding returning home. A spunky girl in a visor and an apron had perked up as she walked by the counter, saying, "Cheese can change your life!" The charm of her youthful innocence would have been enough to be cheered by, but the sample she handed out really did it. The taste was beyond delicious. It was good alone, but it cried out for ham or turkey or a rich beefy broth with deep caramelized onions for soup.

London, Mick would have a final showdown with Chrissie Shrimpton and effectively tell her he felt ‘very bored’ and didn’t want to see her again. When she took a nearly fatal overdose of sleeping pills and sent Mick the hospital bill, he refused to pay it. Lin Eastman became Linda McCartney.5

Paul and Linda were deeply wounded by Seiwell’s rebellion. In Henry’s case, they knew what the problems were, and they knew he would leave eventually, having already quit once. They even, to a degree, respected him for standing up for his own artistry. But their relationship with Seiwell was not just that of band colleagues. It went back to the Ram sessions and had quickly become a real friendship.

And Denny Laine, just weeks after the LP was released, had developed a sour view of the project, and Wings generally. “I look on Band on the Run as definitely their [Paul and Linda’s] album,” he complained to Disc’s Caroline Boucher, while promoting Ahh . . . Laine!, finally released on December 7. “We’re not a group anymore. I’m one of the three, or I’m an individual. If it was Wings I’d feel more a part of it. But it’s not my songs and I’d like to feel more involved and contribute as much as they do.

The band had to stay in outhouses with stone floors,” Jo Jo complained. “We got the impression they had only ever been used for animals. True, they had been swept out, but I was most unhappy. . . . We had an old-fashioned bathtub, and we had to fill it with hot water from pots and pans. [Even though] I was eight months pregnant, I was never offered a wash or a bath in Paul and Linda’s place.

The night that we were going to Lagos, there was a car [sent by Paul] in front of my place, and I just thought, ‘You know what? I’ve got to put an end to this.’ I just said, ‘That’s it, I think I’m going to leave.’ My wife and I were both having tough times trying to keep all the plates in the air, the way things were. I’m in one of the top bands in the world, and we’re living in a dingy, one-bedroom, furnished apartment. It was just really a rat hole. The toilet had a big tank above it, where you’d pull the chain to flush it, and the [manufacturer’s] name on the toilet was Thomas Crapper and Sons. But this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. “I picked up the phone and called Paul, and I said, ‘I’m done. I can’t do this anymore.’ It was hard to do, really, extremely hard to do. And he was shocked.” An argument ensued, both Seiwell and Paul becoming increasingly incensed, until Paul slammed down the phone. Five minutes later, Seiwell’s phone rang, and as soon as he put the receiver to his ear, he heard Linda, shouting, “How dare you inconvenience us?

Linda was keen to try, but musicianship and songwriting did not come easily to her, and she quickly discovered that she could not count on master classes from her highly accomplished husband. “No, he is not a good teacher, Paul,” she said in a frank moment. “He has no patience what-so-ever with somebody who doesn’t know. He

All Paul had to do was show her how to make the leap from listener to creator. Teenagers in garage bands were doing exactly that, all over the world; there was no reason Linda couldn’t become a songwriter too.

But if he and Linda composed together, they stood to earn a higher share, since unlike Paul, Linda was not under contract to Northern Songs and could route her part in the collaboration through another publisher—specifically, McCartney Music, Inc., the publishing arm of the newly formed McCartney Productions Ltd.

The final credit, common to the British and American releases was, “And Paul would love to thank Linda and Linda would love to thank Paul and thanx Denny”—not quite the wording one would expect from musicians trying to project a group image.

Ça ne fait rien”4 (or “It does not matter,” more loosely translated as “Don’t worry, we’ll sort it”). Paul and Linda heard Richards’s comment as “San Ferry Anne,” a phrase they adopted to mean “don’t worry,” and true to form, McCartney began toying with the phrase as the title for a new song.

Arthur could almost imagine Paul McCartney sitting with his feet up by the fire one evening, humming it to Linda and wondering what to buy with the proceeds, and thinking probably Essex.

At sixteen, I saw myself as Annie Leibovitz or Linda McCartney. I did not see myself as a teenager, but maybe this was because so few people treated me like I was one.

None of the other Beatles attended. Just as Paul and Linda were exchanging vows, George was being arrested for drug possession at his own home. He attended the reception. John and Yoko were in the studio completing their second joint LP, Unfinished Music No. 2—Life with the Lions. And Ringo Starr was filming The Magic Christian, with Peter Sellers. No other Beatles were present eight days later, when John married Yoko Ono in Gibraltar.

Linda was many things Jane Asher was not. Much as she enjoyed her career as a photographer, she didn’t live for it, and could happily pursue it avocationally if she didn’t have to make her living doing it. More importantly, she was an enthusiastic cook and a devoted mother, and happy to take on the domestic role that was so important to Paul. Yet she was also a free spirit. She could be stylish when the occasion demanded, but for the most part, her taste in clothes, and her disinclination to wear makeup, were rooted in a hippie sensibility that treated fashion as less important than comfort and practicality.

If Linda McCartney sausage rolls came in boxes of forty-eight I would be doing batch bakes of those and then smashing them down with seven cans of Diet Coke. That’s my other issue – Diet Coke.

If Linda McCartney sausage rolls came in boxes of forty-eight I would be doing batch bakes of those and then smashing them down

The first matter of business was backing vocals for ‘Cook of the House,’ and once that was complete, Paul saw an opportunity to further democratize Wings. Denny now had two vocals, and Jimmy and Linda had one each. That left Joe, and it was not lost on Paul that the lonely protagonist in ‘Must Do Something About It’ had a lot in common with the drummer.

Paul was unusually subdued, his songwriting engine powered down as he digested a book of press clippings and pondered his plans for Wings’ world tour. Venus and Mars was selling well, but criticism always affected Paul’s equilibrium. It was up to Linda to drag him out of a morass of self-doubt. “He likes positive thinking,” Linda explained. “He blossoms when he’s around positive people. Negative people get a bit on his back. It’s so easy, isn’t it, with somebody who’s written as many songs as him, to actually say, ‘Oh, he’s no good.’ I mean, I just don’t see how you can say it. But it’s easy. It’s easy to put down anybody. He’s very self-critical. He is not like a person who thinks, ‘I am great. No matter what they say, I am great. Look what I’ve done. I have it in me.’ No, he doesn’t have that much confidence in that way.”51

Joe had spoken with Paul and Linda about missing home, but he kept his extracurricular drug-taking (apart from smoking with the band) to himself until now. But ‘Wino Junko’ made Joe uneasy. It had bothered him on Friday; on Monday it seemed even more oppressive. There was something beyond homesickness that led Joe toward drugs, though. Even with the Venus and Mars recording sessions and tours of Britain and Australia behind him, he did not feel entirely prepared for the bright spotlight he was thrust into, playing drums behind one of those guys who made him resolve to become a musician when he 15.

Lyrically, the directness and poetic imagery in ‘Warm and Beautiful’ make it a close second to ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ among Paul’s songs inspired by Linda. And it was almost enough to make him reconsider his insecurity about writing lyrics. “I’ve never thought I had a relationship with words that’s very strong. I feel as though it’s more music. But that’s my particular hang up. I think what I’m saying is, there are some people who string words together that I admire to the degree that I don’t think I’m that good. I mean, that’s my natural response—‘No, I’m not very good with words.’ But when I think about it I know I have some moments when suddenly a little flash has come to me and I’ve thought, ‘Okay, that’s good, those are good words.’”48 In Paul’s own estimation, ‘Warm and Beautiful’ was one of those sudden flashes. “That one really does get to me,” he later admitted. “It captures some of my innermost feelings for her.

On May 5, Wings flew to Teterboro Airport, in New Jersey, from which they were driven to their second home base, in Manhattan. Paul and Linda spent the evening with Linda’s friend, Danny Fields. Danny had stepped away from his editing and publicity careers and become co-manager, with Linda Stein, of the Ramones, one of the bright lights of the new punk movement. Fields told Paul that the Ramones had taken their name from a bit of Beatles lore—specifically, the stage name Paul used, Paul Ramon, when the Beatles toured Scotland in May 1960 backing the singer Johnny Gentle. “He was, like, ‘You’re kidding!’” Fields recalled. “And I said, ‘No, they really did.’ I don’t think he really believed me.”31 A few weeks later, when Fields visited Paul and

Linda is a nice chick and I really like her,” Joe English said in a dyspeptic moment, “but let’s face it, she can’t play, and she can’t sing. And Denny Laine can sing, but he tends to sing off-key.”17

On Friday, January 12, Wings met in MPL’s boardroom to map out their immediate future. It was an unlikely scene, for a rock band. “We all sat around one of those big boardroom tables with notepads and glasses of water,” Laurence recalls, “and we talked about what the next step was going to be.”2 The next step, Paul told them, was to release a single. “What did the Beatles do when they needed a single?” someone asked. “We’d write one over the weekend,” Paul replied. Steve remembered Paul proposing a full-band contest. “I remember him saying, ‘I challenge you all to go home and write your best effort, and we’ll review them all on Monday. And whoever’s written the best song is the one we record.’ I honestly don’t remember what I did, but I know I put something together and Denny put something together, and Laurence, and we all came in and one by one played what we had. And then I remember Paul saying, ‘Well, I wrote this,’ and that was ‘Daytime Nighttime Suffering.’ And we all collectively went, ‘Ahh, okay. Well, let’s record that one then!’”3 Linda offered a closer look at Paul’s side of the competition. “He’s actually incredible,” she enthused to Ray Connolly four months later. “On Friday he decided he needed a new single, on Saturday and Sunday he messed around the house writing it, on Monday he explained to the group how it should go, on Tuesday we recorded it. He just never stops. Ideas seem to come to him all the time.

That setup yielded an accident that Paul decided to leave in the track. “At one point,” Steve recalled, “the elevator opened, and Linda came out with baby James in her arms, and he actually went, ‘aaaah.’ And that’s on the recording—you can hear it if you listen carefully, it’s right over one of the stops where there’s a little drum break,”8 about two minutes in.

With Brown advising on the technical side, Paul took Thomas’s advice and hired a film crew to make the reproduction exact, his only proviso being that they use real wood and other materials, rather than the inexpensive facsimiles they might use for a film set. But the reproduction was to be exact, down to the cigarette burns on the engineering console. One of Linda’s photographs, showing the view of the studio as the producers and engineers would see it, would be blown up to the size of the control room window.

In America, ‘Getting Closer’ did slightly better. The anonymous reviewer for Billboard found the song to be “an uplifting rocker” and praised McCartney’s vocals, as well as lyrics and instrumental hooks that were “subtle but effective.”44 The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 64 on June 16 and remained ten weeks. It took until July 28 to hit its peak, No. 20, a spot it held for a fortnight. At Lympne Castle, meanwhile, Wings were filling reels of tape with jamming, and Paul was bringing in new material. One of his new tunes was ‘Ebony and Ivory,’ a song he had started after a row with Linda at High Park in the summer of 1978, but that looked at relationships more globally, using the keyboard as a metaphor for racial harmony: “Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony, side by side on my piano, keyboard, oh Lord, why don’t we?

The take of ‘Let It Be’ they were filling out was recorded on January 31, 1969, and uniquely among the January recordings, it had already received a postproduction touch-up—a guitar solo, recorded by George on April 30. Glyn Johns used that version for his Get Back sequence, and that, combined with the new recording of ‘I Me Mine,’ and the planned refurbishing of ‘Across the Universe’ meant that the “no overdubs” rule for the album was truly abandoned. The overdubs undertaken on January 4 were extensive and included Linda’s debut on a Beatles recording, singing backing vocals with George. “It was supposed to be me and Mary Hopkin,” Linda recalled, “but she’d gone home.

I think that Denny was part of the rock ’n’ roll-folk-R&B axis of the band,” Laurence suggested, “and you get it right from the get-go, even with ‘Go Now,’ which is an R&B song that Denny brought into a kind of an English consciousness. And then you add Denny’s folkiness to it; he’s like a soul-folk musician. So I think that Denny was a part of the balance of the band, you know, as much as Linda was bringing her New York rock ’n’ roll sensibility to things. And Paul could be influenced by that. Even Denny’s voice modulates Paul’s voice in a way that John Lennon would modulate Paul’s voice. You need that extra dimension sometimes just for variety, and in the context of the band. And I think that was an important factor. It wasn’t like we were just hired to be Paul’s backup musicians; we were encouraged to have a band consciousness. And I think that Denny was our kind of anchor within that.”35