Dylan and the Beatles bonded that night, Bob later taking the boys on a tour of New York. In turn, the Beatles entertained Dylan when he came to England. Both influenced the other. Dylan began to set his poetic songs to rock ’n’ roll music, partly because of the success of the Beatles, thus ‘going electric’, which was a turning point in his career. Conversely, Dylan’s influence was heard in the Beatles’ lyrics, which became more story-based and at the same time lyrical and mysterious in Dylanesque style. Lennon and McCartney’s debt to the American was deep. ‘At the time they all loved Bob,’ noted Victor Maymudes, pointing out, however, that his boss could be a difficult guy to love: a fast-living, egocentric loner who could be cold, even cruel, to those around him. The Beatles weren’t immune from Dylan’s sharp tongue. ‘Bob was out of his mind in those years. I remember him screaming at Paul: “No one writes like me!”’ There was an elemental truth to this. Try though he might, Paul would never equal Dylan’s consistent ability to write lyrics that are poetic and seem to contain original insight into what it is to be a human being. Dylan at his best is profound. McCartney at his best is a brilliant tune-smith. In time he also became a great showman. But he is a mediocre lyricist for the most part, which makes him seem less important.
Still, that first night together in New York had been an uproarious, hilarious evening, a truly historic meeting: the night Dylan and his friends turned the Beatles on to pot. They were all pot-heads forthwith, Paul becoming a habitual grass smoker, which would get him into a lot of trouble.
* In the sense that homosexuality itself was still illegal in the UK.
* Nonetheless, Live at the Hollywood Bowl was finally issued in 1977.
HOME SWEET HOME
When Paul and the boys returned to England after their 1964 North American tour John went back to his new home, Kenwood, a 27-room mansion on the St George’s Hill estate at Weybridge in Surrey, a private gated community built around a golf course. Ritchie and George, who weren’t earning as much from publishing (Starr hadn’t yet written any songs), remained for the time being in London, sharing a new flat in Knightsbridge, though they too would soon buy country homes. Although a fortune was piling up in his account at Coutts, the private bank patronised by the Royal Family, Paul felt no urgent need to splurge on a country mansion like John, who had a wife and child to look after, and when he did buy property McCartney always occupied less ostentatious houses.
At this stage, London life was the thing, and when Paul wasn’t on the road it gave him a cosy feeling to be part of the Asher family at Wimpole Street. Jane’s brother Peter was an increasingly good friend. Peter and Gordon Waller were enjoying a surprisingly successful pop career on the strength of songs given to them by Paul, including a pot-boiler entitled ‘A World Without Love’. It wasn’t deemed good enough for the Beatles, and had even been rejected by Billy J. Kramer, but Jane’s brother took it to number one in Britain and the USA in the autumn of 1963, the first of three hits Peter and Gordon scored with Paul’s cast-offs.
When he did decide to buy property, Paul looked first for a house for Dad. The Beatles’ original home addresses were all well known to fans, and Jim McCartney had become used to girls knocking on his door asking to see inside 20 Forthlin Road. ‘I’d usually ask the ones who’d come a long way if they’d like some tea,’ Jim would say. ‘When they said yes, I’d say there’s the kitchen. They’d go in and start screaming and shouting because they’d recognise the kitchen from photographs.’ Patient though he was, Jim had just about had enough of this carry-on and, at 62, he was ready to stop work. So Paul put Dad on the ‘McCartney Pension’, retiring the very first McCartney Pensioner to a detached house on the Wirral.
For working-class Liverpudlians like the McCartneys, the Wirral peninsula represented a better, gentler way of life where professional people lived in larger, often detached homes in a semi-rural setting. For £8,750 ($13,387), Paul bought such a home for Dad, a five-bedroom property named Rembrandt in the village of Gayton. The house was mock-Tudor in style, with views across the River Dee to Wales. It would primarily be a home for Jim and Mike McCartney, but also a Merseyside base for Paul when he was up north, and indeed it is a house he still uses. ‘He says it’s his best house, best memories,’ a member of McCartney’s domestic staff confides, pointing out what a big social shift it was for the family to move across from Liverpool in 1964. ‘It was like coming abroad, he said, when they moved over here.’
Jim had plenty to occupy himself with at Rembrandt, which had large gardens front and back, surrounded by mature trees. He planted laurel and lavender by the front door and kept himself busy mowing the lawns and raking the leaves. Still, there was more to life than gardening. There had been no woman of significance in Jim’s life since Mary died, but with the boys grown up Jim had a twinkle in his eye again. ‘He was looking for a young, smart bird,’ confides cousin Mike Robbins, who became match-maker when he introduced Jim to his friend Angela Williams, a former Butlins Holiday [camp] Princess who’d lost her first husband in a car crash, leaving her a widow at 35 with a young daughter, Ruth, to look after. The child was now five. Angie was working as a secretary for Littlewoods, the football pools company, when Mike and Liz Robbins went round to her flat for dinner. ‘Will you ever marry again, Ange?’ Mike asked the widow.
‘No. Unless it’s a rich old man who loves music,’ replied Angie, who was an accomplished pianist. Mike and Liz looked at each other. ‘Who are you thinking of?’ Angie asked them.
‘Uncle Jim.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘Have you heard of Paul McCartney? His father.’
‘Ooo, really?’
Jim and Angela went on a date. Four more followed. One night at Rembrandt Jim put a proposition to Angela.
While I sat playing the piano, Jim put his hands firmly on my shoulders and said, ‘You’re costing me a fortune in taxis. I want to ask you something … Do you want to get married? Do you want to be my housekeeper? Or do you just want to live with me?’
Angela replied that, for Ruth’s sake, they should marry. They rang Paul immediately, and he drove up from London in his new Aston Martin sports car. The initial meeting between the star and his prospective stepmother was friendly. Always good with children, Paul bonded with Ruth, who became his stepsister when, on 24 November 1964, Jim and Angela were married by the McCartneys’ clergyman relative Buddy Bevan in North Wales. However, relations between Paul and Angie would deteriorate considerably.
Three days after Jim McCartney married, the Beatles released their new single, ‘I Feel Fine’, which opened with a wow of feedback, the first time such a sound had been used deliberately as an effect on a pop record. ‘I Feel Fine’ was a John song. ‘There was a little competition between Paul and me as to who got the A-side, who got the singles,’ John said of this period of their partnership. ‘If you notice, in the early days the majority of the singles – in the movies and everything – were mine …’ Gradually, this would change. The B-side of the new single, ‘She’s a Woman’, was a Paul song and it’s an excellent composition, into the lyrics of which he sneaked a crafty drug reference about turning on, a nod to his recent meeting with Bob Dylan. The single went to number one in the US and Britain in December, where it stayed into the new year.
A new LP, Beatles for Sale, was released a few days later, packaged slightly differently in the USA as Beatles ’65. Because