Kanye West recording My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in Hawaii, sunglasses and a T-shirt and a heavy heart. Dylan in seclusion up in Woodstock, wearing an odd hat, years going by like hours. They walked around in flowing pajama pants and looked like gods. Think of the Rolling Stones in the South of France, recording Exile on Main St., barefoot and shirtless and surrounded by women. A mullet came and went, as did the giant, untamed beard, as he drank ever deeper from that rare cocktail of money and exile and creative prime in which everything is elevated, even style. He'd thrift giant coats and walk around in a tangle of tweed. He was doing complicated, obscurely meaningful things with clothes-going to court, in 1971, to dissolve the Beatles' partnership in the same suit he'd worn to cross the street on the cover of Abbey Road. Who needs a band when you’ve got your best friends? Dying, he later said, “took a lot out of me.” So McCartney went and lay in mud and grew marijuana plants. It was the moment all the idealism and pent-up energy of the past few bright years had gone sideways and sour. ![]() The Beatles were crawling toward one death, the psychedelic '60s toward another. They were people in whom so much was invested that they went into hiding just to cope. Looking back on it now, it was almost like a psychic witness-protection program, the way guys like McCartney or Bob Dylan up and vanished there at the vengeful end of the decade. McCartney, grieving the loss and exhausted by all the attention to which he'd had to become accustomed-attention so unrelenting that when he briefly disappeared, rumor immediately declared him deceased-retreated with his family to High Park Farm, a tax shelter of a property he owned but barely visited in Scotland. The Beatles were on the verge of splitting up, though the world didn't quite know it yet. “The Case of the ‘Missing’ Beatle: Paul is still with us,” the cover line read. One of those photos made the Life cover the following week, and this was how the world found out that Paul McCartney was still alive. Ever politic, even in his feral state, he eventually put down the bucket and posed, he and Linda and their two daughters looking shaggy and a bit startled out in the windy hills of their property. Nobody bothered him much, out in the vast anonymity of Scotland, but when they did it was inevitably weird and fraught-one Life magazine photographer recalls him hurling a bucket of food scraps in the direction of his lens after he'd knocked on the door. He grimaced and stared at the ceiling and smoked or drank whiskey. This suited him, and some days he even acted as if it were true. All rights reserved.Īt the time, many people thought he was dead. © 1975 Paul McCartney / Photographer: Linda McCartney. As the Beatles were splitting, McCartney fled to the country with his family-including baby Mary, riding shotgun here-Īnd his style unraveled in the best way possible.
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