Linda McCartney (1941-1998)
Was an American musician, photographer, and animal rights activist. She was married to Paul McCartney of the Beatles. McCartney was a professional photographer of celebrities and contemporary musicians. Her photos were also published in the book Linda McCartney’s Sixties: Portrait of an Era in 1992.
Linda married McCartney in 1969 at Marylebone registry office in London and thereafter went to St John’s Wood Church for a blessing. Her daughter, Heather Louise, from her first marriage to Melville See, was adopted by her new husband. Together, the McCartney’s had three other children.
Following their 1969 marriage and the 1970 breakup of the Beatles, Paul and Linda formed the band Wings in 1971. She continued to be part of her husband’s touring band following Wings’ breakup in 1981 up until The New World Tour in 1993.
McCartney was an animal rights activist and wrote and published several vegetarian cookbooks. She also founded the Linda McCartney Foods company with her husband.
In 1995 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and died from the disease in 1998 at the age of 56.
McCartney was born Linda Louise Eastman, the second eldest of four children, in New York City. She had one older brother, John (b. 1939), and two younger sisters, Laura (b. 1947) and Louise Jr., (b. 1950).
Her father, Leopold Vail Epstein, was born in 1910 to Jewish Russian immigrants. He later changed his name to Lee Eastman. He practiced entertainment law in New York for well-known clients, including bandleader Tommy Dorsey, songwriters Harold Arlen and Jack Lawrence, and fine artists such as Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. At her father’s request, Lawrence wrote the song “Linda” when McCartney was four. The song was recorded by Buddy Clark in 1947 and went to number 1 on the charts. It was again recorded in 1963 by Jan and Dean.
McCartney’s mother, Louise Sara (Lindner) Eastman, was from a German Jewish family and was the daughter of Max J. Lindner, founder of the Lindner Company clothing store in Cleveland, Ohio.
McCartney grew up in affluent Scarsdale in Westchester County, New York, and graduated from Scarsdale High School in 1959. Following high school, McCartney attended Vermont College, where she received an Associate of Arts degree in 1961.
Her brother John, who studied law like their father, later became Paul McCartney’s attorney and manager.
Linda deviated from the family tradition of law, preferring nature and animals. After graduating from Vermont College, McCartney attended the University of Arizona and majored in Fine Arts.
While McCartney was at the University of Arizona, her mother was killed in the 1962 crash of American Airlines Flight 1 in Queens, New York. McCartney later said that because of her mother’s death, she hated travelling by air. In Arizona she took up nature photography as a hobby.
Photography
McCartney became a receptionist and editorial assistant for Town & Country magazine. During that time, in 1965, she became romantically involved with David Dalton, a professional photographer. She studied the way he worked during photo shoots, learning about how he set up shots and managed lighting and composition. When she began to do more of her own shoots, such as with music groups, he said he was “astonished” at how easily she was able to take control of unruly or uncooperative musicians.
On one occasion, when the magazine received an invitation to photograph the Rolling Stones during a record promotion party on a yacht, she immediately volunteered to represent the publication as its photographer.
McCartney had gained some experience in celebrity photography, and she became an unofficial house photographer at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East concert hall. Among the artists she photographed there were Todd Rundgren, Aretha Franklin, Grace Slick, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Eric Clapton, Simon & Garfunkel, the Who, the Doors, the Animals, John Lennon and Neil Young. Her photo of Young, taken in 1967, was used on the cover of Sugar Mountain – Live at Canterbury House 1968 in 2008.
She photographed Clapton for Rolling Stone magazine and became the first woman to have a photograph featured on the front cover (May 11, 1968). She and husband Paul also appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone on January 31, 1974, making her the only person to have taken a photograph, and to have been photographed, for the front cover of the magazine. Her photographs were later exhibited in more than 50 galleries internationally as well as at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. A collection of photographs from that time, Linda McCartney’s Sixties: Portrait of an Era, was published in 1993. She also took the photograph for the cover of Paul McCartney’s and Michael Jackson’s single “The Girl Is Mine”.
On May 15, 1967, while on a photo assignment in London, Eastman met Paul McCartney at the Bag O’Nails club, where Georgie Fame was performing. They met again four days later at the launch party for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at Brian Epstein’s house. When her assignment was completed, she flew back to New York City.
They got together again the following May in New York, while he and John Lennon were there to inaugurate Apple Records. A few weeks after he returned to London, he invited her to spend some time with him there. When she arrived, they went to his home, where they spent the evening. “He must have been really happy that night,” said one of the fans who often loitered outside his home. “He sat on the windowsill with his acoustic guitar and sang ‘Blackbird’ to us” from his upstairs room.
Paul was attracted to her for a number of reasons. He explained: “I liked her as a woman, she was good-looking with a good figure, so physically I was attracted to her.” But he also liked her sense of independence: “Her mental attitude was quite rebellious… [growing up] she was the kind of kid who would hang out in the kitchen with the black maids” to learn cooking. She disliked socializing. They both liked natural surroundings, he said, and they shared a love of nature, which became one of their most important emotional links. He knew that because of her “very free spirit,” she was considered a rebel and a black sheep by her family for avoiding excelling in education, unlike her father and brother. “She was an artist,” Paul said, “and was not cut out to be an academic.” Linda’s daughter, Heather, created another strong bond between them, since he had always liked and wanted children of his own. When he first met Heather, who was then six, he insisted that she and Linda move to London to live with him. After they did, he devoted time to Heather, playing with her, reading her stories, and drawing cartoons with her. He sang her to sleep at bedtime.
They were married in a small civil ceremony in the Marylebone area of London on March 12, 1969. British fans had a mostly negative reaction to the marriage, partly because it ended McCartney’s status as the last unattached Beatle. Along with John Lennon’s new wife, Yoko Ono (whom Lennon married a week later), Linda was perceived as one of the causes of the group’s break-up. Lennon at one point publicly criticized the way the press had treated Linda: “She got the same kind of insults, hatred, absolute garbage thrown at her for no reason whatsoever other than she fell in love with Paul McCartney.”
During their 29-year marriage, the McCartney’s had four children: in addition to her daughter Heather from her first marriage (whom Paul later formally adopted), Paul was the biological father of Mary (b. 1969), Stella (b. 1971), and James (b. 1977).
Around this time, Paul fell into a deep depression due to the Beatles’ pending breakup. He would spend days in bed and drink excessively, not knowing what to do with his life. McCartney later said that Linda helped him pull out of that emotional crisis by praising his work as a songwriter and persuading him to continue writing and recording:
After he got through that troubled phase of his career, he wrote “Maybe I’m Amazed” in Linda’s honor. He explained during an interview that the song was written “for me and Linda,” and that with the Beatles breaking up, “that was my feeling: Maybe I’m amazed at what’s going on… Maybe I’m a man and maybe you’re the only woman who could ever help me; Baby won’t you help me understand… Maybe I’m amazed at the way you pulled me out of time, hung me on the line, Maybe I’m amazed at the way I really need you.” He added that “every love song I write is for Linda.”
After the breakup of the Beatles in 1970, Paul taught Linda to play keyboards and recorded an album with her, Ram, as a duo. The couple then formed the band Wings. The group garnered several Grammy Awards, becoming one of the most successful British bands of the 1970s, but had to endure jibes regarding Linda’s singing. She later admitted that the accusations about her singing out of tune in the early days with Wings were true.
In 1977, a reggae-inspired single titled “Seaside Woman” was released by an obscure band called Suzy and the Red Stripes on Epic Records in the United States. In reality, Suzy and the Red Stripes were Wings, with Linda (who also wrote the song) on lead vocals. The song had been recorded by Wings in 1972, in response to a lawsuit by Northern Songs and Maclen Music alleging Paul violated an exclusive rights agreement by collaborating on the song “Another Day”, which had the effect of transferring a 50% share of the publishing royalties to his own McCartney Music company. The lawsuit, which alleged that Linda’s co-writing credits were inauthentic and that she was not a real songwriter, was “amicably settled,” according to an ATV spokesman, in June 1972.
The McCartney’s shared an Oscar nomination for the co-composition of the song “Live and Let Die” and were photographed together at the event in April 1974. Linda’s album Wide Prairie, which included “Seaside Woman,” was released posthumously in 1998. Along with eight other British composers, Paul contributed to the choral album A Garland for Linda and dedicated his classical album Ecce Cor Meum to his late wife.
Lifestyle
Vegetarianism
Linda McCartney introduced her husband to vegetarianism in 1975, and promoted a vegetarian diet through her cookbooks: Linda McCartney’s Home Cooking (with author Peter Cox, 1989), Linda’s Kitchen, and Simple and Inspiring Recipes for Meatless Meals. She explained her change to vegetarianism by saying that she did not “eat anything with a face… If slaughterhouses had glass walls the whole world would be vegetarian”.
Animal rights activist
The McCartney’s became outspoken vegetarians and animal rights activists. In 1991, she introduced a line of frozen vegetarian meals under the Linda McCartney Foods name, which made her wealthy independently of her husband. The H. J. Heinz Company acquired the company in March 2000, and the Hain Celestial Group bought it in 2007.
As a strong advocate for animal rights, Linda lent her support to many organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the Council for the Protection of Rural England, and Friends of the Earth. She was also a patron of the League Against Cruel Sports. She narrated a TV advertisement for PETA, in which she said: “Have you ever seen a fish gasping for breath when you take it out of the water? They’re saying, ‘Thanks a lot for killing me. It feels great, you know.’ No! It hurts!” After her death, PETA created the Linda McCartney Memorial Award.
Marijuana
In 1984, McCartney was arrested in Barbados for possession of marijuana; her husband had been arrested in Los Angeles on the same charge in 1975. After flying to Heathrow Airport, London, she was arrested on charges of possession. She later commented that, while hard drugs are “disgusting”, marijuana is “pretty lightweight.
McCartney was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1995, and her condition soon grew worse when it spread to her liver. She died of the disease at the age of 56 on April 17, 1998, at the McCartney family ranch in Tucson, Arizona. Her family was with her when she died.
George Harrison (1943-2001)
was an English guitarist, singer-songwriter, and producer who achieved international fame as the lead guitarist of the Beatles. Often referred to as “the quiet Beatle”, Harrison embraced Indian culture and helped broaden the scope of popular music through his incorporation of Indian instrumentation and Hindu-aligned spirituality in the Beatles’ work. Although the majority of the band’s songs were written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, most Beatles albums from 1965 onwards contained at least two Harrison compositions. His songs for the group included “Taxman”, “Within You Without You”, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, “Here Comes the Sun” and “Something”, the last of which became the Beatles’ second-most covered song.
Harrison’s earliest musical influences included George Formby and Django Reinhardt; Carl Perkins, Chet Atkins and Chuck Berry were subsequent influences. By 1965, he had begun to lead the Beatles into folk rock through his interest in the Byrds and Bob Dylan, and towards Indian classical music through his use of the sitar on “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)”. Having initiated the band’s embracing of Transcendental Meditation in 1967, he subsequently developed an association with the Hare Krishna movement. After the band’s break-up in 1970, Harrison released the triple album All Things Must Pass, a critically acclaimed work that produced his most successful hit single, “My Sweet Lord”, and introduced his signature sound as a solo artist, the slide guitar. He also organized the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh with Indian musician Ravi Shankar, a precursor for later benefit concerts such as Live Aid. In his role as a music and film producer, Harrison produced acts signed to the Beatles’ Apple record label before founding Dark Horse Records in 1974 and co-founding HandMade Films in 1978.
Harrison released several best-selling singles and albums as a solo performer. In 1988, he co-founded the platinum-selling supergroup the Traveling Wilburys. A prolific recording artist, he was featured as a guest guitarist on tracks by Badfinger, Ronnie Wood and Billy Preston, and collaborated on songs and music with Dylan, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr and Tom Petty, among others. Rolling Stone magazine ranked him number 11 in their list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”. He is a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee – as a member of the Beatles in 1988, and posthumously for his solo career in 2004.
Harrison’s first marriage, to model Pattie Boyd in 1966, ended in divorce in 1977. The following year he married Olivia Arias, with whom he had a son, Dhani. Harrison died in 2001, aged 58, from lung cancer that was attributed to years of cigarette smoking. His remains were cremated and the ashes were scattered according to Hindu tradition in a private ceremony in the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India. He left an estate of almost £100 million.
1963: Beatlemania
On 11 February 1963, the Beatles recorded ten songs during a single studio session for their debut LP, Please Please Me. The album was supplemented by the four tracks already released on their first two singles. Martin originally considered recording the Beatles’ debut LP live at The Cavern Club, but after deciding that the building’s acoustics were inadequate, he elected to simulate a “live” album with minimal production in “a single marathon session at Abbey Road”. After the moderate success of “Love Me Do”, the single “Please Please Me” met with a more emphatic reception. Released in January 1963, two months ahead of the album of the same name, the song reached number one on every chart in London except Record Retailer, where it peaked at number two. Recalling how the Beatles “rushed to deliver a debut album, bashing out Please Please Me in a day”, AllMusic’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine comments, “Decades after its release, the album still sounds fresh, precisely because of its intense origins.” Lennon said little thought went into composition at the time; he and McCartney were “just writing songs à la Everly Brothers, à la Buddy Holly, pop songs with no more thought of them than that – to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant.”
Released in March 1963, the album initiated a run during which eleven of their twelve studio albums released in the United Kingdom through 1970 reached number one. The band’s third single, “From Me to You”, came out in April and was also a chart-topping hit, starting an almost unbroken string of seventeen British number-one singles for the Beatles, including all but one of the eighteen they released over the next six years. Issued in August, the band’s fourth single, “She Loves You”, achieved the fastest sales of any record in the UK up to that time, selling three-quarters of a million copies in under four weeks. It became their first single to sell a million copies, and remained the biggest-selling record in the UK until 1978. Their commercial success brought increased media exposure, to which the Beatles responded with an irreverent and comical attitude that defied the expectations of pop musicians at the time, inspiring even more interest. The band toured the UK three times in the first half of the year: a four-week tour that began in February, the Beatles’ first nationwide, preceded three-week tours in March and May–June. As their popularity spread, a frenzied adulation of the group took hold. Greeted with riotous enthusiasm by screaming fans, the press dubbed the phenomenon “Beatlemania”. Although not billed as tour leaders, the Beatles overshadowed American acts Tommy Roe and Chris Montez during the February engagements and assumed top billing “by audience demand”, something no British act had previously accomplished while touring with artists from the US. A similar situation arose during their May–June tour with Roy Orbison.
In late October, the Beatles began a five-day tour of Sweden, their first time abroad since the final Hamburg engagement of December 1962. On their return to the UK on 31 October several hundred screaming fans greeted them in heavy rain at Heathrow Airport. Around 50 to 100 journalists and photographers as well as representatives from the BBC also joined the airport reception, the first of more than 100 such events. The next day, the band began its fourth tour of Britain within nine months, this one scheduled for six weeks. In mid-November, as Beatlemania intensified, police resorted to using high-pressure water hoses to control the crowd before a concert in Plymouth.
Please Please Me maintained the top position on the Record Retailer chart for 30 weeks, only to be displaced by its follow-up, With the Beatles, which EMI released on 22 November to record advance orders of 270,000 copies. The LP topped a half-million albums sold in one week. Recorded between July and October, With the Beatles made better use of studio production techniques than its predecessor. It held the top spot for 21 weeks with a chart life of 40 weeks. Erlewine described the LP as “a sequel of the highest order – one that betters the original”. In a reversal of then standard practice, EMI released the album ahead of the impending single “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, with the song excluded to maximize the single’s sales.
1968
Beatles visiting India
In February 1968, the English rock band the Beatles travelled to Rishikesh in northern India to take part in an advanced Transcendental Meditation (TM) training course at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The visit followed the group’s denunciation of drugs in favor of TM, and received widespread media attention. Led by George Harrison’s commitment, the band’s interest in the Maharishi’s teachings changed Western attitudes about Indian spirituality and encouraged the study of Transcendental Meditation. The visit was also the most productive period for the band’s songwriting.
The Beatles had intended to join the Maharishi in India soon after attending his seminar in Bangor, in Wales, in late August 1967. Their attendance at the seminar was cut short by the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, after which they committed to making a television film, Magical Mystery Tour. Convinced of the merits of TM, Harrison and John Lennon became spokesmen for the Maharishi’s Spiritual Regeneration Movement, as he gained international prominence as the guru to the Beatles. The band members arrived in India in mid-February 1968, along with their wives, girlfriends, assistants, and numerous reporters. They joined a group of 60 people who were training to be TM teachers; among the other celebrity meditators were musicians Donovan, Mike Love and Paul Horn, and actress Mia Farrow. While there, Lennon, Paul McCartney and Harrison wrote many songs, and Ringo Starr finished writing his first. Eighteen of those songs were recorded for The Beatles (“the White Album”), two songs appeared on the Abbey Road album, and others were used for various solo projects.
The retreat and the discipline required for meditation met with varying degrees of commitment from the individual Beatles. Starr left on 1 March, after a ten-day stay; McCartney left later in March to attend to business concerns. Harrison and Lennon departed abruptly on 12 April following rumors of the Maharishi’s inappropriate behavior towards his female students. The influence of the Beatles’ Greek friend Alexis Mardas, financial disagreements, and suspicions that their teacher was taking advantage of the band’s fame have also been cited by biographers and witnesses as reasons for the two Beatles’ dissatisfaction.
The band’s denunciation of the Maharishi proved detrimental to his popularity in the West, and their return from Rishikesh marked the start of a divisive atmosphere that anticipated the group’s break-up in 1970. Harrison later apologized for the way that he and Lennon had treated the Maharishi; like many of the other students at the ashram, he said that any allegations of the Maharishi’s inappropriate behavior were unfounded. Harrison gave a benefit concert in 1992 for the Maharishi-associated Natural Law Party. In 2009, McCartney and Starr performed at a benefit concert for the David Lynch Foundation, which raises funds for the teaching of Transcendental Meditation to at-risk students.
Apple Records
Is a record label founded by the Beatles in 1968, as a division of Apple Corps Ltd. It was initially intended as a creative outlet for the Beatles, both as a group and individually, plus a selection of other artists including Mary Hopkin, James Taylor, Badfinger, and Billy Preston. In practice, by the mid-1970s, the roster had become dominated with releases by the former Beatles as solo artists. Allen Klein managed the label from 1969 to 1973. It was then managed by Neil Aspinall on behalf of the four Beatles and their heirs. Aspinall retired in 2007, being replaced by Jeff Jones.
The Traveling Wilbury
were a British-American supergroup consisting of Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty. The band recorded two albums, the first in 1988 and the second in 1990, though Orbison died before the second was recorded.
The project’s work received much anticipation given the diverse nature of the singer-songwriters. Their debut album Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 proved an enduring critical success, in 1989 and 1990 winning accolades such as a Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group.
