New book ‘Man on the Run’ reveals Paul McCartney’s struggle with drugs, alcohol after Beatles breakup
Paul McCartney began the ’70s in an alcoholic haze and ended them in a Japanese jail. The decade in between was one long and winding road. A new book, “Man on the Run: Paul McCartney in the 1970s,” by music journalist Tom Doyle, reveals just how unprepared McCartney was for life beyond the Beatles.
He was shaken to the core by the band’s demise and further undone by John Lennon’s vitriol. Doyle, who conducted extensive interviews with McCartney and almost everyone else still alive from the singer’s dark decade, tells the story of a man who almost didn’t make it out of the ’60s and the Beatles alive. “He knew he was in trouble the morning he couldn’t lift his head off the pillow. He awoke facedown, his skull feeling like a useless dead weight. A dark thought flashed through his mind; if he couldn’t make the effort to pull himself up, he’d suffocate right there and then,” Doyle writes, pulling from McCartney’s recollections. “Somehow, as if it was the hardest thing he’d ever done, he summoned the energy to move. He flipped over onto his back and thought, Jesus . . . that was a bit near.” On Sept. 20, 1969, at a critical meeting of the still barely together Beatles in London, Lennon announced, “I’m leaving the group. I want a divorce.
Source: NY Daily News
