Scary!

Scary!

When the band was out drinking one evening in a nightclub [during the 1972 European tour], things turned disturbingly nasty. A young man in a green jacket sidled up to Paul and calmly informed the ex-Beatle that he had a revolver in his pocket and planned to kill him. Having coolly revealed this threat to McCartney, the youth swaggered over to the bar and stood there staring and grinning at the singer. McCullough and Laine arrived not long afterward. McCartney, clearly shaken, whispered to his bandmates, telling them what had just happened and gesturing toward the stranger. The guitarists, particularly the streetwise McCullough, who had begun his musical career as a showband player in the rough Northern Irish dance halls of the early 1960s, quickly took control of the situation. Pulling a knife out of his boot, and with Laine in tow, he wandered over to the bar. The pair flanked the now flustered wannabe thug, who began to protest his innocence, claiming it had all been a misunderstood joke. Laine and McCullough quickly wrestled him to the floor and searched him, producing no weapon. As soon as they let him go, the youth scrambled to his feet and took off into the night. In McCullough’s opinion, it was “one of those incidents that happens a thousand times on a Saturday night in any given city. I felt very protective of Paul because of his vulnerability. … He needed a strong helping hand from whoever was around him.”

[—from Man on the Run: Paul McCartney in the 1970s, Tom Doyle]