The Dark Side of Paul McCartney

That bad, bad time, exacerbated by the lawsuit McCartney filed on December 31, 1970, after John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr appointed the mob-boss-like New York accountant Allen Klein as the Beatles’ manager, led to McCartney’s remarkable second act. He was in bed one night with his American wife, Linda, having escaped London for a remote three-bedroom farmhouse in Campbeltown, Scotland, when Johnny Cash came on the television, playing with some country musicians he had never heard of. “I thought, here’s Johnny, he’s doing it. So I turned to Linda and said, ‘Do you want to form a band?’ And she went, ‘Sure.’”