A lying journalist in the early ’70s received a very special present from Paul McCartney, his wife Linda, and even their then-infant daughter Stella. Paul’s first idea? No. 2.
As told by Wings drummer Denny Seiwell in the new book Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run (via NME), McCartney’s second-most-famous group was joined on tour by a journalist who had pitched a story about family life on the road. Paul and Linda had three children at the time: Heather, Mary, and Stella, and the journo said he was going to write about their experience and the experience of other families of the band.
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According to Seiwell, “We take him along to the sound check. We let him backstage. We let him on the bus. We let him see how we live and all that. He didn’t stay for the concert. He flew home.”
Imagine the surprise among McCartney and Wings when that same hack wrote a live review of the concert he missed. And not just any review: a scathing pan.
“He slagged it,” Seiwell recalled. “Everything about it! The way we lived. The way we travelled. The way we sounded.” But being gracious, the McCartney family decided to give the journalist another whiff of family life.
“Stella was a baby at the time. So Paul and Linda took one of those little plastic soap dishes from the hotel we were in and they got one of Stella’s turds, put it in the soap dish, wrapped it up and sent it to him,” Seiwell claimed. “You heard that from me. I don’t care if they want it to be known or not. I thought it was the perfect response to a crude British pressman.”
McCartney himself has yet to confirm or deny the account. Maybe Seiwell was exaggerating or, uh, brown-nosing. But it smells like the truth.
