My Friends Have Lost Their Way
Early in August, George and Pattie, along with Neil Aspinall and Alex Mardas, took a vacation to America. Their plan was to fly into L.A., spend a week there visiting with former Beatles' publicist Derek Taylor and his wife, Joan, who'd moved to L.A. to work with American bands, and then to visit Haight-Ashbury.
George rented a house up in the Hollywood Hills that was on Blue Jay Way and had a spectactular view of the city below. The night they got there, Derek and Joan were supposed to come visit. It got later and later. A fog settled on the Hollywood Hills, which George could see due to the fabulous view. Everyone else went to bed. George stayed up despite his jet lag.
He waited and they didn't come. This was back long before cell phones. He had no way to contact Derek and Joan to know what was happening, but he correctly supposed that despite his directions, they'd gotten lost in the winding and maze like roads of the Hollywood Hills in the fog. There was a Hammond Organ in the rental and to keep himself awake, he sat down and started playing it softly. He ended up composing a song about the situation.
When George sang that night that his friends had lost their way, he meant Derek and Joan and that they had literally lost their way driving to his rental house.
Later he and everyone else would realize that all his friends in the Beatles and the Beatles enourage had metaphorically lost their way. They all were miserable. They were stuck in their grief for Paul. Will's idea to bury him up in Scotland had given them a grave. But the fact that it was up in Scotland made it difficult to visit. The reality was that Melanie Coe, visiting the farm with him in order to see his mother, visited Paul's grave more than John, George, Ringo, George Martin, or Brian Epstein. So they didn't really even have that to process their grief.
Ringo actually liked Will and supported him, or as he called him, Billy Shears. But that didn't mean Ringo also wasn't upset about Paul.
George had basically shut himself off from feeling anything about Will or Paul. He liked he got more songs on the Strawberry Fields Forever album, but that made him feel guilty for he knew if Paul wasn't dead he would have written songs, that George was now willing to admit to himself, would have been better than what George actually did write.
John was angry and getting angrier. His anger at Will had turned into seething hatred. He didn't like he was so filled with hate when what he wanted was to be a man of love. That Will now looked exactly like Paul, and was in the videos they'd made the previous Winter and the album pictures just added to that hate. That Will was supportive and understanding and seemed to honor Paul when ever he could also just added to that hate.
But the worse of them was Brian. He wasn't just stuck in grief and upset like Ringo. He wasn't pushing away his feelings and going numb like George. He wasn't even angry like John. He was afraid and depressed; Ian suspected his response that he just wanted to sleep really was he just wanted to sleep forever.
But Ian was wrong that Will was happy. The simple truth was that most upset of them all was Will Campbell who now was legally Paul McCartney according to the Queen herself. He'd gone into this for two reasons, to take care of his mother, which was happening, and to be able to expand musically. He'd naively hoped that maybe he'd even be able to have some of his own music recorded by the Beatles. He had no illusion he was anywhere the composer Paul McCartney had been and would have been if he was alive. But he felt he could come up with the occcaisonal good song. Maybe they could have used one of his songs instead of Harry's "One." But that was now clear that it would never happen. George and Ringo knew he was a capable musician. He could play bass and keyboards and guitar on records. But that wasn't going to happen either. All he got to do was sing Paul's vocals, and that after John and George left the studio.
Then the rumor had started up. The stress was horrid. He was feeling all the rest felt. He was upset, he was at times numb, he was angry, he was depressed.
The only really good thing in his life was Melanie. But even then he sometimes suspected that she really wanted Paul, not him. She never called him Will.
The first time he heard "Blue Jay Way" he heard that the Beatles had lost their way. He had lost his way. He'd lost himself. Not only had Paul McCartney died in that fateful car crash, so had Will Campbell. His agreeing to replace Paul meant giving up on his own dreams, giving up on his own music, giving up on his own life.
He and Melanie did not attend the premier of John's film "How I Won the War" on October 18th, he knew that John wouldn't want him there. But they did the second night.
Somehow the press found out Paul and Melanie were at the film. As they walked out the couple were besieged.
"Paul, how did you like the film?"
"I loved it. It's a masterpiece."
"How do you think John Lennon did in it?"
"I totally forgot he was John Lennon. A superb job of acting. Doesn't surprise me though."
"Melanie, you talk to your parents lately?"
"On the phone just today, they are fine."
"Paul, what do you say to those who say you're dead."
"I'm not, obviously. Here I am, alive and well."
"Does it bother you that they say that?"
He couldn't take it. "You know what? I'm not dead. But Paul is. I'm not Paul. I'm Will Campbell. I'm just a nobody, fake, stand-in from Canada," he dropped the Paul cadence and Liverpool accent and spoke like a Canadian, "with plastic surgery to make me look like him. I didn't write 'One,' Harry Nilsson did. I didn't write 'How Does It Feel,' John did. 'Penny Lane' was written and sang by the real Paul before the crash. He wrote 'When I'm 64' in their early days."
"Are you joking?"
Before he could answer two men in the crowd suddenly rushed forward, grabbed him and Melanie, and walked them back into the theatre. MI6 had been watching them all the entire time.