Early views: new Paul bio - "Man on the Run"

A number of outlets have stories and reviews of "Man on the Run," a new Macca bio by Irish music journalist Tom Doyle. The book focuses on Paul in the 1970s, post Beatles.

New York Daily News:

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.

...“His often sleepless nights were spent shaking with anxiety, while his days, which he was finding it harder and harder to make it through, were characterized by heavy drinking and self-sedation with marijuana. . . . When he did get out of bed, he’d reach straight for the whisky, his drinking creeping earlier and earlier into the day. By 3 in the afternoon, he was usually out of it.”
McCartney later said he “almost” had a nervous breakdown. That was no almost. Linda found the situation “frightening beyond belief.” The rock star she had married was suddenly a broken, beaten man.

 “Linda saved me,” McCartney says. Over time, she was able to slowly rouse him from his depressed, substance-induced stupor with love and compassion, gently urging him forward.

Daily Mail: 

To make matters worse there were huge ups and downs in McCartney’s relationship with John Lennon.

In 1976 Lorne Michaels joked that he’d give the Beatles $3,000 if they reunited on Saturday Night Live – and McCartney just happened to be watching with Lennon at his New York apartment. They nearly took a cab to the studio. However, when McCartney called round to the apartment – the Dakota – the next day, guitar in hand and ready to make music together again, Lennon spat: ‘Please call before you come over. It’s not 1956, and turning up at the door isn’t the same anymore.’

They never set eyes on each other again.

The book is out June 17.