When Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman in 1969, it made him the final Beatle to officially go off the market. McCartney had spent most of the ’60s in relationships, most notably with actor Jane Asher, but his marriage to Linda left a number of fans dismayed that none of The Beatles were available any longer. McCartney had plenty of despairing girls following the marriage, but evidently, he also ran in to trouble with Linda’s father, Lee Eastman.
Eastman was a prominent entertainment lawyer in New York City at the time when the future McCartneys got together. McCartney didn’t seem to have any kind of problem with Linda’s father. In fact, McCartney pushed for Eastman to manage The Beatles during their final years, only to be outvoted in favour of Allen Klein. Eastman would look over McCartney’s solo career, but one of McCartney’s most famous solo tracks was a result of Eastman’s oversight of his daughter’s relationship.
“I was in a songwriting mood and I was up in Scotland,” McCartney told GQ in 2018. “I just thought, ‘OK, I just gotta go somewhere and try and write a song.’ We happened to have a little pony that was called Jet on the farm. I took my guitar and hiked up this great big hill. I found myself a place which was in the middle of nature, and just sat there and started making up a song.”
‘Jet’ was a top ten hit for McCartney when he and Wings released the song as a single in early 1974. Hitting the top ten in both the US and UK, ‘Jet’ was a key piece to McCartney’s critical and commercial comeback with the Band on the Run album.
“I don’t know where all the words came from. Well I know where ‘Jet’ came from – I liked the name. The words are probably about me and my father-in-law,” McCartney added. “The early days of getting married and when your father-in-law is kind of a nuisance. He’s probably the ‘Major’ in it but it’s only a song so you kind of work your things out.”
“That one was written halfway up a mountain in Scotland, then recorded in Nigeria,” McCartney recalled. “I was wondering where to record and I fancied getting out of England, so I asked my record label which is EMI to supply me with a list of all the studios they had around the world – I knew they had a lot. One was in China, one was in Rio de Janeiro and one was in Lagos, Nigeria. So, I went, ‘Yeah Lagos, come on’, because I like African music a lot. I love the rhythms of African music so I chose that not realizing that it would be a really basic little studio.”
“We kind of built half the studio,” he said. “They didn’t have a vocal booth, so we had to explain to them: you take some wood, you get some glass and you put it in like that. So we built the vocal booths. But it was kind of nice, I liked the primitive aspect of it and being in Africa was a pretty interesting experience.”
Check out ‘Jet’ down below.
