Paul McCartney has recalled the time that he “totally got blasted” on weed with Afrobeat icon Fela Kuti.
On a new episode of the Words + Music podcast, the Beatles legend reflected on the time that he was recording the ‘Band On The Run’ album in Lagos, Nigeria in 1973, and how after one day’s work, he spent a memorable night with Kuti.
Wings had decamped to the city to make the record, and when they got there, McCartney said he noticed a newspaper headline that made it suggest the band planned on “stealing” Kuti’s musical style.
“So I went, ‘oh no’,” McCartney said. “I got his number, rang him up and said, ‘I’m not doing that at all. Come around to the studio. I’ll prove it to you.”
He explained that Kuti did come to the studio and listened to the music that Wings had been working on. “I persuaded him, and so we became really good friends,” McCartney continued.
“I wasn’t going to smoke any pot, but [Kuti] gave some to Ginger Baker. And he said, ‘Ginger Baker: The only man I know never refused to smoke.’ So I thought, ‘Aw shit, I’m the guy who’s refused to smoke.’ So I said, ‘Go on then.’ And I had it. I totally got blasted and really was just out of it, and got pretty nervous and paranoid.”
McCartney went on to say that the one thing that calmed him down that night was listening to Kuti and his band’s music, which brought him to tears.
As explored in the new documentary Man On The Run, McCartney went on to be arrested in Japan in 1980 after customs officials found him with around half a pound of cannabis in his luggage after landing at Tokyo’s Narita Airport. He was detained immediately, and even served nine days in jail before being released and deported, his planned Wings tour cancelled.
McCartney has discussed his relationship with drugs and alcohol several times – in 2018, he revealed that he “self-medicated” with whiskey after The Beatles split, and said he was convinced he had seen God after taking the psychedelic drug DMT with an art dealer in the ‘60s.
In 2012, the chief medical officer of Russia claimed that The Beatles were to blame for the country’s drug problem, while McCartney said in 2015 that he gave up smoking weed because he didn’t want to be a bad influence on his children or grandchildren.
McCartney told NME in 2018 the reason he believes he did not fall prey to the destructive power of addiction. “I’m a bit cautious by nature, I’m a little bit careful with things, whereas a lot of my mates weren’t the cautious types and were more just, ‘Yeah, go for it’,” he said.
Morgan Neville’s documentary Band On The Run is streaming on Amazon Prime Video now, while the accompanying book Wings: The Story Of A Band On The Run was released in November. Wings also released a definitive anthology collection in November.
