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Paul McCartney wrote a song about a man leaving his home in Tucson, Arizona, before he had ever set foot in Tucson.
A tour of Paul McCartney's properties, from his 151-acre Tucson, Arizona ranch and Scottish farm to his Abbey Road-adjacent London home, tracing how Linda McCartney's Tucson roots inspired a Beatles s
Key Takeaways
- Paul McCartney's Tucson ranch is rooted in Linda McCartney's personal history and inspired one of the Beatles' songs.
- The McCartneys valued privacy and an ordinary family life at their Arizona retreat despite their global fame.
- Paul's London home near Abbey Road was central to the Beatles' songwriting and recording era.
- The video presents McCartney's properties as a connected portfolio tied to his personal and creative life.
What the video covers
- Paul McCartney wrote the Beatles' 'Get Back' line about Jojo leaving Tucson, Arizona, before ever visiting the city, inspired by his wife Linda's stories of her time there.
- Linda Eastman studied art at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she developed her love of the desert and began taking photographs seriously.
- In 1979, Paul and Linda bought a 151-acre ranch on East Redington Road on Tucson's far east side, a remote retreat surrounded by desert and mountains.
- The ranch house was an adobe and wood-pole building once owned by the Ellinwood newspaper family, which Paul renovated over several years in the early 1980s.
- The McCartney family spent roughly 19 years at the ranch, where Linda kept Appaloosa horses and the family lived relatively normal lives, even shopping for groceries locally.
- Paul's Tucson connection began with a June 1976 Wings concert in the city, with Linda singing backing vocals.
- Paul grew up in Liverpool, lost his mother Mary at age 14, and met John Lennon at a 1957 church fete in Woolton, which led to the formation of the Beatles.
- In 1965, at age 23, Paul bought 7 Cavendish Avenue in St. John's Wood, London, for around 40,000 pounds, a house five minutes from Abbey Road Studios that became a creative hub for the Beatles.
- The video frames Paul's properties as a kind of 'kingdom' spanning two countries, with the Scottish farm and other homes also featured.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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A few years later, he drove out to 151 acres of Arizona desert and bought it.
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That ranch is only the start.
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He owns a farm at the far edge of Scotland that he has kept for almost 60 years.
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He owns a house in London, a short walk from Abbey Road, where the Beatles made history.
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He owns a farm in Sussex, a place in New York, and a music library with songs by Buddy Holly in it.
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Put them all together, and it stops looking like a list of houses.
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It looks like a city, a whole kingdom of homes and songs spread across two countries, and the man at the center of it is worth close to a billion pounds.
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Today, we are going inside all of it.
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We will walk the Arizona ranch.
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We will stand on the Scottish farm, and we will find out how he lost his own songs in his twenties and then spent 50 years fighting to get them back.
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But first, I need to take you to that desert.
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[music]
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Because the real secret of his empire is waiting there.
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It is not money.
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It is something worth far more than money.
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The song about Tucson.
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In 1969, the Beatles recorded a song called "Get Back."
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And in it, there is a man called Jojo who leaves his home in Tucson, Arizona.
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Paul wrote that line himself.
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He has said that Jojo was made up and that when he wrote it, he had never even been to Tucson.
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[music]
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So why did he pick it?
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Because of a woman.
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Her name was Linda Eastman.
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And before she was Linda McCartney, she was a young art student at the University of Arizona.
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She was born in New York in 1941 into a rich family.
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But it was in Tucson that she found her feet.
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She studied art history there.
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She fell in love with the desert.
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And it was there that she first picked up a camera and started to take pictures seriously.
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She got married young, had a little girl called Heather, and got divorced in Tucson in 1965.
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Then she packed up and moved back to New York with her camera and started photographing the biggest rock stars of the sixties.
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In 1967, she traveled to London, met Paul at a club, and the two of them were almost never apart again.
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They married in March 1969, and Paul took Heather as his own daughter.
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Linda talked about Arizona so much that Tucson crept into a Beatles song before Paul had even seen it.
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Think about that.
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One of the most famous bands on Earth, writing about a city that only existed for Paul inside his wife's stories.
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Years later, when the Beatles were long gone, and Paul wanted a place where nobody could find him, there was only one place he thought of.
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He went looking in the desert, and what he found had been sitting empty for years: the ranch.
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In 1979, Paul and Linda bought a ranch on East Redington Road on the far east side of Tucson.
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Picture the drive.
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You leave the city behind.
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The road turns to dust, and the buildings fade away until all you can see is open desert in every direction.
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Tall cactus stands on the hills like people waiting.
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The Rincon Mountains rise up in the distance, going purple and red as the sun goes down.
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At the end of the dusty road is a gate, and behind that gate is 151 acres, which is more than 80 football pitches of private land.
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On the other side of the fence, there is nothing but wild open country.
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So the McCartneys could ride a horse out of their own back garden and keep going into the wilderness without ever meeting a road.
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At the center of it all sat a two-story ranch house built of adobe and wooden poles.
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It had belonged to the Ellinwoods, one of the old newspaper families of Tucson, who owned the Arizona Daily Star for 40 years.
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But it had been empty for a long time, and it needed everything doing to it.
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So, in the early eighties, Paul brought in builders and spent years fixing it up, turning an old, tired house into a family retreat.
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When it was finished, the security was serious.
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The gate was there to keep the world out and the McCartneys safe inside.
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Because in 1979, Paul McCartney was one of the most famous faces on the planet.
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And in this one corner of Arizona, he wanted to be a man with a house and a family.
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He had bought a hideaway so good that he would keep it for the rest of his life.
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If you love Paul McCartney and want to see more empires like this every week, hit subscribe.
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It takes one second.
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Because what happened inside that house in the years that followed is not what you would expect from a Beatle.
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The quiet life.
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The McCartney family spent 19 years going back to that ranch.
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Their children grew up between England and Arizona.
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Heather was the oldest, then Mary, then Stella, then James.
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Linda had a deep love for animals.
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And at the ranch, she kept her horses, two Appaloosas called Spot and Blanket, and she rode them for hours across the desert.
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Paul was by her side in jeans and boots, a long way from the screaming crowds.
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The locals in Tucson were famous for leaving them alone.
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People who worked on the ranch said that one minute Paul and Linda would be there, and the next they would be climbing into a jeep to drive into town and do the food shopping like anyone else.
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It sounds simple, and that is the point.
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The man who had played to 100,000 screaming fans at a time could buy his own groceries in Arizona, and hardly anyone would stop him.
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Here is a fun detail.
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Three years before he bought the place, on his birthday in June 1976, Paul had played a concert in Tucson with his band Wings.
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Linda was on the stage next to him, singing backing vocals.
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The family had come to the city to work, and they ended up wanting to stay.
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That is how a lot of the most important things in his life happened.
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He would walk into a place for a night and walk out with a piece of it.
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But the question that every fan asks is how a boy from Liverpool got this far.
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And the answer starts with a loss that nobody saw coming.
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The boy from Liverpool.
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Paul was born in Liverpool in June 1942.
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His dad, Jim, sold cotton and played the piano in a little band when he was younger.
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His mom, Mary, was a nurse who delivered babies in people's homes.
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They did not have much money, but the house was full of music.
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Then when Paul was 14, his mother died of cancer.
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He has said that music was how he coped and that he buried himself in his guitar for hours in his bedroom.
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A year later, in July 1957, he went to a church fete in Woolton, and a boy named John Lennon was playing in a skiffle band on the stage.
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Paul walked up afterwards, picked up a guitar, and showed John how to tune it properly.
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John asked him to join the band.
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Imagine the face of the teacher if you told him that the two boys on that stage were about to change the world.
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Five years later, in 1962, the Beatles released their first single, "Love Me Do."
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By 1964, they were so big in America that they got on television, and 70 million people watched.
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Paul and John were writing songs faster than anyone could count them, and the money started pouring in.
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Paul was only 22, and at 23, he made a decision that people still talk about.
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Instead of spending on fast cars and flash parties like the others, he went looking for a house in London.
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And he found a big white one on a quiet street just five minutes from the studio where the Beatles were recording.
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The house near Abbey Road.
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It is 7 Cavendish Avenue in St. John's Wood.
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And Paul bought it in 1965 for around 40,000 pounds.
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For a young man from Liverpool, that was an unbelievable amount of money.
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It was a big, wide house with a garden hidden behind high walls and thick trees, and it sat so close to Abbey Road that he could walk to work.
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In the sixties, it became the heart of the Beatles' world.
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Songs were played over for the first time in that house.
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Friends came and went at all hours.
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John Lennon would turn up with a new idea, and the two of them would sit in the music room and work on it.
Topics:Paul McCartneyLinda McCartneyTucson ArizonaBeatlesGet BackAbbey Roadcelebrity homesMcCartney ranchCavendish Avenuemusic history
