“Yeah, I think I can pull that off.” So she said, what you need to do is get your portfolio to- gether go down to this particular hotel in the French Quarter and meet with the manger, this is his room number, I am sure you got the job. I said, “What job would that be?” She said, “Oh, his album cover, his promotional stuff, the whole thing.” And I went “Un huh, okay. As soon as I hung up the phone, I am jumping and screaming for joy like a little girl and then I’m driving down the French Quar- ter thinking to myself, okay, I can’t cry this time. I can’t cry. It’s Paul McCartney, I cannot cry like I did with George Harrison! So I get to the hotel and I knock on the manager’s door and he invites me in and he looks at all my work and sits me down and says (using his best British accent) “Alright Sidney, when you meet Paul, your aren’t going to cry are you?” and I’m looking at him like, what the hell, this guy is totally physic or else I’m wear- ing my feelings on my sleeve in a major way. I said, “No, I wouldn’t do that, but why would you ask me such a thing?” And he said, “Well, we just left Nashville and in Nashville we hired a young photographer just like yourself, and every time he saw Paul he started to cry and it made Paul very uncomfortable.” I was like oh, I said, “No, no I’m not the crier. No, not me. I’m not going to cry when I see Paul. I’m not even going to ask him for an auto- graph, not a thing.” And he said “Alright, you’ll see him tomorrow then.” And I said that’s fine. So, I leave the room and I go walk out of the elevator into the lobby and I run into a drummer friend of mine named Joe English who you may know.
Yeah, I know all about Joe from Wings and also from Sea Level. Okay, so Joe I knew from Macon. Joe had come down from New York with the band called Jam Factory and they had hoped to make it in Macon. Joe had made a name for himself as a session drummer and the way the story goes, I said “Hey Joe, what are you
doing here?” He said I just got hired to play drums for the album, he said the drummer just quit. I said, I just got hired to shoot the album cover and he said, well do you want to meet him? And I said “Sure” o we walked through the lobby out to the pool area and walked out the doors to the pool and there he was, he was sitting out there in his bathing suit, Linda sitting next to him and the kids were in the pool and Joe said, “Paul, this is Sidney, he is going to be shooting pictures of us while we are here in New Orleans.” And Paul looks up at me and says “Hi Sid, sit down and let me see what you got.” Every sin- gle Beatles album just flashed in front of my face at that moment. From Meet the Beatles to Abbey Road. So I’m sitting there next to Paul McCartney out by the pool and showing him pictures, and he was like “Hey look at Mick Jagger, look at Keith Richards!” I was like “this is not really happening to me. Is this really happening to me?”
I could not believe that So, then Linda pulls a couple of rolls of film out of her purse and says, these are our pho- tos from home and we have no place to de- velop them here do you have a darkroom? I said Sure. She said, “Can you develop these for me and print them?” I said Absolutely. I take the rolls of film home with me and I go into the darkroom, I’m rushing through the process to get all these pictures done, like Paul at home with the kids, Paul in barn with the horses, Paul at the dinner table and I’m rushing back to the hotel so I could have some more face time with the McCartney’s and I get in the elevator and Paul says “Hey Sidney, how ya doing?” Paul is right there in the elevator, and I say “ Hey!” (Laughs) I said to myself, my life could end right this minute, Paul McCartney just said hello to me and called me by my first name and I’m good. He just acknowledged me. I spent several of the next few weeks with them in the studio, I spent night and day with them, they dressed
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