Paul McCartney Recalls the Time He Couldn’t Say No to Smoking Weed With New Friend Fela Kuti: ‘I Totally Got Blasted’

Paul McCartney and Fela Kuti sparked a friendship in the early 1970s by, well, sparking up some marijuana — but before that, they also extinguished a misunderstanding that arose when the Beatles alum’s band Wings traveled to Nigeria to work on new music.

In a clip from the newly announced “Man on the Run” installment of Audible’s Words + Music series — which Billboard is exclusively sharing Thursday (March 19) — McCartney recalls smoothing things over with the Afrobeats innovator. According to the Brit, Kuti had heard that he and his bandmates were planning to appropriate African music for the album that would become 1973’s Band on the Run.

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“The first thing I saw was a newspaper thing: ‘Fela Kuti accuses Paul McCartney of stealing Black man’s music,’” McCartney tells filmmaker Morgan Neville, who conducted the interview for Audible. “So I went, ‘Oh no.’ 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 went on to recall how Kuti — who died in 1997 at the age of 58 — then visited Wings in the studio, bringing along a “big entourage” and his “many wives.”

“I started playing him some of the stuff we’d been working on, which was nothing like his thing,” McCartney added. “I persuaded him, and so we became really good friends.”

That friendship would soon lead to a memorable hangout between the two musical legends. “I wasn’t going to smoke any pot, but [Kuti] gave some to [Cream and Blind Faith drummer] Ginger Baker,” McCartney recalled of the trip. “And he said, ‘Ginger Baker: The only man I know never refused to smoke.’ So I thought, ‘Aw sh–, 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.” The only thing that calmed McCartney down: Kuti and his band’s music, which brought him to tears that night.

The full three-hour interview with McCartney about his life and career, as well as exclusive performances, are now available on Audible. The episode serves as a follow-up to Prime Video’s Man on the Run documentary, which premiered in February.

“I don’t normally spend a lot of time looking back, but I was flattered when Morgan said he was interested in this period,” McCartney said in a statement, referencing the era of Band on the Run, the title track of which would reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. “The first bit of Wings was quite hard work and not very rewarding, but eventually we got some songs under our belts that were hits.”

“Morgan got me to think about stuff I hadn’t thought about for a long time,” he added. “He was asking all the right questions and I was happy to be transported back.”

Past Words + Music installments have featured George Clinton, John Legend, James Taylor, Patti Smith, Snoop Dogg, Eddie Vedder, Yo-Yo Ma, Alanis Morissette, Usher, Smokey Robinson, Rufus Wainwright, Mariah Carey, Elvis Costello, Sting and more.

Watch McCartney share his memories with Fela Kuti above.

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