McCartney Times

The Beatles released their eighth studio album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in the summer of 1967. It won instant praise from fans and critics alike and became the band’s most innovative and celebrated albums to date.The Beatles never played a Tucson concert, although Paul McCartney and his band Wings did once in the late 1970s. Tucson, though, has had plenty of Beatles ties since “Sgt. Pepper’s”: Paul McCartney and his wife Linda, who attended the University of Arizona in the early 1960s, bought a sprawling ranch near Reddington Pass in 1979. They visited Tucson frequently throughout the 1980s and ’90s. In 1998, Linda McCartney, surrounded by her husband and four children — three of them with Paul McCartney — died of breast cancer at the ranch. McCartney has long contended that the character of Jo Jo in the Beatles 1970 song “Get Back” was a made up character. But he chose Jo Jo’s Tucson hometown in deference to his then new wife Linda. Ringo Starr and his wife Barbara Bach went through six weeks of rehab and detox for alcoholism in the fall of 1988 at Sierra Tucson. Starr returned in 1992 to lead a star-studded benefit concert for the Sierra Tucson Foundation. George Harrison showed he was a good sport in love and loss when his best bud Eric Clapton married his once best gal and former wife Patti Boyd. Harrison even attended the wedding and party in Tucson in 1979.Contact reporter Cathalena E. Burch at cburch@tucson.com or 573-4642. On Twitter @Starburch

Source: It was 50 years ago; The Beatles and Tucson | Music | tucson.com