Paul McCartney's Red Wings decal: Meet the man behind it

It’s a pretty safe bet that ice hockey wasn’t a big part of Paul McCartney’s world growing up in Liverpool.

But for decades, the superstar musician has carried a bit of the Detroit Red Wings with him around the world — thanks to the efforts of an audacious college kid who went years unaware of what he’d wrought.

Fans are likely to see it Wednesday night when McCartney plays his first-ever Joe Louis Arena show: the bright Red Wings decal on McCartney’s classic Epiphone Texan acoustic guitar. It’s become an iconic feature on an instrument with a rich history. This was the guitar, after all, used by McCartney in the studio and onstage for “Yesterday” during the Beatles years.

And it all seems to go back to a young Olympia Stadium employee named Mike Kudzia, who says he gave the decal to a somewhat bewildered McCartney on May 7, 1976, the first night of a weekend doubleheader by the ex-Beatle and his band Wings.

After years of murky details about the sticker’s origins, Kudzia was tracked down last week by the Free Press with an assist from the Ilitch organization, which took over the Red Wings in 1982. Now a 61-year-old marketing veteran and grandfather in Clinton Township, Kudzia worked at Olympia in the ’70s while a student at Eastern Michigan University, hauling concessions, preparing rooms for hockey executives and other odd jobs.

He wasn’t scheduled to work that fateful Friday night — indeed, Kudzia says he was en route to his parents’ house when he swung by Olympia to grab his latest paycheck. He decided to stick around for the show.

“Our bosses would allow us to come in even if we weren’t scheduled,” he says. “So long as you put on jeans and a work shirt and kept out of the way, they’d let you stay and watch a concert.”

As an arena employee, Kudzia was accustomed to the occasional celebrity encounter, from Gordie Howe to George Harrison to Elvis Presley. On this night, he situated himself by the stage near Linda McCartney and her keyboard, taking in the concert, when inspiration struck.

“I’m thinking, ‘Wait, there’s Paul McCartney and Wings — and we’re at the Red Wings’ stadium,’” he says. “As a young guy, you’re always looking for a chance to meet a music star. So I went and got a Red Wings sticker (from a nearby merchandise booth) and thought, ‘I’ll go back and present this to him.’”

But Kudzia wasn’t on the clock, and getting backstage after the show took some maneuvering.

“The security was fairly tight, but as an employee there were certain things you could say and do to get around to certain places,” he recalls with a laugh. “Back then I would have gotten fired for telling you this, but I dropped a few names and got myself backstage.”

Olympia bosses had always warned staffers not to bother the talent, "because they didn’t want you running up like some starry eyed groupie,” Kudzia says. But he plowed on, decal in hand, managing to intercept McCartney and an assistant in a hallway that featured a painted Red Wings logo.

Kudzia says he handed the sticker to McCartney and suggested he attach it to a guitar.

“It was like I hit him off-balance with the whole thing. They didn’t know what to think about it, kind of looking at me half-goofy,” Kudzia says. “I said, ‘Here you are, Paul McCartney and Wings. And here are the Red Wings, right on the wall!’ They just looked at me like, ‘Whatever.’"

But clearly it clicked: At some point, McCartney indeed attached the decal to his legendary Epiphone. He recounted the situation in an online Q-&-A in 2014:

“We were on a Wings tour quite a while ago and when we played Detroit somebody gave me a Red Wings sticker, which I liked the look of,” McCartney said, “so I stuck it on my guitar and I have kept it there ever since.”

But for most of his life, Kudzia didn’t have a clue. He had graduated, gotten married, had two kids. And while he was quick to reminisce with friends about his youthful brushes with celebrity, he'd long since quit keeping up with music.

In July 2011, Kudzia was browsing the Facebook page of a friend who had just attended McCartney’s show at Comerica Park. There sat her snapshot of McCartney onstage with his acoustic guitar — complete with Red Wings logo.

“I’m going, ‘Holy (crap), he did it,’” Kudzia says. “It was a shock to me. I couldn’t believe it. After all those years.”

Hitting the web, Kudzia quickly realized that McCartney’s Red Wings sticker had become iconic — so intimately associated with his guitar that Epiphone has included it with some of its McCartney-branded special editions.

“I was reading all these stories on the Internet about where it came from: ‘He got it this way, he got it that way,’” Kudzia says. “Every site had a different answer. I’m just sitting there laughing.”

Alas for Red Wings fans, the decal got a neighbor in 2010, when McCartney added a Pittsburgh Penguins sticker at the behest of the city’s mayor. (In last year’s Q-&-A, McCartney said the Red Wings sticker had proved “a little awkward” in certain cities.) Michigan ultimately gets the upper hand: McCartney’s Epiphone Texan, for which he likely paid about $200 in late 1964, was manufactured at Gibson Guitar’s Kalamazoo factory.

Kudzia hasn’t been to a McCartney show since that night at Olympia. But he does still have the tour T-shirt he bought there — and one heck of a story to go with it.

“I look back now and think, why the hell did I do that, how did I get away with it?” he says. “Here I was, just some long-haired college kid telling Paul McCartney what to do.”

Contact Brian McCollum: 313-223-4450 or bmccollum@freepress.com.

Paul McCartney

8 p.m. Wed.

Joe Louis Arena

600 Civic Center, Detroit

313-396-7000

$26.50-$250