The perambulation around European capitals was not over yet. Five months earlier, in the aftermath of Yoko’s miscarriage, she and John had coproduced and codirected their most ambitious film to date. This was a seventy-five-minute piece entitled Rape and featuring twenty-one-year-old Hungarian actress Eva Majlata. The rapist was a television camera, which followed Majlata’s character everywhere with the same remorselessness that such devices once had stalked the Beatles—and now did the newlywed Lennons—almost hounding her to her death in front of a truck, finally cornering her in an apartment, impervious to her whimpers for mercy. The film had been commissioned by Austrian television and went out immediately after the Amsterdam bed-in, on March 31.
That same evening, John and Yoko held a press conference in the Red Room of Vienna’s famous Hotel Sacher. Once again, the media found them hidden inside a sack. Despite a chorus of pleas, John declined to come out, explaining “This is a Bag Event—total communication.” Some questioners asked if such reticence wasn’t a little odd for a man who had just invited the world’s press into his bedroom. “We’re showing how all of us are exposed and under pressure in the contemporary world,” he replied. “This isn’t just about the Beatles. What’s happening to this girl is happening in Vietnam, Biafra, everywhere.” The bag-in generated considerably more seriousness than had the bed-in. Rape was subsequently shown at the prestigious Montreux Festival and received a glowing review in the London Evening Standard from the German-born critic Willi Frischauer, who wrote that “it does for the age of television what Franz Kafka’s The Trial did for the age of totalitarianism.”
Unfettered though John might now seem, he was still tied to the Beatles’ annual life cycle, which carried on under Apple just as it had under EMI. Spring meant a new single, just ahead of an album that would set the tone of the summer for millions. But the Get Back project was in no state to meet either demand. When the sessions in Apple’s basement studio had finally ground to a halt, none of the band—not even Paul—could face sifting through the thirty-odd hours of tape with George Martin to find twelve serviceable tracks. Instead, the whole lot were turned over to Glyn Johns, their engineer at Twickenham Studios, to put into the best shape he could.
The Beatles single released on April 11 offered two of the songs they had played in that reluctant alfresco concert on Apple’s roof. Neither gave any hint of a band reaching for a simpler, more “honest” style. The one actually called “Get Back” was a catchy but unmeaningful McCartney A-side about characters in a pastiche American West—Jojo and Sweet Loretta Martin. On the B-side, John’s “Don’t Let Me Down” spoke directly to Yoko with heart-whole commitment of an extra marriage vow: “I’m in love for the first time…It’s a love that lasts forever / it’s a love that has no past.”
On April 22, the Apple roof was pressed into service again for a ceremony reaffirming his commitment to Yoko. Up there among the Mayfair chimneys and burbling pigeons, in front of a Commissioner for Oaths, he discarded his war-baby middle name of Winston and became John Ono Lennon to her Yoko Ono Lennon. Afterward, he noted with pleasure that between them they now mustered nine letter o’s—his lifelong lucky number. “The simplest way of saying what Yoko is to me and what I am to her is that before we met we were half a person. You know, there’s no myth about people being half and the other half being in the sky or in Heaven or something or the other side of the universe or the mirror-image bit…We were two halves and together we are a whole.”
Another Lennon song was on the drawing board that had even less to do with getting back to where he once belonged. His lyrics always been a kind of journalism, drawn as much from passing headlines as from the heart and soul. Now he decided to file his own version of the story that had been eating up newsprint this past month. The result was “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” a piece of reportage laced with satire and double entendre, structured like a short story and with dialogue like a play. It retraced the couple’s European odyssey, from “standing in the dock at Southampton” to flying into Paris and Peter Brown’s discovery that they could “get married in Gibraltar, near Spain”; from the Amsterdam Hilton and “talking in our bed for a week” to Vienna and eating chocolate cake (the Hotel Sacher’s famous, decidedly nonmacrobiotic Sacher torte) “in a bag.” A chorus of pursuers and persecutors played walk-on parts: immigration officers, hostile questioners at the bed-in, newspaper commentators muttering snidely that “She’s gone to his head” and “They look just like two gurus in drag.”
The middle eight featured a metaphysical quotation from Yoko, here cozily depicted as “the wife,” while the chorus of “Christ! You know it ain’t easy!” and the prediction that “They’re gonna crucify me” overtly dared the religious zealots of three years earlier to rise up again.
None of it had anything to do with the other Beatles, yet John still looked for no other collaborators to bring his combined travelogue, PR job, and cry of protest to fruition in the studio. At that point in mid-April, however, George had gone abroad; Ringo was making a film, The Magic Christian; and only Paul was in London. Despite the rift between them over business, John asked him to help finish and record “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” And, despite Paul’s lack of engagement in the subject matter, it was an appeal he could not refuse. John came to his house in St. John’s Wood; they discussed the song while walking in the garden, then went around the corner to Abbey Road Studios to cut it. They settled on a laid-back, almost Latin beat, dividing the roles of the two absentee Beatles between them—John on lead guitar as well as lead vocal, Paul on drums as well as bass, piano, and maracas. The track was finished in a single session amid much good-humored mutual joshing about their surrogate roles. “Go a bit faster, Ringo,” John called out at one point. “Okay, George,” Paul replied.
Thus, the song that represented John’s first break for freedom ended up being credited to Lennon and McCartney and released in the United Kingdom as an extra springtime Beatles single on May 30, while “Get Back” was still number one. Thus, thanks to pairing with an indifferent George Harrison song, “Old Brown Shoe,” the truant had his first A-side with the band in two years, and a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. And thus it seemed that in his escapades with beds and bags, the other three stood as solidly behind him as ever.
Lennon and McCartney’s truce over “The Ballad of John and Yoko” ended well before the single came out. Early in May, John went to Paul, backed by George and Ringo, and asked for his signature alongside theirs on the management contract Allen Klein had drawn up. Paul conceded defeat but, reluctant to let Klein reel them in with such apparent ease, suggested trying to reduce his commission from the 20 percent he was asking. The deputation said there was no time for further argument, as Klein had to fly back to New York that same day and present a fully ratified contract to his “board.” Paul saw this as just a ruse to pressure them: Klein was a virtual one-man band in his company, ABKCO Industries, and, anyway, they were just coming up to a weekend, so nothing needed be done until the following Monday. There was a heated argument, which ended with Paul saying “Fuck off” and the other three walking out.
The following week, discussions reopened on a calmer note. Paul accepted the majority decision to hire Klein, with the proviso that his 20 percent would not extend to the Beatles’ earnings from Capitol Records in America. When he negotiated a new royalty rate with Capitol, later that year, he would receive 20 percent only on the increase. Even now, Paul did not actually sign the management agreement. Nor did he acknowledge that Klein had any personal sway over him as an individual and—emphatically not—as a musician. For such advice and guidance as he sought in these areas, he continued to turn to his new father-in-law and brother-in-law, Lee and John Eastman, and, increasingly, to his wife, Linda.
The immediate effect was to make him lose all interest in the organization he above all had wanted to bring into existence and had worked so hard, on so many fronts, to maintain. His pride hurt more than his smiley face ever let on
, he retreated with Linda and little Heather behind the walls of his London house or to his Scottish farm near the Mull of Kintyre.
With all opposition now removed, Klein went through Apple like a Rottweiler through a basket of newborn puppies, slashing costs, axing idealistic or unproductive projects like the Apple school, the Apple Foundation for the Arts, Apple Films, and Apple Electronics, firing all staff members he deemed nonessential, creating an atmosphere of terror and insecurity that was normal to American business but still almost unknown in Britain. That many marked for termination considered themselves personal friends of John or George, as much as large-salaried and expense-accounted employees, made no difference. Apple Records’ top man, Ron Kass, was instantly let go, even though his division represented the company’s one undoubted commercial success. The head of A&R, Peter Asher, resigned out of loyalty to Kass, taking with him a soon-to-be monster moneymaker, James Taylor. Concerned that, here and elsewhere, Klein seemed to be throwing out the baby with the bathwater, Neil Aspinall protested to John, but even he received short shrift. Back came a telegram that seemed to take little account of Neil’s longtime loyalty and selflessness. “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” it said.
Klein’s powers turned out to have some limits. Derek Taylor, the Apple press officer, was too much beloved of John—never mind the press—for Klein to try to unseat him or seriously curb the daily carnival that went on in his office. And Aspinall soon found that his years of loyalty were not as undervalued as he had thought. “One day in the boardroom, Klein tried to make me sign a contract while John and Yoko were sitting at the table,” he would remember, “I’d never had any kind of written contract with the Beatles, and I wasn’t going to start now. I got up and started dodging round the table and Klein chased me, waving this piece of paper. When he got to John and Yoko, John put out a hand and stopped him. ‘Look at all the trouble I got into, signing bits of paper.’ John said. ‘He’s not stupid. Leave Neil alone!’”
Ron Kass’s departure had left vacant an elegant, high-ceilinged office on the ground floor, looking into Savile Row. This now became a self-contained headquarters for John and Yoko where the pair would develop their own film and musical projects and continue the momentum of their recent European travels. They formed a company named Bag Productions, hired their own art adviser, a critic and exhibition organizer named Anthony Fawcett, and announced open house.
After the bed-in, every pacifist organization in the world was avid for John’s suggestions on how to publicize their message with similar effect. Among those who requested his input was the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), whose mass rallies and marches on nuclear bases had made headlines in the late fifties, but had since greatly declined in newsworthiness. John suggested a promotional strategy that certainly would have won it more attention: “You’ve got women in your movement. Sell sex for peace.” He received countless invitations to address conferences and seminars, but declined them all because formal speechmaking had never been his bag, and also on the perfectly sincere grounds that “I’m a shy guy under all this madness.”
Apple’s staff were expected to work for Bag Productions also, carrying out assignments that sometimes made Beatle whims seem almost routine. Picking up the theme of their Coventry Cathedral exhibit, John and Yoko decided to present every major world leader with two acorns to bury as a symbol of peace. Since this was springtime and oak trees do not yield their crop until autumn, a nationwide search for secondhand acorns had to be made. Leading philosophers and thinkers, among them the nonogenarian Bertrand Russell, had to be contacted and asked for support. “Think of it as a pop song,” John said. “You’ve got to have a great catchphrase and the catchphrase is ‘Acorns for peace.’”
He was aware of the jokes and cruel nicknames that Yoko inspired around Apple and, on his angrier days, believed the whole house to be colluding to undermine their projects. On May 9, they released a second album of sonic experimentation, Unfinished Music No. 3—Life with the Lions. This nod to John’s childhood radio favorite, Life with the Lyons, was the only lighthearted touch. The contents included a recording of his gig with Yoko at Cambridge in February, and the brief heartbeat of the baby they had lost four months earlier. The front cover showed Yoko in bed at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, with John next to her on the floor where he had slept. The back-cover image was a press photograph of them being mobbed outside Marylebone Magistrates Court after John’s drug conviction.
Life with the Lions did not come out on Apple but on Zapple, a subsidiary label dedicated to poetry-and prose-reading, run by the Indica Gallery’s Barry Miles and miraculously still unmauled by Klein. It clearly was never going to get much radio play beyond John Peel’s esoteric Night Ride program on the BBC. Nonetheless, John was furious with Apple’s promotion department for not doing more to plug it.
He might have merged his name with Yoko’s, mingling letter o’s like red corpuscles, but in the public’s mind it was still indivisibly joined to that of his former creative other half. The Lennon-McCartney song catalog was the richest storehouse of universally adored music ever created. Northern Songs, the public company that controlled it, ranked with Shell Oil, Ford Motors, and the other most enduring chart-toppers on the London Stock Exchange. Behind that simple, rain-on-cobblestones name were 129 Lennon-McCartney song copyrights, many now ranked as classics alongside the best of Cole Porter or Irving Berlin.
Northern was still run by Dick James, the small-beer publisher who had set it up around John and Paul after a single hearing of “Please Please Me” in 1962. So long as Lennon gave an appearance of being as house-trained as McCartney, the future of Northern Songs was rosy. But once John’s individuality asserted itself and a threat to that golden stream of hits was perceived, the share price began to wobble alarmingly. In March 1969, Dick James’s nerves could stand no more and, without any advance warning, he sold his 23 percent stake for £1 million to the television mogul Lew Grade, whose ATV corporation already owned 12 percent. With 35 percent now under their belt, Grade and ATV had announced a £9.5 million bid for the rest of the company.
The news had come when John was in bed in Amsterdam and Paul enjoying a more conventional honeymoon in America. Despite their disagreement on other issues, they were united in fury against James for having sold them down the river without even the courtesy of a warning. The managerial duel between John Eastman and Allen Klein at this point was still far from resolved, but once again Klein took the initiative, putting forward a strategy for Apple to snatch Northern Songs from Lew Grade’s open jaws. At present, John and Paul each owned 15 percent of the company, and another token 1.6 percent was held jointly by George and Ringo. Klein’s plan was to offer £2 million for the 20 percent that would secure them a hair’s-breadth majority stake. The money was to come from a firm of merchant bankers on collateral including John’s entire holding in Northern, 650,000 shares. While these arrangements were going forward, it emerged that, on Eastman’s advice, Paul had quietly increased his own holding to 750,000 shares, which would form no part of the collateral. John was vociferously upset by what he saw as Paul’s underhanded behavior and selfishness.
By mid-May, it seemed as if they were going to win. Apple had found enough allies to secure that vital extra 20 percent, most crucially a City consortium that currently held 14 percent. A delicate deal was in place, stipulating among other things that Klein would have no part in the new Northern’s management structure and that John and Paul would extend their creative involvement beyond the present expiration date of 1973. Then, at a crucial meeting with the consortium’s representatives, John lost his temper and announced he was “sick of being fucked around by men in suits, sitting on their fat arses in the City.” The offended suits instantly switched allegiance to ATV, Lew Grade gained control of Northern Songs, and Lennon-McCartney’s catalog became a pass-the-parcel prize that would be handed down the decades, increasing stupendously in value each time it was unwrapped.
Between M
ay 26 and June 2, John and Yoko staged a second bed-in. They originally planned to do it in America on a mission that would also include visiting the country’s new Republican president, Richard Nixon, and presenting him with two acorns to bury for peace. The rest of that painstakingly gathered crop had been put into little boxes, labeled with the names of other world leaders, such as China’s Mao Tse-tung and the Soviet Union’s Leonid Brezhnev, who were likewise to be invited to forget warfare and oppression, choose a plot of earth, unwrap their acorns, pick up a spade, and get digging. John wanted to take the boxes to the United Nations building in New York where the emissaries of every leader, except China’s, could be found “in a pile.” Those that could not be handed over personally at the UN would be mailed.
The original plan was for him and Yoko to cross the Atlantic on the Cunard company’s brand-new Queen Elizabeth II liner, with Ringo and Maureen Starr, Derek and Joan Taylor, Peter Sellers, and the writer Terry Southern as fellow voyagers. En route to Southampton to board the QE2, John was called on his car telephone and told that, because of his drug conviction, he had been refused an American visa. As Joan Taylor remembers, he shrugged philosophically and told Derek and her to go on without him, little guessing how much more of this was to come.
Even then, he suspected the reason was not his—very mild—drug offense so much as his widely quoted criticism of the Vietnam War and, still more pertinently, the fact that he’d written a song entitled “Revolution.” At the time, other British pop stars with drug convictions were being granted American visas with little or no problem, most recently the folksinger Donovan. “The States are afraid we’re going to go over there and rouse the kids up, which we don’t intend to do at all,” he insisted. “We intend to calm it down, you know. I think the States needs us, and we can help.”
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