by Bob Spitz
The Beatles had reason to be infuriated. As they had hoped, owning NEMS would have given them complete control of their financial interests and access to a much larger chunk of their income. The million pounds that NEMS was prepared to accept from Apple was a pittance compared with what the Beatles would have collected over the next seven years. Besides, the sale put their careers in the hands of a faceless, ruthless corporation whose only interest was the bottom line.
Klein attempted to strong-arm Triumph’s managing director, Leonard Richenberg, into selling the company back to the Beatles on reasonable terms. If not, he warned, they intended to have NEMS make good on large sums of money supposedly owed the Beatles for performances over the past ten years. No exact figure was established, according to Richenberg, but it was suggested that NEMS owed the Beatles far more than the company could ever hope to collect.
Richenberg, however, called Klein’s bluff. He kicked Allen out of his office and refused to meet with the Beatles as long as their acting manager was involved in the negotiations. For his part, Klein answered him threat for threat. He notified EMI in writing that from that time forth, the label was to pay the Beatles’ own merchant bankers “all royalties payable by you directly or indirectly to Beatles and Co. or Apple Corps.” Otherwise, it was implied, the Beatles would fulfill the remainder of their recording contract by singing various versions of “God Save the Queen.” With more than £1.3 million of royalties owed the Beatles, the company was damned no matter who it sided with. The whole sordid matter was referred to the courts.
The next theater of battle developed on the music publishing front. On March 28, during the Amsterdam bed-in, John opened the newspaper to discover that Dick James and his partner, Charles Silver, were selling their controlling interest in Northern Songs to ATV, the entertainment empire owned by Lew Grade, for roughly £1.2 million. John felt ambushed. He knew their songs effectively belonged to a publicly held corporation, which meant they were somewhere out there in the ozone, somewhere beyond his control, but he hadn’t expected a betrayal from what should have been a devoted ally, a grateful ally. The Beatles made Dick James. His entire mini-empire was established on their northern backs.
John’s ire grew steadily as he absorbed the full meaning of the article until by nightfall he was fuming. “I won’t sell!” he bellowed to an audience of tickled journalists. “These are my shares and my songs and I want to keep a bit of the end product.” But what about his partner? reporters wanted to know. Shouldn’t he consult the reluctant Mr. McCartney for his view of the deal? John remonstrated. “I don’t have to ring Paul. I know damn well he feels the same as I do.”
The Beatles felt James had ripped them off. They hated him—and now this. James should have offered Northern Songs to the Beatles at the same price. But he was poised for the quick hit. He was afraid of the Beatles—afraid of their eccentricity, afraid of their instability, afraid of their unpredictability and increasingly weird behavior. He was also tired of taking the Beatles’ abuse, which had grown harsher since Brian’s death. Their behavior, too much of a liability, put his investment at risk, providing even more justification for the sale.
John Eastman spoke for everyone at Apple when he called James “a bastard.” The Beatles were determined not to let Northern Songs slip away. But how to do battle with the Herculean ATV? There was one clever solution: have the Beatles declared “a national treasure”: under those conditions, they should be protected by statute. Hoping to win such designation, they appealed to a group of London city institutions heavily invested in Northern Songs for control of their blocks of shares. It was a wild long shot—but successful. When combined with the Beatles’ own holdings, these pledged shares, totaling about 14 percent, would give them majority interest in the company and a chance at genuine recovery. But as agreements were being signed, John grew suspicious—or paranoid—of his benefactors in the business establishment, whom he proceeded to denounce in the press. “I’m not going to be fucked around by men in suits, sitting on their fat arses in the city,” he fumed. It was a bizarre outburst, and in a somewhat stunned response the shares were promptly withdrawn, thus torpedoing the deal.
Throughout April and early May, the war for Northern Songs raged on between the Beatles, ATV, and a consortium of investors who rushed into the deal at the last minute, hoping to play spoiler. Meanwhile, the Beatles had their hands full on other fronts. There was still internal conflict over who would handle their business affairs—Allen Klein or the Eastmans—and hostilities between all the parties escalated as the legal consequences sharpened.
John, George, and Ringo were adamant: Klein was their man; Paul was just as adamant: anyone but Klein. “Paul was getting more and more uptight until [he] wouldn’t speak to us,” John recalled. He told the other three: “Speak to my lawyer. I don’t want to speak about business anymore,” which John interpreted as “I’m going to drag my feet and try and fuck you.”
“We had great arguments with Paul,” Ringo remembered, but none that compared with a confrontation that ultimately determined Klein’s fate.
On the night of May 9, 1969, the Beatles were booked into Olympic Sound for a recording session that had been ongoing since mid-April. In the midst of such protracted turmoil, the band managed to agree that making music helped clear the atmosphere, and they were laying down basic tracks for what would eventually become Abbey Road. Since the beginning, they had loosely structured “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” “Oh! Darling,” “Octopus’s Garden,” “Something,” and “You Never Give Me Your Money,” all of which would be reworked throughout the summer. On this night, however, they were due to polish the forthcoming Get Back LP under George Martin’s direction when Paul was confronted with an ultimatum. John, Ringo, and George wanted his signature on Klein’s three-year management contract—right away. Klein was outside, waiting for it to be hand delivered.
In essence, Paul had already agreed to the representation, but he hated like hell to formalize it. Now the contract, rolled loosely in his hand, made it official. He couldn’t do it; he couldn’t put his name on it. The fee to Klein—20 percent across the board—was too rich, Paul told them. “He’ll take fifteen percent.” This last-minute obstacle enraged the other Beatles. “You’re just stalling,” they complained. Paul insisted: “No, I’m working for us. We’re a big act—the Beatles. He’ll take fifteen percent.”
They went back and forth over the percentages, neither side budging from its position, until Paul threw up his hands. It was growing late, a Friday evening. “We could easily do this on Monday. Let’s do our session instead,” he proposed. The others wouldn’t hear of it. Voices were raised, threats leveled. The hotter tempers got, the further Paul withdrew. Finally, he’d heard enough: he was waiting until Monday, at which time his lawyer would be present. For the others, that was it. “Oh, fuck off!” they bellowed, before storming out of the studio.
Over the next several weeks the Beatles not only aggressively pushed for a solution that would give them control of the company but, clearly acting with their merchant banker’s blessing, waged a public campaign against ATV, asking undecided shareholders to reject the conglomerate’s offer. John and Paul, realizing that they were vulnerable to the takeover, appeared almost daily in the press, where, to build public support, they painted themselves as helpless victims of corporate rapacity. They promised to fight on, to turn back the repugnant opposition, the haters of music and all that was good.
The Beatles raised the stakes by pledging their own shares in the company, as well as those held by Pattie Harrison, and Suba Films (a division of Apple that had produced A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, and Yellow Submarine), as collateral against a loan from Henry Ansbacher and Company strong enough to beat back ATV’s bid. Even Allen Klein stepped up, adding his 145,000 shares of MGM stock to the war chest. It was a powerful countermeasure—John referred to their gambit as playing “Monopoly with real money.”
But on the advice of John Eastman, who felt
“there was no point in putting out cash to get control of the company,” Paul refused to commit his shares as part of the collateral package, touching off what one source called “a monumental row.” Paul obviously assumed—Eastman had probably led him to assume—that ATV would ultimately reconsider its position, give up, and sell its 35 percent stake to the Beatles rather than risk losing Paul’s and John’s services. In any case, Paul believed that no matter what happened, there would always be plenty of income from those songs regardless of ownership; so secure was he in this belief that he hadn’t even consulted John before pulling the plug. It was a tremendous mistake. He came off as disunited, antagonistic, and high-handed. John’s, George’s, and Ringo’s patience had just about run out. Despite their entreaties, Paul continued to refuse to sign the agreement with Allen Klein. And now he’d bailed out on them with ATV.
“Paul actually stopped coming into the office,” recalls Peter Brown. “Once Klein took charge, it soured things for Paul and, for a time, even the others wanted nothing to do with him.” John and Yoko saw it as an opening and rushed to fill the void, demanding “the best office in the building,” the room Ron Kass had recently vacated. The once-elegant space, decorated in an array of expensive white Italian furniture, white television console, and an oversize chrome-and-leather desk, became the headquarters for their new venture, Bag Productions, formed exclusively to promote an exuberant line of John and Yoko vehicles. The building became an “ever-changing John and Yoko exhibition.” The couple plunged ahead, launching one crazy project after another, hoping to make up in shock value for what they lacked in direction.
For their first press conference in Vienna, John and Yoko lay obscured inside a large white sack, singing and humming, promoting a process they called “total communication.” A second album of experimental recordings—Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions—was released with another controversial cover (grainy photos depicting Yoko’s hospital stay on one side, their drug arraignment on the other); aside from the usual discordant gibberish, one track contained a four-minute segment of the heartbeat of the baby Yoko miscarried. Derek Taylor, in classic understatement, described their behavior as “very fast living in the mad lane.” They filmed hours of self-indulgent documentaries, gobbled down drugs, staged loony press conferences (usually to announce a scheme whose “premise” was ostensibly to promote world peace but wound up promoting a Yoko Ono happening), and scheduled more bed-ins. John jabbered incessantly in a thickening Liverpool brogue, but incoherently, like a lunatic, and his appearance reflected it; he looked gaunt, sickly, from the heroin he ingested, his hair long, unkempt, and stringy. Variety reported that two producers were pursuing him to star in a thirteen-part television series, Jesus of Nazareth, a report later discredited, though he certainly looked the part. (Months later he actually was approached by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice to play the title role in Jesus Christ Superstar, but they lost their interest when he said: “If I do it, I would want Yoko Ono to play Mary.”) Loyal fans, to say nothing of his closest friends, found him bizarre. “I don’t know what people think of John at the moment,” Ringo said, puzzled. “Maureen was in Liverpool and I know a lot of people there are saying that he has gone a bit crazy…. [T]hey think he has gone off his head.”
In Barry Miles’s biography, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, Paul attributes much of John’s behavior to the heroin and “paranoia,” which he believed was covered up well by John’s so-called genius. But the paranoia didn’t lead to the antics. Within days after the first bed-in, John announced their next move, Acorns for Peace: sending envelopes “containing two acorns to the head of state of every country in the world” so they could plant trees instead of bombs. Later in the year they would take over billboards in eleven world cities, declaring “The War Is Over.” Then, on April 22 John assembled a small gathering of friends and reporters on the roof of Savile Row and officially changed his middle name from Winston, which he hated, to Ono. Yoko insisted that it was politically motivated, based on a conversation they had after their wedding. “How would you like it if you had to change your name upon marriage to Mr. John Ono?” she demanded of him. Admitting it was “unfair,” John declared: “I do not feel patriotic enough to keep the name [Winston, after Churchill]. I am John Ono Lennon.”
John was having so much fun stirring up trouble, manipulating the press with Yoko, that nothing, not even money and legal hassles, was important enough to distract him. Occasionally, when Allen Klein managed to corral his attention, John dealt with matters that affected the Beatles’ well-being; once, at a point when the negotiations for control of Northern Songs were going down the tubes, he even attended regular meetings with his Liverpool bandmates. But they belonged to the past, and he rarely socialized with them anymore.
As the Beatles stumbled toward summer, there was still no consensus on a manager, and the prospects for hammering out an agreement—any agreement—seemed bleak. Even so, Allen Klein negotiated a new long-term contract with EMI that gave the Beatles an impressive 25 percent royalty on their albums, paid directly to Apple. With this commitment from the label and infused with newfound enthusiasm, Paul persuaded the others to return to Abbey Road to continue work on a new studio album.
Whether John, George, and Ringo were inclined to record with Paul, they recognized the importance of putting some product in the pipeline. The tapes from earlier in the year that would eventually become Let It Be languished in the can, abandoned, a victim of haste and sloppy execution. “[They] were so lousy and so bad,” according to John—“twenty-nine hours of tape… twenty takes of everything”—that “none of us would go near them…. None of us could face remixing them; it was [a] terrifying [prospect].” “It was laying [sic] dormant and so we decided, ‘Let’s make a good album again,’ ” George recalled.
A good album. He obviously meant with carefully crafted songs and diligent production, both hallmarks of the Beatles’ legacy. Either of those conditions, however, would require a top-flight producer—or a referee. Paul phoned George Martin to inquire whether he’d be available, or even willing, to make a Beatles album “like we used to.” The request, although routine, caught Martin off guard. Considering the way they were arguing, to say nothing of the way he’d been ignominiously shunted aside for the Let It Be sessions, Martin assumed he’d worked his last with the Beatles. Still, no one excited, challenged, or delivered for him like the boys. Would he do it? Indeed, in a heartbeat, but… “Only if you let me produce it the way we used to,” he told Paul. John also had to agree, he insisted, but Paul assured him their decision was unanimous.
John was actually psyched to record. When the vast snarl of red tape that had been occupying so much of the past five months finally began to unravel, the drive to make music was so fierce that he couldn’t wait for the other Beatles. Yoko had exhorted him repeatedly to “get it down,” arguing that he didn’t need Paul, George, or Ringo to validate his talent. He was brimming with material, real edgy stuff. Pages of lyrics were strewn conspicuously on a coffee table in his house, their imaginative stanzas and middle eights a constant reminder of his personal output. But Yoko was only partly right. In a pinch, John still relied on Paul to polish a song with potential, as he had with “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” which he’d written while on his honeymoon in Paris. On the evening of April 14 only Paul was available (George was in the States; Ringo was preoccupied filming The Magic Christian), and ready to rock, the two estranged mates, working like master craftsmen, recorded and mixed the entire song in a fast-paced, productive seven-hour session at Abbey Road. John handled all guitar parts, while Paul filled out the rhythm track, adding piano, bass, and drums, and the two men harmonized beautifully on the chorus, as though they’d been doing it all their lives (which, of course, they had), in a way that truly exemplified Beatlesque.
John had also recorded the anthemic “Give Peace a Chance” in a makeshift hotel-room studio staged at a bed-in for peace in Montreal. His original plan had bee
n to get to the United States, where an entourage consisting of Yoko, Ringo, Maureen, Derek Taylor, and his wife, Joan, Terry Southern, Peter Sellers, and Denis O’Dell would pull off a doozy of a press event intended to protest the Vietnam War. On May 16, however, as they were about to set sail from Southampton on the newly christened QE2, John was turned back at dock, having been denied an entry visa by U.S. Customs as an “inadmissible immigrant” based on his drug conviction in December. Declassified internal FBI memos reveal that J. Edgar Hoover had long had his eye on John, as had Richard Nixon and a number of American conservative bureaucrats who feared the Beatles’ influence in their vocal opposition to the war. This was their petty revenge.
Now John approached the forthcoming session with great enthusiasm. To a music journalist, during a rare moment of détente, he confessed that songwriting was “something that gets in your blood” and forced him to put aside old conflicts. “I think I could probably write about thirty songs a day,” he bragged in the course of the interview. “As it is, I probably average about twelve a night. Paul, too—he’s mad on it…. I’ve got things going around in my head right now, and as soon as I leave here I’m going round to Paul’s place and we’ll sit down and start [to] work.”
In fact, he was taking Paul the rudiments of “Because,” which he’d sketched out only earlier that afternoon. As for his inspiration: “Yoko was playing some classical bit [on the piano], and I said, ‘play that backwards,’ and we had a tune.” According to Paul, he recognized the melody’s debt to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, identifying Yoko’s influence from lyrical themes lifted “straight out of Grapefruit.” Even so, it was a gorgeous reinterpretation—“one of the most beautiful things we’ve ever done,” George recalled—with three-part harmonies that were as sweet and tight as anything the Beatles ever attempted.