by Bob Spitz
“But the Beatle thing,” he admitted, “is over.”
[III]
In late August 1969, John, Paul, George, and Ringo sold their remaining shares in NEMS Enterprises, officially ending all ties to the company they had joined in January 1962. Then, on September 25 they finally lost the yearlong battle with ATV for control of their Northern Songs catalogue; Paul and John held on to about 30 percent of their songs, but the takeover signaled that the identity they had fought so dearly to preserve was slipping from their hands. Impatient to divest themselves of the equity, they sold their remaining shares in Northern Songs to a reluctant ATV board based on Lew Grade’s recommendation that “the songs in Northern will live on forever.”
With Northern Songs off the table, John, reeling from shock, finally expressed his wish to leave the Beatles. “I told Allen I was leaving” in September, he explained, but Klein warned him against announcing it publicly. “He didn’t want me to tell Paul even.” But telling Paul was the least of his worries. On the verge of negotiating a new contract with EMI designed to give the Beatles a larger cut of the wholesale price of record sales, Klein wanted nothing to rock the boat. Any outburst from John would surely threaten that deal. Klein had already failed in his attempts to buy back NEMS and gain control of Northern Songs, as promised. It would justify his worth to the Beatles—and, more important, to Paul, his lone adversary—to close the EMI agreement fast and without a hitch.
John may have held off any announcement of a breakup as a favor to Klein, but his actions spoke louder than words. If he couldn’t leave the Beatles outright, he’d simply form another band. Accepting an invitation to perform at the Toronto Rock ’n Roll Revival Festival on September 13 alongside “all the great rockers” who had influenced the Beatles—Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, and Bo Diddley—John cobbled together a group of sidemen that included Klaus Voormann, Eric Clapton, and Alan White and set out for Canada as the Plastic Ono Band. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t even rehearsed together. Everyone knew the old standards he’d selected: “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Dizzy Miss Lizzie,” and “Money,” along with fairly straightforward rockers like “Yer Blues.” There was also a new song he’d just written called “Cold Turkey.” “We tried to rehearse on the plane,” John recalled, “but it was impossible.” Over the Atlantic, he and Clapton huddled in the galley behind the last row of seats, attempting to go over key signatures and arrangements. Clapton remembered: “We picked out chords on the guitar, which you couldn’t hear because we had nowhere to plug in, and, of course, Alan didn’t have his drums on the plane with him.” It also didn’t help matters that both John and Clapton were strung out, fighting off waves of nausea from withdrawal symptoms.
The show itself, although workmanlike—Clapton generously referred to it as “a glorified jam session”—was significant if for no other reason than John’s own stunning observation: “It was the first gig I have played since the Beatles stopped doing live performances in 1966.” Three years away from the stage! It seemed preposterous, inconceivable. There was nothing quite as satisfying, for John Lennon, as playing rock ’n roll in front of a live audience. Although terrified before going onstage—eyewitnesses report him being “really uptight, edgy, and nervous,” and John said, “I just threw up for hours until I went on”—he felt liberated, turned on by the experience. “I can’t remember when I had such a good time,” he exclaimed. “I don’t care who I have to play with, I’m going back to playing rock on stage!”
Be that as it may, he didn’t intend to play with any of the Beatles again. On the way back to London, he reiterated his desire to leave the group, going so far as to announce it on the plane to a stunned, if disbelieving, entourage. In separate conversations with Klaus Voormann and Eric Clapton, John confided his plans privately and offered them roles in his new group. The two musicians, perhaps out of uncertainty, chose not to reveal this fact to anyone else. But once back in London, John couldn’t slow his momentum. He had to tell the other Beatles. But how? His assistant, Anthony Fawcett, recalled in a memoir that “it was not an easy decision…. I watched him agonize for days over it—irritable, chain-smoking, and impossible to be around, skulking in his bedroom, losing himself in sleep or drugging himself with television.” Clearly John was conflicted, alternately loathing the group identity and trying to preserve its vaunted existence. The thought of pulling the plug on the Beatles for good terrified him.
In October, during a meeting at the Apple offices at which the Beatles had gathered to sign their new Capitol Records contract, John and Paul went head-to-head over an offer for a TV special. Paul pressed to accept it; John flatly refused. Neither man would give an inch; as their tempers flared, John broke the angry impasse with an unexpected outburst, blurting out his intention to seek a divorce. According to John, Paul, extremely distressed, asked, “What do you mean?” to which he responded: “I mean the group is over. I’m leaving.”
The others, for the most part, may have written this off to another of John’s overheated threats. George admitted dismissing it as bluster at the time. “Everybody had tried to leave” the band at one time or another, he recalled, “so it was nothing new.” But John believed “they knew it was for real—unlike Ringo and George’s previous threats to leave.” Recalled Paul, “Everyone blanched except John, who colored a little, and said, ‘It’s rather exciting. It’s like I remember telling Cynthia I wanted a divorce.’ ”
Moments after the blowout, a colleague working downstairs in his private office recalled how “John burst into the room, red in the face and fuming with rage. ‘That’s it—it’s all over!’ he shouted.” It seemed long overdue, but so damn incredible, so final.
And in a way, as Ringo noted, it felt like “a relief.” The way he recalled it, “we knew it was [a] good [decision],” interpreting John’s dismissal favorably to mean leaving the Beatles intact as a corporate entity, while breaking up the band. The constant sniping and infighting among “the lads” had disturbed Ringo’s gentle soul. But still the breakup was “traumatic,” and he spent time immediately after the climactic meeting sitting in his garden, “wondering what the hell to do with [his] life.” George, on the other hand, wasted no time in regret. “I wanted out myself,” he recalled. “I could see a much better time ahead being by myself, away from the band. It had ceased to be fun, and it was time to get out of it.”
To Paul’s relief, he and Allen Klein persuaded John not to announce the breakup of the Beatles publicly. Klein, having only just gotten his hands on the Beatles, stood to lose the sweet flow of cash they were about to put into the pipeline. It had taken him a long time, longer than anyone realized, to gain control of their empire. A breakup now would throw their affairs into chaos and ultimately derail his management agenda. As for Paul, his entire world, “since I’d been seventeen,” he acknowledged, had been wrapped up in the group. He had so much invested in it, emotionally and personally. He loved the music they made, loved the recognition and adulation. And privately he held out hope that John would eventually come around. Announcing that the Beatles had broken up added too much of an obstacle. John knew Paul was trying to buy more time, but for whatever it was worth, John agreed to keep the breakup private. Nothing, however, altered his decision.
Whether or not Paul felt encouraged by John’s compromise, he was deeply disturbed by subsequent events. In the days that followed, everyone went his own way, which only heightened the feeling that the Beatles had indeed disbanded. He lapsed into a depression—“a withdrawal,” he called it in retrospect—that swung between two emotional extremes. Some days he really missed the band, the guys and their horseplay, but there were also times he despised them. “Anger, deep, deep anger sets in,” he recalled, “… with yourself, number one, and with everything in the world, number two.” He felt cheated, abused. “And justifiably so because I was being screwed by my mates.”
It must have seemed like it at the time. The other Beatles had betrayed hi
m, Paul concluded, abandoned the dream they had shared. There was nothing he could do to restore their enthusiasm. The others seemed determined to go their own ways. For a few weeks they avoided one another, convinced that it was necessary to ending the nagging dependency. Any business was left to the accountants and lawyers. But Paul’s life and his work were inextricably bound, and it was impossible to separate himself from the Beatles. He tried everything to distract himself from the overwhelming loss. There was a line of artists vying for his production skills. He listened to their tapes, even met with Mary Hopkin and Badfinger to discuss other projects. But nothing seemed to capture his immediate interest. He couldn’t even get himself out of bed in the morning. “Then, if I did get up, I had a drink,” he recalled. “Straight out of bed.” He felt inadequate, empty, convinced that “I’d outlived my usefulness.” The Beatles had given his life meaning. As he felt the anchor uproot and drift away, his aimlessness knew no bounds. After three weeks of bumping around between the house and the office in a daze, he grabbed Linda and Heather and headed to the farm in Scotland.
This sudden retreat did nothing to staunch the rumors of Paul’s death, which were still swirling in the press and expounded on by a legion of conspiracy theorists determined to prove the grand hoax. Nor did it solve his own deepening malaise. The emptiness and anger continued to consume him. At some point his anger turned to despair. He spent hours, days, weeks, trying to make sense of the breakup, lashing out at anyone who attempted to draw him out of the funk. When he could motivate himself at all, instead of writing music, he spent long hours outside “just planting trees” or helping Linda renovate the old farmhouse, making it suitable for a family.
It never occurred to Paul just how much he missed John. More than anyone else, John had been his friend for ten years, to say nothing of his collaborator, his sidekick, his shadow. Not only had they played music together, they’d hung out together, dreamed together, fucked together, become famous together. Grown up together. “We were each other’s intimates,” he acquiesced. By the barest accounts, the relationship had given him “security, warmth, humor, wit, money, fame…. ” At first Paul held out hope that the separation was temporary, admitting that “nobody”—especially himself—“quite knew if it was just one of John’s little flings and that maybe he was going to feel the pinch in a week’s time and say, ‘I was only kidding.’ ” But as the weeks, then months, ticked away, Paul finally realized it wasn’t a joke. Convinced that John was now abandoning him, increasingly jealous of his relationship with Yoko—and Allen Klein—Paul atoned for the loss with anger. He was angry at the Beatles, but even angrier at John. It took another six months for him to admit the extent of his heartbreak. “John’s in love with Yoko,” Paul confessed to a reporter from the Evening Standard, “and he’s no longer in love with the other three of us.” But for all intents and purposes, he might as well have been talking about himself.
Without John, Paul finally admitted, the Beatles were indeed a thing of the past. That did not mean that their music wouldn’t endure, that it wouldn’t resonate; however, the band as they knew it was finished. The immensity of it flattened him like a speeding car.
Then, one day just after Christmas in 1969, Paul emerged from the foggy wreck. He had a Studer four-track installed at his house in St. John’s Wood and, in an attempt to “get it together,” began doing the only thing he knew how to: making a new record. Only this time, he was making it by himself.
As far as Paul knew, even as he began this novel adventure, the other three Beatles had already moved on to other projects that expressed their newfound independence. Ringo segued from his brief self-doubt right into making an album of standards—“songs Ringo likes and his parents love,” according to an Apple press release—called Sentimental Journey with the assistance of George Martin, while George produced records on Apple for Billy Preston and Doris Troy. In his spare time, George even played a few dates as part of Delaney and Bonnie’s funk band, shuffling onstage anonymously and without fanfare, which rekindled his enthusiasm for performing. There were no expectations other than playing music that really rocked—and, better yet, no screaming, ducking, police escorts, helicopters, and running for one’s life. The experience proved so satisfying that it led George to admit: “I’d like to do it with the Beatles, but not on the old scale, that’s the only drag.” His preference, he said, would be to model it loosely on “Delaney and Bonnie, with… a few more singers and a few trumpets, saxes, organ, and all that.”
John was another story altogether. By late fall his and Yoko’s life together had become a traveling carnival of put-ons and misbehavior, rhetoric, and activism. No opportunity to grab headlines, no matter how inane or scandalous, went unexplored. After Yoko suffered yet another miscarriage that nearly took her life, the couple went on a tear of public misadventure that stretched out into the following year. To set the scene, they staged a four-hour retrospective of their self-produced films at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Under cover of darkness, a “frequently perplexed audience” watched unending footage from Two Virgins, John and Yoko’s Honeymoon, Rape, and Self-Portrait, the latter of which featured John “smiling beatifically while bird, traffic, and airline noises are heard on the soundtrack.” A week later they announced plans to help fund and launch the Peace, a 570-ton Dutch freighter converted into a pirate radio station that was to anchor outside the territorial waters of Israel and Egypt, from where it would broadcast news, political commentary, and music. And following that, they released The Wedding Album, a lavishly decorated box set of mementos from their marriage ceremony along with an LP that contained one whole side of John and Yoko screaming each other’s name.
It didn’t stop there. Despite John’s concerns that the Beatles were going broke, he gave away Dor Inis, an island off County Mayo in Ireland that he bought as an investment in 1966, offering it free to a group of “dropouts and nonconformists” called the London Street Commune. He and Yoko “donated” tens of thousands of pounds to the Black House, the London headquarters of the militant black power movement, via his drug dealer Michael X.
Then, in perhaps the most unexpected and bizarre twist, John sent his chauffeur, Les Anthony, to Buckingham Palace to return his Order of the British Empire to the Queen, accompanied by a flippant note typed on Bag Productions stationery that read: “I am returning the M.B.E. in protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts.” British citizens were outraged by his gesture, which they considered a public relations gimmick at the most, and at the very least, disrespectful. A diabolical-looking picture of John and Yoko, smugly holding an identical letter sent to Prime Minister Wilson that appeared in every major newspaper the next day, only boosted public scorn. John told a BBC correspondent that he’d been “mulling it over for a few years.” In an eerily delivered rejoinder, he muttered: “Really shouldn’t have taken it. Felt I had sold out. I must get rid of it. I kept saying, ‘I must get rid of it.’ So I did. Wanted to get rid of it by 1970 anyway.” He said he had been waiting for “an event to tie up with it,” and while he sided with neither Nigeria nor Biafra, he was “beginning to be ashamed of being British.”
By saying that, John had finally crossed the line. Even George Harrison admitted the public now viewed John as “a lunatic or something.” If he wasn’t off his rocker, as many suspected, he had lost their unconditional respect. The Daily Mirror went so far as to name John “Clown of the Year” for 1969.
In January 1970 John recorded a new Plastic Ono Band single, “Instant Karma,” with Phil Spector overseeing the production. An all-out rocker with a great hook and sharp percussive accents playing against John’s raw, agitated vocal, Spector layered it with his trademark “wall of sound” to give the track a heavy, haunting swell, then “mixed [it] instantly,” practically on the spot, so as not to lose the incredible energy. It was a powerful piece of music-making strai
ght out of John’s Cavern and Kaiserkeller handbag, which to his ears sounded “fantastic… like there were fifty people playing.” It was honest, thrashing, concussive rock ’n roll. In fact, it was exactly the sound he’d described to George Martin when they set out to record Let It Be.
Perhaps there was still hope for that as well. John’s enthusiasm over the single led Allen Klein to hire Spector to remix the tapes of Let It Be. “None of us could face remixing them,” John recalled. They’d been moldering in the can, untouched, for almost a year. Letting Spector have a pass at them, “to tidy up some of the tracks,” so to speak, might salvage the abandoned session. George and Ringo voiced no objection, and since Paul hadn’t signed the management agreement, they saw no reason to seek his approval. In fact, Paul knew nothing about it until a remixed test pressing of “The Long and Winding Road,” which Allen Klein chose as the first single, arrived at his house along with a note from Klein explaining that the changes were necessary. “I couldn’t believe it,” Paul told Ray Connolly in an interview published shortly thereafter in the Evening Standard. It was the same acoustic track he’d written and sung on, but “with harps, horns, an orchestra, and women’s choir added.” Someone had come in and tampered with his music—the first time that had ever happened.
Paul was offended by it and enraged, not only by the remix but that it had been done behind his back. He threatened to sue Klein until John Eastman advised him that it was pointless. To make matters worse, Paul was informed in a handwritten memo from John and George that his solo album, which had been given an April 17 release date, would have to be pushed back to June 4 to make room for Let It Be and its accompanying documentary film, which United Artists was releasing the following month. “It’s stupid for Apple to put out two big albums within 7 days of each other,” they wrote him, “so we sent a letter to EMI telling them to hold your release date…. It’s nothing personal.”