McCartney later said in an affidavit that when John, George, and Ringo outvoted him three to one in favor of Klein, it was “the first time in the history of the Beatles that a possible irreconcilable difference had appeared between us.” At the time, music publisher Dick James and his business partner Charles Silver owned nearly 35 percent of the Beatles’ song publishing company, Northern Songs. James’s business relations with the late Brian Epstein dated back to 1963, and the Beatles had made him a fantastically wealthy man. By the late 1960s, however, James had grown anxious about the future worth of Northern Songs. He was put off by the drug culture that the Beatles had become immersed in and by Lennon’s eccentricity. He worried whether the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership would endure. He had also grown to dislike the Beatles personally, no doubt in part because the Beatles plainly despised him. John and Paul regarded Dick James as the worst kind of capitalist pig. He’d never done much of anything on the Beatles’ behalf, they reasoned, and yet he’d managed to become extraordinarily rich off their accomplishments.
It was not until Klein got involved with the Beatles, however, that James finally decided to sell all of his Northern Songs stock to Lew Grade, the media mogul who owned ATV (Associated Television). “James knew of Klein’s propensity for lawsuits and tearing up contracts,” remembered Peter Brown. “This was clearly the time to abandon ship.”
The transaction was carried out abruptly and privately on March 28, 1969, and it left John and Paul in the lurch: James did not even offer them the chance to buy his share of the company that owned their songs. Furthermore, having just acquired 35 percent of Northern Songs, Grade went in hot pursuit of 15.1 percent more—just enough to put him in control. Meanwhile, McCartney and Lennon decided that they wanted to own Northern Songs. Holding the balance of power between Lennon and McCartney and their allies (on the one hand) and Lew Grade (on the other) stood a consortium of brokers and hedge fund investment managers.
In the midst of all this, Klein’s reputation in England took a seismic hit. On April 13, 1969, the Sunday Times printed an investigative report on Klein, “The Toughest Wheeler-Dealer in the Pop Jungle.” The paper attributed Klein’s success to “a startling blend of bluff, sheer determination, and financial agility, together with an instinct for publicity and the ability to lie like a trooper.” It also revealed that he had been involved in no fewer than forty lawsuits, that the SEC was prying into his affairs, and that the Rolling Stones’ North American publishing royalties were paid directly into Klein’s own company, Nanker Phelge USA.
All of this made the remaining Northern Songs shareholders so skittish that Klein was forced to publicly pledge that, should the Beatles win control of the company, he would not join its board or interfere with its management in any way. Nevertheless, after about six months of complicated negotiations and maneuvering, it was Grade who won the controlling share of the Beatles’ publishing company. And if that wasn’t depressing enough to the Beatles, amidst all of this it was revealed that Paul had been secretly buying shares of Northern Songs in his own name; he owned 751,000 shares compared to Lennon’s 644,000. That was flagrantly in violation of a verbal agreement the two had made to keep their shares on equal footing. When Lennon discovered the double-cross, he grew more hostile toward Paul than ever.
Of course, it would be fallacious to say that Klein caused the Beatles’ dissolution. Other factors contributed as well. When the Beatles released the double LP known as The White Album (officially, The Beatles) in November 1968—before any of them had even met Klein—it was clear that they were moving in different artistic directions. The White Album was hugely successful, but people often remarked that it sounded more like a collection of solo projects than a coherent group effort. And it did.
The White Album also indicated that George was rapidly maturing as a songwriter. Nevertheless, John and Paul continually stymied his attempts to take an enhanced role in the group. George became particularly resentful after they turned away his recent material around the very time that Paul was subjecting the group to laborious recordings of some of his corniest songs, like “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” George also felt that Paul had ceased seeking any creative input from the others. A scene in Let It Be captured Harrison’s mood: he and McCartney are seated across from each other, working on the arrangement for “Two of Us,” when Paul makes a suggestion that causes George to snap. “I’ll play whatever you want me to play,” he says through clenched teeth. “Or I won’t play at all, if you don’t want me to play. Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it!”
Paul’s ill-timed jocularity likewise grated on the others. Again, the Let It Be documentary is revealing. McCartney is frequently shown trying to summon up a spirit of mutuality and esprit de corps when it was plainly obvious that nobody else was in the mood. Paul’s chirpiness was particularly annoying to Lennon. And yet John must have realized that he had little ground to stand on, since he had largely absolved himself of any responsibility for the Beatles. When he wasn’t at home snorting heroin, he would frequently stalk around the studio in a volatile mood, shooting people dirty looks or verbally smacking down anyone who dared cross him. Or he would completely disengage from the others. The Beatles would be trying to build a consensus on something important (like “should we perform live again?”) and John would flout his disinterest by staring into space, or doodling in his notebook.
The entire time, John and Yoko subsumed themselves into each other. The Beatles had never before allowed wives or girlfriends in the recording studio, and now Yoko was present at nearly every session. The others did their best to make her feel uncomfortable and de trop, but to no avail. Yoko’s effrontery had no limits, they complained. She was always whispering conspiratorially in John’s ear or sitting imperiously on an amplifier—as if she were supervising the Beatles’ recording sessions. (McCartney: “We were always wondering how to say, ‘Could you get off my amp?’ without interfering with their relationship.”) Worst of all, she would sometimes make comments and suggestions about their music, as if (the audacity is breathtaking) she were now a part of the group. And although Yoko made little effort to get to know the Beatles’ friends and helpmates, she was quick to order them around, as if they were her own personal errand boys.
Yoko also kindled Lennon’s smoldering interests in avant-gardism and political activism, which only further alienated him from the group (and that may have been the point). In November 1968, the couple released Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, a spontaneously recorded experimental record that hardly anyone heard, but everyone talked about: its cover was made from a photograph that showed John and Yoko in the nude, full frontal and hairy (John’s uncircumcised penis and all). Neither of them looked terribly healthy. They must have thought they were making an important artistic statement, perhaps having something to do with innocence, honesty, and vulnerability. But it was scarcely the paradigm buster that John and Yoko imagined it to be. About thirty years later, George said, “What I thought about the sleeve then was the same as I think now. It’s just two not very nice looking bodies, two flabby bodies naked.”
It must have been exhausting, putting up with John and Yoko. Lindsay-Hogg tells an anecdote about filming Let It Be in January 1969—right around the time Lennon brought Allen Klein into the picture. The Beatles had just endured a long and dreary meeting, and as it was drawing to a close, John produced a sound recording that he wanted the others to hear. It was something he and Yoko had made.
He got up and put the cassette into the tape machine and stood beside it as we listened.
The soft murmuring voices did not at first signal their purpose. It was a man and a woman but hard to hear, the microphone having been at a distance. I wondered if the lack of clarity was the point. Were we even meant to understand what was going on, was it a kind of artwork where we would not be able to put the voices into a context, and was context important? I felt perhaps this was something John and Yoko were e
xamining. But then, after a few minutes, it became clear. John and Yoko were making love, with endearments, giggles, heavy breathing, both real and satirical, and the occasional more direct sounds of pleasure reaching for climax, all recorded by the faraway microphone. But there was something innocent about it too, as though they were engaged in a sweet serious game.
John clicked the off button and turned again to look toward the table, his eyebrows quizzical above his round glasses, seemingly genuinely curious about what reaction his little tape would elicit.
However often they’d shared small rooms in Hamburg, whatever they knew of each other’s love and sex lives, this tape seemed to have stopped the other three cold. Perhaps it touched a reserve of residual Northern reticence.
After a palpable silence, Paul said, “Well, that’s an interesting one.”
When Lennon asked the others what they thought, it’s easy to imagine that his mannerisms might have been a bit contrived. Surely, he was dissembling. He wasn’t really interested in their feedback or their critique or their opinion. No, this was just his way of informing the rest of the group that he wasn’t interested in being a Beatle anymore.
• • •
When the Beatles broke up in 1970 they also nixed the tantalizing possibility that they might form some kind of an alliance with the Rolling Stones. However febrile the idea sounds in retrospect, it was once a live possibility. “There was always a ‘movement’ wanting to put the Stones and the Beatles together in any way possible,” Wyman recollected. A couple months after Epstein died, McCartney and Jagger bruited about the idea of merging the two groups’ business interests. Mick even went so far as to have a lawyer register the name “Mother Earth” as a possible moniker for a jointly owned recording studio. Paul was known to muse about how cool it would be to have a heliport on top of their headquarters. A statement from the Beatles’ press office said, “the prospect of some professional tie-up between the Beatles and Stones is very intriguing. What the boys are contemplating is a separate business project for opening up a joint talent center that will build up on other people’s talents, produce and distribute their records.”
In other words, they were talking about collaborating on something a bit like Apple’s record label. Left to their own devices, it’s impossible to know if the Beatles and the Stones would have followed through. But Klein was naturally quite horrified by the possibility of a merger, and on October 17, 1967, he ordered Les Perrin, the Stones’ PR guy, to throw a wet towel over the whole idea. McCartney and Jagger had only had “preparatory conversations of a purely exploratory nature,” Perrin’s statement said. “These conversations have not been resolved and any assumption to the contrary should be considered premature.” A few years later, however, the Stones went on to form their own label, Rolling Stones Records, headed by Marshall Chess and distributed in the US by Atlantic Records. Although the Stones never wound up signing many artists, at the outset they had wanted it to resemble the Apple label, only without all of the grandiosity, chaos, and attendant headaches.
On December 31, 1970, McCartney filed suit against the other three Beatles to dissolve their partnership. Along with almost everyone else, the Rolling Stones were disappointed by the news. No doubt that was partly because they would miss their extraordinary music. In a 1971 interview with Rolling Stone, Keith Richards expressed his gratitude toward the Beatles, as well as his dismay about their demise. “When they went to America, they made it wide open for us,” he said. “We could never have gone there without them. [They were] so fucking good at what they did. If they’d kept it together and realized what they were doing, instead of . . . disintegrating like that in such a tatty way. It’s a shame.”
Then again, Mick and Keith might also have been disappointed that the Beatles parted ways at the very time that the Stones seemed poised to overtake them as the world’s most important band. For about a six-year span in the 1960s, when both groups were churning out records at roughly the same pace, the Beatles’ efforts were generally better appreciated. When the Stones released Beggars Banquet in 1968, however, they showed they were no longer using the Beatles as a template; instead, they were concentrating their energy in their strongest medium: blues-inflected rock. Then in 1969, the Stones showed even more improvement with Let It Bleed. The smartest critics said that Let It Bleed surpassed the Beatles’ Abbey Road. Then in 1971, the Stones—now featuring wunderkind Mick Taylor on guitar (replacing Brian Jones)—put out Sticky Fingers, a thrilling and wide-ranging album with an Andy Warhol cover. The following year they left Mother England for southern France, where they lived an even more decadent and perilous lifestyle than ever before, and yet somehow managed to record Exile on Main St.—perhaps the finest album of their brilliant career. Even if the Beatles had stayed together, some find it hard to imagine that their output in the very early 1970s would have matched what the Stones accomplished. Of course, we’ll never know.
It was in this period that some of the goodwill between the two groups seemed to evaporate. In 1969, Jagger declared, “I don’t really like what the Beatles have done very much.” The White Album, he said, was “ordinary.” Jagger was also horrified that the Beatles had allowed their ceaseless bickering and internal power struggles to become press fodder, and he vowed his group would never devolve into such a tawdry spectacle. When a reporter asked Mick if the Stones would ever break up, he answered, “Nah. But if we did, we wouldn’t be so bitchy about it.
“. . . We’ll remain a functioning group, a touring group, a happy group.”
Lennon shot back in a famously cranky interview with Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner. “I was always very respectful about Mick and the Stones, but he said a lot of tarty things about the Beatles, which I am hurt by, because you know, I can knock the Beatles, but don’t let Mick Jagger knock them.”
But his complaints against Mick ran much deeper than just that: “I would like to just list what we did and what the Stones did two months after, on every fuckin’ album and every fuckin’ thing we did, Mick does exactly the same. He imitates us. And I would like one of you underground people [sic] to point it out, you know, Satanic Majesties is Pepper, ‘We Love You’—it’s the most fuckin’ bullshit—that’s ‘All You Need Is Love.’
“I resent the implication that the Stones are like revolutionaries and the Beatles weren’t,” Lennon continued. “They’re not in the same class, music-wise or power-wise. Never were. And Mick always resented it. I never said anything. I always admired them because I like their funky music and I like their style. I like rock and roll and the direction they took after they got over trying to imitate us.”
Lennon still was not through: “[Mick] is obviously so upset by how big the Beatles are compared to him; he never got over it. Now he’s in his old age [he was twenty-seven] and he is beginning to knock us, you know. And he keeps knocking. I resent it, because even his second fuckin’ record [‘I Wanna Be Your Man’], we wrote it for him.”
In a rarely seen interview, filmed sometime in the mid-’70s when Keith Richards was etiolated from heroin, someone asked the Stones’ guitarist for a response to Lennon’s outburst. Richards didn’t hold back.
“I think John’s, uh, John’s just a little bitter, you know? Always has been, and [he] could never take another band coming up and doing things better than him maybe? Or you know, some things, they could do—when they were together—they could do things better than we could. And there was [sic] other things that we can do better than they can. John Lennon is probably past his golden period. Unless he does something soon, I don’t think anyone’s going to take much notice of what John Lennon says or does. Because musically he hasn’t turned out anything approaching six or seven years ago, what he was doing with the Beatles. None of them are.”
“Not even McCartney,” the interviewer said, with a touch of sadness.
“Not even McCartney,” Keith agreed.
EPILOGUE
At least the Beatles didn’t break up because they starte
d to suck. Fans have long debated what a final “Beatles album” would have sounded like, if only the group had stayed together long enough to record the best songs from everyone’s early solo projects. Naturally, people disagree over which songs would have made the final cut, and the question raises numerous imponderables: Who would have produced the album—George Martin, Phil Spector, or someone else? How much would John and Paul have tried to shape each other’s songs? Would the two of them have finally granted George more space to feature his blossoming talent? Historians tend to shy away from these types of counterfactuals. Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine that if the Beatles had lasted just a short while longer, they might have produced another masterpiece.
For a long time after the Beatles disbanded, the former members dealt with pesky questions and rumors about whether they would reunite. Some have even speculated that on a few occasions the group came tantalizingly close to doing so. But that was probably wishful thinking. The last time all four Beatles even appeared in the same room together was for a business meeting in September 1969. And with each passing year, the odds for a Beatles reunion may well have been dwindling. In late 1980, John Lennon taped an interview with Playboy magazine in which he ridiculed the idea that grown men should even want to carry on in a rock ’n’ roll group. It struck him as a pathetic thing to do. He also lashed out against fans who were still clamoring for a Beatles reunion.
LENNON: They want to hold on to something they never had in the first place. Anybody who claims to have some interest in me as an individual or even as part of the Beatles has absolutely misunderstood everything I’ve ever said if they can’t see why I’m with Yoko [instead of the Beatles]. And if they can’t see that, they don’t see anything. They’re just jacking off to . . . it could be anybody. Mick Jagger or somebody else. Let them go jack off to Mick Jagger, OK? I don’t need it.
Beatles vs. Stones Page 24