by Tim Riley
Had it worked, they might have pulled off a major PR reversal—but the other three Beatles hadn’t counted on McCartney’s plan: he had been recording his own material and booked some London studios with engineers Alan Parsons and Chris Thomas to finish a solo project. Even more brazenly, he intended to release it within weeks of Spector’s Let It Be; the feature film was slated for late spring release. As the first Beatles record produced without George Martin, Spector’s Let It Be incensed both Martin and McCartney. When he finally emerged from Scotland to give Spector’s package a listen, McCartney spat nails in a letter to Klein, reprinted in the Anthology:
He addresses Allen Klein with deeply sarcastic formality and tears apart Spector’s arrangement: “In future no one will be allowed to add to or subtract from . . . one of my songs without my permission . . .” He then gives Klein explicit instructions on how to fix the overwrought production. McCartney insists he had considered orchestrating the track, but decided against it. As for the new version, he gives explicit instructions: reduce volume for strings, horns, voices, and all added noises; bring up lead vocal and Beatle instrumentation; completely remove the harp and reinsert piano statement at the end.
He signed it bluntly: “Don’t ever do it again.”9
Because McCartney steadfastly refused to answer his messages or attend Apple meetings, Ringo was sent to his Cavendish Avenue home to discuss putting off Paul’s solo debut. After all, McCartney had an interest in the Let It Be project: it would give them all solvency and options, and for the good of Apple, they hoped the genial Ringo could persuade McCartney to be reasonable and follow Lennon’s lead from the previous fall: put off talk about a breakup until the band’s new record had a chance to perform.
They all underestimated McCartney’s determination. In one of the biggest confrontations yet, with Ringo as proxy, McCartney let loose all his rage at Spector’s mixing “Long and Winding Road” without his input, and Klein’s bulldozer style, by many accounts shouting Ringo from his front door. Starr returned to the others and suggested they simply gulp hard and go along with both albums coming out during the same season. In some ways, this accidental decision worked in everybody’s favor.
In some UK promo copies of McCartney, Paul conducted a coy self-interview where he blandly let slip he would probably never work with the others again. If this wasn’t intended as a bombshell, McCartney made sure its effect got felt. On April 10, the press materials for McCartney spurred the Daily Mail headline: PAUL IS QUITTING THE BEATLES. Quoting the “self-interview,” Apple’s Derek Taylor dealt with a new deluge of phone calls. “They do not want to split up,” said Taylor’s official statement, “but the present rift seems to be part of their growing up. . . . At the moment they seem to cramp each other’s styles. Paul has called a halt to The Beatles’ activities. They could be dormant for years.”10
Lennon couldn’t believe McCartney’s gall, and how the press ate it up. After all, McCartney hadn’t put on his own gallery shows and made private art films and concocted zany media events from his honeymoon suite or appeared with an impromptu band at a Canadian festival with new solo material. Lennon had already jumped off the deck in public not once but innumerable times without his bandmates—they had even refused to record “Cold Turkey”—and yet here came Paul, announcing, “the Beatles are over.” McCartney even took journalist Ray Connolly out to lunch and tried to backpedal the whole thing, which created more furor. All of Lennon’s attempts to upstage McCartney were reversed in a single day.
“I wasn’t angry, I was just—‘shit!’ ” Lennon told Jann Wenner later:
He’s a good PR man, Paul. I mean he’s about the best in the world, probably. He really does a job. I wasn’t angry. We were all hurt that he didn’t tell us what he was going to do. I think he claims that he didn’t mean that to happen, but that’s bullshit. He called me in the afternoon of that day and said, “I’m doing what you and Yoko were doing.” . . . And I said, “Good.” Because that time last year, they were all looking at us as if it was strange trying to make a life together and doing all the things and being fab, fat myths. So he rang me up on that day and said, “I’m doing what you and Yoko are doing and putting out an album. And I’m leaving the group too,” he said. I said, “Good.” I was feeling a little strange, because he was saying it this time—a year later.11
From Lennon’s point of view, McCartney’s maneuvers seemed hypocritical and self-serving. How could anybody buy the idea that McCartney was breaking up the group when it was Lennon who had been actively releasing independent work ever since the spring of 1968? Did McCartney’s perpetual good cheer, even when twisting the knife, detract attention from his guile?
When reporters went around the horn compiling quotes from the others, Lennon simply said, “You can say I said jokingly, ‘He didn’t quit, he was fired.’ ” John and Yoko issued a hoax press release announcing: “They have both entered the London clinic for a dual sex-change operation.” As usual, Ringo Starr uttered the best break-up quote: “This is all news to me.”12
“I remember Lennon being very upset when McCartney made the papers with his announcement of the breakup,” columnist Ray Connolly recalls:
He had told me months before that he was leaving the Beatles, and I wrestled with that private confession terribly, wondering whether I should print it or not, knowing it was a huge story. But Lennon had asked me not to because of his contractual obligations. Now he tore me down for sitting on it, and I was stupefied. “But John,” I said, “you told me not to break that story . . .” He had no hesitation: “You’re the journalist,” he said derisively. Of course he would have been upset no matter what I did, but he took a certain pleasure in blaming me for McCartney’s ingenious PR play.13
McCartney’s guile wasn’t all public relations. Instead of cowering in the shadow of the great Beatle monuments, McCartney simply acted as if the Beatles were a Saturday-morning cartoon, and as if leaving the band and making a little solo record were of no consequence. This is what Scousers refer to as “cheek,” a giant flip-off couched in a smile, the sort of brutal reduction Lennon most admired in McCartney’s ego. He had already handed off a hit record to Badfinger (“Come and Get It”), Apple’s Scottish protégés, and McCartney contained a potential monster hit, “Maybe I’m Amazed”—a Beatle track from top to bottom, even though his bass playing paled compared to his fluid work on Abbey Road. It was as if McCartney hadn’t just quit the Beatles, he had quit the bass, which betrayed far humbler musical ambitions. McCartney seemed to orchestrate the whole charade—a soft-core solo tour de force, a press eruption, a looming legal standoff—with a churlish virtuosity, which gave John and Yoko pause: Lennon’s former partner had played a hand that would be very tough to beat.
In the midst of McCartney’s end-of-Beatles campaign, the gap between leftist activism in America and Britain widened. In Britain, this took shape around an underground newspaper, Oz, which invited schoolkids to help edit one issue. The May 1970 issue included an article which parodied Rupert Bear, created by one Vivian Berger, who pasted the head of the cartoon character onto an X-rated cartoon by Robert Crumb. (Coincidentally, Paul McCartney had just bought the rights to Rupert the Bear to develop as a children’s project.) Unfortunately, like a lot of censors before and since, the Obscene Publications Squad lacked humor, and since the Oz editorial offices had already been raided several times (mostly for photos of shirtless females), this time they made their case.
Oz had just been through a debilitating Australian trial around similar issues; now its British publication became the counterculture cause of 1970, accused of “conspiracy to corrupt public morals” and fined out of operational costs. Alongside Barry Miles’s International Times being hauled into court for carrying a classified ad with “homosexual content,” this defeat dragged antiestablishment morale to new lows. (In 1971, Lennon took a look at the situation and coughed up one of his better political songs, “Do the Oz,” to help the paper defray its legal costs.)
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While British authorities derailed youth culture’s momentum by chasing obscenities, American protests had long since darkened. The Vietnam War entered a prolonged stalemate as President Nixon played a cynic’s game of outmaneuvering his critics: “Peace with honor” became double-talk for bombing Laos and Cambodia, stretching Cold War “domino theory” beyond all reason. In this netherworld of war logic, one had to “destroy villages to save them.” It took a Pentagon insider, Daniel Ellsberg, to leak the military’s history as the Pentagon Papers, which pulled the thread from the official narrative. Ellsberg emerged as a counterculture hero, an insider willing to stand up to corruption. Student unrest became a weekly headline, to the point where Governor Reagan of California proclaimed, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.”14 He got his bloodbath. Later that month, a radical leftist SDS faction formed the Weather Underground and plotted a bombing campaign on government buildings in New York, California, Washington, Maryland, and Michigan.
The courts finally acquitted the Chicago Seven (including Tom Hayden, the author of the Port Huron Statement, and Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin) in February 1970, but the charges of “crossing state lines” were upheld until overturned on yet another appeal. At the end of April, the Vietnam War intensified. On the advice of Henry Kissinger, Nixon began bombing Cambodia to stop the supply lines and safe harbor of the Vietcong, a war crime that would render Henry Kissinger’s 1973 Nobel Peace Prize a moral affront. On May 4, four college students were killed and nine others wounded by the Ohio National Guard, ordered to push back against protestors at Kent State University. The cruel thud of police clubs at 1968’s Democratic National Convention had turned fatal: America’s own soldiers were now gunning down peaceful, unarmed civilians on a state campus. Two more students were killed at Jackson State University in Mississippi on May 14. 1968’s political assassinations still haunted the American mind. How many more nonviolent marches would it take to end this immoral war? How many more students would be killed expressing their constitutionally protected right to peaceful dissent?
A new protest song appeared that summer: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Ohio”—snarling guitars driving a plodding, mournful groove that owed a lot to the barren outrage on Lennon’s “Cold Turkey”: “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming / We’re finally on our own . . .” By May 9, when one hundred thousand antiwar protestors marched on Washington, the mood had turned bitter and antagonistic. Only now they had a new song to sing: Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” still credited to Lennon and McCartney. Lennon counted it among his most cherished accomplishments and hoped to write more songs in the same vein; perhaps he began to realize how unforgiving the verse was for large crowds, with prolix, run-on stanzas that vexed even solo singers.
When Let It Be showed up in movie theaters over the summer of 1970, it captured this frayed cultural hangover like a bookend to A Hard Day’s Night’s Beatlemania only six years before. In the public’s mind, early distinctions took shape between the album and its feature-length film, which did poor business up against Woodstock (which ultimately grossed more than $50 million). The same figures who once snubbed the grim businessman in the opening sequence of A Hard Day’s Night now invited their audience into rehearsal dysfunction. What kind of insolence was this, inverting showbiz tradition by allowing their huge worldwide audience to eavesdrop on these dreary, end-of-the-line scrimmages? Only those in the know deciphered the January 1969 filming date; this out-of-order anomaly made an awkward appendage to the Abbey Road songs that were still on the radio. Let It Be slumped in theaters like the first countercultural dinosaur.
Lennon saw the movie in San Francisco with Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner: “There were a couple of jam sessions in Let It Be, with Yoko and The Beatles playing, but they never got in the movie, of course. I understand it all now. . . . That film was set up by Paul for Paul. That’s one of the main reasons The Beatles ended. I can’t speak for George, but I pretty damn well know, we got fed up of being sidemen for Paul.” Lennon’s voice collapses as he spills these secrets, knowing how vengeful they’ll sound: “After Brian died, that’s what began to happen. . . . The camera work was set up to show Paul and not to show anybody else. That’s how I felt about it. And on top of that, the people that cut it, cut it as ‘Paul is God’ and we’re just lying around there. And that’s what I felt. . . . There were some shots of Yoko and me that had been just chopped out of the film for no other reason than the people were orientated toward Engelbert Humperdinck.”15
There are two comic shots of Ringo peeping from behind his limousine in front of Apple and feigning shock when Heather, Linda’s daughter, hits one of his drums. But Ringo’s balefully detached expression, especially during the Twickenham sequence, rivals Lennon’s quietude.
The closing rooftop set was almost too successful—it didn’t make any sense coming after all the stops and starts and a wearied McCartney looking up at the camera on “Let It Be” and “The Long and Winding Road.” By the time fans screened the movie, the breakup was public knowledge, and it looked like a leftover diary of defeat. Here were the Beatles falling apart, and the whole myth of sixties utopianism seemed to crumble with them. That final sequence on the roof, the briefest reprise of past glories, closed the movie with an ironic freeze-frame, as if trying to stop the inevitable.
Here was another chance to argue about cultural identity and how Americans had done the most to bring down Britain’s pride and joy. British critics in particular lashed Phil Spector for the applied histrionics on the Let It Be album. But Spector had no trouble pushing back: “Most of the reviews were written by English people, picked up by the American Press, and the English were a bit resentful of an American, I don’t care who it was, an American coming in, taking over. They don’t know that it was no favor to me to give me George Martin’s job, because I don’t consider myself in the same situation or league.” As far as Spector was concerned, the band’s regular producer, George Martin, had failed (even though the Beatles deliberately kept him out of this loop). Seen from his point of view, Spector did everybody a favor with a rescue job. Besides, Spector didn’t consider Martin, or anybody else, in his league at all: “I don’t consider him with me. He’s somewhere else. He’s an arranger, that’s all. As for Let It Be, he had left it in deplorable condition, and it was not satisfactory to any of them, they did not want it out as it was. . . . If my name hadn’t been on the album, there wouldn’t have been all that.”16 (That’s like a composer calling a piano player a mere “instrumentalist.” From Spector’s imperious vantage, an “arranger” is a lowly hired hand.)
The Glyn Johns version of Let It Be (which included Lennon’s “Don’t Let Me Down” and McCartney’s “Teddy Boy”) circulated widely among fans who preferred the material without the commercial gloss. But the noise around Spector’s work is a red herring: all he did was buff up rough tracks—another producer might have made different choices, but Spector’s are perfectly respectable as far as it goes. Let It Be became a Rorschach test. Most of the British sharks felt Spector never deserved to get his hands on Beatle tapes in the first place. Glyn Johns’s mix has achieved the status of “lost classic,” although its dashed-off brilliance lacks sonic definition. Spector has the dubious distinction of overseeing the one album not produced by George Martin, the one that elevates all Martin’s other Beatle achievements.
Unlike Abbey Road, which sported Harrison’s hit single “Something” and the cathartic finale of “Carry That Weight” (“Boy . . . you’re gonna carry that weight a long time . . .”) and “The End,” Let It Be sounded unfinished and underwhelming, even though Spector dressed up songs where he could, roping in “Across the Universe” from early 1968. Most famously, he added strings, harp, and female chorus to “The Long and Winding Road,” forever alienating McCartney. McCartney seemed not as upset about the actual arrangement as the simple fact that he was not given veto power before its release. His lifelong gripes to rework the record would cu
lminate with his release of Let It Be . . . Naked in 2003.
McCartney’s obsession with this track seems misplaced: the strings on “Across the Universe” brought no Lennon complaints, and Spector’s lush arrangement had plenty of precedent; George Martin added orchestra and chorus wash to Lennon’s “Good Night,” and McCartney’s “Hey Jude” had strings, brass, and choir. If any Beatle song deserved to be smothered in glucose, it would be “The Long and Winding Road.” McCartney complaining about Spector’s arrangement is a bit like Cher complaining about the tabloids—at a certain level, this material begs to be exploited.
Spector didn’t sit by for McCartney’s abuse, either: “Paul took the Grammy for it, though,” Spector says. “He went and picked the Grammy up, for the album that he didn’t want out, supposedly that we used to ruin him artistically. . . . What did he pick the Grammy up for? Silly.”17
Like The White Album, Let It Be grouped together songs that stressed individuality. Understated ensemble fireworks punched everything up a level, especially on “Dig a Pony,” “Get Back,” and the quickened pulse of “One After 909,” the 1963 song they revived for a nostalgic romp, which bathed the live set in youthful afterglow. Watching the rehearsal sequences during the first two-thirds of the film, there’s no predicting the emotional rush “One After 909” gave the band on the rooftop, and in many ways it said as much about their shared history and commitment to the music as even “Don’t Let Me Down,” which had already been sliced off the album for the B side to the “Get Back” single. Let It Be follows The White Album by three months chronologically and several eons perceptually. To have dumped thirty songs on the market in November, only to regroup with a new chest of material for January’s cameras, argues for the Beatles’ intense work ethic. On songs like “Let It Be,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” and “Two of Us,” Abbey Road’s twilight emotional colors come into view.