by Peter Brown
Q: Do you foresee a time when Lennon-McCartney become an active songwriting partnership again?
A: No.
Q: Do you miss the Beatles and George Martin? Was there a moment, e.g., when you thought: ‘Wish Ringo was here for this break’?
A: No.
On April 10 Paul announced to the newspapers what John had wanted to announce all along. He was leaving the Beatles “because of personal, business, and musical differences.”
6
Through the autumn of 1970, Paul and the Eastmans continued to make polite inquiries as to whether the other Beatles were agreeable to letting Paul out of his partnership contracts. The major problem with the dissolution of the partnership was that an enormous tax burden would have to be paid in the near future if all the Beatles’ funds were divided up. The Eastmans weren’t sure how much this tax burden would be, because Klein was allegedly obstructing the Eastmans’ access to the account books. “I don’t give a damn about tax considerations,” Paul said. “I don’t want to be an ABKCO-managed industry. It was weird, my albums would come out saying ‘An ABKCO Company’ and [Klein] wasn’t even my manager.”
One day, rather offhandedly, Paul said to Klein, “Either let me out of my contracts or I’ll sue you.” Klein, who had been sued over forty times before, just laughed at him.
Paul once again tried to talk to each of the Beatles individually, but John and George didn’t care to listen. He invited Ringo to his house on Cavendish Avenue again to play arbiter. “Look,” Paul said, “it’s not the rest of the group, it’s just that I don’t want to have anything to do with Klein. It’s Klein that’s the problem.”
“It’s not just Klein,” Ringo told him. “It’s the Eastmans, too.” Then Linda started to cry hysterically, so Ringo shut up. Every time Ringo tried to speak, defending Klein, Linda would dissolve in tears. Thus frustrated in his discussions, the meeting ended without any solution.
Next, Paul tried writing a long letter to John, asking him to agree to a formal dissolution. All he got in return was a cartoon drawing from John with the words “How and Why?” in a bubble.
Paul wrote back, “By signing a piece of paper agreeing to dissolve the Apple partnership? Why? Because we don’t have a partnership anymore.”
John responded with a postcard. “Get Well Soon,” it said. “Get the other signatures and I will think about it.”
For most of November and December Paul sat around his house in St. John’s Wood mulling over whether or not he had the heart to sue the other Beatles. It was Klein he really wanted, but the only way to get at him was through the others. He kept thinking, “I can’t do this. I can’t sue my pals. It would ruin my reputation. I’ll be characterized as the villain. I can’t possibly sue the others...”
But he did.
And he did it on New Year’s Eve. He had John, George, and Ringo each served with writs on December 31, 1970, and started proceedings in the High Court Chancery Division.
I handed in my resignation that same day. Paul begged me not to do it, because I was his only sympathetic contact at Apple, but I wasn’t able to be much help to him anyway. My departure had been coming for a long time. Robert Stigwood had asked me to join his now very successful company, and Klein had long wanted me out of the way. Klein would have tried to fire me and Neil Aspinall if he thought the Beatles would have stood for it, as they had with Alistair Taylor; but we were clearly invaluable to the running of the company, and Neil and I were their last links with Liverpool. In any event, things had become so ugly at Apple over the last year that I was looking for a way out myself. Handing in my resignation was really only a formality.
Neil Aspinall was lost after the lawsuit began. Neil without the Beatles was unthinkable. He seemed like a man who was falling from a great height without ever reaching bottom. At first he stopped coming into the office, saying he was on vacation. He had married Suzie Orenstein, an attractive, petite American girl, in 1968 and was the father of three, so there was much to keep him busy at home. But Neil was soon bored with family life, and he started visiting one or another of the Beatles at their homes almost daily. He settled in for a time at George’s place, making 16 mm experimental movies and eventually set himself to the task of editing together thousands of feet of documentary footage on the Beatles that he had gathered over the years, most of it never before seen by the public. It was a pathetic project, Neil standing over an editing machine all day, watching his youth roll by on a small screen. The documentary took years to finish and has never been seen by anyone outside of Neil’s immediate circle of friends.
Neil was never taken off salary. Deservedly, too, for although John, Paul, George, and Ringo would deny it, he was as much a Beatle as any of them. And now that it was over, the four others survived intact, as personalities and as stars; Neil Aspinall lived in limbo as an executive of Apple, which is now just a moribund record label, in existence only to collect the substantial royalties from the never-ending sale of old Beatles albums. As Neil put it, “I am the custodian of the graveyard.”
The court trial itself began on January 10, 1971, and lasted for nine days. Paul was the only one to show up in court, winning a two-shilling bet with a courtroom attendant who insisted that John and Yoko would be there too, not wanting to miss a chance to have it out with Paul in public. But the three others were represented only by affidavits. These affidavits were read aloud in court, the details of which became the next day’s headlines. Some of the less soiled of the Beatles’ dirty laundry was thus washed in public, including the Twickenham Studio tensions and Paul throwing Ringo out of his house.
Paul’s lawyers, who were very well prepared by the Eastmans, took the position that Allen Klein was unscrupulous and they feared for Paul’s interests. They roasted Klein in the process of the trial, bringing testimony to the court that Klein had recently been convicted of ten charges of tax fraud in the United States. The court was urged to appoint a receiver and to freeze the funds.
John, George, Ringo, and Klein’s lawyers had a different story; evidence was introduced that Klein himself had drawn only £150,000 commission from the group since he joined them, a nominal sum indeed when it was disclosed that the Beatles’ earnings had increased by nine million pounds in the previous nineteen months. In fact, Klein had doubled the Beatles’ record royalties of the last eight and a half years. This, it was pointed out, did not include the vast income from John’s and Paul’s songwriting royalties.
On March 10, the high court appointed Mr. J. D. Spooner as receiver of the Beatles’ assets. As a group, at least, Allen Klein no longer represented the Beatles, but he still represented John, George, and Ringo. As large sums of money began to accrue to the receiver, both sides frantically tried to figure out a way to unfreeze them. One major problem, as usual, was the tax. A large tax would have to be paid almost immediately, and John, George, and Ringo wanted Paul to sign a personal indemnification against it. The Eastmans wouldn’t hear of it, and so the money sat.
What followed was a barrage of mean and vitriolic interviews. If Beatles fans were disillusioned by the nastiness of the trial, John and Paul proceeded to destroy any respect for them that might have been left. The most notable interview of this period was John’s 30,000 word “Working Class Hero” interview with Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, in which the Beatles’ breakup was discussed with any truthfulness for the first time. The interview also touched on John’s relationship with Brian and Yoko and accounted for the Beatles’ breakup “because we were tired of being side-men for Paul.”
In response, Paul gave a rare interview to England’s Melody Maker in which he said, “I just want the four of us to get together and sign a piece of paper saying it’s all over, and we want to divide the money four ways... But John won’t do it. Everybody thinks I am the aggressor, but I’m not. I just want out.”
John was so infuriated by this interview that he dictated a long letter to Melody Maker and asked that it be published in the next edition. Several lines had to be edited
out for libel. John asks in the letter, “For the millionth time... I repeat, what about the TAX? It’s all very well playing ‘simple honest ole human Paul’ in the Melody Maker, but you know damn well we can’t just sign a bit of paper... If you’re not the aggressor (as you claim), who the hell took us to court and shat all over us in public?”
The argument continued on vinyl. Paul, responding to the criticism that his McCartney LP was too raw and unfinished, went in the opposite direction with his second solo outing called Ram. Ram was recorded at Abbey Road with the best studio musicians available. It was a cute, tuneful little album, a bit silly in its musical innocence but not in its lyrical content. The cover featured a Linda McCartney photo of Paul taking a ram by the horns, with an interior photo of two beetles fucking each other, a not so oblique reference to the way Paul felt his pals were treating him. Lyrically, the references were more direct. When Paul sang, “Too Many People Preaching Practices,” John knew he was singing it to him, and that he was just a “silly boy(s) breaking their lucky breaks in two.” And it was to John to whom Paul sang, “Dear Boy, I hope you never know how much you missed [me].” Rolling Stone called the album “the nadir in the decomposition of sixties rock thus far.” One English newspaper posed the question, “How do you tell an ex-Beatle that he has made a lousy album?”
John Lennon was gleeful. In September of 1971 he responded with an album called Imagine, recorded during the summer in his studios at Tittenhurst Park. In comparison to the pain of the primal LP, Imagine was a pleasantly tuneful album but not without some good old-fashioned rock and roll nastiness. In “How Do You Sleep?”—on which George happily plays guitar—John spells it all out to Paul: “those freaks was right when they said you was dead... / The only thing you done was yesterday / And since you’ve gone you’re just another day... / A pretty face may last a year or two/ but pretty soon they’ll see what you can do / The sound you make is Muzak in my ears / You must have learned something in all those years / Oh, how do you sleep?”
There was also a tune called “Crippled Inside.” And just in case anybody missed the point, the album package included a postcard with a parody of Paul’s Ram cover: John wrestling a big old barnyard pig by the ears.
All this vitriol managed to overshadow one of the most popular tunes of John’s career, the title tune, “Imagine,” which wasn’t even released as a single in England until 1975. “Imagine” is one of John’s heartfelt but hopelessly naive visions of a world free from strife. “Imagine,” he sings, “there’s no heaven, / It’s easy if you try, / No hell below us, / Above us only sky. /... Nothing to kill or die for, / And no religion too. / Imagine all the people living life in peace, /... you may say I’m a dreamer, / But I’m not the only one. / I hope some day you’ll join us / And the world will be as one.”
The Rolling Stone critic, Ben Gerson, wrote, “I fear that John sees himself in the role of the truth-teller, and as such can justify any kind of self-indulgent brutality in the name of truth.”
Mick Jagger, when asked if the Rolling Stones would ever break up said, “Nah. But if we did, we wouldn’t be so bitchy about it.”
Three members of The Beatles pop group yesterday abandoned their appeal against a High Court order putting the affairs of their company, Apple, in the hands of a receiver. John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr now face a bill for legal costs estimated at £100,000.
—The Times
April 27, 1971
chapter Nineteen
That was your worst mistake.
You took your lucky break and broke it in two.
Now what can be done for you?
You broke it in two.
—Paul McCartney
“Too Many People”
George
Everywhere they went, people on the street, desk clerks, interviewers, all asked the same thing: “When are the Beatles going to get together again?” Each of the ex-Beatles hated the question as much as the frequency with which it was asked. If you said “never,” which was the truth, it made you the bad guy, so Paul and George and Ringo just sloughed it off. John had a pat response: “When you go back to high school.”
If the dissolution of the Beatles benefited anyone, it should have been George. George was always complaining about how John and Paul oppressed him, and now he had his chance to show his stuff. Free of the Beatles’ yoke, George went into the studios with Phil Spector and spent six months handcrafting his first solo venture, All Things Must Pass. This beautifully boxed, three-record set included four sides of new material by George and a third record of a superstar jam session, which included Eric Clapton, Dave Mason, and Billy Preston, who also appear on the rest of the album. Released just before Christmas of 1970 at a record-breaking $13.98 retail price, the album instantly became number one in America and England. It was perhaps the most lavishly praised album since Sergeant Pepper, and deservedly so. George proved once and for all that he was something of a musical genius on his own. Bolstered by Phil Spector’s highly orchestrated production techniques, All Things Must Pass managed to be an uplifting listening experience. As Melody Maker said, “Garbo talks! George Harrison is free!”
Despite the sudden accolades and solo credit, George didn’t seem any happier than the rest of them. This confirmation of his talent didn’t take the edge off his strident personality, if anything he seemed moodier and more dissatisfied than ever. He became inwardly spiritual and turned away from his friends. In one of his more famous quests for religious fulfillment, he spent several days sitting on a mountaintop in Cornwall on a search for “truth.”
In 1970 George bought an enormous mansion in Henley-on-Thames, thirty miles west of London. This $300,000 estate, called Friar Park, was in terrible disrepair and would cost George hundreds of thousands more to put it in shape, yet it was undoubtedly one of the most fabulous and eccentric domiciles in the world. It had been built some eighty years before by multimillionaire Sir Frank Crisp, a lawyer and advisor to the Liberal Party. Sir Frank’s sense of humor was obviously as big as the eighty-room house. Each room was more overwhelmingly elaborate than the next. The theme was friars and religion, and there were ornate carved wood moldings and faces everywhere, around all the windows, doorframes, ceilings, and staircases. They were carved into seraphim, serfs, flowers, and thousands of fat little friars’ heads. There were friars’ heads everywhere you turned, on every door, in every nook and cranny, even on the light switches, which were friars’ heads cast of brass with the switch sticking out of their mouths. Some rooms were as vast as ballrooms, and the bathrooms were as big as an average flat in London.
The grounds of the house featured three man-made lakes and seven major theme gardens, including one with a replica of the Matterhorn. One of the lakes was equipped with stepping-stones just below the surface of the water, so one could give the appearance of walking across the lake. The gardens had some 40,000 different varieties of flowers and trees, which took five full-time gardeners to care for them. There was also a complex of subterranean caves, some with skeletons and distorting mirrors. One was filled with statues of gnomes (which can be found on the cover of All Things Must Pass) and one was a wine cave illuminated by glass grapes that were actually tiny lightbulbs.
In this bizarre, quasi-religious setting, George continued along his spiritual path, now almost obsessively. He supported the growing Krishna movements around the world and hooked up with a new guru, Bhaktivedanta Swami, the seventy-seven-year-old spiritual leader of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. He invited the guru and several saffron-robed monks to live in one of the smaller houses on the grounds of Friar Park. He began to rise at the crack of dawn, bathe in cold water, and study the Bhagavad-Gita. As time passed he became more and more fascinated by Friar Park’s massive gardens and spent hours walking through them, examining the plants and trees. He found particular pleasure in making things grow and began planting and tending the garden himself. He became, to all those he considered less enlightened than
he, a stern lecturer. His conversations consisted of long, wandering dissertations on karma and life metaphors to plants. He spouted on about the problems of being a rock-star millionaire confronted with the luxuries of the material world, when the spiritual one was the only one that really mattered. His friends began to call him “His Lectureship” behind his back, and his beliefs, however well intentioned, became one big bore.
Pattie Harrison was miserable. After six years of marriage she felt unfulfilled and stifled. Only twenty-six years old, she was forbidden to have her own career and was isolated almost continuously in the big gloomy house with all the friars’ heads. She wanted dearly to raise a family, but she never seemed to get pregnant. George was the only Beatle who had never become a father, and in a peculiar way it embarrassed him. Both George and Pattie went for fertility tests, and George, who discussed the problem with a few close friends, said the medical problem was his. But, around Apple, it was suspected that this was not true, that it was Pattie’s problem and that George was being gallant by taking the blame.37 Pattie was willing to adopt children, but George refused. They had heated arguments over this, and Pattie began to escape him by taking overnight trips to London. Once, after one of their more violent arguments, Pattie climbed onto the roof of the main building of Friar Park, as far as the uppermost cupola, removed the OM symbol that always flew there, and replaced it with a pirate’s skull and crossbones. The war was on.
Pattie’s strongest weapon against George was the man who had become his best friend now that the Beatles were gone: Eric Clapton. Clapton’s own career had recently skyrocketed, and he had become perhaps the most revered virtuoso rock guitarist in the business, called “Old Slow Hand” because of his distinctive twangy guitar sound. For a long time now it had been obvious to anyone who saw Eric and Pattie together—including George—that Eric was madly in love with her. He turned into a pile of romantic mush in her presence, while she blinked at him with those big blue eyes and giggled. Now that Pattie was so unhappy in her relationship with George, she encouraged the attentions of the handsome and romantic rock guitarist. She began to manipulate Clapton’s infatuation with her to control and anger George. “She used me, you see,” Clapton later admitted, “and I fell madly in love with her.”