by Mick Brown
After eighteen months, the AM deal stuttered to a close. Spector had delivered just two albums, by the Checkmates, and Ike and Tina Turner—and that a grab bag of material dating from the recording sessions in 1966—and a handful of singles. In a trade paper story, a spokesman for AM described the parting as “not amiable.” Spector, it was reported, was now going to Europe, “to discuss new projects.” It did not specify what they were. There was no mention of the fact that Spector’s prayers had been answered, and he had been thrown a lifeline by the biggest group in the world.
18
With the Beatles
The son of a kosher butcher from Budapest, Allen Klein had an unhappy childhood. Klein’s mother died just a few months after his birth, in 1931 in New Jersey, and his father put Klein and his two sisters into an orphanage. When his father remarried, Klein was sent to live with an aunt.
As a young man, he worked two or three jobs at the same time in order to put himself through accountancy school. He took a job with a firm that looked after the books for several show business figures, among them the singer Bobby Darin. One day he happened to run into Darin at the wedding of a mutual friend. Klein asked the singer if he’d like to make $100,000. “What do I have to do?” Darin said. “Nothing,” Klein replied. A few months later, Darin received a check for outstanding royalties and fees that Klein had managed to unearth from his record company. Word of Klein’s skill in hunting out the discrepancies in record companies’ bookkeeping, and his tenacity in recovering the money, quickly spread. In 1962 he became Sam Cooke’s business manager, securing an unprecedented agreement for Cooke in which the singer received all his master tapes, site fees, gate revenues for concerts and 10 percent of all records sold and back royalties.
In 1965 Klein was hired as business adviser by the Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Oldham—but that relationship quickly turned sour. Klein went on to represent other British groups, such as Herman’s Hermits and the Dave Clark Five. But it was the biggest pop group of them all, the Beatles, on whom he had his sights trained; and in January 1969, Klein arrived in London, ready to make his move.
Their five-year reign as the most popular group in the world had exacted its toll on the Beatles. The friendship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney had disintegrated into a state of mutual acrimony about musical direction and money, and a combination of poor business decisions and cavalier profligacy had brought the group close to bankruptcy. John Lennon had broken the news to the English music press that, if their company Apple were to go on losing money at the current rate, “we’ll all be broke in six months.” Lennon himself was “down to my last fifty thousand pounds.”
When Klein sent word that he was in London, Lennon was the first to take him up on his invitation, arriving at Klein’s Dorchester Hotel suite with his wife Yoko Ono in tow.
Thorough as ever, Klein had carefully prepared his pitch, as Lennon would later remember.
“Not many people knew which was my song and which was Paul’s, but he’d say, ‘Well, McCartney didn’t write that line, did he?’ And I’d say, ‘Right,’ you know, and that’s what really got me interested, because he knew what our contributions were to the group.”
To Lennon, the fact that Klein had once been a “penniless orphan” also weighed in his favor. “How insecure can you get,” Lennon reasoned with dubious logic, “with nothing to hang on to?”
Lennon listened attentively as Klein quickly summarized the cause of the Beatles’ problems and his proposals for remedying them. By the end of the meeting Lennon had made his decision. Borrowing Klein’s pen, Lennon scribbled out a note to Sir Joseph Lockwood, the chairman of the Beatles’ record company EMI. “Dear Sir Jo—from now on Allen Klein handles all my stuff.”
Not everybody shared Lennon’s enthusiasm for Klein. Paul McCartney wanted the Beatles’ affairs to be put in the hands of his new representative—and father-in-law—the New York attorney Lee Eastman. Lennon’s championing of Klein also sent shivers of apprehension through the Savile Row offices of Apple—which were in no sense eased when Mick Jagger telephoned Peter Brown, who was in charge of administration at Apple, to warn him of the potential problems ahead if Klein took over. “I said, ‘Why don’t you come in and tell the Beatles that?’” Brown remembers. “And Mick, to his great credit, was willing to come to the Apple office and say to the four of them, ‘This will be a disaster.’ So I got them to come in to the office; and John, in his perversity, got Klein to come to the meeting. Poor Mick walked in the door to be confronted with Klein as well. And of course he couldn’t say anything.”
In May 1969, with the sanction of Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, Allen Klein moved into his new office at Apple and began his task of reorganization with an executioner’s zeal. His first act was to dispense with Apple’s managing director Ron Kass and AR man Peter Asher. The Beatles insisted that Peter Brown and Neil Aspinall, the director in charge of artistic affairs, should stay on. Intent on generating income for his new clients, Klein then cast a calculating eye over Apple’s available assets. Foremost among these was an uncompleted Beatles’ album, provisionally entitled Get Back, which had been recorded in a mood of lassitude and finality earlier that same year. Get Back had been conceived by McCartney as an “honest” album to restore the Beatles’ compact with their audience, a record that would convey all the spontaneity and raw energy of the group’s earliest performances, and at the same time appease John’s disgruntlement with “overproduced” albums like Sgt. Pepper. To make the idea go further, it was decided that the making of the album would be turned into a film.
In January 1969, the group convened at Twickenham film studios, where in happier times they had filmed A Hard Day’s Night and Help! But after ten ill-tempered days, that location was abandoned and they instead adjourned to the studios in the basement of the Apple offices in Savile Row. All the intended spontaneity and “honesty” quickly evaporated as the sessions became bogged down in a quagmire of recrimination and indecision. By the end the group had recorded dozens of different tracks, consisting of new compositions and songs from their Hamburg and Cavern days.
Thoroughly sick of the project and each other, neither the Beatles nor George Martin could face the task of editing and remixing the tracks. For months they sat on the shelf untouched. The engineer Glyn Johns took a stab at assembling them into an album, but his efforts failed to win the unanimous approval of the group.
It was at that point that Klein suggested that his old friend Phil Spector should be given the opportunity of salvaging the project.
“I think it was Klein trying to prove to John that he knew about music,” Peter Brown says. “‘I’ll help get this out, I know how to get it finished.’ Because Klein always needed to prove himself. And I think he was rather proud of himself that he’d found somebody of such…eminence to bring in. So Phil was asked. John at that time would have done anything to fuck anyone, he was so disenchanted with everything, he just wanted out. So Phil was a puppet in a way.”
In the first week of January 1970, Spector flew to London with George Brand in attendance, and put up at the Inn on the Park on Park Lane. Ronnie had returned to New York with Donte, to be close to Beatrice, moving in to Spector’s apartment at the Hotel Navarro on Central Park South. “Donte was just starting to walk,” she recalled in Be My Baby, “and I loved being able to take him to Central Park just like any other mom. That time I spent in New York was the happiest period in my marriage.”
Spector did not travel well. Apart from his previous visit to Britain in 1964, and a brief excursion to Tijuana to secure a Mexican divorce from Annette, he had never left America. He had little curiosity about the unknown, was never the type to jump on a plane to India to meet the Maharishi, or to travel to Florence to see the Uffizi. “Phil wouldn’t even go to Hawaii,” says his friend David Kessel. “He liked to sit in his mansion. It was his little niche.”
Not only was the lengthy transatlantic flight an instrument of torture, but
Spector did not even have the consolation of his familiar creature comforts waiting for him at the end of it. He complained to friends about the food—Can you believe it? The English put cheese and mayonnaise on white bread and think it’s a delicacy?—the fact that shops closed at 5:30 p.m. and pubs at eleven, and that there was nothing on TV.
But the Beatles were worth any inconvenience or discomfort. “At that point in his life Phil was like Sherlock Holmes without a case,” David Kessel says. “He’d had people offering tapes, acts, none of which he was interested in. But when the call comes to save the Beatles, yeah, okay, that’s exciting.”
Spector’s appointment had served only to deepen the divisions in the Beatles. While Lennon and George Harrison—both great fans—were enthusiastic, and Ringo was prepared to accept anybody who would finish the record, McCartney would prove less welcoming. Peter Brown remembers Spector arriving at the Apple office, “this little bundle of nerves and enthusiasm. He had the biggest act in the world; he’d been asked to get involved. But he was in a very difficult position, because there was one member of the group who didn’t want him under any circumstances. Paul didn’t want to have anything to do with John or Klein. But my view was that this was a man of great talent, who respected the group enormously and wanted genuinely to help.”
Spector had been in England barely a week before he was in the studio—but not with the Get Back tapes. The first of the Beatles to strike out on his own, John Lennon, had already recorded two singles, “Give Peace a Chance” and “Cold Turkey,” with Yoko and a loose aggregate of musicians he called the Plastic Ono Band. At the end of January, struck by sudden inspiration, he hastily organized a session at Abbey Road Studios, to record a new composition, “Instant Karma (We All Shine On),” calling on the services of George Harrison, the drummer Alan White, bass player Klaus Voormann—and Spector. Voormann recalls that Lennon was in such a hurry that he hadn’t even bothered to inform the other musicians that Spector was producing the session.
“It was very strange. John came running in the studio, went to the piano, played the song; we thought, Oh yeah, great. Went to our instruments, started running through, and then suddenly we heard a different voice in the control room. We had no idea who it was. ‘Can you put the cymbals a little higher; or take them off?’ Then after a while this guy came into the studio, and he had PS monogrammed on his shirt. It still didn’t dawn on me. He went back in the control room; we did a couple more takes and then went into the control room. Everywhere there were tape recorders, equipment—it was just ridiculous; stuff Spector had brought in from all the other studios. He turned up the volume all the way, and we heard the count in…even that sounded incredible. And what followed just blew us away. It was not only the volume; it just sounded incredibly good. That was the moment when I knew it was Spector.”
Intent on beefing up Lennon’s sound, Spector had Lennon playing on one grand piano, while Alan White and George Harrison hammered at either end of another and Voormann played electric piano. Voormann was bemused when Spector reprised his old trick from the Gold Star days, telling the drummer Alan White to remove all his cymbals. “It looked crazy. Normally you can never see the drummer because he’s hidden behind all these cymbals. But I think Phil told Alan to take them off to resist temptation. And he also ordered Alan to lay a towel over his tom-tom. All these tricks. You really got the sense this was a guy who knew what he was doing.” Spector pushed White’s drum to the front of the mix, adding handclaps and percussion, to create a sound as stark and propulsive as a jackhammer, while Lennon’s voice, laced with echo, acquired a harsh urgency never heard in Beatles records. In search of more voices to emphasize the chorus, someone was dispatched to the Speakeasy, a favorite music-business watering hole, to recruit volunteers.
Spector wanted to overdub strings, but Lennon, thrilled with the results, was adamant the record should be released just as it was. It was only later, when he heard the American release of the single, that he realized Spector had remixed the song without his approval, producing a somewhat cleaner and smoother version. Lennon complained that “It’s the only time anyone has done that,” but Spector was let off the hook. As far as Lennon was concerned, he’d passed the audition.
Doing his best to ignore the divisions around him, Spector now set about salvaging the Get Back tapes, installing himself first in the basement studios at Apple and then in Abbey Road.
He would later complain to his friend the musician Dan Kessel. “It was a near impossible job, the tapes were that bad,” Kessel says. Phil had to do lots of edits, listen to take after take, and find the one good verse from one take and the one good chorus from another, and then make copies to piece it together. He was doing extensive surgery, just to get the skeleton of the song, even before it came to overdubbing strings or whatever else he was putting on there.”
Faced with bare bones, Spector chose to do a radical overhaul on everything. He added strings to George Harrison’s “I Me Mine” on the song “Let It Be” he added a brass section, and rummaged through a host of outtakes to find the sharp and lyrical guitar solo from George that punctuated the song. But the most radical makeover was reserved for Paul McCartney’s ballad, “The Long and Winding Road” a pretty song that had sounded feeble in its original version. Spector decided to embellish it with strings, choir and a celestial harp that added a sugary coating of chocolate-box sentimentality to the song’s theme of romantic longing.
McCartney was not consulted on Spector’s revisions and when he heard “The Long and Winding Road” he was furious. He immediately dispatched a letter to Allen Klein, demanding that the added instrumentation be reduced, the harp part eliminated, and that he should “never do it again.” But Klein ignored his demands and released the song as a single. According to the Beatles’ publicist Derek Taylor, McCartney thought it was “the shittiest thing anyone had ever done to him, and that was saying something.”
A month before the release of the album, now entitled Let It Be, in May 1970 McCartney released his own solo album and formally announced his departure from the Beatles. When, in January of the following year, he began court proceedings against his fellow Beatles he would cite Spector’s remodeling of “The Long and Winding Road” as an example of Klein’s “intolerable interference” and one of his reasons for seeking the dissolution of the group.
The critics would prove no kinder to Spector’s revision than McCartney had been. “They just panned the shit out of me,” Spector later told the writer Richard Williams. “It was fun to see people getting into it…‘how Spector ruined the Beatles’…There was also the fact that most of the reviews were written by English people, picked up by the American press, and the English were: an American, I don’t care who it was, an American coming in, taking over.”
While it may not have pleased the critics, the mood of plangent sentimentality that Spector invested in the song captured the imagination of the public as the perfect epitaph to the Beatles’ career. Released in America as the group’s last single in May 1970, it sold 1.2 million copies in the first two days, and on June 13 it became the Beatles’ twentieth and final number 1 single in America. When, later that year, Let It Be won a Grammy, Paul McCartney had no hesitation in going to collect the award.
Much as he had come to loathe everything about the Beatles, and much as he wished to cut himself free of all that being a Beatle entailed, the bitter and rancorous disintegration of the group drove a final nail into the fragile psyche of John Lennon. For years, the group had been the instrument of transformation and catharsis for all of Lennon’s frustration, anger and pain; the childhood wounds inflicted by the desertion of his father Fred when Lennon was just nine years old, his abandonment by his mother Julia, and her early death; his conviction in his own genius; his deep, underlying insecurities. Drugs, sex, Transcendental Meditation, fame, money—even Yoko and evangelizing for world peace—all had failed to exorcize Lennon’s demons. By March 1970 he had taken to his bed in his Georgian manor
house, Tittenhurst Park, apparently in the grip of a minor nervous breakdown. It was then that salvation arrived, in the form of a bulky package from America, containing a book The Primal Scream, written by a Los Angeles psychologist named Arthur Janov.
Janov had devised a process, which he called Primal Therapy, that involved regressing a patient back to the moment of his birth, and replicating the “primal scream” of infant anguish, when all wants and needs demanded to be fulfilled. In the re-creation of this moment, the theory went, all of the neurotic defense mechanisms that the patient had built up through his life would be demolished, and the patient would be reborn in a condition of prelapsarian purity and innocence. Janov claimed his treatment was a panacea that could cure not only neurosis but also “homosexuality, drug addiction, alcoholism, psychosis, as well as endocrine disorders, headaches, stomach ulcers and asthma.”
Lennon, who had been silently screaming all his life, was galvanized. At Yoko’s instigation, Janov traveled to England to lead the couple through their first sessions at Tittenhurst Park. Janov would later recount that Lennon “had the kind of pain that would knock a patient off the floor it was so catastrophic.” For his part, Lennon would greet Primal Therapy as “the most important thing that happened to me besides meeting Yoko and being born.” Duly converted, at the end of April the Lennons returned to Los Angeles with Janov, where they would spend the next four months in therapy. Spector, who remained in London, magnanimously put his home, his staff and his refrigerator at their disposal. Lennon was bemused some months later to find that Spector had billed Apple for food and accommodation costs.
With the Lennons in America, Spector now turned his attention to another Beatle. George Harrison had been so delighted with Spector’s work on Let It Be that he had no hesitation in inviting him to produce his first post-Beatles solo album. Nor did Harrison have any shortage of songs to bring to the project. Having long been frustrated by being fobbed off with the inclusion of only one or two of his compositions on Beatles albums, Harrison had accumulated a formidable catalogue of work—the ensuing album, All Things Must Pass, would comprise twenty-three of his songs.