By selling peace, Lennon believed he was operating beyond the spectrum of politics. But he soon manoeuvred himself into a political controversy 3,000 miles away, in Berkeley, California. Community activists and students had proclaimed a three-acre area near the University of California campus as People's Park. It was a symbolic act, reclaiming land that had once held public housing but was now earmarked for college sports facilities. As radical historian Todd Gitlin explained, 'People's Park amounted to the spirits of the New Left and the counterculture in harmonious combination: it was a trace of anarchist heaven on earth.' University officials failed to appreciate the symbolism, and a bloody contest ensued between activists and police, resulting in the death of one demonstrator and the blinding of another.
A protest march was scheduled for 30 May, and two days earlier the cream of California's psychedelic rock bands staged a fund-raising concert, firmly aligning the musical community with those who wanted to preserve People's Park for the people. Activists approached Lennon for a gesture of support. Instead, he preached his new philosophy of non-violent disobedience. 'I don't believe there is any cause worth getting shot for,' he told the Berkeley dissidents. 'You can do better by moving on to another city or moving to Canada. Go anywhere – then they've got nothing to attack and nobody to point their finger at.' Then he lapsed into hippie clichés: 'You can make it, man; we can make it, together,' and so on. It was not what the Berkeley protestors had expected: rather than fighting the system, Lennon preferred to ignore it and give it free rein. In the eyes of Village Voice columnist Robert Christgau, Lennon was 'firming up his newfound status as a pompous shit'. Abbie Hoffman, one of the leaders of the anarchic protest movement the Yippies, accused Lennon of propounding 'an establishment form of pacifism'. He believed that the Beatle and his wife, whom he racistly dubbed 'Oko Nono', were in the pay of the American government. 'Lennon wrote to the [US] State Department,' Hoffman complained, 'and said, "I will do a good service here, I will speak to the young people, I will tell them not to be violent, I will tell them not to shout, 'Kill the pigs.'"' His postscript exposed the widening gulf between Lennon and his more politically aware fans: 'I ain't gonna buy his records any more. I'm not interested. He doesn't say anything to me any more.'
Anyone offended by Lennon's pacifism would have been equally bewildered by George Harrison's philosophy. The focus of his life wasn't with the Beatles, or at home, where his wife Pattie found him increasingly withdrawn, not depressed but simply elsewhere. Although he was prepared to support pet projects at Apple – Billy Preston's gospel tunes, or a spiritual chant by the London members of the Radha Krishna Temple – his imagination was directed high above this material world. On this spiritual level such petty concerns as war and peace were irrelevant. Through meditation, he declared, you should 'be able to conjure up that peace in the middle of Vietnam . . . There is no problem if each individual doesn't have any problems . . . The problems are created more, sometimes, by people going around trying to fix up the government, or trying to do something.' These, then, were the political role models on offer to the increasingly radicalised generation who had grown up with the Beatles: one hero who declared it was better to flee than fight oppression, and another who believed that oppression was merely an illusion.
No wonder Beatles fans were confused about what the group stood for, and where they were heading. The pop newspaper Disc asked its readers, who had recently voted the Beatles the world's best group, how they really saw them. Some interpreted Lennon's peace crusade in the spirit that he intended, referring to him as a 'saint', but one drew a vivid distinction between the Beatles as men and as musicians. 'If Lennon raped a 10-year-old girl,' he commented, 'it would make no difference to the next single.'
In any case, the next single was a deliberate blurring of music and message: a simplistic chant recorded in the Lennons' Montreal hotel room entitled 'Give Peace a Chance'. The US magazine Billboard announced that it would be a Beatles release, an understandable error given that their last single had been exclusively about Lennon and his wife. But instead Lennon chose to issue it under the pseudonym of the Plastic Ono Band, an open-ended entity which offered a refuge from the restrictive dimensions of the Beatles. *8 For the moment, he chose to maintain the fantasy that he was still collaborating actively with Paul McCartney, whose name duly appeared on the record as co-writer. 'Give Peace a Chance' matched the sales of recent Beatles releases, and achieved its intended purpose as an anthem during a major anti-war rally in Washington DC.
While Lennon transformed his music into a vehicle for social commentary, Harrison had more profound ambitions. 'The first thing in my life is music,' he insisted that summer, 'but now I just want to sing songs that give me some benefit. I've come to understand that music should be employed really for the benefit of God-perception, like chanting, that sort of thing.' His work with the Radha Krishna Temple solidified his image as a disciple of one of God's oriental incarnations, and carried the holy refrain of the 'Hare Krishna Mantra' into the Top 20. The temple's shaven-headed disciples became regular visitors to the Apple office. 'Paul didn't relate to the Krishnas,' Derek Taylor recalled. 'You'd hear them coming down the street, chanting and ringing their bells, and when the bells stopped outside, you'd think, Oh no, the fucking Krishnas are coming upstairs. They could be as disruptive as anyone.'
The four Beatles had not attempted to make music together since early May, but their cottage
industry at Savile Row continued merrily without them. Apple proudly announced that they would shortly be issuing an album from the ill-tempered January 1969 sessions, entitled Get Back. Its cover photograph would echo their first LP, Please PleaseMe, but with the bearded Beatles replacing their more conservative predecessors. The photograph would demonstrate how much had changed in those six years and provide a symbolic farewell if the Beatles were unable to work together again. But the Get Back album didn't appear, despite frequent promises. Instead, the raw tapes leaked onto the new underground market for unauthorised bootleg records. Several American radio stations aired the recordings, and this illicit distribution of the Beatles' music was widely interpreted as a triumph of the people over the greed of big business.
Paul McCartney had remained uncharacteristically quiet after Allen Klein's appointment. But he was clearly in elegiac mood. 'Paul called me,' Neil Aspinall recalled, 'saying, "You should collect as much of the [film] material that's out there, get it together before it disappears." So I started to do that, got in touch with the TV stations around the world, checked what we had in our own library, the promo clips. I got newsreel footage in, lots and lots of stuff.' The Beatles had never been sentimental about where they'd been: in 1965, for instance, they had refused to help the owners of Liverpool's Cavern Club, where they had performed nearly 300 times, to keep the venue alive. But now they could envisage a future in which they would no longer be Beatles. As Aspinall's archive expanded, all four of the group authorised him to compile a documentary film about their career.
Their relationship with the film industry remained uneasy. The success of their first two features, A Hard Day's Night and Help!, was tainted by their embarrassment at their gauche appearance on screen. Lennon's experience in the satirical comedy How I Won the War proved equally unsatisfying. Their misgivings weren't merely artistic: Brian Epstein had signed a contract committing the group to make a third film with United Artists, and lawyers were uncertain that the YellowSubmarine animation had fulfilled the deal. Rather than risk a costly court case, the Beatles continued to search for an appropriate vehicle for their talents. They had recently attempted to obtain the rights to J.R.R. Tolkien's mythic trilogy of fantasy novels The Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien's lawyers refused to let their property fall into such unruly hands, and the project was abandoned. So attention was focused on the documentary footage that the Beatles had shot in January. By July director Michael Lindsay-Hogg had prepared a rough cut that ran for some 210 minutes, barely shorter than Gone With the Wind. Allen
Klein invited the Beatles to a screening, after which he proposed that the project – entitled Get Back at this stage, like the accompanying album – should be aimed at the cinema, not television. *9 The four musicians were asked for their comments, and McCartney, Harrison and Starkey each complained that too much screen time was devoted to Lennon and Ono. Rather than confront Lennon directly, Klein cunningly asked Lindsay-Hogg to concentrate on the Beatles and their music, rather than the surrounding milieu. If Ono's role thereby became less prominent, that was merely an unfortunate side effect of a purely artistic decision.
Klein's primary purpose remained 'to make for each one of [the Beatles] in cash, after tax, as much money as everyone felt that they ought to have and should have'. Slowly he began to exert pressure on EMI boss Sir Joseph Lockwood, pointing out that the Beatles had effectively fulfilled the terms of their 1967 contract and might choose to express themselves in other fields if their deal were not improved. Lockwood replied that the Beatles had known what they were signing in 1967 – 'They had a year to consider it. They knew their rights' – and that 'They have done jolly well.' He was prepared to negotiate a revised contract that would benefit both parties. But he believed that the Beatles themselves were perfectly satisfied with the existing deal: the objections, he suggested, emanated from Klein not his clients.
Both Klein and the Beatles understood that Lockwood would never agree to improve the terms of the contract if the group was no longer active. Partly to prove that they still existed, partly out of habit, all four Beatles agreed to return to the familiar surroundings of Abbey Road Studios on 2 July 1969. The previous day McCartney taped a lead vocal for 'You Never Give Me Your Money', perhaps feeling it would be easier to express his ambivalent feelings towards the group if none of the others was present. Meanwhile, Lennon, Ono and their two children (Lennon's son, Ono's daughter) were holidaying in Scotland. Lennon was at the wheel as they headed to the airport: never a confident or competent driver, he ran their car off the road. The family escaped with comparatively minor injuries, but Lennon and Ono were kept in hospital under observation. So it was a three-man Beatles who regrouped at Abbey Road, with George Martin once more at the controls, and made significant progress towards a new album. The most telling contribution came from Harrison. 'Just to be singing, "It's a lovely day today," and all that, it's a waste of energy,' he declared that summer, but his beautiful song 'Here Comes the Sun' proved him wrong. Engineers noted the lack of tension among the three musicians, and waited anxiously to see how the atmosphere might change when Lennon and Ono returned.
Business remained a potentially divisive subject, no matter how many Beatles were present. The future of Northern Songs was still uncertain, and Lennon and McCartney heightened the stakes by promising to take their publishing interests elsewhere if the company fell into the hands of Sir Lew Grade's ATV corporation. By mid-May neither the Beatles nor ATV controlled the majority of shares, and stalemate was reached. Both sides claimed victory, but neither could clinch it.
The relationship between the Beatles, their former management company NEMS and the banking consortium Triumph Investments was equally taxing. EMI maintained its neutrality by holding back the royalties earned by the Beatles' records – a grievous blow at a time when Apple was struggling to achieve financial stability. In late June the dispute escalated when Clive Epstein and NEMS issued a writ against the Beatles, Klein, Neil Aspinall and anyone else with an interest in the group's film company Subafilms. The focus was the income generated by the Yellow Submarine animation: should the money be going to NEMS or directly to the Beatles?
Legal arguments now shadowed the Beatles' earnings from records, songwriting and films. Klein's urgent priority was to solve the dispute over NEMS, and thereby release their EMI royalties from captivity. A prolonged series of meetings with Triumph banker Leonard Richenberg produced a peace agreement, officially announced to the press on 9 July. 'The situation has been resolved to the satisfaction of both sides,' the press release said with the gravitas appropriate for a treaty between warring nations. 'New arrangements have been made which will give the Beatles the independence they desire.' Under the terms of the deal, NEMS dropped all its claims to represent the Beatles. In return, the Beatles agreed to sell their 10 per cent interest in NEMS to Triumph. NEMS was offered compensation of around £750,000 for the earnings it might have gained as the group's managers up until 1972, while the company was also promised 5 per cent of the Beatles' record royalties from 1972 until 1976.*10 There were two immediate benefits for the Beatles: first, EMI released the £1.3 million it had been safeguarding during the dispute; second, the Beatles acquired the NEMS shareholding in Northern Songs, which seemed to give them a decisive edge in the battle with ATV.
Inevitably, perhaps, this settlement was not reached without sniping behind the Beatles' lines. The final agreement had to be signed by all four of the group, and the documents were duly sent to Paul McCartney via his lawyers. He signed without argument, while Klein obtained the other three signatures on a separate copy of the agreement. On 7 or 8 July Klein was visiting John Lennon, who had just returned from Scotland, when he was called by one of Apple's lawyers. Klein alleged that McCartney threatened to pull out of the deal unless Klein agreed not to take any payment for negotiating the agreement over the previous five months. Klein couldn't believe what he was hearing, so he checked with McCartney's lawyer, who confirmed the news. It was a gesture of almost adolescent defiance but very little potency. Klein hurried to Abbey Road, where the other three Beatles were working. In front of Harrison and Starkey he told McCartney what his lawyer had said. McCartney was cornered: he could either refuse to pay Klein, scupper the deal and probably sabotage any chance of the Beatles completing their album, or he could back down. He chose the politer option, telling Klein that what he'd heard was 'ridiculous', and phoning his lawyer to authorise the exchange of contracts. 'So far as I am concerned,' Lennon said later, 'Paul did accept Klein as the Beatles' manager, though he may not have liked him.'
It was perhaps just as well that Lennon was not a witness to this scene. He returned to the fray on 9 July and, for a few seconds, it appeared that he had come alone; but then Yoko Ono hobbled into the studio, followed by four porters from Harrods department store, wheeling in a bed. Ono was still suffering severe whiplash after the car crash in Scotland, but Lennon insisted that she should attend the sessions. 'Jaws dropping, we all watched as it was brought into the studio and carefully positioned by the stairs,' engineer Geoff Emerick recalled. 'More [porters] appeared with sheets and pillows and sombrely made the bed up. Then, without saying a word, Yoko climbed in, carefully arranging the covers around her.' And there she remained for the next few days, as if she was staging some magnificently comic piece of performance art, a third bed-in, perhaps, for the benefit of a very carefully selected audience. As McCartney noted, it was 'not the ideal way for making records'.
Perhaps in an unconscious attempt at revenge, McCartney subjected Lennon and the other Beatles to several days of hard labour, trying to transform his novelty song 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' into a possible single – 'which it could never have been', as Lennon said bitterly. Somehow the group managed to rise above their petty squabbling for the next four weeks, regaining their collective identity to the extent that Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were able to devote almost twelve hours to recording the most choirboy-perfect harmonies of their entire career, on Lennon's composition 'Because'. But this show of unity disguised the fact that the group's two main creative forces now had completely different agendas. While McCartney retained his almost freakishly inspired command of melody, Lennon was only interested in music that was an unvarnished expression of emotion. At its most extreme, this gulf was demonstrated by the weightless trickery of 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer', from McCartney, and Lennon's relentlessly direct love song 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)'. Both men, meanwhile, chose to underestimate the flowering talents of George Harrison, whose best work – such as his two contribu
tions to this album, 'Something' and 'Here Comes the Sun' – combined the most attractive qualities of his elder colleagues. The Beatles had always been a blend of talents, but now the fusion could only hold if the four men were prepared to restrain any creative impulses that didn't fit the mould. For Lennon, this degree of compromise was no longer bearable.
Fortunately he was able to submerge his passion for the avant-garde long enough for this final album, entitled Abbey Road, to be completed. The name was a description rather than an expression of love for a studio complex that the Beatles felt they had long since outgrown; it also enabled them to shoot a cover picture quickly and comfortably. On the morning of 8 August 1969 they marched back and forth across the zebra crossing outside the studio to create one of the most famous album sleeves in history. Lennon became increasingly impatient as a crowd of onlookers gathered: 'I was muttering, "Hurry up", you know, "Keep in step,"' he admitted afterwards.
It had become increasingly difficult for the Beatles to keep in step for longer than it took to click a camera shutter. At Apple aides such as Tony Bramwell experienced the daily fluctuations of power.
People like myself and Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans would constantly be getting calls from one of the Beatles, asking us to do something but not tell the others. Paul would want us to book him a recording session at Morgan Studios, but not let John know, while John and Yoko had their own reign of terror. John got completely negative about everyone else's projects. He would only be interested in himself and Yoko. One week Paul would be in the office, the next it would be John and Yoko ruling the roost. It was difficult for those of us who'd grown up being faithful to them, and who suddenly found ourselves having to play them off against each other, behind each other's backs.
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 12