For Lennon, Apple no longer offered even the illusion of freedom. 'The problem is that two years ago our accountants made us sign 80 per cent of all our royalties to Apple,' he explained. 'We can't touch any of it, and it's a ridiculous situation. All the money comes into this little building and it never gets out. If I could get my money out of the company, I'd split away and start doing my own projects independently. I'd have much more freedom and we'd all be happier. I still feel part of Apple and the Beatles, and there's no animosity, but they tend to ignore Yoko and me.' In fact, Lennon and Ono were difficult to ignore at Apple. 'They tended to be very demanding,' recalled Derek Taylor, 'but I was used to being demanding myself, so that didn't worry me. But Yoko did tend to come into my office and expect a thousand different things to be done immediately, which presented something of a challenge.'
Money was uppermost in Lennon's mind in August 1969, as he faced a bill for three months' building work on Tittenhurst Park, the Ascot mansion he had bought in May. (In fact, the property had been purchased by Maclen Ltd, which handled Lennon and McCartney's songwriting income, opening up another financial problem for the future.) The grounds, which had been open to the public for decades, were expansive; the house was a perfect example of rock star grandiosity. The Lennons proudly invited the other Beatles to visit, on 22 August 1969. Photographer Monty Fresco documented the occasion in a series of shots that comprised the group's final photo session. Inevitably, Ono found her way into the frame more often than not. Perhaps sensing this was a historic occasion, Pattie Boyd took some silent-film footage of the four musicians as they would never be seen again.
Now there was no reason for the Beatles to meet except business. While they completed work on Abbey Road, Allen Klein continued to negotiate a takeover of Northern Songs. The block of shareholders known as the Consortium, who had refused to choose between the Beatles and ATV, remained an enticing target for Klein, who learned in late summer that they might finally be prepared to sell. He invited John Eastman to fly to London so that McCartney's interests would be fully represented. The relationship between the two men had recently descended into open enmity. 'Dear John,' Klein wrote to Eastman on 2 September, 'I am on a diet, so please stop putting words in my mouth. Your misuse and abuse of the truth is almost without parallel.' Eastman arrived on 15 September, and a day or two later all four Beatles endured a turgid discussion about voting rights and share options, which broadened into a desultory fight between Lennon and Harrison about the latter's right to equal exposure on any future Beatles record. Though nobody realised it at the time, this was an epochal moment: it was the last occasion on which Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starkey would be together in the same room. A saga that had begun in passionate commitment to rock 'n' roll music ended in a life-draining argument about the consequences of that passion.
On 19 September, Klein, Eastman and the Beatles (except Harrison) met again at Apple. To assure the Consortium that the Beatles' camp was speaking with one voice, a series of photographs was taken by Linda McCartney, showing the Beatles and Klein apparently signing a document together. Klein stood at the centre of the shots, with McCartney playful, coy and sheepish alongside the man who had outflanked his in-laws.
The mood changed abruptly as they turned their attention to business. Heading the agenda was the question of who should sit on the board of Northern Songs when it fell into the hands of the Beatles. According to Klein, John Eastman threw the meeting into confusion when he 'insisted that Paul should have as many votes as the other three Beatles put together. Mr Starkey looked incredulously at John Eastman and said, "I cannot believe what you are saying. Do you mean that Paul should have as many votes as all of us?" [McCartney] then looked at John Eastman and said, "John, that can't be right, why should I have as many votes as all of them?"' Eastman's reply – 'If we become unhappy, we should want to be able to vote with the other side' – didn't satisfy Lennon or Starkey, who told him, 'Look, the more and more we talk, it seems like you're trying to split us, not keep us together.'
The argument was soon rendered irrelevant by the discovery that the Consortium had thrown in its shares with ATV: the battle for Northern Songs was lost.*11 And at least two of the people at that meeting knew that another fight was nearly over: the struggle to preserve the Beatles. On 13
September Lennon and Ono attended a rock 'n' roll festival in Toronto with a hastily assembled group of musicians answering to the name of the Plastic Ono Band. George Harrison was among those invited to take part, but he told Lennon that he didn't have any interest in performing Yoko Ono's avant-garde music. There was a strict hierarchy among the musicians, as guitarist Eric Clapton discovered: 'It was raining, and we were standing around waiting for the luggage when a huge limo rolled up, and John and Yoko jumped into it and drove away, leaving the rest of us standing in the rain without a clue as to what to do next. Well, that's nice, I thought.' The Plastic Ono Band was booked to appear alongside many of Lennon's 1950s heroes, and to control his nervousness he inhaled a vast quantity of cocaine. The combination of nerves and stimulant took its toll, as the event's compère Kim Fowley recalled: 'John threw up. And he started to cry. He said, "I'm terrified. Imagine if the Beatles were the only band you've ever been in, and it's the first time you are going to step on stage with people who aren't the Beatles."' As bass guitarist Klaus Voormann noted, "John stood in the dressing room, which was admittedly rather tatty, saying, "What am I doing here? I could have gone to Brighton."'
Wearing the white suit that had become his public uniform, Lennon eventually led the Plastic Ono Band on stage for an ill-rehearsed but charismatic set of rock 'n' roll standards and his own recent compositions – notably 'Cold Turkey', a graphic account of heroin addiction that he had offered to the other Beatles as a potential single. Then he turned the stage over to Ono, who delivered two lengthy fusions of rock and performance art, culminating in a series of guttural shrieks, superseded by the relentless howl of guitar feedback. 'People were surprised when I suddenly used to start screaming during our concerts,' Ono said. 'But they didn't realise I had vocal training.' Press reports suggested that her uncompromising performance was greeted with howls of derision, but she demurred: 'I was completely wrapped up in the music. I did not feel any of that hostility, even though I'm sure it was there.'
Performing rock 'n' roll without the Beatles was a profoundly symbolic action. All that remained was the deed itself. On the flight to Toronto, between bouts of unamplified rehearsal, Lennon told Clapton and Voormann that he intended to quit the Beatles, and would be forming another band, if they were interested. Allen Klein was the next to be informed. He didn't attempt to change Lennon's mind; he simply said that contractual negotiations with EMI had reached a delicate stage and might be endangered if the record company learned that the Beatles could no longer work together.
Klein can scarcely have been surprised. He knew that Starkey and Harrison had walked away from the group in the past, and he was aware of the tensions aroused at Apple by the conflicting demands of the Beatles and the Lennons. He may have hoped – indeed, assumed – that Lennon was merely voicing a passing fantasy, and that once he was safely back on British soil he would resume his place as the group's fiercest internal critic. Securing the Beatles as his clients, Klein knew, would mean nothing if they disintegrated as soon as he assumed control.
The meeting on 19 September confirmed to Klein that the problem was not Lennon's commitment to the group, but the increasingly obvious split between McCartney and the rest. For once it was Starkey rather than Lennon who most vehemently opposed Eastman's proposals. The overriding impression left by Eastman's arguments was that McCartney should always be able to match the voting power of the other three, even if – as he was perennially in 1969 – he was in a minority of one. Starkey was outraged, rejecting each of Eastman's arguments in turn. 'Eastman is representing him,' he said, pointing at McCartney. You' – he indicated Klein – 'represent us.'
The following day, 2
0 September 1969, the same parties regrouped at Apple. They were there to authorise and sign the new recording deal that Klein had secured from Capitol Records, the North American arm of EMI, which was responsible for 75 per cent of the group's global record sales. Although John Eastman had originally wanted to stall the negotiations, going so far (according to Klein) as to tell Capitol that Klein did not represent McCartney in the talks, he had finally agreed to the deal. So too had McCartney, who could not fail to be impressed by the unprecedented terms of the agreement, which saw the Beatles awarded a higher royalty rate (25 per cent of the wholesale price) than any other recording act. The rate would rise again in 1972, as long as the last two Beatles-related albums issued at that point had each sold more than 500,000 copies in the USA, a clause that would become a subject for debate three years later. Derek Taylor summarised the negotiations: 'Klein takes EMI and Capitol to the cleaners and to hell and back and it is Stanley Gortikov, a senior executive at Capitol, who says a lot later that year that, OK, Capitol paid up, but did Klein have to be so hard about it?' Klein noted, 'I did Capitol a great favour. I delivered them product. These boys want to work, but you have to motivate them. They won't work when they're being screwed by a record company. But when somebody gets rid of the bullshit, and they're getting a fair deal, they'll work.' But would they work together?
In his official chronicle of this meeting, delivered to the London High Court in 1971, Klein testified, 'Everyone was in a very cheerful frame of mind and regarded this as a good deal, and a great occasion in the life of The Beatles.' Lennon, McCartney and Starkey duly appended their name to the contract; Harrison, who had just discovered that his mother was suffering from terminal cancer, signed later.
But Klein's account omitted the crucial fact that before the contract was signed John Lennon had left the Beatles. There was a long, circular conversation: as McCartney lamented later, 'We started talking about the future of the group, not knowing that there wasn't to be any future to this group.' It was a throwback to the dead-end discussions of January 1969: Lennon virtually silent, McCartney self-consciously enthusiastic, aware that the more optimism he displayed, the more he opened himself up to his former partner's contempt. There was sullen agreement from Lennon and Starkey that the Beatles should continue, but neither of them could muster a vision of how that might work. It was then that McCartney – not for the first time – unveiled his concept of how they could function in the decade ahead: they should return to their roots and turn up in small clubs unannounced, maybe billed under some pseudonym such as Rikki and the Redstreaks. They could reconnect with their audience, and themselves, and rediscover the commitment that had so clearly been missing from their relationship since the death of Brian Epstein.
Lennon's response was curt and abusive: 'I think you're daft.' Then, while McCartney looked on aghast, he smiled and said, 'Look, I might as well tell you. I wasn't going to say anything until after we'd signed the Capitol deal, but I'm leaving the group.' In McCartney's recollection, 'Our
jaws – me, Ringo, George and Linda, because she happened to be nearby – dropped.' But Harrison wasn't there, and in later years Starkey couldn't remember any sense of shock, only relief. McCartney stuttered something like, 'What do you mean?' and Lennon hammered in the final nail: 'I've had enough. I want a divorce, like my divorce from Cynthia. It's given me a great feeling of freedom.' And then the three ex-Beatles signed their Capitol Records contract under the pretence of total unity, 'in a bit of a daze,' McCartney remembered, 'not quite knowing why we'd done it', though that was obvious: the deal ensured that whether they worked together or alone, they would earn much more from their record sales. 'I was reluctant to enter into the Capitol deal since it had been negotiated by Klein,' McCartney testified in 1971. He could not bring himself to admit that his enemy had secured such a lucrative agreement. For McCartney, money was no longer a priority. 'I would have liked the Beatles never to have broken up,' he admitted later. 'But the really hurtful thing to me was that John was really not going to tell us.'
As far as Starkey was concerned, it didn't matter whether Lennon had spoken or not: 'You could see it coming, but we all held it off for a while.' Elsewhere, he remembered that when Lennon made his announcement, 'We all said yes, because it was ending – and you can't keep it together, anyway, if this is what the attitude is.' The decision made so little impression on Harrison that he couldn't remember hearing about it; clearly it paled in his memory alongside the diagnosis of his mother's cancer. 'Everybody had tried to leave, so it was nothing new,' he said later. 'Everybody was leaving for years. The Beatles had started out being something that gave us a vehicle to be able to do so much when we were younger, but it had now got to a point where it was stifling us. There was too much restriction. It had to self-destruct, and I wasn't feeling bad about anybody wanting to leave, because I wanted out myself.' Starkey concurred: 'It was a relief once we finally said we could split up. I just wandered off home, I believe, and I don't know what happened after that.' He saw Lennon's decision as a moment of integrity: 'As anyone will tell you, if we had wanted we could have just carried on and made fortunes, but that was not our game.'
To celebrate, Lennon, Ono and Klein adjourned to a West End restaurant, the Peppermill. There Lennon took a decisive step into the future, appointing Klein manager of his Bag Productions company for the next three years. Perhaps the most important part of the deal for Lennon was that ABKCO would instantly transfer £20,000 to his account, enabling him to pay off the builders working at Tittenhurst Park. Over the next few days Lennon recorded his second Plastic Ono Band single, 'Cold Turkey', and its B-side, Ono's 'Don't Worry Kyoko', which he later described as the 'best fucking rock 'n' roll record ever made'. He also sat down with his friend Barry Miles for a lengthy interview that was syndicated across the underground press, ostensibly to promote Abbey Road. Even with Miles, he was careful to avoid any mention of his departure from the Beatles, although in retrospect there were hints: 'I don't write for the Beatles. I write for myself.' How had his relationship with Ono affected the group? 'You'll have to ask them.' More telling was his account of how his life had changed over the past two years: 'I'm more myself than I was then, because I've got the security of Yoko. That's what's done it. It's like having a "mother" and everything.' Friends had noticed that he had been calling Yoko mother since the summer; it was both an acute psychological summary of their relationship and a colloquialism familiar in the north of England. And, of course, for Lennon 'mother' meant not only protector and carer; it meant the carefree spirit who had abandoned him as a small child and then reappeared in his teens, sparking a confused medley of emotions that ran from primal love to forbidden lust. 'It all came back to me like I was back to age 16,' Lennon said, not realising exactly what he was revealing. 'All the rest of it had been wiped out. It was like going through psychiatry, really.' And the interview closed with a line that would have meant so much if its readership had known what had just happened: 'It's like starting my whole life again.'
The same realisation struck Richard Starkey. He was perfectly capable of rationalising the split: 'The break-up came because everyone had ideas of what he wanted to do, whereas everyone used to have ideas of what we would do, as a group. We weren't really fulfilling John's musical ambitions or Paul's or George's or my own, in the end, because it was separate.' Understanding why the Beatles could no longer function was one thing, dealing with the emotional consequences quite another. 'I sat in the garden for a while wondering what the hell to do with my life,' he admitted later. 'After you've said it's over and go home, you think, Oh God – that's it, then. Now what do you do? It was quite a dramatic period for me – or traumatic, really.'
Rather than finding solace in alcohol, as he would in later years, Starkey invented something to do. His solution echoed Lennon's: he would return to mother – not by marrying a dominant woman, but by recording songs that his own mother loved, a throwback to the days of crooners and big bands. Aware that his v
oice was an acquired taste, he enlisted the help of George Martin, who commissioned a set of arrangements from talents old and new. The sessions, which began in October 1969, were engineered by Geoff Emerick, who had always felt distant from Starkey and now found him more difficult than ever. 'Ringo was just uptight all the time, or perhaps it was just an act to keep me at a distance. The problem was that I never knew if I was talking to the actual person underneath the veneer or not.' For Starkey perhaps more than the other Beatles, the gulf between his lovable public image and his authentic self would grow increasingly difficult to bridge. Some fundamental sense of insecurity had always shone through his Beatle persona, where it appeared as self-deprecation, and boosted his appeal with fans. Now he had no obvious role, no reliable showcase for the musical talent of which he was so proud. But neither had he been seen to develop as a personality since 1963, in the way that his colleagues had. Their maturity was expressed through their songwriting; Starkey said little and wrote less*12, so he remained a mystery to his audience, who chose to believe in his simple decency.
Like Starkey, McCartney was now forced to face himself, as an individual, beyond the safety of the Beatles and without the self-assurance he had always gained from Lennon's love and approval. In later years he would admit that the shock of Lennon's announcement had first numbed him, and then left him fearful and uncertain. He was the one Beatle who had a guaranteed future as a soloist: critics had been applauding his innate talents as a songwriter ever since they became aware that Lennon and McCartney worked as two separate entities. But success only seemed meaningful for McCartney in the context of Lennon: most of his actions in the months ahead seemed to be designed to demonstrate his independence, and to demonstrate it to Lennon most of all.
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 13