By contrast, Harrison was already so removed from the Beatles that he was barely touched by the split. He went through the motions of promoting the Abbey Road album in October 1969, though his technique was unorthodox. 'To me, listening to Abbey Road is like listening to somebody else,' he announced. 'It doesn't feel like the Beatles.' Nor did he feel like one of the Beatles: he was already assembling songs for a solo album, thrilled to have escaped the restrictive gaze of his elder colleagues.
None of this alerted the public to the possibility that the Beatles had disbanded. 'I was at Apple,' recalled journalist Ray Connolly, a close friend of the group during this period, 'and Derek Taylor came in and said, "Well, that's it, we're all fucked." But he wouldn't say why. It was only later that I discovered that was the day when John announced he was leaving. Then a few weeks later I was in Toronto with John, and he pulled me aside and said, "Ray, I want to tell you something. I've left the Beatles. But you mustn't tell anyone. I'll let you know when it's OK to tell people." Every so often I'd ask John and he'd say, "No, not yet."' Harrison could still talk blithely about a future record on which 'we're going to get an equal rights thing, so we all have as much on the album'. Allen Klein authorised the release of a single, combining two songs from Abbey Road: Lennon's 'Come Together' (the subject of an immediate claim for copyright infringement by the publishers of Chuck Berry's 'You Can't Catch Me') and Harrison's 'Something'. There was a promotional film for the latter track, which featured footage of all the Beatles with their wives – but individually, never as a group. Lennon and Ono maintained their fiendish work schedule: they released a Wedding Album, an extravagantly packaged box set in which the record was one of the less intriguing items; 'Cold Turkey' carried the subject of withdrawal from heroin into the Top 30 for the first time; they prepared a live album of their Toronto performance; and they screened their experimental films in London, including the infamous Self Portrait of Lennon's penis.
Perhaps sensing that there was something awry, a pair of American DJs let their minds free-associate and decided that the answer was simple: Paul McCartney was dead, and had been replaced by a lookalike in 1966. The 'news' broke in mid-October, boosting sales of the Beatles' back catalogue and encouraging idle minds to scan the group's recordings for clues. Music was played backwards; photographs examined for evidence of the imposter; album covers interpreted. There were obvious flaws in the theory. If McCartney's death was a secret, why were the Beatles offering clues in their songs? And how had they managed to find a doppelgänger who could write 'Hey Jude' and 'Blackbird'? But the story tapped into the global sense of distrust that had greeted the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At their most extreme the JFK conspiracy theories asked US citizens to accept that their president had been replaced in a coup d'état. The notion that one of the Beatles was a fake offered a safer route to that satisfying frisson of paranoia.
What's ironic is that the Beatles were indeed conspiring to keep a secret from their fans; the theorists had simply identified the wrong target. Yet the clues were there, all the same: the conspirators could not restrain their tongues. Starkey distanced himself from his friends: 'I'm sorry, but I'm just not like them'; 'I don't particularly dig what John and Yoko are doing'; 'We are four completely different people. We have all stopped doing things together.' McCartney was unearthed at his Scottish farm by a reporter from the US magazine Life. The magazine trumpeted the fact that McCartney was alive, but missed the barely concealed subtext: 'The Beatle thing is over. It has been exploded, partly by what we have done, and partly by other people. We are individuals – all different. John married Yoko, I married Linda. We didn't marry the same girl.' It was an intriguing way to describe the break-up, deflecting his disagreements with Lennon onto their choice of partners.
Inevitably, Lennon was the least restrained of the four. In a radio interview he referred to 'the Beatles, so-called'. Under the headline BEATLES ON THE BRINK OF SPLITTING, the New Musical Express reported his observations in detail: 'Paul and I both have differences of opinion on how things should be run. But instead of it being a private argument about how an LP should be done, or a certain track, it's now a large argument about the organisation of Apple itself.' There was no mention of wives, and Lennon added gracefully, 'I don't really want to discuss Paul without him here.' He concluded, 'The Beatles split up? It just depends how much we all want to record together. I don't know if I want to record together again. I go off and on it, I really do.'
For McCartney, and maybe Harrison and Starkey as well, this signified hope. 'For about three or four months,' he recalled years later, 'George, Ringo and I rang each other to ask, "Well, is this it, then?" It wasn't that the record company had dumped us. It was just a case of: we might get back together again. Nobody quite knew if it was one of John's little flings, and that maybe he was going to feel the pinch in a week's time and say, "I was only kidding." I think John did kind of leave the door open. He'd said, "I'm pretty much leaving the group, but . . ."' McCartney testified in 1971, 'I think all of us (except possibly John) expected we would come together again one day.' Yet it's hard to imagine him reading some of Lennon's other comments in late 1969 without a stab of pain – for example, 'The Beatles can go on appealing to a wide audience as long as they make nice albums like Abbey Road, which have nice little folk songs like "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" for the grannies to dig.'
Of course, the Beatles were still locked together as the reluctant controllers of 'the Beatles Group of Companies' under the supervision of Allen Klein. Although they had failed to secure control of Northern Songs, there remained the dilemma of what to do with their substantial shareholding. Klein negotiated for ATV to buy the Beatles out, only for negotiations to be disrupted when ATV received a letter from John Eastman claiming that Klein did not represent McCartney in any way. This surprised Klein, to say the least, as he had been negotiating regularly with McCartney about exactly that subject. There was a crisis meeting at Klein's apartment in Mayfair at which McCartney spoke to Eastman by telephone, scolded him for contacting ATV, and told him that he supported what Klein was doing. McCartney said that Eastman's final words were, 'Well, I don't understand it. You're all crazy.' Klein then recalled that McCartney phoned ATV chief Sir Lew Grade and told him, 'Allen Klein is coming over and he speaks for me.' The deal was concluded, and Klein registered it as a decisive victory in his battle of wills with the Eastmans.
On the same day that ATV bought the Beatles' shareholding, Klein held another screening of the Get Back film. He invited the entire group and their wives, but Lennon and Ono did not attend. The movie now ran around 100 minutes, about half its original length, and McCartney, Harrison and Starkey agreed that it was fit to release. Klein claimed credit for suggesting that it should be retitled Let It Be, enabling the McCartney-penned song of that title to be issued as a single at the same time, alongside a soundtrack album. *13 At dinner Klein told the three Beatles about another proposal, which Lennon had already approved: Apple Records should invite the American record producer Phil Spector to join its staff. The group had met Spector on several occasions in 1963 and 1964, and Harrison in particular was an admirer of his work. 'They were all enthusiastic,'
Klein recalled.
Apparently random events filled the landscape of the Beatles' new world. While McCartney and Starkey struggled to imagine how they might survive outside the group, Lennon ran fearlessly into the future. He outraged many right-thinking British citizens by returning the MBE medal he had been awarded in 1965, complaining about the government's inaction in the face of famine and civil war in Nigeria, and, as if to annoy anyone who wasn't already ruffled, adding a sly comment about the fact that 'Cold Turkey' was now sliding down the Top 30. His action spurred one gesture of solidarity, as Nigerian boxer Dick Tiger also returned his MBE, and a flurry of protests from those who felt that Lennon was insulting both the Queen and the decaying British Commonwealth. The next day Lennon prepared fresh edits of two songs he'd recorded earlier, 'What's the
New Mary Jane' and 'You Know My Name', and announced that they would be rush-released as a Plastic Ono Band single. Just as quickly, the project was cancelled, with Apple explaining, 'It was mutually decided by the Beatles that it sounded more like the Beatles themselves than the Plastic Ono Band' – not least because both songs were indeed Beatles recordings. McCartney's reaction to Lennon's attempted theft can easily be imagined.
A clear sign that the times had changed came with the December 1969 publication of the final edition of The Beatles Book, which had appeared every month since 1963 with the group's increasingly distant approval. 'The Beatles have lost interest,' publisher Sean O'Mahony complained to the Guardian. 'They won't co-operate, let us have new pictures, or give interviews.' In his last editorial he attacked the group for their willingness to encourage young people to take drugs. 'I didn't think that the pop world had done young people any favours,' he recalled later. 'It was fine for them: they were rich, and had someone to pick them up if they fell over. But their fans didn't have the same support network if things went wrong.'
With the timing that would become his trademark, US promoter Sid Bernstein chose this moment to offer the Beatles another substantial payday, if only they would come to their senses and perform together: $1 million for an appearance at a Dutch festival in August 1970. Lennon had similar plans of his own. Fired by his recent appearance in Toronto, he proposed a much more ambitious project: a peace festival in the city that would not only involve the Beatles but Elvis Presley, Led Zeppelin, the Who and virtually every other artist whose name came to Lennon's mind. The idea was doomed from the start, as Lennon was insistent that (a) the artists should be paid and (b) it should be a free festival. This equation proved impossible to solve, and after much hype in the underground press Lennon and his fellow organisers acrimoniously parted company. Stranger still was the idea, also given credence by Apple, that Lennon might sit on the board of a United States peace festival – to be staged not by hippies and peaceniks, but by the United States government. Even Lennon realised that this might endanger his image, and the proposal disintegrated in the wake of heightened protests against America's involvement in the Vietnam War.
'When we're not working, we get pretty depressed,' Lennon admitted, and his activities had taken on a frantic quality – demonstrations, films, records, every aspect of his life translated into performance art. Surprisingly, Harrison echoed his work rate, having signed up with the touring
band of US rock-soul duo Delaney and Bonnie alongside Eric Clapton. On 6 December the musicians appeared in Liverpool, where Harrison allowed himself a rare moment in the spotlight. Unknown to him, Clapton had developed a passionate attachment to Pattie Boyd, who attended the Liverpool show with her younger sister Paula. According to Clapton, Harrison took him aside afterwards 'and suggested that I should spend the night with Pattie so that he could sleep with Paula . . . but at the last moment he lost his nerve and nothing happened. The end result was not the one George wanted, as I ended up spending the night with Paula instead.' Clapton began to live with Paula Boyd while continuing to court her sister.
Harrison also found time in Liverpool to tell a journalist, 'I'd like to do the Beatles thing, but more like Delaney and Bonnie with us augmented with a few more singers and a few trumpets, saxes, organ and all that.' The closest that his dream came to fruition was nine days later, when Lennon, Ono and the Plastic Ono Band were joined by the entire Delaney and Bonnie troupe, including Harrison, for a 30-minute charity performance in London. The impromptu 'supergroup', as the pop papers named it, played extended versions of the songs from Lennon/Ono's latest single, hitting almost supernatural peaks of what Lennon regarded as the music of the future, but confusing as many fans as it delighted.
It was easy to imagine that Starkey might have appeared alongside Lennon and Harrison that night, but McCartney would never have been invited. He continued to isolate himself from his colleagues and from Klein, despite being happy to benefit from the contracts that Klein had renegotiated. He secretly began work on a solo album, instructing his confidants at Apple that Lennon should not be told. That month he phoned Klein early one New York morning, and (so Klein alleged) 'said something about my not giving interviews to newspapers, and leaving his in-laws alone'. Meanwhile, Lennon was describing Klein's impact on Apple as 'really marvellous . . . He's swept out all the rubbish and the dead wood, and stopped it being a rest house for all the world's hippies. Klein's very good.'
Derek Taylor had the unfortunate task of interpreting the Beatles' actions for the outside world. As 1969 came to a close, the Apple press officer was invited to speculate about the year ahead. He clearly knew nothing about McCartney's recording activity, as he said that the musician was 'the only one who doesn't seem to have an outlet for whatever he gets together'. He hoped that McCartney would return from his winter holiday prepared to spur the reluctant Beatles back to work. 'We can expect a Beatle meeting to be called in January,' he said. But Taylor revealed that the Beatles might now be a more elastic concept than in the past. 'Yoko's really one of them,' he claimed. 'Without Yoko, there wouldn't be the Beatles. [Lennon] and Yoko are 50 per cent of each other, so if John's a Beatle, that makes her a Beatle too.'
One of Taylor's predictions was proved right, although not in the fashion he might have anticipated. On the afternoon of 3 January 1970 the Beatles gathered in the familiar setting of Studio Two, Abbey Road Studios. This was not a quartet, however, or even quintet, but the three-man group that had worked together so successfully in July. John Lennon was absent, undergoing hypnosis treatment in Denmark in an effort to quit smoking, cropping his hair and telling the press that all his future record royalties would be donated to the peace movement. (Allen Klein's 10 per cent share of Bag Productions was suddenly looking less attractive.) Without Lennon, the Beatles recorded Harrison's 'I Me Mine'. The song was featured in the Let It Be film, and Klein was anxious that it should appear on the soundtrack album. The following day the trio applied various overdubs to McCartney's 'Let It Be', and Linda McCartney was persuaded to flesh out the background harmonies with her naive, untutored voice. Eighteen months after Lennon had first invited Ono to participate in a Beatles session, McCartney had finally secured his hollow revenge.
Once again the luckless Glyn Johns was asked to assemble an appropriate album; once again the four Beatles turned it down. Let It Be was now scheduled for cinema release in May, and Klein was desperate to seize the commercial opportunity that the film represented by issuing a new record. He had already asked Apple Records' US head, Allan Steckler, to compile an album for the American market entitled HeyJude, which the Beatles condoned as it represented a way of earning money without any effort. Klein must have been tempted to overrule his infuriatingly indecisive clients and authorise his own version of the Let It Be soundtrack. But even he could not have imagined that the Beatles' record company could release a new album by the group without their unanimous consent. As it turned out, his imagination was about to be stretched to its limit – and so was Paul McCartney's patience.
Chapter 4
You mustn't pretend that brothers don't fight, because they fight worse than anybody.
Richard Starkey
At Christmas 1969 John Lennon and Yoko Ono launched a worldwide poster campaign to announce 'War Is Over (If You Want It)'. It was a stunningly simple and effective message, placing the responsibility for peace on the whole of mankind. It also removed the couple's self-imposed burden of saving the world. There was little more talk of donating their earnings to peace or carrying their bed-in tactic behind the Iron Curtain. Their priority now was personal freedom: physical, chemical, existential. 'We've been through the post-drug depression,' Lennon explained when they returned from Denmark in mid-January. 'Now we've resurrected hope in ourselves.'
Yet the world was closing in on the Lennons: their marriage was disintegrating, so was the Toronto Peace Festival; Ono's health was delicate after a series of miscarriages; and there was the perenni
al problem of Apple. Since May 1969 two ravenous sets of lawyers had been debating the legality of the management agreement that Lennon, Harrison, Starkey and Klein had signed. As Paul McCartney reflected ruefully, 'We put every lawyer's kid through school.'
During a meeting at Apple in mid-January, Lennon, Harrison and Starkey agreed an expanded management contract with ABKCO and Klein designed to cover the gaping loopholes in the original draft. (Significantly, McCartney was not consulted about the deal.) They signed on behalf of a web of companies that month – not just the various Apple subsidiaries, but such concerns as Singsong Ltd (handling Harrison's music publishing), Startling Music Ltd (likewise for Starkey) and Ono Music Ltd. There were Apple offices in Switzerland, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, France and Germany to consider; twin incarnations of Apple Records Inc. in New York and Los Angeles; Bag Music Inc., for some far-flung outpost of the Lennon/Ono empire; and Joko Films Inc., which looked after the Lennons' US film interests. A total of 33 companies sheltered under the Apple umbrella, each now owing allegiance to Klein's ABKCO.
The meeting was held a few hours after Lennon and Harrison had completed a recording session at Abbey Road – not for the Beatles, but for the Plastic Ono Band. The previous day Lennon had woken up with a song, which he titled 'Instant Karma!'.*14 Impatient as ever, he wanted to record it and release it immediately. He contacted George Harrison, who was in London with Phil Spector discussing his first solo album. 'I said to Phil, "Why don't you come to the session?"' Harrison recalled. With characteristic brio, Spector transformed the ambience of the track, which crackled with tension as Lennon delivered his deconstruction of stardom over ominous piano and whiplash drums.
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 14