You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles

by Peter Doggett

  Lennon was ecstatic: in a few minutes Spector had concocted a fervid, almost claustrophobic sound beyond anything the Beatles could have achieved. The producer was erratic and prone to frequent explosions of temper and ego, but Lennon was smitten. He told Klein that he wanted Spector to produce his next album as well as Harrison's. 'Why don't we get Phil to listen to the Let It Be tapes?' he added.

  The decision required the approval of all four Beatles, and for several weeks it proved impossible to pin McCartney down. He had finally decided to accept Lennon at his word: the Beatles were over. 'I started thinking, Well, if that's the case, I had better get myself together,' he recalled. 'I can't just let John control the situation and dump us as if we're the jilted girlfriends.' He closed the doors to the outside world and worked in an environment where there was no one to question his judgement. His first solo album took shape in his home studio, before he ventured into Morgan Studios in north-west London – removed from the hub of the London recording industry. Even so, he reserved all his session time under the pseudonym Billy Martin, a ruse that continued when he finally felt brave enough to stroll round the corner from his home to Abbey Road Studios in February.

  Eventually, McCartney answered the string of messages he'd received about Phil Spector. A soundtrack album was definitely required, but McCartney must have wondered whether someone who had already worked with Lennon, and was about to produce Harrison, could deliver an impartial appraisal of his material. Eventually he agreed, on the same proviso as the other Beatles: the album could not be released until all of them had approved Spector's work. Meanwhile, McCartney completed his own record, a charming if insubstantial collage of fragments, including rejects from the Beatles' January 1969 sessions, instrumentals and two hauntingly beautiful love songs, 'Every Night' and 'Maybe I'm Amazed'.

  All four Beatles were now promising solo albums. Harrison had a stockpile of at least 20 songs, some of which had been rejected by the Beatles in January 1969, while others had been carefully retained for his own use, notably his collaboration with Bob Dylan 'I'd Have You Anytime'. Yet he was still torn between the spiritual and the secular. He had recently bought Friar Park, a Gothic mansion on the outskirts of Henley-on-Thames, formerly occupied by an order of nuns. Built by the Victorian eccentric Sir Francis Crisp, it was surrounded by grounds that encompassed not just ornamental lakes but a network of underground caves that could be explored by boat and extravagant gardens that had been allowed to slip into disrepair. Harrison's plans ran to a complete refurbishment of the property and its surroundings, and the installation of a lavish recording studio. Even by the standards of rock star grandeur, it was an epic enterprise in consumerism, but Harrison also envisaged the house as a spiritual haven.

  He soon invited several members of the Krishna Temple to live with him, to his wife's muffled horror. She felt more and more isolated from her husband. 'He became increasingly obsessive about meditating and chanting,' she recalled. 'He would do it for hours.' After several months dedicated to the spirit, Harrison would relapse: 'As if the pleasures of the flesh were too hard to resist, he would stop meditating, snort coke, have fun flirting and partying.' As Boyd explained, 'I didn't want to chant all day. George did it obsessively for three months, then went crazy.'

  It was Harrison the chanter who travelled to Paris in March 1970 with the acolytes of the Krishna Temple on a mission to spread the word of God. 'It was rather like throwing a mountain into a puddle,' said his Krishna friend Shyamasundar, 'because about 330-odd Frenchmen, photographers and pressmen met him at this restaurant and almost smothered him. We didn't get too much Krishna consciousness propagated.' The same observer noted that Harrison's 'future plans were to become Krishna conscious . . . He's got everything that the material world can offer, but still there's no satisfaction in it, so he knows that to understand Krishna and actually associate with the supreme personality of God is the highest and rare-most [sic] achievement of man.' And Shyamasundar confirmed that Krishna also dominated Harrison's musical ambitions: 'He has said that from now on he only wants to sing mantras.' Yet Harrison knew that wasn't an appropriate dish to set before Phil Spector, so he kept the producer waiting.

  So did John Lennon, despite Apple confidently announcing in March 1970 that he was about to begin an album. (Meanwhile, George Martin was promising that the Beatles would record together in June, a triumph of hope over reality.) Several obstacles remained, not the least of which was Lennon's lack of songs. After the deluge of inspiration he'd experienced in India, his creativity had been spasmodic, although the quality of his material, from 'Come Together' to 'Instant Karma!', obscured his difficulties. He continued to insist that his relationship with Yoko Ono had unleashed his full capabilities as an artist, but to write songs it seemed he needed the Beatles and the stimulus of McCartney's competitive instinct, or else the intervention of an irresistible force from outside. The Toronto Peace Festival certainly wasn't the answer: it collapsed in early March 1970, after Lennon sent the promoters a telegram that ended, 'We want nothing to do with you or your festival. Yours in disgust, John and Yoko.' Harrison might have found Lennon's vision of the festival sympathetic: 'Our latest idea was to have everyone at the festival singing only "Hare Krishna" . . . Can you imagine what we could achieve together in the one spot – singing and praying for peace – one million souls?' But his final words to his global audience were more despairing. 'We are sorry for the confusion. It is bigger than both of us . . . We still believe. Pray for us.' It sounded like a last telegram from the Titanic.

  Still prepared to engage with the outside world, Lennon found a fresh hero in Trinidad-born black-power activist Michael Abdul Malik (known professionally as Michael X), founder of a London collective known as the Black Eagles, inspired by the Black Panther Party of California. Malik stumbled upon every radical's dream, a rich and guilt-ridden patron. 'Michael was a persuasive guy,' recalled Lennon's friend Barry Miles. 'He became whatever people wanted him to be. He would spin these rich people a yarn, and how could they not write him a cheque? John Lennon was bound to be impressed by him. It was inevitable.' Malik talked his way into Apple's offices and fearlessly accused Lennon of cultural larceny. 'You have stolen the rhythms of the black people you knew in Liverpool,' he said. 'You might have done it consciously or unconsciously. Anyway, now you owe us a debt.' Lennon offered him cash from the Bag Productions account, ostensibly as an advance on a book deal, although no contract was ever signed or manuscript delivered.

  When he and Yoko Ono had cut their hair in Denmark, he had saved the cuttings in a plastic bag, aware that in a world still prone to Beatlemania there were few things more valuable than true fragments of a Beatle. Now he had found a cause worthy of his sacred offering. On 4 February 1970 Lennon, Ono and Derek Taylor climbed to the roof of Malik's HQ, watched by a crowd of photographers. Lennon handed over the bag of hair, Malik offered a pair of bloodstained shorts once worn by boxer Muhammad Ali, and Lennon grinned inanely at the cameras. 'It was such an ugly meeting. Nobody printed anything,' recalled Derek Taylor. 'There was a massive press turnout, with photographers clambering over the roofs, and then nothing in the papers. I definitely should have had the wisdom to call a halt to the daily press conferences they were giving. Every day there was a new campaign, a new cause. This was the final proof that they were overexposed.'

  Lennon's desire for publicity seemed to have reached manic proportions. Even the Valentine's Day gift of his psychedelic Rolls-Royce to Allen Klein was accompanied by a press advert and a statement: 'Believe it or not, Allen Klein is a soul brother from way back – a few incarnations ago. We went out to eat with him, and it was revealed unto us, and I was sorry for the thoughts I'd had about him, even the paranoia I'd had laid on me by other people. There'll be no more of that, and I wanted to give him this to surprise him. He's just fantastic, and I know there's a lot of shit going around about him. About us too.'

  More pressing was what Lennon in a notorious 1971 letter would call 'shit from
the inside, baby': the psychological turbulence that was corroding his relationship with Ono. In January 1970 Lennon received a book in the mail. Entitled The Primal Scream, it was the work of radical psychotherapist Arthur Janov. '[ John] read it,' Janov recalled, 'and he came to me.' The book represented a profound break from orthodox psychotherapy. 'I believe that the only way to eliminate neurosis is with overthrow by force and violence,' Janov wrote, 'the force of years of compressed feelings and denied needs; the violence of wrenching them out of an unreal system.'

  These feelings and needs, he declared, were the accumulation of primal pain, first experienced in the earliest stages of childhood, perhaps even during the birth process itself. They represented rejections by fathers, mothers and other authority figures, all the agony of life in the cauldron of everyday cruelty. 'Just as neurosis results from a gradual shutting-off process, becoming healthy involves a gradual turning-on again,' Janov wrote. 'Primal Therapy is like neurosis in reverse. Each day in a young child's life, hurt after hurt closes off more of his feelings until he is neurotic. In Primal Therapy the patient relives those hurts, opening himself up until he is well.' The final breakthrough of recovery, Janov said, would come in an outpouring of emotion so urgent and unrestrained that it would emerge as a piercing shriek of pain.

  Instinctively repelled by intellectual theory ('bullshit'), Lennon still devoured The Primal Scream with the same excitement that TheAutobiography of a Yogi inspired in George Harrison. He immediately phoned Janov and asked him to come to England. By mid-March the therapist was at Lennon's Ascot home, encouraging him to scream for his mother's love. 'John had about as much pain as I've ever seen in my life,' Janov recalled. 'He was a very dedicated patient. Very serious about it.' A measure of Lennon's commitment is the fact that he did not immediately run to the press, like an excited schoolboy, to alert the world to his new discovery. He had become a compulsive enthusiast, for drugs, for the Maharishi, for Ono, and for Klein, but Primal Scream Therapy affected him too profoundly to be translated into a poster event. Soon he would be dragged back into the material world, however, as the more recent past demanded his attention.

  Nearly six months after Lennon had quit the group, the Beatles continued to pretend that they were still a functioning unit. Any concerns to the contrary were calmed by the imminent arrival of the Let It Be film, and by statements from Starkey and Harrison suggesting the quartet would soon work together. 'We've got unity through diversity,' Harrison explained cryptically. It was an epigram that would soon be exposed as wildly optimistic.

  There was a series of Beatle landmarks on the horizon. The HeyJude album was released on 26 February 1970. Starkey's SentimentalJourney was scheduled for 27 March. The Let It Be film was meant to premiere in New York on 28 April, then in London a week later. And the 'Let It Be' single was rush-released on 6 March, though tellingly it failed to top the British chart. Nevertheless, McCartney's elegant, gospel-inflected tune *15 whetted the global appetite for the soundtrack album, which still awaited completion.

  Suddenly there was another item to squeeze into the agenda, an album entitled McCartney. Its creator believed that, as a co-owner of Apple, he could impose his own schedule: the record, he said, would be issued on 10 April. Neil Aspinall politely asked if he would mind postponing the album for a week, to allow Starkey's record a little longer in the spotlight. McCartney agreed, prepared a final mix on 23 March, handed over the tapes and artwork, and discovered on 25 March, when his brother-in-law John Eastman visited EMI, that Allen Klein had already postponed his album's release. McCartney immediately phoned Harrison, who told him that there was no question of delay, confirming this in a telegram that he sent to the other Beatles, Klein and Aspinall.

  McCartney triumphantly showed the telegram to EMI, but his victory was short-lived. On the same day he finished his record, Phil Spector had begun work at Abbey Road on the Let It Be album. By the end of March Spector was confident that the project would be completed within a couple of days, so Klein alerted EMI that the new Beatles LP would be issued before the end of April, to accompany the premiere of the film. But the most suitable date was just one week after McCartney was due to be released. Now the Beatles would effectively be competing for sales with Paul McCartney.

  Klein visited EMI executives, and 'discussed with them the problem of two long-playing records coming out together. They agreed that it was undesirable from a selling point of view.' Once ego was removed from the equation, the solution was obvious. McCartney was only a record; Let It Be was a multimedia package, albeit chaotically assembled and still, less than a month before release, unfinished. Besides, Let It Be was a group project, and should automatically take precedence over that of an individual. And so McCartney might have agreed, had the decision not followed eighteen months of acrimony.

  Lennon and Harrison certainly had no qualms about delaying McCartney. On 31 March Lennon informed EMI of their decision, writing, 'We have arrived at the conclusion that it would not be in the best interests of this company for the record to be released on that date.' Meanwhile, Harrison wrote to McCartney:

  Dear Paul, We thought a lot about yours and the Beatles LPs – and decided it's stupid for Apple to put out two big albums within 7 days of each other (also there's Ringo's and Hey Jude) – so we sent a letter to EMI telling them to hold your release date til June 4th (there's a big Apple-Capitol convention in Hawaii then). We thought you'd come round when you realized that the Beatles album was coming out on April 24th. We're sorry it turned out like this – it's nothing personal. Love John & George. Hare Krishna. A Mantra a Day Keeps MAYA! Away.

  Harrison's religious references sounded almost aggressive; McCartney must have wondered whose side Maya, the Hindu goddess of illusion, was on.

  Harrison's letter to McCartney was sealed in an envelope labelled 'From Us, To You', and left at the Apple reception desk for a messenger to carry to McCartney's home. But Richard Starkey agreed to deliver the bad news in person. 'I didn't think it fair some office lad should take something like that round,' he explained. He drove to St John's Wood, handed over the letter and told McCartney that he agreed with what it said. 'He went crazy; he was crazy, I thought,' Starkey recalled. 'He just shouted and pointed at me. He was out of control, prodding his finger towards my face. He told me to get my coat on and get out. I got brought down, because I couldn't believe it was happening to me.' McCartney explained: 'I really got angry . . . I said, in effect, this was the last straw, and "If you drag me down, I'll drag you down." What I meant was, "Anything you do to me, I will do to you."' Lennon felt that 'Paul's was just an ego game . . . Ringo had not taken sides or anything like that . . . he attacked Ringo and he started threatening him and everything, and that was the kibosh for Ringo.' As Starkey admitted, 'I'm very emotional; things like that really upset me at the time.' The Beatles weren't strangers to the raised fist – it was an instinctive reaction from Lennon when he felt he was being challenged – but none of the group had ever physically confronted Starkey, who was its most diminutive and vulnerable member.

  The immediate victor was McCartney: the distraught Starkey reported back to Apple, and the decision was taken to let the bassist's album go ahead. But the incident had a grievous effect on the relationship between the two men. Throughout the disputes over Apple and Klein, Starkey had never let business decisions affect their friendship. Now he felt disgusted, alienated, crushed, battered, the whole range of negative emotions that McCartney had experienced when Ono and then Klein disrupted his perfect universe.

  The next day John Eastman wrote to United Artists Films to say that McCartney had not yet agreed that the film should be released, and that Klein's word could not be trusted. Meanwhile, Phil Spector was close to completing the soundtrack album. The day after his confrontation with McCartney, the luckless Starkey faced another psychodrama. Spector had commissioned orchestral and choral decoration for three songs, and Starkey was there to overdub his percussion tracks, which might otherwise be obscured. For
the last five years nothing had been added to a Beatles track without the approval of its composer. Now songs by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were about to be augmented, and none of the three was there to watch it happen.

  Richard Hewson's*16 arrangement for McCartney's 'The Long and Winding Road' was by far the most radical, and controversial, of the revisions. As originally recorded, the song was a selfconsciously maudlin affair, overflowing with sentimentality. Rather than subverting this mood with a touch of atonality, Hewson boldly decided to accentuate it. He delivered a score that was almost claustrophobic, like the ill-ventilated sick room of some ancien régime noble. On another day Starkey might have insisted that McCartney was consulted. But he was still in shock after their confrontation and also faced a more immediate problem: attempting to prevent the overwrought producer from treating the studio staff and orchestra so badly that they walked out. 'Phil had a style of humiliation that was part of his humour,' recalled Leon Russell, veteran of many Spector sessions.

  With Spector's work complete on 2 April, copies of the Let It Be album were forwarded to the Beatles for their approval, with a letter from Spector. 'If there is anything you'd like done to the album,' the producer told them, 'let me know and I'll be glad to help. Naturally little things are easy to change, big things might be a problem. If you wish, please call me about anything regarding the album tonight.' 'We all said yes,' Starkey recalled. 'Even at the beginning Paul said yes. I spoke to him on the phone, and said, "Did you like it?" and he said, "Yeah, it's OK." He didn't put it down.' Starkey himself agreed: 'I like what Phil did, actually.' So did Harrison: 'I personally thought it was a really good idea.' And Lennon: 'He always wanted to work with the Beatles, and he was given the shittiest load of badly recorded shit – and with a lousy feeling to it – ever. And he made something out of it. It wasn't fantastic, but I heard it; I didn't puke. I was so relieved.' And finally, not exuberant but phlegmatic, McCartney: 'When I got the finished record there were loud ladies' voices wailing. It wasn't terrible . . . I preferred it the way it was.' But he