Not that Klein's ABKCO company was any more secure, it seemed. For a year or more he had been unchallenged as the most influential manager in the rock universe, controlling the affairs of not just the Beatles but also, despite their misgivings, the Rolling Stones. The Stones' agreement with Klein officially expired at the end of May 1970, however, and two months later the group announced that he would no longer be operating as their business manager.*18 The inevitable legal manoeuvring would follow soon enough, and Klein was left with effective control over all the music the Stones had recorded plus a vital share in their music publishing. Financially his position was enviable, but the end of his active involvement in their career compounded the feeling that Klein was more careful with columns of figures than with people and their fragile emotions.
Remarkably, Klein had not abandoned hope that the Beatles might resume their career. In July 1970 he contacted his accountants to check the potential tax implications of a grandiose project: a worldwide tour by the group with a documentary film to chronicle it for posterity. If a tour had taken place, he would have been eligible for 20 per cent of the proceeds. Given the distance between McCartney and the others, Klein can only have been anticipating that Lennon, Harrison and Starkey would recruit a replacement and carry on regardless.
Meanwhile, Klein's clients were still creating music. Richard Starkey's debut album had been greeted fondly as an indulgence from a national treasure. In June 1970, however, he recorded something more substantial in Nashville. Producer and steel guitarist Pete Drake assembled a crack session band and a bunch of previously unrecorded songs, and guided the nervous but soon
exuberant Starkey through an album of country material ideally suited to his lugubrious voice. Meanwhile, Starkey was considering the possibility of making an album of experimental music. Suddenly the least creative of the Beatles was acting like the first graduate of the Lennon/Ono school of artistic expression. 'What I really wanted to do was confuse everyone,' he explained. 'I wanted the standards album, a country one, and I've done an electronics album which I haven't put out yet. I wanted to put all these albums out and people would say, "Shit, what's going on here! Electronic, country, standards, pop records!"' The country record, Beaucoups of Blues, duly appeared in late 1970, but sadly Starkey lacked the momentum to pursue his multidimensional scheme. His most significant artistic decision of this period, however, was only recognized much later: he was responsible for championing the classical composer John Tavener, whose first two albums were issued by Apple. 'The next thing I want to do with him,' Starkey said excitedly, 'is get a rock group together, just a crowd of friends, and I'm [going to] put his stuff on top of what we play.' It was another tantalizing but unfulfilled vision of Starkey as the Renaissance Beatle.
Starkey was among a dozen musicians assembled at a variety of London studios that summer by Phil Spector and George Harrison. Spector was responsible for forcing Harrison into the most inspired vocal performances of his career, and also for the intense, almost decadent quality of the three-LP box set that resulted, titled All ThingsMust Pass. In later years Harrison would compare these sessions to 'a case of diarrhoea', as he poured out the songs that had been held back for so long. Only one tune, 'My Sweet Lord', matched Harrison's determination to record nothing but spiritual chants, but many of the songs were pitched perfectly between the romantic and the divine.
More intriguing were the glimpses of Harrison's Beatles inheritance. 'Apple Scruffs' was a playful tribute to the fans who littered the doorstep of their London HQ, one of whom subsequently wrote a book documenting how close the Beatle came to crossing the divide between hero and lover.*19 'Wah-Wah' was both a celebration of a guitar effects pedal and a response to Harrison's exile from the group in January 1969. 'Isn't It a Pity' was a remarkably non-judgemental commentary on the disintegration of the Beatles' spirit. But the most compelling testimony to the recent past was provided by 'Run of the Mill', a title that perhaps reflected a comment about his songwriting from one of his fellow Beatles. Certainly they inspired the song, which was both a rejection of the culture of recrimination that had scarred the Beatles' final months and a lament for lost love and respect. In a flashback to the Let It Be sessions, Harrison recalled 'another day for you to realize me, or send me down again', perhaps remembering how Lennon had unfeelingly criticised his songs. When he sang 'you've got me wondering how I lost your friendship' the sentiment was more apposite for his decaying relationship with McCartney. 'Even before I started,' he recalled, 'I knew I was gonna make a good album, because I had so many songs and I had so much energy. For me to do my own album after all that, it was joyous, dream of dreams.'
In retrospect, critic Simon Leng astutely noted 'the self-referential nature of many of the solo Beatle songs' that emerged over the next couple of years. 'It's as if "the Beatles" were an everyday fact of life,' he wrote, 'as much a natural subject for a song as the weather or walking the dog. Such was the celebrity status attached to the group that the public and media longed for these further installments of "The Beatles soap opera".' The Beatles were not alone in this self-obsession; it became a hallmark of the singer-songwriter movement that was emerging in the USA, fuelling the increasingly insular work of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor. But Harrison's work offered a teasing glimpse into an intimate world that had previously been off-limits to the public.
No Beatle project would ever match the self-exposure of the songs written by John Lennon during 1970. They were an unfiltered and uncensored portrayal of an artist who was shedding his past and uncertain of his future. Lennon had been eager to excise poetic imagery from his writing. There would be no more of the self-consciously psychedelic verbiage that filled his songs in 1966/7. The visceral roar of his wife's voice, which he viewed as an outpouring of pure emotion, had inspired him to search for words that would fulfil the same impulse. The songs he wrote under the spell of Primal Scream Therapy represented the apotheosis of that technique.
In lyric after lyric on the album that became John Lennon: Plastic Ono Band he scratched at the scars of the past, from the desertion of his parents ('Mother', 'My Mummy's Dead') to the inadequacies of his education ('Working Class Hero', 'I Found Out'). During his sessions with Janov he had laid bare his core of pain, which fuelled songs such as 'Remember' and 'Isolation'. While some of his writing was little more than a digest of Janov's theories, the most effective used the doctor's therapeutic techniques to reveal the shape of his soul, undecorated and unashamed.
None of Lennon's new songs was as blatantly a cleansing of the spirit as 'God', which presented a relentless list of divinities and heroes in whom he had lost belief. As the parade went by, icons and idols were brought to their knees, from Jesus and Buddha to Elvis Presley and Bob (Dylan) Zimmerman. But the most shocking disavowal, at least for Lennon's audience in 1970, came in the final line, followed by a suitably awed silence: 'I don't believe in Beatles.' Lennon later explained that he was denying 'Beatle' as a symbol, as a disguise, a deception; but it was hard for anyone who heard the song not to feel that he was pronouncing sentence on the group he had formed in his teens.
Initially his audience amounted to just three people: Yoko Ono, of course, plus Janov and his wife Vivian. He presented the Janovs with a handwritten set of his new lyrics on 6 August 1970. Janov wanted the Lennons to undergo his therapy for at least a year, but Lennon was convinced that he was under threat from the US immigration service. 'He said, "Could you send a therapist to Mexico with me?"' Janov recalled. 'I said, "We can't do that, John." We had too many patients to take care of. They cut the therapy off just as it started, really . . . We had opened him up, and we didn't have time to put him back together again. I told him that he had to finish it, but it wasn't possible.'
When Lennon returned to England in August he was around 30 pounds heavier than he had been in the spring. He had been living, he said, 'on chocolate and Dr Pepper'. He would soon refer back to his 'fat Elvis period' of the mid-1960s,
when a combination of fame and lethargy had affected his physique. Now he had regained all the weight that he had found so contemptible.
'Part of [Primal Scream Therapy] was not to self-control in any way,' he explained, 'so I would just eat and eat and eat. And it was all very well for the mind, but for the body it was terrible. But the idea was, Well, I am an artist, not a model, so fuck it, I wonder who I'm trying to please? It was me I was trying to please, I found out – too late.'
Having embarked on the process of casting out idols, he found it difficult to stop. Lennon's espousal of a new passion, followed quickly by total rejection, formed a pattern in his adult life. It stretched from fame, which had been the initial impetus for all four Beatles, through sex (too many groupies), drugs (too many bad trips), Maharishi (disillusionment) and Magic Alex (further disillusionment). Only Yoko Ono and Allen Klein remained intact, because even a fully cleansed Lennon needed someone to lean on. Janov was the latest addition to the list. The therapist recalled that when Lennon left he 'wanted to put an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle saying, "This is it: Primal Therapy." I said to him, "I don't want you to do that. This therapy's far more important than the Beatles in the long run of history, and I think it's got to stand on its own."' Slowly, though, Lennon's familiar process of doubt set in. The power of Janov's therapy was unmistakable, but could its creator be trusted? Lennon started to wonder why all his sessions had been taped (standard practice, Janov said) and some of them filmed (not true, according to Janov). Could he trust another father figure when so many had let him down? Eventually he decided to distinguish between the man and his message, claiming, 'Janov was an idiot, but he was not bad. His therapy was good. It was just that he was a pain in the neck.'
In late September 1970 Lennon entered a recording studio for the first time in almost eight months. Phil Spector had already agreed to produce the album, but nobody at Apple could contact him, and eventually Allen Klein had to book a full-page ad in Billboard magazine, which read simply, 'Phil! John is ready this weekend.' By the time Spector appeared, the album was virtually complete, and the producer did little except supervise the mixing process and play piano on one song. Lennon was insistent that the sound should be as sparse and compelling as the lyrical content, so there was no call for Spector to demonstrate his flair for lavish orchestration. Indeed, Lennon recruited just three musicians for the project: Billy Preston, who made a fleeting appearance at one session, Klaus Voormann and Richard Starkey. Musical simplicity aside, the choices reflected Lennon's awareness that he could only record such revelatory material if he was with close friends.
The impact of Janov's therapy was soon clear to both Voormann and Starkey, who recalled that 'suddenly we'd be in the middle of a track and John would just start crying or screaming – which freaked us out at the beginning'. Voormann added, 'He was very vulnerable in a way. Very up and happy a lot of the time – but really emotional, crying a lot. He was still living those experiences out. He would cry in the control room, listening to the songs, talking to Yoko, remembering the kind of things in the lyrics. You could see that he was moved.' And though Starkey never let down his guard, Voormann revealed that the drummer found the sessions disturbing: 'Ringo was very sad. The old John had gone; it was a different John. It wasn't the old one he was used to. For him, that was quite a thing. Ringo told me that after one session – that it was hard for him.'
Midway through the sessions Lennon celebrated his 30th birthday – a cultural event of sorts, although no fanfare had greeted Starkey's arrival at the same landmark a few months earlier. Various rock luminaries were approached by Apple's Mal Evans to record musical greetings, among them Starkey and George Harrison, both of whom delivered their gifts in person.*20 That same day Lennon's estranged father, Freddie, visited him unexpectedly with his teenage wife and new baby. The visit might have been designed to trigger an immediate primal scream, and it ended with Lennon howling violent threats at his father, threatening to have him killed. Freddie Lennon was sufficiently disturbed to lodge an account of what had happened with a solicitor, in case he was murdered.
A few days earlier Lennon, Voormann and Starkey had laid down the skeleton of a song that its drumming composer called 'When Four Knights Come to Town'. Starkey completed the song with Harrison's help a few days later, and it was released the following year under the title 'Early 1970'. In four simple verses Starkey painted a vivid miniature of each of the Beatles: Lennon staying in bed for peace, Harrison escaping his 40-acre grounds to play endless sessions, McCartney keeping his 'plenty of charm' hidden away on his farm, Starkey exposing his own limited musical skills. The message was simple: Starkey knew that when Lennon and Harrison came to town, they would be happy to work with him, but would McCartney? He didn't know. But he was certain about one thing: 'When I come to town, I want to see all three.' It was a rough draft of a peace treaty, and for the handful of people who heard the track in October 1970 it must have signalled that a reunion was still not impossible, and that Lennon's 'rebirth or death' equation might have a positive solution. That was October, however, and the song wasn't released until March. By then, 'Early 1970' would seem like a false memory of a mythic past, its Arcadia tangled with weeds.
Chapter 5
[The Beatles] are not children. They know what they are doing. One forgets that, I think, sometimes.
Apple counsel Morris Finer, the High Court, 1971
'America is where it's at,' John Lennon said in December 1970. 'You know, I should have been born in New York, man, I should have been born in the Village! That's where I belong. Why wasn't I born there?'
Once the Beatles belonged to Liverpool, then England, then the world. Apple had anchored them in the English capital, but for a year or more the office had meant only stress. Freed from responsibility to each other, three Beatles made their way to New York as the year closed. George Harrison followed Phil Spector to his hometown for the final sessions on his solo album. Lennon was drawn by the city's reputation as an artistic hub: 'Everybody heads towards the centre, that's why I'm here now. I'm here just to breathe it . . . this is where it's happening.' New York was also where Allen Klein plied his trade, but that didn't prevent Paul McCartney from travelling there in November. The move marked a symbolic break from the depression that had
burdened him in Britain. For all three men New York represented liberation. Only Lennon admitted to being overwhelmed by the city: 'I'm such a fucking cripple that I can't take much of it; it's too much for me. I'm too frightened of it. It's so much, and people are so aggressive.'
Like Linda McCartney, Yoko Ono was effectively a New Yorker, and she walked her husband through the city's art world, where she had acquired her maverick reputation a decade earlier. In her domain the couple inevitably adopted her style, quickly assembling two conceptual films: Fly, in which an insect crawled across the drugged body of a naked woman and was encouraged to dwell near her more exotic curves and crevices, and Up Your Legs Forever, a logical sequel to FilmNo. 4 ('Bottoms').
The McCartneys were in New York to inaugurate their own creative partnership, in which the balance of power was tipped decisively in Paul's favour. Linda's contribution to the McCartney album had been ephemeral, but when he began his first ever sessions in America the goal was a 'Paul and Linda McCartney' record. Not that the nature of the partnership was obvious: 'Linda didn't have much to do in the studio; she just took care of the kids,' revealed session guitarist David Spinozza. 'I really don't know what she did aside from sit there and make her comments on what she thought was good and what she thought was bad. I don't know where she's coming from. Now she thinks she's a producer.' In a tone that Harrison might have recognised, Spinozza complained, 'There was no freedom. We were told exactly what to play. He knew what he wanted, and he just used us to do it.'
Harrison and his wife Pattie were in New York when All ThingsMust Pass was released. A three-record set – the first in rock history – it was greeted as 'an extravaganza of piety and sacrifice
and joy, whose sheer magnitude and ambition may dub it the War and Peace of rock and roll' by Rolling Stone magazine. The airwaves resounded to the spiritual chanting of Harrison's single 'My Sweet Lord'. 'Every time I put the radio on, it's "Oh my Lord",' John Lennon noted. 'I'm beginning to think there must be a God.' The Rolling Stone reviewer was among the first to note that 'My Sweet Lord' sounded like the Chiffons' 'He's So Fine', a 1963 hit built around an almost identical structure and melody line. Harrison later admitted that he had set out to rewrite another song, 'Oh Happy Day', but had taken the precaution of altering the melody. It is remarkable that neither he nor Phil Spector recognised the similarity to a record that had been a sizeable hit on both sides of the Atlantic. On 14 February 1971 Bright Tunes, the publisher of 'He's So Fine', filed a lawsuit claiming that Harrison had plagiarised their song and demanding financial restitution. By then, 'My Sweet Lord' had swept the world like the Beatles hits of old, topping the sales charts in the UK and US. Though it retailed for more than twice the price of a single album, All ThingsMust Pass was a worldwide No. 1 hit by January. The comparison with the therapy-inspired John Lennon Plastic Ono Band was telling. Despite being the first album of new Lennon songs since the demise of the Beatles, it sold no better than the audio-vérité recording of his Toronto performance a year earlier.
The knowledge that he had been outstripped by his supposedly less talented friend ensured that Lennon took a jaundiced view of Harrison's work. 'I wonder how happy George is?' he said dismissively. He complained that Harrison was 'not the kind of person I would buy the records of.
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 18