I don't consider my talents fantastic compared with the fucking universe, but I consider George's less.' Harrison recalled, 'I remember that John was really negative at the time. I was away, and he came round to my house, and there was a friend of mine living there who was a friend of John's. He saw the album cover and said, "He must be fucking mad, putting three records out. And look at the picture on the front, he looks like an asthmatic Leon Russell." There was a lot of negativity going down.'
That may explain why Harrison and Lennon avoided each other in New York, despite both making regular visits to Allen Klein's office on Broadway.*21 But the Harrisons did find time for the McCartneys, the first time the two men had met since McCartney's publicity coup in the spring. Though the encounter began peaceably enough, the mood soured – as it so often would over the years to come – when the conversation turned to business. McCartney recalled, 'I said, "Look, George, I want to get off the [Apple] label," and George ended the conversation, and as I say it now I almost feel like I'm lying with the devil's tongue, but I swear George said to me, "You'll stay on the fucking label. Hare Krishna." That's how it was, that's how the times were.'
Ironically, when the press learned of the meeting between the two Beatles, they treated it as a sign of détente. Knowing that Lennon had been in the same city, they embellished the story to the point where the conversation became a summit conference. The pop paper Disc trumpeted its 'exclusive' a few days later: 'Come Together! The Beatles may play again – live!' Journalist Mike Ledgerwood proclaimed that the group were planning a concert in Britain 'following reports that Paul McCartney's "rift" from John, George and Ringo is about to be patched up'. He quoted an anonymous 'friend', who told him, 'They certainly seem serious about working together. There have been definite discussions in that direction.' The New Musical Express caught the same whispers in the breeze: 'The Beatles are said to be closer than at any time for the last 18 months.' Harrison did nothing to dispel the rumour, saying coyly, 'Stranger things have happened.' The reality was that Lennon had arranged a meeting with McCartney in Manhattan, but McCartney had cancelled the appointment. Just as well, Lennon revealed later, as he hadn't planned to turn up either.
After his argument with Harrison, it was obvious that McCartney would investigate other ways of escaping from the Beatles' partnership agreement. So a scheme was hatched to narrow his options. According to Lennon, 'Paul would have forfeited his right to split by joining us again. We tried to con him into recording with us too. Allen came up with this plan. He said, "Just ring Paul and say, 'We're recording next Friday, are you coming?'" So it nearly happened. It got around that the Beatles were getting together again, because EMI heard that the Beatles had booked recording time again. But Paul would never, never do it, for anything, and now I would never do it.' The result was the recording session for Starkey's song 'Early 1970', which – if McCartney had accepted the bait – would have been the symbolic focus of a manipulative Beatles reunion.
Once the rumour had been let loose, it proved impossible to contain. Within two weeks the story had changed: now McCartney was the outsider, and his colleagues had supposedly enrolled their mutual friend Klaus Voormann in his place. Voormann found the subsequent media attention so oppressive that he escaped to Harrison's Friar Park home. Once he went into hiding, the press decided that the new Beatle must be another bass guitarist, Lee Jackson (formerly with the Nice). The details were irrelevant: it was an open secret that the Beatles were about to re-form.
Coincidentally, both Lennon and McCartney chose to puncture the fantasy. They were working independently, to separate agendas, in starkly different ways. But their actions in December 1970 effectively ensured that there could be no Beatles reunion, then or in the years ahead. Lennon moved first. On 8 December, he and Ono submitted to the longest interview he had ever given, with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner. The encounter took place at the ABKCO office, where Klein's staff were instructed to provide Lennon with laxatives and headache medicine – corroborating later claims that, despite the benefits of Primal Scream Therapy, Lennon had relapsed into heroin use. On the aural evidence of the tape, his drug of choice could just as easily have been cocaine, as his voice displayed the manic enthusiasm and aggression of the habitual user.
Designed to promote the Plastic Ono Band album, the Rolling Stone interview (published in two issues of the magazine and subsequently in book form) broadened into a virtual manifesto of the post-Beatle Lennon. He set out his credo: he believed in himself, Yoko, art as creative expression and total honesty, in whatever proportions suited him best. Everything could be judged by these criteria, and aside from the Lennons' work outside the Beatles and the primitivism of 1950s rock 'n' roll, everything was found wanting.
Intrinsic to his philosophy was rejection of the past, which in the arithmetic of Primal Scream Therapy equalled pain. If, as he believed, Janov's therapy had liberated him from his inner torment and the defence mechanisms he'd erected to conceal it, then he needed to rid himself of all the other encumbrances he'd gathered in recent years. None of them weighed or imposed more than the Beatles. After initially diverting Wenner away from that subject, as if he was frightened how much he might reveal, Lennon tore ferociously into the myth, exposing the group's internal warfare, their debauchery on tour, their manager's homosexuality and their individual failings. He raged against the way that Harrison and McCartney had treated Ono, dismissed George Martin's claim to any credit for the Beatles' music and attacked his most loyal friends at Apple for not realising that they weren't Beatles, merely hangers-on.
'That was a pity,' Derek Taylor noted years later,
because the one thing Neil Aspinall and I did know was that there was a difference between us and them. At that time John was very oppressed by fame, and he was a terrific one for lashing out. We at Apple weren't feeling good anyway, because Apple had failed, and here was one of our friends telling everyone who reads Rolling Stone that we were cunts. In the end we had to say, 'Well, we're not.' John later retracted some of it, and we became friends again. And I forgave him. He would forget he'd said it, and expect to be forgiven, as he always was.
During his final meeting with Lennon, George Martin also confronted him about the Rolling Stone confessional.
We spent an evening together, and I said, 'You know, you were pretty rough in that interview, John.' He said, 'Oh Christ, I was stoned out of my fucking mind.' He said, 'You didn't take any notice of that, did you?' I said, 'Well, I did, and it hurt.' I was very incensed about that interview. I think everybody was. I think he slagged off everybody, including the Queen of England. I don't think anyone escaped his attention.
Lennon's account of his final years in the Beatles was profoundly shocking for anyone still clinging to the image of the four buccaneers who had captured the world's hearts. Layer by layer, he exposed the frail humanity beneath their fame. 'We took H [heroin] because of what the Beatles and their pals were doing to us,' he alleged. Asked to pinpoint the reason for the split, he identified a familiar target: 'We got fed up with being sidemen for Paul . . . Paul took over and supposedly led us, you know. But what is leading us when we went round in circles?' But McCartney was not the sole culprit, he claimed. 'I presumed I would just be able to carry on and just bring Yoko into our life, but it seemed that I either had to be married to them or Yoko. I chose Yoko, you know? And I was right.'
His denial of the Beatles was devastating enough for his audience, but Lennon was only just beginning. In the magazine that prided itself on being the voice of the counterculture, read by the people who had grown up with the Beatles and followed them into expanded consciousness, spiritual exploration and political idealism, he delivered the death knell for the whole fantasy that would become known as the Sixties. 'The dream's over,' he repeated. 'I'm not just talking about the Beatles is over. I'm talking about the generation thing. The dream's over, and I have personally got to get down to so-called reality.' None of that utopian spirit was relevant any longe
r; all that mattered was the pain that stretched back to his childhood, when his teachers and guardians failed to notice the genius that was sitting in front of them. 'Fuck youall!' Lennon screamed as if he were still in the therapy room. 'If nobody can recognise what I am, fuck them!'
Lennon still adhered to the concept of art as life and life as art. 'That's the way the genius shows through any media,' he explained. And on those terms the Rolling Stone interview, a sustained barrage of invective, profanity, humour and compulsive truth-telling, was as fully realised and uncompromising as the album he had just released. Indeed, it had claims to being his last great piece of concept art, the final occasion on which he would focus every ounce of his being onto a single purpose without losing concentration or lapsing into self-parody. At last, John Lennon was fully John Lennon; and in the process he destroyed almost every close relationship in his life. From now on Yoko Ono would have to carry the weight of being Lennon's companion, co-creator and saviour, a burden that left precious little space for her own artistic ambition and ego.
The Rolling Stone interview stood as his testament, for the next decade at least, defining his attitude to his fellow Beatles long after he had mellowed his views. For Paul McCartney, who had already endured the loss of Lennon as musical partner and friend, the interview represented the end of the affair. 'It's just like divorce. It's that you were so close and so in love that if anyone decides to start talking dirty – great, then Pandora's box is open. That's what happened with us. In the end it was like, "Oh, you want to know the truth about him? Right, I'll tell you."' As McCartney reviewed this trauma in 1987, he revealed how the episode had haunted him. 'Obviously, I go over this ground in my mind. I was one of the biggest friends in his life, one of the closest people to him. I can't claim to be the closest, although it's possible. It's contentious, but I wouldn't . . . I don't need that credit. But I was certainly among the three or four people who were closest to him in his life, I would have thought, and obviously it was very hurtful.' He might not have needed the 'credit', but his answers revealed how deeply he needed the acknowledgement – a moment, in private or public, when Lennon could drop his guard and confirm an obvious truth, that McCartney had occupied a key role in his life.
McCartney later conceded that there was 'one good thing' about the Rolling Stone interview: 'I'm glad I never answered a lot of John's stuff. I thought, No, I can't handle a big battle in the media with John. I think part of it was that I knew he'd do me in.' Yet he hated the sense of powerlessness, of being assaulted without the freedom to retaliate. He took the unwise step of replying in a medium in which Lennon had already proved himself a master of aggression. Hidden in a song entitled 'Too Many People', was a reference to 'too many people preaching practices'. 'He'd been doing a lot of preaching,' McCartney explained later, 'and it got up my nose a little bit.' It was hardly character assassination, but it briefly made McCartney feel empowered. For the moment though, 'Too Many People' remained a private joke.
Harrison's contemptuous dismissal of McCartney's plea for freedom had decimated his options. He hated to imagine the other Beatles as his enemies and would have preferred to target Allen Klein. But Klein wasn't his manager and so couldn't be fired. Likewise, Klein couldn't release McCartney's earnings from the Beatles partnership. This wasn't about money; if it was, then McCartney could have read the sales figures for Harrison's new records and relished the unearned 25 per cent that would soon be added to his account. What he wanted was to be a Beatle, and if that wasn't possible, then he wanted not to be in the Beatles, rather than being lost in this no-man's-land of phoney partnership. And it was the legal enactment of that partnership that fenced him in. The only valid escape routes from the agreement were expulsion by his colleagues or death. One was not available to him, the other not an attractive option. He was no longer prepared to go through the contortions required by the contract that all four Beatles had signed in April 1967, which bound them as business partners if not friends. It was, he said later, the most difficult decision he had ever made.
On 31 December 1970 McCartney's legal advisers filed a writ at the London High Court, 'A declaration that the partnership business carried on by the plaintiff and the defendants under the name of The Beatles and Co., and constituted by a deed of partnership dated 19 April 1967 and made between the parties hereto, ought to be dissolved and that accordingly the same be dissolved.' The plaintiff also wanted Klein's control over the partnership's affairs to be restricted, and an official receiver appointed to safeguard the Beatles' collective earnings. The plaintiff in case M 6315 of the Chancery Division of the High Court of Justice was James Paul McCartney; the defendants were John Ono Lennon, George Harrison, Richard Starkey and the company that McCartney had conceived and once controlled, Apple Corps Ltd. Though the basis of the case was financial, the symbolism was unmistakable. McCartney, already regarded as the protagonist in the break-up of the Beatles, was now suing his three closest friends.
In an affidavit lodged on the same day, McCartney laid out his case:
I have been driven to make this application because (a) The Beatles have long since ceased to perform as a group, (b) the defendants have sought to impose upon me a manager who is unacceptable to me, (c) my artistic freedom is liable to be interfered with so long as the partnership continues, and (d) no partnership accounts have been prepared since the Deed of Partnership was entered into.
As he told the press, 'We've split, and everything that we've ever earned should now be split. They don't agree. They think it should continue exactly as planned. But if the three of them want to, they could sit down today and write a little bit of paper saying I'll be released.' McCartney made that 'little bit of paper' sound so simple, but for Klein it signified 'horrendous tax problems', as it would expose to the taxman a set of massive individual payments that could no longer be offset against Apple expenses. Klein presented himself as the voice of reason: 'It doesn't accomplish anything, except bringing out into the public a lot of dirty laundry within the life that they live.' He also pointed out that McCartney had been happy to share the money that the Beatles earned from the song 'Yesterday' despite the fact that he had written it alone and performed it without the help of his colleagues. But Klein's argument undermined itself: in 1965, when they released 'Yesterday', the Beatles had been a unit; in 1970 they were four individuals with starkly different agendas.
The three defendants received their first notification of the impending writ (a 'letter before action') four days before Christmas. 'I just could not believe it,' Harrison testified a few weeks later. 'I still cannot understand why Paul acted as he did.' Starkey concurred, adding that he had been under the impression that all four Beatles would meet in London during January 1971 for the first time in almost eighteen months. 'I know Paul,' Starkey said, 'and I know we would not lightly disregard his promise [to meet]. Something serious, about which I have no knowledge, must have happened between Paul's meeting with George in New York, and the end of December.' Neither man understood that it might have been the confrontation between McCartney and Harrison that had tipped the plaintiff 's hand.
Three days before the court case became public knowledge, the Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night was broadcast on British TV for the first time. Among the audience was John Lennon, freshly returned from New York. To him, the movie felt like a postcard from a previous century: there he was, acting out the role that had become his life, effortlessly confident and happily ensconced with the musicians whose reputations he had just undermined in Rolling Stone. Clearly shaken by what he'd seen, he began to sketch out a song with the sarcastic title 'I'm the Greatest'. Captured on tape in embryonic form a few days later alongside a painful revision of the Beatles' 1965 hit 'Help!', it provided little evidence of the arrogance that Lennon had displayed to Wenner. His therapy had uncovered a storehouse of pain that he had been able to channel into song, but where was his inspiration when the past ran dry? One answer came in another partially completed lyric, 'I Promise'
, the first in a long series of uncomfortably revealing ballads that spelled out the depth of his dependence on Yoko Ono.
Anxious to escape the court case, Lennon and Ono fled to Japan. 'I didn't tell anybody I'd arrived,' Lennon recalled. 'We just pissed off up in the hills and nobody could find us. Then suddenly I get these calls from the lawyer, fucking idiot. I didn't like his voice as soon as I heard him, you know. A sort of upper-class Irish–English voice. Fuck! And then he insisted I come home. I could have done it all on the fucking phone.'
Meanwhile, the McCartneys returned to work on their album in America. In their absence the first court hearing took place in London before Mr Justice Stamp. McCartney's chief lawyer, Queen's Counsel David Hurst, presented the fundamentals of his client's case. Although Allen Klein was not a party to the action, it soon became clear that he would be at the heart of the dispute. Hurst told the court that Klein 'is a man of bad commercial reputation. Mr McCartney has never either accepted him or trusted him, and on the evidence his attitude has been fully justified'. He reflected McCartney's complaint that Klein had never supplied him with accurate accounts for Apple or the Beatles' partnership. A bewildering array of figures was thrown at the court: $7 million of record royalties here, £1.56 million of assets there, a tax deficiency of £450,000, the suggestion that Klein had so reduced the group's corporate finances that they would be unable to meet their tax liabilities. The judge heard the initial evidence and ruled that the action should proceed. In the meantime, both sides agreed that the Beatles' current and recent income should be frozen for the duration of the case, tying up almost four million pounds.
Klein defended himself in New York. 'I wish to make it clear that the partnership is solvent,' he told a news conference, 'and has more than sufficient net current assets to meet all income tax and surtax liabilities.' But he knew that fate was working against him. A local court was about to convict Klein of ten offences of 'unlawfully failing to make and file returns of Federal income taxes and FICA taxes withheld from employees' wages'. He immediately appealed but knew that the verdict was bound to shadow the London court hearings. As David Hurst noted with typical legal irony, the convictions had 'obviously not enhanced Mr McCartney's confidence in Mr Klein'.
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 19