As Lennon told his friend Kenny Everett two weeks later, 'We see more of each other now with the court case going on, so in a way it has brought Ringo, George and I closely together again.' Lennon also confirmed, 'It's like 90 per cent [probable] that George, Ringo and I would record together again, but maybe not as the Beatles.' Confusion between enforced and voluntary reunions sparked a press story that the three ex-Beatles had gathered at Apple with Klaus Voormann to discuss the formation of a new band. In fact, the Apple meeting was a legal conference, after which it was announced that Lennon, Harrison and Starkey were appealing the recent verdict. News that Paul McCartney had just attended the Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles to collect a trophy for Let It Be, the album he hated, must have entrenched their position.
McCartney chose the US news magazine Life as the vehicle for his public defence. For the first time he revealed his reaction to Lennon's decision to quit the band, his rage at Klein's decision to slap the ABKCO logo on the adverts for his album and the misgivings he'd felt about suing the other Beatles. 'All summer long in Scotland I was fighting with myself as to whether I should do anything like that. It was murderous. I had a knot in my stomach all summer.' In vague, almost inarticulate terms he came close to thanking Lennon for forcing him to exist outside the Beatles: 'I've changed. The funny thing about it is that I think a lot of my change has been helped by John Lennon. I sort of picked up on his lead. John had said, "Look, I don't want to be that any more. I'm going to be this." And I thought, That's great. I liked the fact he'd done it, and so I'll do it with my thing. He's given the OK.'
He was asked how he had reacted to Lennon's already infamous interview with Rolling Stone. For once in his life McCartney found an adult persona in himself that held no hint of victim or persecutor – an acceptance of the entirety of Lennon's personality, from cruelty to love. 'I ignored John's interview,' he said.
I looked at it and dug him for saying what he thought. But to me, short of getting it off his chest, I think he blows it with that kind of thing. I think it makes people wonder why John needs to do that. I did think there were an awful lot of inconsistencies, because on one page you find John talking about how Dylan changed his name from Zimmerman and how that's hypocritical. But John changed his name to John Ono Lennon. And people looking at that just begin to think, Come on, what is this? But the interview didn't bug me. It was so far out that I enjoyed it, actually. I know there are elements of truth in what he said. And this open hostility, that didn't hurt me. That's cool. That's John.
To emphasise the point, he wrote a song entitled 'Dear Friend', a pained but still affectionate acceptance of their emotional divide.
For the first time one of the Beatles recognised that the group now existed beyond the four individuals who had brought it to life. 'Of course, we aren't just four fellows,' McCartney told Life. 'We are part of a big business machine. Even though the Beatles have really stopped, the Beatle thing goes on – repackaging the albums, putting the tracks together in different forms, and the video coming in.' It was a premonition of the decades to come, as the story was told and retold, and the myth hardened into false memory. 'I like fairy tales,' McCartney admitted.
The battle seemed to be over. 'My clients now consider, in the unhappy circumstances which have arisen,' Morris Finer told the High Court on 26 April, 'that it is in the common interest to proceed to explore as a matter of urgency a means whereby the plaintiff may disengage himself from the partnership by agreement. My clients feel that the continuance of this appeal would be inimical to establishing an atmosphere best suited to negotiation of this kind. They have therefore decided not to prosecute this appeal and ask for it to be dismissed.' The judge concurred: 'I can only express the court's hope that the parties will come to some amicable and sensible arrangement.' The hearing was over in five minutes. As a pledge of good faith towards his clients, Klein asked for ABKCO to be added to the official list of defendants, which ensured that he would share in the costs of the proceedings.
'My friend Johnny Eastman won the first round,' Allen Klein conceded later that summer.*22
But it was a victory in PR. The trouble was the establishment was against us. The establishment, the fucking courts, the government, they can all exercise what's known as direction, when they don't wanna face the facts. I knew the partnership would be dissolved. I know the English law. The only reason for opposing it was the horrendous tax consequences that could result. But that old judge, Stamp, he didn't understand what it was all about. He got lost. He got Beatlemania.
Another version of Beatlemania was apparent that spring, as singles by all four of the group competed for sales. In Britain and America Harrison's 'My Sweet Lord' easily outsold its competitors, with the McCartneys' 'Another Day' and Starkey's 'It Don't Come Easy' close together behind, and Lennon's less mellifluous 'Power to the People' trailing in fourth. With Harrison's All Things Must Pass already having outstripped Lennon's Plastic Ono Band, a decisive shift in power was under way. Admirers of the group could console themselves with a future in which the struggle for commercial supremacy might provoke the quartet to new creative heights. Optimists could taste the scent of reconciliation too, as Starkey and Harrison performed on each other's hits and played separately on Lennon's sessions, while a gulf was bridged at Mick Jagger's wedding in May, when McCartney and Starkey met for the first time since March 1970. 'That was a bit strange,' Starkey explained, 'but we both knew that everything was OK. We had to get warm together.' EMI Records, whose profits had sagged alarmingly over the previous year, hoped that eventually the temperature might rise enough for a four-man reunion.
The resolution of McCartney's case against the other three offered only a brief respite in the schedule of consultations, briefings and court appearances. Debates about the detail of ABKCO's earnings from the Beatles would continue well into 1972, for example. The day after Jagger's wedding McCartney's legal team were scheduled to meet representatives of Apple to discuss the ongoing dilemma of how to break up the Beatles' partnership without incurring massive tax liabilities. When Apple's lawyers failed to show up, McCartney's representatives continued without them but effectively endorsed what Klein had been saying for the previous year: if McCartney sold his share of Apple, the taxman would take almost all of the proceeds. 'Paul's probably cost us a million since he started this thing,' Lennon commented, 'and his tax counsel's just come up and given us exactly the tax advice we gave him two years ago, to tell him exactly not to do all that he's done.' Klein had suggested that the Beatles sell Apple to ABKCO; now the McCartney camp proposed that EMI take over the company. They would then be free from each other, but have no more control over their work than any other recording artists – scant reward for their bold attempt to remodel the music business three years earlier.
Other legal matters required more urgent consideration. Lennon and Ono were in hot pursuit of her ex-husband Tony Cox and their daughter Kyoko Cox. The search led them to Majorca, where the Lennons found Kyoko at a meditation camp and took her away without her father's knowledge. Cox told the police that the girl had been kidnapped, and the Lennons were brought in for questioning. In the mid-1940s Lennon had been placed in the appalling position of having to choose between his parents. Now nine-year-old Kyoko faced the same dilemma. Scared by the police intervention and the chaos caused by the Lennons' arrival, she declared that she wanted to be with her father. To secure right of access, the Lennons flew to the US Virgin Islands, where Ono and Cox's divorce had been registered, and back to Majorca, where the two sides reached a short-lived truce. Within a couple of weeks, however, Cox had slipped back to the USA, which is where the Lennons headed in June. Lennon would never see his stepdaughter again.
Two plagiarism suits continued to run, the first concerning two lines of lyric from Chuck Berry's 'You Can't Catch Me' that reappeared in John Lennon's 'Come Together'. The second was the problem surrounding Harrison's 'My Sweet Lord' and 'He's So Fine', handled by the US firm Bright Tunes. Klein
met the company's president and suggested Harrison buy the entire Bright Tunes catalogue, including the song he was accused of plagiarising. Bright's president declined, and said that his company and Harrison's music publisher Harrisongs should share all the income from 'My Sweet Lord'. With neither side willing to concede, the legal machine began to gather evidence for another courtroom battle.
Publishing was at the heart of another case that June, filed in the Supreme Court of New York County. At stake were the potentially lucrative publishing royalties from Ram, the Paul and Linda McCartney album released in mid-May. Lennon and McCartney's deals with Northern Songs stated that the company would retain 100 per cent ownership of every song they wrote, regardless of whether they were composed with any other party. McCartney had decided to list his wife as co-writer of more than half the songs on Ram, plus the hit single 'Another Day'. Despite her lack of musical pedigree, he insisted that Linda had been an active collaborator, making valuable suggestions about lyrics and melodies. Northern Songs, however, believed he was effectively robbing them of half their potential income. Lennon was an amused observer. 'The thing with Paul is, he wants all the action.' Another set of lawyers prepared to prosper at the Beatles' expense.
Briefly it appeared that the album would be delayed until the dispute was resolved, but the warring sides recognised that they would both suffer from this decision. After his unassuming debut album, Ram demonstrated that McCartney had lost none of his skill as a melodist since the demise of the Beatles. Lushly orchestrated and full of the playful verve that had long been his trademark, it was a richly enjoyable record, culminating in a mini-suite ('Back Seat of my Car') that was a triumph of pop arrangement. Yet alongside the emotional honesty of Lennon and Harrison's work, Ram appeared lightweight, empty, meaningless.
Lennon's first reaction was 'Fucking hell, it was awful. In general I think the other album he did was better, in a way. At least there was some songs on it.' Besides the people 'preaching practices' and the 'first mistake' on 'Too Many People', Lennon thought he could find sarcastic references to himself and the other Beatles throughout Ram. There was the three-legged dog who couldn't run; the 'Dear Boy' who never knew what he had found (McCartney explained later that the song was about his wife's ex-husband); the noxious friend in 'Smile Away'; and the defiant proclamation in 'Back Seat of my Car', 'we believe that we can't be wrong'. As Linda McCartney recalled, 'They thought the whole album was about them. And then they got very upset.' The truce was over: forgetting what he had said about McCartney in Rolling Stone, Lennon treated Ram as an unprovoked attack and responded the only way he knew: openly and viciously.
Where McCartney had wielded a stiletto, Lennon opted for the axe. 'I always got angry,' he admitted later. 'If there was a game going on between Paul and me, I was the one who would get furious and emotional about it, and he would just do it subtly. There was stuff on his previous album and we were all annoyed by it, George, Ringo and me, but I answered back.' On 22 May 1971 Lennon began to record a song entitled 'How Do You Sleep'. Across three acerbic verses, Lennon mutilated McCartney's reputation, his lifestyle, his music and – ironically, given Lennon's own mother/lover complex – his dependence on his wife. 'I remember when he was writing, he was a bit tongue in cheek,' Ono recalled, 'like, "Wait until they see this."' 'We didn't take it that seriously,' Lennon confirmed. Other observers reported the relish with which he unleashed gratuitous insults at McCartney. George Harrison smiled indulgently as Lennon went to work, but Richard Starkey watched for a while and attempted to calm Lennon down. Underground journalist Felix Dennis watched the session. 'I remember Ringo getting more and more upset by this . . . I have a clear memory of his saying, "That's enough, John."' Lennon and Ono competed to come up with the most insulting lines, Dennis said. 'Some of it was absolutely puerile. Thank God a lot of it never actually got recorded because it was highly, highly personal, like a bunch of schoolboys standing in the lavatory making scatological jokes.'
'John would forgive himself, and expect Paul to forgive him,' Derek Taylor recalled. As Lennon said later, 'I'm entitled to call Paul what I want and vice versa – it's in our family.' But he must have calculated the impact of such lines as 'those freaks was right when they said you was dead' and 'the only thing you done was Yesterday'. Allen Klein joined in, querying Lennon's original line about 'Yesterday' ('you probably pinched that bugger anyway') and suggesting a more subtle reference to McCartney's recent single.
Amusing or sadistic, depending on one's distance from the line of fire, 'How Do You Sleep' was impassioned, armed with a string arrangement that cut as deep as the words, and more revealing than Lennon ever intended. Shortly before his death he hinted at a deeper knowledge of what lay behind the song: 'I used my resentment against Paul that I have as a kind of sibling rivalry resentment from youth.' Felix Dennis glimpsed a different relationship: 'It's quite obvious that Paul must have been some sort of authority figure in Lennon's life, because you don't take the piss out of somebody that isn't a figure of authority . . . As I felt it, they were taking the piss out of the headmaster.' The reference to an 'authority figure' was ironic, as that was exactly how McCartney viewed Lennon: 'It was just a bit [like] the wagging finger, and I was pissed off about it.'
By 1973 Lennon was prepared to admit, 'I'm talking about myself in that song. I just know it.' And so he was. McCartney was the ostensible subject, but the song was actually about Lennon's psyche, not McCartney's. It would have required a tough soul to find solace in that if you were Paul McCartney, however, and although he insisted, 'I don't have any grudge whatsoever against John,' he never claimed that he hadn't been wounded. In fact, he admitted in 1994, 'I have to say that the most hurtful stuff came from John. It was like a mate betraying me.' Elsewhere, he added, 'I think he was a sod to hurt me. I think he knew exactly what he was doing, and because we had been so intimate he knew what would hurt me, and he used it to great effect.'
There was a sense that Lennon's emotions were running out of control. In the same month that he wrote 'How Do You Sleep' he came across a publicity booklet about the Beatles compiled by a hapless member of the Apple staff. Lennon went berserk. When he couldn't find anyone willing to claim responsibility, he grabbed a felt pen and began to deface the booklet. 'This is so prejudiced against John, [and] Yoko and slightly against Ring[o] and Mo [Maureen] and G[eorge] and P[attie] that I want to know who put it together and fire them,' he scrawled. He added a speech bubble to a shot of the 21-year-old McCartney: 'I'm always perfect.' Alongside a reference to a McCartney visit to Hollywood, he wrote bitterly, 'Cuts Yoko and John out of film!' There was a line about the McCartneys' wedding, which Lennon altered to read 'funeral'. It was the work of a jealous child rather than an artist who had been freed of pain by Primal Scream Therapy. Asked incessantly about McCartney in interviews, Lennon insisted that the pair would never work together again, and couldn't become friends until their business quarrels were mended. 'Maybe about a year or two after all the money thing's settled, we might have dinner or forget about it,' was as friendly as he was prepared to be. He was still willing to work with Harrison and Starkey, and perhaps Klaus Voormann, as Starkey conceded that summer: 'We keep having laughs about it. Not yet, though.' But sooner than any of them realised, the opportunity would come for all four Beatles to unite for a cause greater than ego or money.
Chapter 6
Imagine how we've flowered since [the split]. George is suddenly the biggest seller of all of us. I think my music's improved a million-fold, lyric-wise and everything. I think we're much better than we ever were when we were together.
John Lennon, July 1971
I don't think Linda is a substitute for John Lennon, any more than Yoko is a substitute for Paul McCartney.
George Martin, August 1971
More than eight million people – the population of London or New York – fled their homes in 1971, as civil war racked Bangladesh. The territory comprised the eastern section of the divided nation of Pakistan,
a geographically illogical entity formed after the partition of India 24 years earlier. One thousand miles of India separated West and East Pakistan, rendering equal distribution of resources impossible. An appalling cyclone in November 1970, which killed around 250,000 people in the East, emphasised the divide. Demonstrations against the government were harshly repressed, and by March 1971 the result was a civil uprising – a bid for independence which was crushed with merciless brutality. Millions fled the violence in search of sanctuary across the Indian border. Instead, they found famine and dehydration, and thousands began to starve. Another 300,000 citizens were killed in the fighting. It was a humanitarian catastrophe, widely ignored in the West.
One of Bangladesh's most famous sons was sitar maestro Ravi Shankar. Early that summer he explained the dire state of his homeland to George Harrison and told him that he was planning a fund-raising concert. Wary of imposing, he asked if Harrison would compère the show. 'Why don't I play?' Harrison replied. By the end of the conversation, one of rock's most spectacular displays of altruism was born.*23 Allen Klein booked New York's premier concert venue, the 20,000-seater Madison Square Garden, for an appearance by 'George Harrison and Friends'. Demand for tickets was so intense that Harrison agreed to play two full shows on 1 August 1971. There had been rock benefits before, but never on this scale, encompassing not just live performances, but an album, film and accompanying single, all devoted to raising the consciousness of the world to the tragedy of Bangladesh. The challenge was enormous, not least because Harrison had been the Beatle least enthusiastic about touring in the mid-1960s and the first to suggest that the group should quit the road. Since then he had only performed as an unannounced guest with Delaney and Bonnie and John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band. Now he had to command an audience on the strength of his own name, with much more than his reputation at stake.
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 21