Lennon continued to defend Klein, almost without reservation: 'I don't think he deserves the shit he gets thrown at him, and if time proves me wrong in the end, so be it. I think he deserves what he earns.' Removed from the Bangladesh charity fracas, he concentrated on his radical agenda. 'Repression is bad for you,' he had recently proclaimed, and there was little sign of restraint in his songwriting during the final months of 1971. First he penned a banal protest tune about the shooting of prisoners at Attica State jail in New York State, then he focused on the downtrodden Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. 'It became journalism and not poetry,' he later admitted of his work during this period. 'I was making an effort to reflect what was going on. Well, it doesn't work like that.' But in the reflected glory of revolutionaries such as Jerry Rubin, Lennon believed he had found his calling.
Klein had helped him organise a retrospective exhibition for Ono's art in upstate New York*26 – her first such showcase in two years – and now Lennon envisaged a future in which they could both function as full-time artists, removed from the expectations of the past. Ono, however, was less optimistic. 'After my exhibition,' she recalled, 'I stopped, because the crowds who came to the show came to see the Beatles. It was pandemonium, and my work is quiet.' She refused to place barriers between her art and the spectators, in a bid to sharpen the sense of communication and vulnerability, and was rewarded with accidental breakages and deliberate damage. When Lennon penned a one-line note for Ono's Fly album late that year – 'Love means having to say sorry every five minutes' – he was not only parodying the sales pitch for the hit movie Love Story, but acknowledging that his wife's creativity was being submerged beneath his own. †4
All of Yoko Ono's creative enterprises – exhibitions, films, albums – were being paid for by ABKCO. 'Klein was in a difficult situation,' remembered Apple Records' US head Allan Steckler. 'I remember him saying to me, "Steckler, what can I do? She's spending a fortune. But she's the guy's wife! How can I say no to her?" Klein wasn't thrilled by the Janov album, let alone when they started making political records, but we had to keep funding them.'
Jerry Rubin now imagined that Lennon and Ono would lead a revolutionary cavalcade to disrupt the 1972 presidential election. 'We would launch a musical, political caravan, tour the United States, raise money to feed the poor and free prisoners from jail,' he recalled. 'The shows would combine music and fun with political consciousness-raising, and all the money would go to the people!' So Rubin was surprised when the Lennons returned to the studio with Phil Spector, not to record one of their new political statements, but for a Christmas single built around their two-year-old peace slogan, 'War is over if you want it.' It was completed too late to catch the seasonal market, but survived to become a perennial favourite.*27 During the sessions Spector asked Lennon if he had heard McCartney's new album, adding, 'It's really bad. Just four musicians, and it's awful.' 'Don't talk about it,' Lennon replied. 'It depresses me . . . whenever anybody mentions his name, I don't think about the music – I think about all the business crap. Don't talk about him.'
Just seven months after releasing Ram, McCartney had completed Wild Life, the debut album by Wings. He penned some twee sleeve notes under a pseudonym to hype the record's magical qualities, but it was a severe embarrassment. Among its few highlights was 'Dear Friend', which as McCartney explained later was addressed to Lennon: 'Let's lay the guns down, let's hang up our boxing gloves.' But he could not stop himself dwelling on the past. 'He's talking about money now,' said his assistant Shelley Turner ruefully. 'That's one of his pet points. He'll never stop.' If he could have maintained the detachment of 'Dear Friend', the quarrel with the other Beatles might have been mended. Instead, McCartney let months of resentment and pain pour from his lips.
His obsession was the group's business partnership, no closer to being broken eight months after he had won the court case. 'I just want this thing settled,' he said. 'We just can't get at the money.' He repeated the demand he'd been issuing for two years: 'I just want the four of us to get together somewhere and sign a piece of paper saying it's all over, and we want to divide the money four ways. No one else would be there, not even Linda or Yoko or Allen Klein. We'd just sign the paper and hand it to the business people and let them sort it all out. That's all I want now. But John won't do it.' And so he continued, letting rip at Klein, Lennon's political posturing and the Apple bureaucracy that wouldn't let him leave the label: 'I didn't want to bring the new album out on Apple. I phoned the others up and asked them, "Well, what about it?" They hummed and aahed over the phone but a couple of days later when I spoke to them they didn't like the idea. So I asked them, "Have you been talking to Klein?"' Legal staff at EMI and Apple spent several weeks debating the issue of whether McCartney would be allowed to release Wild Life without using the familiar Apple logo that symbolised everything he wanted to escape.
Lennon could no more restrain himself than McCartney. He was so outraged by McCartney's comments in the rock paper Melody Maker that he typed a three-page reply, headed 'Please publish, "equal time".' It was as acerbic and wounding as 'How Do You Sleep', as Lennon revealed how McCartney had told him, 'if we didn't do what you wanted, you'd sue us again, and that "Ringo and George are going to break you John" . . . Who's the guy threatening to "finish" Ringo and Maureen, who was warning me on the phone two weeks ago? Who said he'd "get us" whatever the cost? As I've said before – have you ever thought that you might possibly be wrong about something?' Lee Eastman was caught in the line of fire: 'You must KNOW we're right about Eastman; he can't control himself in PUBLIC – even the people he buys paintings from squirm! (Shit from the inside, baby!)' Lennon briefly managed to calm himself: 'No hard feelings to you either. I know we basically want the same . . . whenever you want to meet, all you have to do is call.' But his sarcasm won out: 'P.S. The bit that really puzzled us was asking to meet WITHOUT LINDA AND YOKO. I know you're camp! But let's not go too far! I thought you'd have understood BY NOW, that I'm JOHNANDYOKO. P.P.S. Even your own lawyers know you can't 'just sign a bit of paper' (or don't they tell you?!).'
A month earlier Lennon had asked journalist Ray Connolly to deliver a letter to McCartney in London. 'He wanted to tell Paul something without going through the lawyers,' Connolly said. 'I phoned Paul when I got home, but he had changed his number, so I dropped John's letter into his postbox. Later I phoned Paul's dad to check that Paul had received the letter. "I think so," Jim McCartney said, "but things have got worse since then. If I were you, I'd keep well out of it."' The exchange of insults in Melody Maker demonstrated the breadth of the divide.
Remarkably, this very public duel provoked a truce. McCartney dared to make the first call, and the pair avoided arguing long enough to reminisce about the distant past. Within a few days Lennon sent his ex-colleague a gift*28 with a handwritten note: 'Happy Xmas! (war is over if you want it . . .) THE BEATLES. Dear Paul, Linda et al. This is THE DECCA AUDITION!! I found the bootleg not the tape: they were a good group fancy turning THIS down! Love John + Yoko.' Shortly after Christmas the McCartneys visited the Lennons at their Greenwich Village apartment. The two men talked reconciliation and a solution to their business differences. But a few months later Linda McCartney admitted, 'We saw John and Yoko at Christmas, and it was all, "We're going to do it" and "You'll be out by March, man", and Yoko Ono said, "To hell with the contracts." But nothing happened.'
The Lennons suddenly had more pressing issues to confront. They wanted to release an album of two impromptu performances from 1969 and 1971, under the title Live Jam, or perhaps London Air & NewYork Wind. But Allen Klein strongly resisted the idea. He was equally unimpressed when the Lennons started work on an album of political material in spring 1972. Klein explained why: under the terms of the contract they had signed with Capitol, the four Beatles would only be entitled to a second increase in their royalty rates if the two most recent albums they had released by autumn 1972 had each sold 500,000 copies. Previous records by the solo Beatles
had easily surpassed that figure, but Klein feared that a live or political offering from the Lennons might struggle to reach the target. Lennon cared nothing for long-term financial gain – all he wanted was unconditional support from his manager – and he felt that by daring to question his artistic decisions Klein was demonstrating a fundamental lack of confidence.
His growing distrust of Klein would pale alongside another looming crisis. For all his revolutionary rhetoric, Lennon had a naive faith in the morality of the capitalist system. He had experienced censorship in the past, but he never imagined that by aligning himself with some of the most notorious revolutionary figures in America he might incur the wrath of the US government. The more often he cavorted with the Yippies and the Black Panther Party, the more dangerous he appeared to the already paranoid Nixon administration. They feared that dissent organised by one of the world's most influential public figures might endanger Nixon's chances of re-election that November. On 4 February 1972 Senator Strom Thurmond wrote to the US attorney general, enclosing a summary of Lennon's contacts with the revolutionary left and suggesting that the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) might intervene. 'This appears to me to be an important matter,' Thurmond wrote, 'and I think it would be well for it to be considered at the highest level. As I can see, many headaches might be avoided if appropriate action is taken in time.' Lennon was only in America on a six-month visa, due to expire on 29 February, but he blithely continued to plot with his fellow radicals. He and Ono had sealed their solidarity with Rubin and Hoffman at Bank Street, in a blood pact: the four of them nicked their thumbs with a penknife and let their collective life force run together. With that gesture the Lennons pledged themselves to the revolution. After months of political disillusionment, Rubin was ecstatic: 'Something new is in the air. Somehow the arrival of John and Yoko in New York has had a mystical and practical effect that is bringing people together again.'
While Lennon relished the excitement of being a subversive, Ono retained her natural pacifism. 'I made John and myself isolated from the rest,' she insisted later, 'as our friends were trying to lash out, wanting to bomb the White House, something violent like that. I insisted that we should keep doing things in a peaceful way, because violence breeds violence.' Yet a more sinister form of isolation was creeping into their relationship. As an FBI informant noted, 'John Lennon does not give the impression he is a true revolutionist since he is constantly under the influence of narcotics.' Another detected a rift between Rubin and Lennon regarding the latter's 'excessive use of narcotics'. The Lennons were forced to travel to the US Virgin Islands in an attempt to conquer his renewed addiction to heroin. When they returned, tensions were evident in their relationship. 'If you were around them, you would see very quickly that she runs the show,' recalled TV presenter Mike Douglas, whose programme they commandeered for a week. 'She was very rough on the staff. The kids were very young, and probably fans when they arrived, [but] probably terribly let down at some of the behaviour.' A few weeks later the couple travelled to San Francisco to undergo treatment with methadone – withdrawal from which, Lennon admitted later, 'almost killed Yoko'.
On 30 January 1972, British army paratroopers shot dead 13 Catholics on the streets of the Northern Irish city of Derry. It was the single most radicalising moment of the entire 'troubles' that afflicted the area from 1968 onwards. Lennon memorialised the tragedy in a song, 'Sunday Bloody Sunday', which preached the republican manifesto of the IRA in an affected New York accent. Much less predictable was Paul McCartney's reaction to the shootings. Two days later he took Wings into the studio to record his own political anthem, the inappropriately chirpy 'Give Ireland Back to the Irish'. 'I always used to think, God, John's crackers, doing all these political songs,' he explained. But the events in Derry slapped him in the face and demanded a response. Ironically, his song kept closer to the Lennons' peace ethic than theirs did, striking a tone of disapproval rather than rebellion. When Lennon had first written about the situation in Ireland, in a song called 'The Luck of the Irish', he had promised to donate all his earnings to civil rights activists there. If McCartney made a similar gesture, he kept it quiet. It was hard to avoid the cynical feeling that one of McCartney's motives was to show Lennon that he too had a political conscience.
From the Lennons, there was now the promise of a series of fundraising concerts for the Irish struggle. They would begin at Madison Square Garden, echoing Harrison, and then tour Ireland itself. Friends began to scout for a suitable home there for the couple. Meanwhile, Allen Klein boasted that George Harrison was proposing to perform a charity show in London on behalf of the homeless. 'You know what's happening at Wembley?' he crowed. 'George will announce he's gonna do a concert, right? About two weeks before, Ringo will say, "Hey, I'll play too." Then
John says he's gonna be there. Everyone will wanna know where Paul is. He'll think I'm trying to embarrass him. You betcha. I'm gonna roast his fucking ass.' None of these events happened, however, and by early March 1972 it was apparent that if Lennon left the USA the immigration authorities would not allow him back in. His life degenerated into a routine of INS hearings, deportation orders and appeals, sapping his radical energy.
Meanwhile, Klein's own activities flashed into the spotlight. Journalist Peter McCabe published 'Some Sour Notes from the Bangladesh Concert' in the magazine New York. He alleged that, far from channelling the royalties from Harrison's album to charity, Klein and ABKCO were making a profit of $1.14 on each copy. A further 25 cents was supposedly earmarked for Bob Dylan, and 50 cents to the songwriters and publishers who were also supposed to be donating their services for free. Assuming an eventual sale of three million copies, McCabe said, this meant that around $6 million would not be reaching its intended destination.
Phil Spector, who had co-produced The Concert For Bangla Desh, phoned the magazine to register his disapproval of McCabe's piece. Klein's reaction was more substantial: he filed a libel suit against this 'false and defamatory matter', demanding $150 million to compensate for the damage to his reputation, the distress the article had caused and the loss of sales it would provoke. He called a press conference to defend himself, and prepared a detailed breakdown of the costs and receipts of the project, which he sent to Rolling Stone magazine. They printed it verbatim and then queried his arithmetic. But Klein insisted that he and ABKCO hadn't taken a penny from the project; indeed, they were actually losing a dollar on each set.
The press conference descended into farce because Klein's staff made the mistake of issuing invitations to the city's underground press. Among those who accepted was A. J. Weberman, who had already led a demonstration against Capitol Records, complaining that they should be manufacturing and distributing the Bangladesh album at cost, not at a profit. He was predictably outraged by McCabe's article, and led a small party of Rock Liberation Front activists to the ABKCO office, chanting slogans such as 'You'll wonder where the money went, when Klein runs a charity event.' 'We brought along some rotten fruit,' he recalled. 'We called it our Free Food for Starving Music Executives Programme. We said, "Hey, if you guys have to steal from the people of Bangladesh, you must be a bunch of hungry mother-fuckers. So what we have for you is free fucking lunch." We took all these vegetables that we got from the dumpster and threw them all over the office.' He and Spector got into a fist fight, Weberman said, 'and Spector attacks my old lady, Ann. He likes to beat on women, you know. Wonderful fucking human being.'
When news of the demonstration reached the underground press, Weberman received an unexpected phone call. 'John and Yoko called me up,' he remembered, and they said, 'Hey, man, bring your old lady for tea, cos Klein is ripping us off too, man.' So we went over there to Bank Street. John and Yoko were there, stark naked. And I started hanging out with them. Sometimes he would be going through cold turkey. He got deeper and deeper into junk. Lennon would sit around and tell me how much he hated McCartney, and how he'd like to punch him out. But if I ever said anything bad against [Bo
b] Dylan, he wanted to punch me out too, and Yoko had to restrain him.
A maverick even by the standards of Greenwich Village, Weberman had connections with dope dealers and revolutionaries, sometimes in the same skin. So too, he claimed, did Lennon: 'There was one guy who was smuggling Lebanese hash into the US. With the money he got, he'd go into gun stores and purchase weapons, and then ship the weapons back to Ireland. Lennon introduced me to this guy, who was a total fucking revolutionary from the IRA. I said to Lennon, "Man, you're pretty well connected back in England. Now I'm gonna hook you up here in the United States."' So, Weberman claimed, he hooked Lennon up with a group long suspected of funnelling money from Irish republican sympathisers in the USA to the IRA. They became the beneficiaries of Lennon's song 'The Luck of the Irish'. 'Lennon gave them this huge contribution,' Weberman says, 'and they had a big party to celebrate. They invited me – at last I was a hero! Everyone was saying, "Hey, this is Weberman, he turned Lennon on to us."'
The Irish republican movement was stoutly defended by the British underground press until February 1972, when several catering workers were killed in a bomb explosion at a barracks in Aldershot. Further killings followed, as the conflict in Northern Ireland hardened into guerrilla warfare. Thereafter, the IRA lost the sympathy of everyone in the UK but the revolutionary left. From his distant vantage point in New York, however, Lennon maintained his contacts with the organisation. 'I was over there on a speaking tour,' said Gerry O'Hare, then a prominent member of the more militant Provisional wing of the IRA. 'A guy said to me, "Would you like to meet John Lennon?" I said, "Are you spoofing?" Two days later I went to his apartment.' He asked if the ex-Beatle would perform a benefit concert for the republican movement. 'He offered to do one in Dublin,' O'Hare said. 'He gave me the impression he was genuine. But I got the impression that if he did one in Dublin, he also wanted to do one in Belfast too, for the Protestant community. But he said he had a problem, that if he left America he might not be able to get back in.'
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 23