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

by Peter Doggett

  Both camps made occasional, half-hearted attempts to have the other side's litigation annulled. Ferocious attempts were made by the rival lawyers to prove that one Apple company or another was, or was not, an active concern in New York or Los Angeles. There were queries about the legality of a corporate system under which George Harrison could resign as the employee of a company that he himself ran and in which he held 99 per cent of the shares, before deciding that he did want to work for himself after all, and applying to himself for his job back.

  At the moment when it seemed that the legal picture could not be less clear, more mud was applied. Klein launched two more court cases, claiming that Lennon had never paid him for his work on the Northern Songs saga five years earlier, and that ABKCO was now the rightful owner of Harrisongs Music Inc., which held the US copyright of Harrison's compositions. That case, at least, could be settled: a judge decided in June 1975 that Harrisongs Music Inc. was owned, as the musician's lawyers claimed, by Harrisongs Ltd, and hence by Harrison himself. Two other proceedings ended that year, when Lennon and Harrison quietly agreed to repay the money they had borrowed from Klein. But the bulk of the litigation rolled on, funded by the remarkable sales of the Beatles' recent compilation albums.

  In late 1973 Paul McCartney endeavoured to bring the Beatles together in the same room for the first time in more than four years, hoping that they might be able to agree a collective strategy to reduce the legal burden. 'I just got my visa,' he explained.

  I rang John up, and John was keen to do it. He was going to fly in today from LA to New York. Great! I was going to be here; John was going to be here. Then I rang Ringo, and Ringo couldn't figure out what we were actually going to say, outside of 'Hi there.' And he didn't want to come all the way to New York from England, he was just getting settled for Christmas. So he was a bit down on it, that kind of blew it out. Then I called John and he said he was talking to George and George was having some kind of visa problems. So it's a bit difficult to get the four of us together. But it will happen soon.

  Though McCartney denied the connection, it was surely no coincidence that his latest album with

  Wings was entitled Band on theRun. Recorded under conditions of extreme duress in Nigeria, it was widely greeted as his most coherent work since leaving the Beatles. The device of opening and closing the album with the same melodic theme encouraged reviewers to make comparisons with Sgt Pepper, a trick that worked so well McCartney repeated it on several subsequent albums. Perhaps McCartney's creativity had been freed by his moral victory in the debate over Allen Klein; perhaps he simply thrived on adversity. But Band on the Run exhibited a frothy self-confidence that was reminiscent of the Beatles at their most productive, although its songs lacked any of the emotional grounding that Lennon and Harrison might have provided. It re-established McCartney as the most commercially viable of the ex-Beatles, consolidating the shift in power that had begun earlier in the year with Klein's dismissal.

  The year's frantic recording activity – five solo records from the four Beatles and a batch of hit singles – raised the possibility that McCartney, Lennon, Starkey and Harrison could be accepted as legitimate artists (or entertainers) in their own right, without being compromised by the lucrative trade in Beatle nostalgia. Yet the media and public still wanted a reunion of the entire quartet. McCartney's father-in-law, Lee Eastman, was convinced that despite their differences the four Beatles shared a 'fervent hope' of a reunion. 'First,' he explained, 'they have to sever their economic interests. Then they could be friends. Then, finally, they might play together.' Other sources suggested that their legal obligations were so demanding that they would re-form to meet the costs of the litigation.

  For two weeks in February 1974 lawyers congregated in New York to analyse the intricacies of the litigation between Apple and ABKCO. All four Beatles were represented, and Lennon and McCartney also made brief appearances, but negotiations broke down, according to Lee Eastman, 'because lawyers for Mr Lennon made financial demands that lawyers for the other three principals considered excessive'. As Paul McCartney recalled, 'John came to a meeting and asked for a £1 million loan. That made us stumble! Everyone went, "Say what?!" and jaws dropped, and the meeting was cancelled.' His separation from Ono and carousing in Los Angeles had clearly taken their toll on Lennon's already precarious finances.

  All this legal activity was interpreted as proof that a reunion was imminent. The British rock paper Melody Maker announced excitedly, BEATLES GET TOGETHER!, claiming that 'the four of them are preparing a joint statement to be issued in the next few days, revealing their plans for a new Beatles album'. Harry Nilsson, a mutual friend of all four, was named as the catalyst for the project. The New York Times proclaimed that Harrison, Starkey and Eric Clapton were about to tour together, an unlikely prospect given their complicated marital arrangements at the time; while Lennon and Starkey were tipped to play at a fifth-anniversary celebration of the Woodstock festival. David Geffen, president of Asylum Records and manager of acts such as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and Joni Mitchell, offered $30 million for a new Beatles album. And even if they refused to co-operate, there was money to be made from their name, as two entrepreneurs prepared theatrical adaptations of the Sgt Pepper album.

  In March 1974 all four Beatles were in Los Angeles, although they contrived not to meet. Harrison was producing an album for Ravi Shankar at A&M Records, where he met a secretary

  named Olivia Arias. 'My first impression of George was that he was smaller than life,' she remembered. 'Very humble, normal and thoughtful. He was very focused. He had such a strong sense of self. He didn't seem to be a frivolous person, though he was, but from the first day I met him, he was working on music.' The couple soon began a relationship that would last for more than 25 years.

  Lennon was also acting as a producer, for Harry Nilsson. Besides recording a dark, riotous album (Pussy Cats), the pair rampaged through Hollywood's chic nightlife, throwing back brandy Alexanders like nomads at an oasis. One night they visited the home of Playboy executive Hugh Hefner, and Lennon supposedly stubbed out his cigarette on a painting by Magritte. On another they found themselves at the Troubadour club for a performance by comedians the Smothers Brothers, and were expelled for bellowing 'I Can't Stand the Rain' during the show and tossing insults at the stars. 'I heard someone yelling about pigs,' said Tommy Smothers, who had befriended Lennon in 1969. 'It was fairly disgusting. The heckling got so bad that our show was going rapidly downhill.' Lennon threw punches at everyone who got in his way, and was subsequently sued for assault by a waitress. 'It's not the pain that hurts,' she said, 'it's finding out that one of your idols is a real asshole.' Then he went outside and attacked the young man looking after the club's parking lot. Pictures of Lennon launching himself at a photographer were telegraphed around the world. A few days later Nilsson had to restrain Lennon at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, as he attempted to strangle May Pang because she wanted him to stop drinking.

  A few weeks earlier, in February, Yoko Ono had celebrated her 41st birthday at the Dakota with friends such as Allen Ginsberg and James Taylor, but she was suffering from low blood pressure caused by anaemia, and was reported to be frail and depressed. During a brief trip to London she paid an unexpected visit to the McCartneys. 'Linda or I said to her, "Do you still love John?,"' McCartney recalled.

  'Do you want to get back with him?' She said, 'Yes.' We said, 'Well, what it would take, then? I can take a message. What would I have to tell him?' And she gave me this whole thing: 'He would have to come back to New York. He can't live with me immediately. He'd have to court me, he'd have to ask me out. He'd have to send me flowers, he'll have to do it all again.' Of course, she'd sent him off with May Pang, but that wasn't the point at the time.

  The balance of Lennon and Ono's relationship was shifting. As the instigator of their separation, Ono supposedly held the initiative, yet she demanded that Lennon keep in constant contact with her and phoned him incessantly. Lennon claim
ed to be relishing his freedom, although his self-destructive behaviour suggested otherwise. But he was back in touch with old friends such as Mick Jagger, who discovered it was easier to communicate with Lennon when he was apart from Ono. McCartney also found May Pang more welcoming than Ono had been. But ironically he now set out to reunite Lennon with his wife.

  'I went there,' he recalled, 'and he was doing Pussy Cats with Nilsson and Keith Moon and Jesse Ed Davis – three beautiful, total alcohol nutters, plus John, forget it! We went round to a session and sat there for a bit.' That night at Burbank Studios Lennon and McCartney jammed together for the first time since 1969, on a ramshackle rendition of the folk tune 'Midnight Special'. Three days later the McCartneys returned to the studio, prepared to record with Lennon. 'It was a strange session,' McCartney said. 'The main thing that I recall is that someone said, "What song shall we do?" and John said, "Anything before '63. I don't know anything after '63." Anyway, it wasn't a very good session.'

  McCartney wasn't exaggerating. Many years later the evidence emerged in the form of a 30-minute tape. It revealed no hint of the Beatles' magic, no rapport between the two men, merely a cocaine-driven Lennon berating and bullying the engineer before floundering through fragments of half-forgotten rock 'n' roll hits. This was the moment the world had been waiting for: the reunion that would thrill the planet and shake up a moribund music industry. And it was a fiasco. Small wonder that none of the participants mentioned the session until after Lennon's death.

  After McCartney left, Lennon drifted back into his compulsive hedonism, out of habit more than pleasure. The next morning McCartney visited the house that the revellers were renting. 'I remember Harry Nilsson offering me some angel dust,' McCartney said. 'I said, "What is it?" He said, "It's elephant tranquilliser." I said, "Is it fun?" He thought for about half a minute. "No," he said. I said, "Well, you know what, I won't have any."' It was late morning, and Lennon was still in bed. 'He was a teenager again,' McCartney reflected. 'He was just being his old Liverpool self, just a wild, wild boy.' When Lennon eventually surfaced, McCartney told him that Ono was prepared to take him back and explained the conditions she had laid down. 'That's how they got back together again,' McCartney explained, although nearly a year passed in the interim and Ono later ridiculed his claim.

  Lennon's conduct was arousing some concern. 'There has been much talk here in Los Angeles,' commented local reporter Chris Van Ness, 'that something is wrong with John. Many have speculated that his break-up with Yoko is the cause of his violent behaviour, but it seems to me that it must be something more pronounced than that.' Van Ness, who had witnessed the furore at the Troubadour, added, 'Now John's ego-anchors are gone. His marriage appears to be on the rocks, and his career is at its lowest ebb for ten years. Perhaps there lies the understanding for John Lennon's actions of late.' Speaking with a year's hindsight, Lennon reflected, 'With my personal life and the Apple business, the Klein business and the immigration business . . . you don't want to admit it while it's happening, that that's what's making you go barmy. You're still living every day, and you think you're going to a party, then you end up throwing up in the toilet. I just woke up in the middle of it and thought, There's something wrong here. I'd better straighten myself out.'

  Hollywood was not the place to do it. For the rock aristocracy 1974 was the year of cocaine. Everyone snorted, everyone felt invincible, and nobody noticed that their music was suffering. Propelled by epic quantities of alcohol, it sent Lennon and his playmates on a switchback ride from ecstasy to despair, never allowing a moment's contemplation to interrupt the thrill. Its effects could be heard on the records made that summer – Nilsson's Pussy Cats, Keith Moon's Two Sides ofthe Moon and Ringo Starr's Goodnight Vienna, all starring the same bunch of party animals, with the perpetually juiced Starkey and Lennon at their heart, and their long-time aide Mal Evans alongside them, on the same reckless pursuit of oblivion. While Pussy Cats channelled these emotional extremes into music that was compelling and confessional, Goodnight Vienna was a curiously tame affair. It marked a significant step away from the rosy bonhomie of the Ringo album, anticipating a future in which Starkey would effectively vanish as a personality from his own records.

  It's easy to imagine Lennon drowning in someone's pool or choking on his own vomit in the summer of 1974. Instead, he and May Pang returned to New York, where he could connect with something deeper than his stardom. They took an apartment in midtown Manhattan and welcomed visitors. For the first time in three years Lennon established contact with his son Julian, who flew over with Cynthia. Pang recognised how important this link was for father and son, and did her best to maintain it. Paul and Linda McCartney were also frequent visitors. 'We spent two or three nights together,' Lennon said, 'talking about the old days, and it was cool, seeing what each other remembered from Hamburg and Liverpool.' Other comrades from the old days reappeared in his life. 'I didn't see John that much until he separated from Yoko,' Mick Jagger recalled. 'We got really friendly again, more friendly than we'd ever been, in fact.' The two men recorded together, and Jagger let Lennon know how much more relaxed he seemed since he'd separated from his wife. Not that the separation was complete: Ono was still phoning every few hours to check what her husband was doing. For the first time though, Pang recalled, Lennon had begun to resent her constant monitoring: 'It seemed that John had made up his mind to run away from Yoko. She would telephone him, and in a rage John would say, "I'm not talking to that woman." John was rediscovering so many things – his friends, his music, his son.'

  The change in Lennon's life was apparent on Walls and Bridges, the record he made in July and August 1974. In the studio he was focused and driven, riding the band through take after take like a pocket general. 'I just got back into music,' he explained after the sessions were over. 'As long as I'm going through something, I've got something to say. I have to bang my head on the wall and then write about how good it is to stop. Otherwise I think you die as an artist. I always have to keep moving or falling over just so something's happening to me. I've died artistically a few times. I didn't like it. As long as I'm writing songs, I know where I am.' Not since Imagine in 1971 had he demonstrated any genuine inspiration. Now he was able to tap into his emotions without becoming their slave. 'Bless You' was a touching farewell to Yoko Ono; 'Surprise Surprise' an equally heartfelt message of lust and love for May Pang. There were songs of ecstasy and despair plus a cameo from the Lennon of old, 'Steel and Glass', in which he subjected Allen Klein to the 'How Do You Sleep' treatment. For the first time since he left the Beatles Lennon was creating music that was not just psychotherapy or political sermonising. Like McCartney's Bandon the Run, Walls and Bridges represented a reconciliation with the past: an ability to build on what each man had learned from the Beatles and reshape it for a more adult audience. Lennon would never sound so self-assured on record again.

  Confident about the merits of his work, he threw himself into an exhaustive campaign of self-promotion. On radio and in print he sounded thrilled to be alive and to have experienced and survived his spectacular past. 'I'm going to be an ex-Beatle for the rest of my life,' he reflected,

  so I might as well enjoy it, and I'm just getting round to being able to stand back and see what happened. A couple of years ago I might have given everybody the impression I hated it all, but that was then. I was talking when I was straight out of therapy and I'd been mentally stripped bare and I just wanted to shoot my mouth off to clear it all away. Now it's different . . . I can see the Beatles from a new point of view. Can't remember much of what happened, little bits here and there, and I've started taking an interest in what went on while I was in that fish tank. It must have been incredible.

  Lennon revealed that he had begun to collect Beatles memorabilia with the same enthusiasm that he had once devoted to denying his past. 'Why not? It's history, man, history!' In mid-September he asked May Pang to represent him at the first Beatlefest celebration at the Hotel Commodore in New York. Ne
il Aspinall at Apple supplied a film of the group's 1965 concert at Shea Stadium, while thousands of fans milled around the memorabilia stalls and greeted 'celebrity' speakers such as concert promoter Sid Bernstein. All four Beatles had donated instruments for a charity auction. As journalist Joel Siegel discovered to his amazement, the crowd was awash with 'fourteen- and fifteen-year-old faces, faces that hadn't started kindergarten when the Beatles invaded America, faces that hadn't even begun to flesh out into adulthood when the Beatles last played together'. They could barely remember a time when there had been Beatles in action. For these teenagers, the lure was nostalgia for a golden age that they had been told was brighter and more meaningful than the present day. Some had been attracted by the success of McCartney and Wings, but most simply wanted to be transported back to 1964, when Beatlemania was young.

  May Pang arrived home with a bundle of bootleg records and – at the suggestion of reporter Chris Charlesworth – a set of photographs of the group taken by their friend Jürgen Vollmer in the early 1960s. Lennon quizzed her. Who were these kids? What did they want? Who did they think he was? 'I think it's great,' he commented a few days later. 'Smells a bit of Rudolph Valentino, but they must be the people who buy the repackages, because some of them are only 14 or 16. I mean, it's good for business, isn't it? It goes to the family. And if we ever did anything together, there they are, waiting. It's nice to know.' It suited him to deny the possibility of a reunion: 'No! What for? We did it all.' But increasingly his mind turned to the rapport he'd shared with the only men who understood what he'd been through. 'Together we would sound exactly the same,' he admitted, 'only better, because we're all better now.'