During the Walls and Bridges sessions Lennon had tried to forget the deal that his lawyers had cut with Big Seven Music over the 'Come Together' plagiarism case. The album he had begun with Phil Spector was still unfinished, and the music publishers were threatening to renew their legal action. To calm them, Lennon promised that he would complete the Spector project, if necessary without the errant producer, who had vanished with the tapes, leaving Lennon to pay the studio bills. In October 1974, as Walls and Bridges climbed the charts and its single 'Whatever Gets You Thru the Night' headed for No. 1, he pulled a band into the studio, overdubbed the best of the Spector tracks and polished off a slick set of cover versions in less than a week.
Over the fade of 'Just Because', the song that had been a vehicle for his psychological disintegration a year earlier, Lennon now delivered greetings to his friends and family in England, including his fellow Beatles – only to remove their names before the record was released. But the track included another significant message, as Lennon explained: 'You hear me saying, "And so we say farewell from Record Plant East" . . . Something flashed through my mind as I said it, am I really saying farewell to the business?'
The business was not ready to wave him – or the Beatles – goodbye. Entrepreneurs still dreamed of the millions to be made from the quartet's name. Promoter Bill Sargent emerged in June 1974 with the extravagant vision of a concert that would not only reunite the Beatles, but also tempt Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones onto the same bill, with a stadium crowd to share the experience and four million more watching via worldwide closed-circuit TV. He offered the Beatles a guaranteed cheque for $10 million – not quite enough to meet Allen Klein's demands – as an advance against ticket sales. The plan was enough of a novelty for the Beatles to consider it; subsequent proposals would be dismissed out of hand. It was McCartney who delivered the death blow to Sargent's scheme, and none of the others tried to persuade him otherwise.
One of the Sgt Pepper stage shows reached Broadway in November 1974, and Lennon attended the premiere with May Pang. The musical left him amused rather than annoyed, but George Harrison had a more visceral reaction in London, walking out of Willy Russell's play John, Paul, George, Ringo . . . and Bert. Its centrepiece was a surprise Beatles reunion, abandoned when news reached the media. The drama was seen through the eyes of Bert, an imaginary ex-member of the group who represented Everyman. Derek Taylor attended the opening with Harrison, and recalled that the musician had found it uncomfortable to watch 'himself ' on stage. Meanwhile McCartney complained that Russell laid the blame for the Beatles' break-up on his shoulders, and refused to allow his old adversary from the NEMS era, Robert Stigwood, to produce a film version. Convinced that a Beatles-related movie had commercial potential, Stigwood turned his attention to Sgt Pepper and commissioned a script loosely based around the album which would not feature the group as characters and hence wouldn't require their approval.
The consequences of fame continued to haunt the Beatles. With Apple now merely an agency for collecting money and lawsuits, and the company's last artists released from their contracts, no trace remained of the utopian ideal that Lennon and McCartney had preached in 1968. Yet the other two members of the quartet now chose to launch miniature replicas of the original Apple design. In September 1974 George Harrison announced the formation of Dark Horse Records, a vehicle for talent new (a pop duo named Splinter, who enjoyed immediate success) and old (Ravi Shankar). Harrison announced his intention of joining the label himself, once his contract with EMI had expired in January 1976. Meanwhile, Richard Starkey formed Ring O' Records – a name coined by Lennon. The company's ethos sounded eerily familiar: 'I thought, we'll form a label. No one will have to beg.' Soon, however, Starkey discovered something he should already have known: 'I ended up being in the boardroom too much, being bored. Business! Musicians, we're creative, we're not businessmen.'
While Starkey's venture was little more than a plaything, Dark Horse shaped up to become a more significant force in the music business. To consolidate its identity, Harrison recorded an album of the same name. More surprisingly, he announced a lengthy concert tour of North America, starting on 2 November 1974. Unfortunately, his record was still unfinished when rehearsals began, and by the time of the final sessions his voice was 'dark hoarse', as critics soon noted.
Harrison's enthusiasm for the venture began to fade at the opening press conference, where he was besieged with questions about a Beatles reunion. It didn't take long for his patience to crack as badly as his voice. Soon he was admitting, 'The biggest break in my career was getting into the Beatles in 1963. In retrospect, the biggest break since then was getting out of them.' He added determinedly, 'People are afraid of change. You can't live in the past.' But you can talk about it, endlessly, and the reporters continued to prod the same wound. Eventually the scar tissue gave way, and Harrison's true feelings erupted: 'It's all a fantasy, putting the Beatles back together. If we ever do that, it's because everybody is broke.' Then he focused on one of his colleagues: 'I'd rather have Willie Weeks [from his 1974 band] on bass than Paul McCartney . . . Having played with other musicians, I don't think the Beatles were that good . . . Paul is a fine bass player, but he's a bit overpowering at times. I'd join a band with John Lennon any day, but I couldn't join a band with Paul. That's not personal, but from a musical point of view.' As Starkey noted a few days later, 'How can we get together if George won't play with Paul?' Having survived vitriolic press criticism from Lennon, McCartney took Harrison's comments on the chin. 'I think the others are great. I'd always stick up for them. I don't agree with George. I don't think the Beatles weren't any good. I think they were great.'
Harrison's comments aroused the same sense of shock as Lennon's earlier admission, 'I don't believe in Beatles.' The furore heightened the already formidable pressure on the guitarist to justify himself. Sadly, his Dark Horse album had the same ragged quality as Harry Nilsson's Pussy Cats but little of the psychological drama. 'After I split up from Pattie,' Harrison admitted later, 'I went on a bit of a bender to make up for all the years I'd been married. I wasn't ready to join AA or anything – I don't think I was that far gone – but I could put back a bottle of brandy occasionally, plus all the other naughty things that fly around. I just went on a binge until it got to the point where I had no voice and almost no body at times.' That was exactly how the record sounded, with 'Simply Shady' offering the clearest portrait of an artist in distress. His seasonal single 'Ding Dong' was so banal that few people noticed the accompanying video, in which he mockingly donned his Beatles suits from 1963 and 1967, before posing naked apart from a strategically placed guitar and a pair of Himalayan boots.
As with Richard Starkey's Goodnight Vienna, sales of Dark Horse owed more to habit than enthusiasm, and it soon faded from the charts. It didn't help that Harrison's early concerts received disapproving reviews. After the first-night audience in Vancouver became restless while Ravi Shankar's musicians were playing, Harrison told them that he was prepared to die for Indian music, but not for rock 'n' roll. The ravaged condition of his voice was impossible to disguise, and when he ventured into his back catalogue, he altered lyrics that were almost regarded as holy writ. The key line of John Lennon's 1965 song 'In My Life' now ran, 'In my life, I love God more.' Another Beatles classic became 'While My Guitar Gently Smiles', and he cheapened his most famous composition by singing, 'Something in the way she moves it.' The whole exercise
was tinged with typically sly humour – 'Bring your lawyers and I'll bring Klein', he quipped on 'Sue Me Sue You Blues' – but the audiences had come to relive the past, not satirise it. 'They wanted a Beatle tour,' Harrison believed. As keyboardist Billy Preston recalled, 'George didn't want to do "Something" at all. I knew he was gonna have to do it. So he started rebelling against it by doing it in a different way.' After the Vancouver show Harrison complained, 'Why do they want to see if there is a Beatle George? I don't say I'm Beatle George. The image of my choice is not Bea
tle George. If they want to do that they can go and see Wings. Why live in the past? Whether you like me or not, this is what I am. I didn't force you or anybody at gunpoint to come to see me. And I don't care if nobody comes to see me, nobody ever buys another record of me. I don't give a shit, it doesn't matter to me.' And there were still 44 shows to go.
Asked later what he had gained from the tour, he replied, 'I learned that I should make sure that I have plenty of rest.' Despite the sense of purpose he experienced when the band kicked in and the music took over, he felt increasingly estranged from his fans. One night he watched after the show as the crew 'were bulldozing all the rubble left by the audience. There were mountains of empty bottles of gin and bourbon and tequila and brassieres and shoes and coats and trash. I mean, it was unbelievable. I'd go on out there, and you'd just get stoned, there was so much reefer going about. And I just thought, Do I actually have anything in common with these people?'
Four weeks in, when Harrison had reached Atlanta, attention was distracted from his failing voice by events in New York City. Lennon had promised that in the unlikely event his latest single reached No. 1, he would join Elton John onstage at Madison Square Garden. His surprise appearance on 28 November 1974 comprised just three songs – two of them, it was noted, taken from the Beatles' catalogue, including 'I Saw Her Standing There', written 'by an old estranged fiancé of mine called Paul'. Elton John was arguably pop's hottest property, but he was happy to be upstaged by his hero. 'Even [Lennon] was overwhelmed,' a critic reported. 'You could see it. He tried to continue chewing his gum in regular jaw patterns, and he pulled funny faces, even lounged against the piano in an attitude of mock-relaxation – but that deafening cry, a vocal anthem for old heroes, as you might say, and him the biggest hero of them all, had him swallowing hard.' As Lennon recalled, 'They were all screaming like Beatlemania.' Backstage, he was visited by Yoko Ono, and according to the myth they constructed in his final months, 'We got together that night.' But in fact he went home with May Pang, with whom he was planning to buy a house in the New York suburbs.
In mid-December Lennon and Pang met Harrison and his new companion Olivia Arias at the Plaza Hotel in New York, before attending Harrison's show the following night. They agreed that when the tour reached Madison Square Garden that weekend, Lennon would make another cameo appearance alongside his former bandmate. '[George] was pretty weird,' Lennon recalled, 'because he was in the middle of that tour, and we hadn't communicated for a while. I was a bit nervous about going on stage, but I agreed to because it would have been mean of me not to go on with George after I'd gone on with Elton.'
First they had to take care of business. After more than three years of negotiations, and cripplingly large lawyers' bills, the representatives of the four Beatles had finally concocted a separation document that would mark the formal dissolution of their legal partnership and allow the official receiver to divide up the royalties accrued since spring 1971. As Harrison, McCartney and Lennon were all in New York, it was arranged that they should sign in each other's presence on the morning of Harrison's first concert in the city. 'We had all arrived for the big dissolution meeting in the Plaza Hotel,' McCartney recalled. 'There were green baize tables with millions of documents laid out for us to sign . . . and John wouldn't show up! He wouldn't come from across the park! George got on the phone and yelled, "Take those fucking shades off and come over here, you!" John still wouldn't come over. He had a balloon delivered with a sign saying, "Listen to this balloon." It was all quite far out.'
'I didn't sign it because my astrologer told me it wasn't the right day,' Lennon explained. 'The numbers weren't right, the planets weren't right, and John wasn't coming,' Linda McCartney sneered. 'Had we known there was some guy flipping cards on his bed to help him make his decision, we would all have gone over there. George blew his top, but it didn't change anything.' As Lennon recalled, 'Somehow or other I was informed that I needn't bother to go to George's show. I was quite relieved in the end, because there wasn't any time for rehearsal and I didn't want it to be a case of just John jumping up and playing a few chords.' So Lennon stayed home, and his son Julian, who was visiting for the Christmas holidays, went in his place. The following day peace was restored, and Lennon met McCartney at Lee Eastman's law office. Then the McCartneys left town, and Lennon attended the final show of Harrison's tour. Backstage, he and May Pang talked amicably with Harrison, Ono and Neil Aspinall, who had flown over for the signing ritual.
A week later Lennon and Pang took his son to Disneyworld. 'I think [Julian] likes Paul better than me,' he admitted afterwards. 'I have the funny feeling he wishes Paul was his dad. But he's got me.' Father and son took a ride on the monorail that crosses the park. 'We went on what must have been the most crowded day of the year,' he recalled. 'I was sitting along with everyone else, not being recognised, and I heard someone with his back to me say that George Harrison was there today. The guy was leaning on me, and he'd heard that a Beatle was there somewhere. He couldn't see the wood for the trees.' Lennon was carrying the Beatles' legal documents with him, and May Pang took photos of the moment when he signed. It amused him to think that the saga that had begun nearly twenty years earlier, and that had carried him and his comrades around the world, should end in the cartoon splendour of a theme park. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starkey were no longer the Beatles: they were no longer tied together by name or by law. They were free to become whatever Beatles could become, perhaps even free from their past.
Chapter 8
I am an artist, and that's what I want to be. Let me make the music!
John Lennon, February 1975
The Beatles' thirteen-year partnership was formally dissolved in the London High Court on 9 January 1975. The lawyers could step aside, and the accountants could take their place. Four
years of earnings had to be calculated, divided and safeguarded from the greedy hands of the taxman. A dividing line was drawn: royalties from everything they had released, together or alone, before October 1974 were divided equally between them. For records issued after that date – including the latest albums by Lennon, Harrison and Starkey – each Beatle only took home the money he had earned.
The four men were still bound together as the joint owners of Apple Corps Ltd, which now entered sedate middle age, with its recording studio closing in May 1975 and all pretence abandoned that it was still an active record company. Most of its staff were given notice; only Neil Aspinall and his accountants remained. It now suited the Beatles to pretend that the idealistic Apple of 1968 had never existed. 'What people don't realise,' Starkey said, 'is that Apple was never really much more than an extension of [EMI label] Parlophone.' In that sentence he wrote off the legacy of the 1960s counterculture, the hope that the Beatles could overturn the commercial model of the music industry and the dream of enabling artists to reach the public without tangling with businessmen.
Not that the Beatles had ever achieved that dream. A month later Lennon said hopefully, 'After I deal with this last batch of lawsuits, I ain't gonna have any more. I don't know how they happen. One minute you're talking to someone, the next minute they're suing you.' He discounted the instinctive greed of the business community and his own equally innate naivety. At heart Lennon still believed that if he wanted something to happen, it would happen, and there would be no consequences. After twelve years swimming in the waters of fame, he was still surprised to find himself getting wet.
His almost preternatural talent for stepping from disaster to catastrophe was demonstrated by the sorry saga of his Rock 'n' Roll album. The entire saga was pockmarked with good intentions. In 1969 Lennon had been asked to pen a campaign song for radical activist Timothy Leary. Instead, he took the idea and the title, and turned it into his last major contribution to the Beatles, 'Come Together'. Its lyrical spark was a couplet by Chuck Berry, which Lennon borrowed quite consciously, considering it an artistic homage in the tradition of Yoko Ono's Fluxus group rather than an act of theft.
But music publishers find it easier to calculate money than gestures, and Lennon was sued for plagiarism. There followed the chaos of the Phil Spector project, Lennon's failure to include three Big Seven Music songs on Walls andBridges, and the hurried sessions in October 1974 with which he appeared to have fulfilled his obligations.
Despite his history of throwing himself into the arms of saviours and being disappointed when they let him slip to the floor, Lennon continued to assume that anyone whose company he enjoyed was automatically a friend. Had Allen Klein been on hand, Lennon would never have slipped into his latest quagmire; Klein knew a villain when he saw one. But when Lennon encountered Morris Levy, who now owned Big Sky Music, he was entranced. Like many Britons brought up on American thrillers, he had a soft spot for anyone who reminded him of Jimmy Cagney or Edward G. Robinson. Levy fitted the bill: he was a classic music business gangster, with a history of exploiting young talent and ensuring that copyrights always ended up in his pocket. He had great stories of Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building, and Lennon was a sucker for anybody who could spin a tale. When Lennon and Levy met to discuss the settlement of the Big Seven case, the musician was thrilled to be in the presence of a character rather than a bureaucrat.
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 28