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

by Peter Doggett

  So it was inevitable that when Levy offered Lennon the use of his farm in upstate New York as a rehearsal studio for his Rock 'n' Roll sessions, Lennon would accept; and when Levy said that the best way of selling records in the mid-1970s was via TV advertising and mail order, Lennon agreed to give it a try. He never thought of alerting EMI or Apple; after all, he wasn't a contract lawyer. He simply handed Levy a rough cut of the Rock 'n' Roll album as proof that he had satisfied the Big Seven deal, and then waited for nothing to happen. But Levy took Lennon at his word and worried about the legalities later. As far as he was concerned, Lennon wanted him to promote his new album on TV, so he set about the task as if it was still 1955, and Lennon was simply another two-bit kid with a song who thought that royalties lived in English castles.

  By late January Levy had thrown together a garish album package and booked TV time. His error was telling Allen Klein what he was doing. Klein was still suing, and being sued by, Lennon; but business and friendship were separate in his mind, and he asked Lennon if he knew about the advertising campaign that Levy was planning. Only then did Lennon tell his record company that he might possibly have handed over his forthcoming album to one of the industry's most notorious outlaws. In Britain it would have been easy to close down Levy's outlets, but in the USA it took time, and meanwhile Levy was able to begin marketing the record, which he retitled Roots. Capitol immediately sent out a cease-and-desist order, and accelerated the schedule for their official release by several weeks, with the result that Rock 'n' Roll appeared without the extensive liner notes that Lennon had written. Ironically, his text included a wry summary of the album's tortuous gestation: 'The behind the scenes story on this long unwinding will be revealed by a congressional committee to investigate psychodrama in the music business, but only after a period of grateful silence.' And that period was what Lennon now resolved to observe. Finally realising that every time he signed a contract, he opened himself up to litigation, he resolved to free himself from his contractual ties and see what happened next.

  The comparison with McCartney was revealing. In sacking the only man who understood the full financial ramifications of his career, Lennon had exposed himself to fate. McCartney, on the other hand, had married into the gods. Like Klein, his father-in-law Lee Eastman was an expert in making money out of music. As early as 1971 he encouraged McCartney to invest his income in something substantial. Already wearied by the Apple saga, McCartney was unwilling to embark on another business adventure, but Eastman suggested that he could combine his passion and his financial interests by investing in music publishing. 'Whose music do you like?' he asked his son-in-law, and returned a few days later to tell McCartney that Buddy Holly's catalogue of songs – the inspiration for the earliest Lennon/McCartney compositions – was for sale. This was the birth of a formidable publishing empire, which would see MPL (McCartney Productions Limited) Music become a major player in one of the few sectors of the entertainment business that would never go out of fashion. The Eastmans expanded MPL's catalogue with great shrewdness, creating a reservoir of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley standards, material which had already proven its staying power and would continue to generate income long after most solo albums by ex-Beatles had been forgotten.*32 Best of all, MPL Music owed nothing to Apple or the other Beatles, and it was guaranteed to provide for McCartney's children and grandchildren. For a family man, nothing could be more attractive.

  Yet one thing still eluded him. 'I know that Paul was desperate to write with John again,' Linda McCartney remembered in 1984. 'The sad thing is that John and Paul both had problems, and they loved each other, and boy, could they have helped each other! If they had only communicated! It frustrates me no end, because I was just some chick from New York when I walked into all of that. God, if I'd known what I know now . . . All I could do was sit there, watching them play these games.'

  In January 1975 the McCartneys and Wings, rebuilt as a quintet after the traumas of 1973, travelled to New Orleans. The city had a rich heritage of black music, which McCartney was keen to access. Once he was settled, he phoned John Lennon in New York. Lennon had already agreed to work with David Bowie in California, and for the first time he was prepared to contemplate a reunion with McCartney. Singer Art Garfunkel had recently worked with Paul Simon for the first time in six years. Lennon invited Garfunkel to dinner and told him, 'I'm getting calls from my Paul. And he wants to know if I'm available for the recording. What should I do?' Garfunkel told him, 'John, I would do it – put all personality aside and go with the fun of the [musical] blend. Make music with somebody you have made a sound with. A great pleasure is the thing to stick with.'

  Lennon asked May Pang a similar question: 'What would you think if I started writing with Paul again?' As she recalled, 'My mouth fell open and I said, "Are you kidding? I think it would be terrific."' When Lennon wrote to former Apple press officer Derek Taylor, he told him in his inimitable approximation of typewritten English, 'Bowies cutting 'universe' (Let It Beatle). Am a gonna be there (by reqest of courset). Then possibley down to New Orleons to see the McCartknees.'

  It was the perfect moment. Their business quarrels were settled, Lennon had shown himself a master of contemporary soul styles on Walls and Bridges, and McCartney was recording in a haven of rhythm and blues. Moreover, McCartney realised that he was not at a creative peak. 'I reckon I've made some bum records in the last couple of years,' he had admitted a few weeks earlier. 'I like them, and they're all OK, but the things I've been through in the last few years aren't very conducive to inspiration.' At the same time he reckoned that Lennon's Walls and Bridges had been 'great, but he can do better . . . I heard [the Beatles] "I Am the Walrus" today, for instance, and that's what I mean.' Both men had recently proved themselves superior craftsmen, but together they might rekindle the spark that had fired the Beatles.

  There was still resentment on both sides. A few months before, Lennon and Richard Starkey had taped radio commercials for each other's albums, the kind of co-operative gesture that Lennon would never have considered with McCartney or Harrison. Between takes, the two men had talked about McCartney's recent success. 'Does Paul know who you are, Ringo?' Lennon asked sarcastically, before quipping that he would 'swap two Pauls for a George'.

  Yet the affection between the two men was genuine, as long as nobody mentioned Apple or Allen Klein. So was Lennon's willingness to consider revisiting the Beatles catalogue. 'I've lost all that negativity about the past,' he conceded. 'I'd be as happy as Larry to do "Help!". I've just changed completely in two years. I'd do "Hey Jude" and the whole damn show.'

  A key factor in the rapprochement between Lennon and McCartney was the fact that the McCartneys had no history of tension with May Pang. Johnandyoko had the power to make McCartney feel insignificant; John and May were simply an old friend and his attractive young partner. But the past was about to claim a stake in the future. Lennon and Pang had now been together for 18 months, and planned to buy a cottage in Montauk on Long Island in early February, but Ono still rang Lennon constantly. As Pang recalled, Ono phoned Lennon at the end of January and 'told him she had a method to help him stop smoking, and that he should come over to the Dakota. I told him I didn't like him going over there, and he said, "Stop it!". He was yelling at me, "What's your problem? I'll be home by dinner; we'll go have a late dinner, and then we'll make plans to go to New Orleans and see Paul and Linda."'

  In Lennon's account, 'I was just going to visit [Yoko]. I visited her many times before. And I just walked in and thought, I live here, this is my home. Here is Yoko, and here is me.' Elsewhere he said simply, 'It fell in place again. It was like I never left.' Ono's recollection, shortly after her husband's death, was more realistic: 'We sat trembling in each other's presence, not talking and sometimes crying the first times we were together again.' Lennon said, 'I feel like I went to get a coffee and a newspaper somewhere, and it took a year.'

  When he returned that night, Pang said, 'He was a different person abo
ut Paul. It wasn't the same. He was saying, "Oh, you know when Paul and Linda used to visit us? Well, I couldn't stand it." Obviously something had happened on the other side of Central Park.' Within a day or two he had moved back into the Dakota. 'I was so numb,' Pang recalled. 'He told me Yoko would still allow me to see him. But it didn't make any sense to me. I kept asking him, "What about our love?" We were just about to buy a house together, but he just shrugged and said, "It'll be all right."' Johnandyoko was reborn, and there was no trip to New Orleans. Lennon, it seemed, had to choose between Ono and McCartney: he couldn't have both.

  Two weeks later Lennon claimed to be ecstatic. 'This is no disrespect to anybody else I was having relationships with, but I feel like I was running around without my head on.' He told another reporter, 'I don't wanna put May down. She is a nice girl. But she knew what the scene was.' He said that he had 'sort of filled in' with Pang, 'so as not to be alone at night'. Ono, by contrast, could never be dismissed as a 'nice girl'. Even Pang realised that 'Yoko dominated John just as he had been dominated by his Aunt Mimi when he grew up.' She came to understand that 'John felt guilty because he was having so much freedom.' He needed the boundaries that his relationship to Ono would provide. Lennon was still the boy who had lost his parents and who believed he could only function if somebody else was in control.

  By 1980, when Lennon gave his final interviews, his 18-month separation from Ono was described as 'a lost weekend', a period of emotional anguish and creative bankruptcy between two great romantic eras. This revision of history discounted the artistic worth of Walls and Bridges. It asked people to believe that Lennon was more himself in the years ahead, when he produced nothing, than when he was making two coherent albums in the space of a few weeks. And it prolonged the myth that the most productive relationship of Lennon's life was not with Paul McCartney but with Yoko Ono.

  What happened at the Dakota in January 1975? Various biographers have suggested that Ono might have drugged Lennon or hypnotised him, or used her esoteric knowledge of witchcraft. But these farfetched rumours underestimate the power of Lennon's psychological drives. More intriguing, in retrospect, is Ono's rationale. Did she choose this moment for a reunion because the numbers were right, or was she afraid that she might lose him forever if he reunited with McCartney? Whose dependence was greater: Lennon's on the woman he called mother, or Ono's on the man who had brought her global recognition? One thing is certain: Lennon and McCartney would have worked together in February 1975 if Lennon had not returned to the Dakota, and history – theirs and ours – might have been very different.

  The reunion of Lennon and Ono could have triggered another propulsive era of artistic and political collaborations, but the times had changed and the energy had dissipated. Briefly Lennon threw himself into publicising his Rock 'n' Roll album, letting it be known that he was not blocking a collaboration with the other Beatles. But, he admitted, 'I no longer have the dream of wanting to be the record company . . . the record business is filled with lawsuits and immigration is just one lawsuit. I would like to live life without litigation.' Morris Levy filed a $73 million lawsuit against him within weeks of his return to the Dakota, and the case would linger for another year before Lennon finally emerged victorious.

  'I meself have decided to be or not to be for a coupla years,' Lennon wrote to Derek Taylor that spring. 'Boredom set in . . . how many back beats are there? I ask meself.' In March Ono discovered that she was pregnant. 'I was with them when Yoko had her pregnancy confirmed,' said EMI executive Bob Mercer. 'They were absolutely ecstatic about it and John turned to me and said, 'Well, that shelves the work for some time now.' He just said that his own feelings were that he didn't want to have his signature on any pieces of paper. He'd had enough of contracts.' In April Lennon ended a four-year legal battle with Sir Lew Grade and ATV by appearing on a TV tribute to the entrepreneur, accompanied by a band wearing two-faced masks to reflect his genuine feelings. The following month he made a fleeting appearance at a charity radiothon in Philadelphia. Informed that 98 per cent of the American public wanted the Beatles to re-form, he quipped, 'I'd like to meet the 2 per cent.' As the summer passed, and Ono's pregnancy continued without serious incident, he told a friend, 'I am currently going through one of my 18-month or so retreats – à la Primal Therapy.' He said that Yoko's condition 'happens to coincide with my natural and instinctive hibernations. At the ripe old age of 34 I find myself going back to the age-old question, What the hell is going on? Why are we here? Followed closely by, Am I doing what I really want to do . . . or simply doing what I'm supposed to do?!?!'

  During his process of self-discovery he made strenuous efforts to connect with his family in Britain – cousins, half-sisters, his son. But with the birth of his child imminent he chose to shut the door again. 'As time went by and John's calls ceased,' recalled his sister Julia Baird, 'we found it impossible to reach him. Every time I tried, I got Yoko . . . She seemed to me to be monitoring his life and equally he seemed to be allowing it. "John is asleep. You don't understand his life. No, I can't wake him up." . . . Whether or not John ever knew that I was still trying to make contact, I will never know.' That summer Lennon channelled his creativity into writing a book, telling Derek Taylor, '[I] don't feel like dealing with assholes.' He added that Linda McCartney was constantly suggesting that he and Paul should work together, but 'I can't really see it myself.'

  In October 1975 several events conspired to shape the years ahead. Lennon issued a compilation of his solo singles to complete his recording contract with EMI/Capitol. 'Make me an offer,' Lennon told Derek Taylor when he was asked about the prospect of signing with Warners, but when Taylor did, Lennon didn't reply. He was equally curt with EMI, when executive Len Wood tried to persuade him to renew his contract: 'Yes, it was a high old time we all had in the 60s . . . but not judging by your "offer" (I could think of a better word for it). Corporate vision, even after all these years, never ceases to amaze me! I am enjoying my family, and uncommitted freedom.' The US Court of Appeals overturned the government's order for his deportation, stating that his 'four-year battle to remain in our country is testimony to his faith in the American dream'. Two days later, and seven years after the couple's first miscarriage, the Lennons' son Sean was born. 'We might get over there early next year,' Lennon told his sister in England, but he would never return to his homeland again. Aside from a brief recording session with Richard Starkey the following year, Lennon abandoned music, art and any connection with the Beatles.

  More by inebriated accident than design, Richard Starkey had taken a similar decision. He divorced his wife and set up home in Monaco and California with American actress Nancy Andrews – one of a series of relationships with younger women that filled the rest of the decade. His closest friends were alcoholics – Keith Moon, Harry Nilsson, Monty Python member Graham Chapman – and he prided himself on being able to match them, drink for drink. 'Someone said, "We weren't musicians dabbling in drugs and alcohol; now we were junkies dabbling in music,"' he recalled. 'I was sliding down. I wasn't taking enough interest.' One day he shaved his head completely, even his eyebrows, in a desperate search for novelty. Freed from EMI in January 1976, he signed a new deal that required him to deliver an unfeasible seven albums in five years, but the record label backed out after four increasingly mediocre efforts. Chapman and his collaborator, Douglas Adams, attempted to find Starkey a purpose, crafting the skeleton of a TV sitcom for him. 'It was to be a science fiction comedy,' Adams recalled. 'It involved a bloke called Ringo Starr who worked in an office as a walking chauffeur – he carried the bosses around on his back – until one day a flying saucer landed, bearing a robot which gave Ringo the power to travel through time and space, do flower arranging and destroy the universe by waving his hand. That's as far as we got.' Instead, Starkey starred in an impeccably uncreative US television special, inevitably titled Ringo, narrated a children's album and waited for death or oblivion to deliver him. Lennon noted to a friend that nothing
could be done to save him.

  George Harrison had charted a more positive path into the future. Shortly after completing his traumatic US tour, he met the Monty Python team of comedians, and recognised that he had found a boys' club to replace the Beatles. As early as January 1975 Michael Palin wrote in his diary, 'He wants to be involved in some kind of way with us in the States. He said he has so many ideas to talk about, but I was a little wary, especially when he said he envisaged a Harrison– Pythons road show with us doing really extraordinary things throughout the show, such as swinging out over the audience on wires.' Visiting Harrison's mansion later in the year, Palin lamented, 'One can't escape the feeling of George somehow cut off from everyday life by the wealth that's come his way' and found the ex-Beatle anxious 'that we should stay the night, play snooker on his Olympic-size snooker table, drink and generally enjoy ourselves'. Harrison found that the Pythons' defiantly English humour exactly matched his own. In December 1975 he happily satirised his image on Eric Idle's TV show Rutland WeekendTelevision, in contrast with the world-weary atmosphere of his final Apple/EMI album, Extra Texture. Though the record betrayed traces of comedy – in place of the standard Apple logo, Harrison used a chewed-up apple core – its portentous and moralising tone won few admirers, continuing his steady slide out of public affection.

  Harrison could rightfully have complained that his old schoolfriend Paul McCartney had cornered the market in moralising. Completing his sessions in New Orleans without Lennon, McCartney issued a public scolding to his former colleagues of the kind that had infuriated them in 1969. 'I really ought to talk to those boys,' he said patronisingly, '[and] tell them the facts of life. I thought we were finished with all those immature things – religious kicks, drug kicks, chasing birds – that was good when we were kids, but it's no good now.' His reference to religion might have been intended to rile the increasingly devout Harrison. A few months later McCartney made amends, insisting,