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

by Peter Doggett

  George is so straight. He's so straight and so ordinary and so real. And he happens to believe in God . . . There's nothing freaky about George at all . . . John's supposed to be a loony according to some people, and I know he isn't. If you ask me, the Beatles are very sane, but they're cheeky with it. With the Beatles, our great in-joke was always that whenever we'd split up, we'd do a Wembley concert, and John was going to do this big thing, like 'Fuck the Queen.' We were really going to blow it. It was a beautiful dream.

  In late May 1975 McCartney and Wings issued Venus and Mars, another collection of exquisitely produced but lightweight pop, which dominated the airwaves as the Beatles had done a decade earlier. Three months later Wings opened a tour that would eventually – once McCartney's visa problems, caused by a series of drug busts, were solved – take them around the world. At the first show, in Southampton, McCartney was so nervous that the show started several minutes early. After a couple of songs someone shouted at him, 'What about John Lennon?' McCartney stared back for a few seconds and said dryly, 'What about John Lennon?' But the key moment came when he played the unmistakable opening chords of the Beatles' 'Lady Madonna'. It was the first time he had performed one of the group's songs in public for nine years. 'We were keen for Wings to get an identity of its own,' he recalled, 'and not rely on the Beatles. By then you could look at them just as songs, not as statements, and not as an admission of failure. By then it was clear that we'd proved our point.'

  McCartney was still wrestling with the comparison between the two bands. A few months earlier he had commissioned veteran sci-fi author Isaac Asimov to write a screenplay. 'He had the basic idea for the fantasy, which involved two sets of musical groups,' Asimov recalled, 'a real one, and a group of extraterrestrial imposters. The real one would be in pursuit of the imposters and would eventually defeat them, despite the fact that the latter had supernormal powers.' Beyond that framework, McCartney offered Asimov nothing more than 'a snatch of dialogue describing the moment when the group realised they were being victimised by imposters'. Asimov set to work and produced a screenplay that he called 'suspenseful, realistic and moving'. But McCartney rejected it. As Asimov recalled, 'He went back to his one scrap of dialogue out of which he apparently couldn't move.' It's tempting to imagine that the project collapsed because McCartney knew subconsciously that he was aligned with the losing side.

  While George Harrison and Richard Starkey were directing their money towards offshore havens and Swiss banks, McCartney was creating a business empire in the heart of London. A mass of companies was now run out of the same small office, including McCartney Pictures, McCartney Publishing, MPL Pictures, MPL Music, MPL Productions and their parent, MPL Communications. Besides offering ample opportunity for offsetting income against expenses, this complex structure symbolised his independence from the corporations that had controlled the Beatles for more than a decade.

  On 26 January 1976 the Beatles' recording contract with EMI Records expired. The following day George Harrison joined his Dark Horse label, under the wing of A&M Records. Richard Starkey's deal with Polydor (for Europe and the UK) and Atlantic (for North America) followed in March – not a moment too soon, as he had financial worries and had been forced to borrow large sums against future royalties. McCartney agreed to remain with EMI, albeit with a renegotiated contract that offered him a substantially higher royalty. According to Lennon, McCartney was also promised increased payments on the Beatles' catalogue – but only if he succeeded in reuniting the group and bringing them to EMI. Meanwhile Lennon opted to remain out of contract, telling friends that he had some 'beautiful songs' but no desire to release them.

  Another link with the past was severed that month. Since the breakup of the Beatles their road manager Mal Evans – who shared none of his colleague Neil Aspinall's financial acumen – had struggled to cope with the collapse of the dream that had carried him through the 1960s. Initially he provided tea and sympathy for Lennon, Harrison and Starkey's early solo projects. But as their work rate slowed and they became scattered across the globe, Evans had no obvious role in their lives. He left his family in England and attempted to become a record producer in Los Angeles, but he was unable to control the drinking buddies working on Keith Moon's solo album, and he was thrown off the project. Instead he found a ghostwriter for his autobiography – as Lennon quipped, 'Should be a laugh . . . "Tues: 1965: Got up, loaded van"' – and appeared as a guest speaker at a Beatlefest celebration.

  On 4 January 1976 he phoned his former Apple colleague Ken Mansfield, who thought he sounded upset. 'Nothing is wrong,' Evans told him. 'Paul and I just worked out some problems, and he is going to give me credit for some of the things I wrote with him.' It had long been an open secret within the Beatles' circle that Evans had contributed some lines to the Sgt Pepper album; indeed, Lennon had been hurt by McCartney's willingness to ask Evans for suggestions rather than him. But Evans didn't live long enough to sign that agreement. Later that day Los Angeles police arrived at his apartment after his girlfriend told them he was waving a gun around and seemed out of control. When the officers challenged him, he refused to drop the gun – effectively committing what has become known as 'suicide by cop'. 'Mal was a big lovable bear of a roadie,' McCartney recalled. 'He'd go over the top occasionally, but we all knew him and never had any problems. Had I been there I would have been able to say, "Mal, don't be silly." In fact, any of his friends could have talked him out of it without any sweat.' Instead, Evans died instantly.

  Evans had been a friend, a servant, a confidant and (alongside Aspinall) one of two men who had shared the Beatles' daily lives. Lennon wept uncontrollably when he heard the news; Evans had been one of the few people who had welcomed Yoko Ono into the Beatles' milieu, and Lennon never forgot his generosity. Tragedy soon ebbed into farce, however: after Evans was cremated, his ashes went missing. His friend Harry Nilsson recalled, 'Neil Aspinall called from Apple and kept saying, "Where's Mal?" I said, "I sent him." And he said, "Well, we can't find him. He's not here and his mother's downstairs and his wife Lil is here and they're all crying. What am I supposed to tell them?" Finally a few days later I got a call from somebody and they said they found him. I asked where, and they said, "In the dead letter office."'

  He died at a time when it seemed possible that the Beatles might, after all, be requiring the services of a road manager. Once their EMI deal expired, they were barraged with ever more outlandish financial offers for a reunion. Promoter Bill Sargent promised the quartet $50 million for a single show. They could play solo, he stipulated, but must perform together for a minimum of 20 minutes. In return, Sargent would retain full commercial rights around the world, a clause that the Beatles' advisers would never have tolerated. When the group's approval wasn't forthcoming, he doubled his offer, to no avail. Meanwhile, the boss of Electro-Harmonix electricals, one Mike Mathews, seized his moment in the spotlight, offering £3 million in cash for a one-off Beatles concert, plus a share in the profits of closed-circuit broadcast that would raise their income to around £30 million. By the summer writer Kathleen Tynan was proposing a benefit concert for Vietnamese children, which the Beatles could headline. 'How about a cup of tea together?' Harrison said sarcastically. 'Get these four people and just put them in a room to have tea. Satellite it around the world at $20 each just to watch it, and we could make a fortune.' Like Henry Kissinger's Nobel Peace Prize, this illustrated the moment when reality made satire irrelevant: millions of Beatles fans would happily have paid to study these four men who had not shared a room since 1969.

  The most persistent advocate of a reunion was Sid Bernstein. In September 1976 he ran a full-page ad in major US newspapers, pleading with the Beatles to unite for 'a one-off charity concert'. Today the world 'seems so hopelessly divided', he wrote; 'more than ever, we need a symbol of hope for the future . . . Let the world smile for one day.' In the 1960s parents had brought their disabled children to the Beatles' dressing room, as if the laying-on of hands might cure
them. Now the group was expected to bring about the spiritual renewal of the entire planet. 'I wrote to him and said, "Look, that was then,"' Harrison complained. 'The Beatles can't save the world. We'll be lucky if we can save ourselves.' Yet the sheer weight of Bernstein's figures overshadowed any attempt at logic. He calculated that a concert broadcast around the world on TV and issued subsequently on film and album might generate $230 million. The Beatles might like to donate 20 per cent of their earnings, he suggested. He would take 10 per cent for his trouble, but would give three quarters of that to charity, ensuring that he would still walk away with almost $6 million.

  When news of Bernstein's offer broke, comedian Eric Idle rang Harrison. 'He didn't know about it,' Idle reported. 'He said, "Fucking hell."' McCartney's response was equally concise: 'You can't reheat a soufflé.' Lennon remained enigmatically silent. Starkey had an album to sell, entitled Ringo's Rotogravure, with lukewarm contributions from Lennon and McCartney, so he was left with the burden of framing an official response. 'I think Sid is trying to get his name in the papers,' he said. 'I don't care about Sid Bernstein; I'm promoting my record. Next week someone's gonna come in with $500 million.' When the questioner persisted, Starkey snapped, 'Look, we've just spent ten minutes talking about this guy who writes to a newspaper.' His final word on the subject: 'We didn't start doing it for money, and we ain't going to end it that way.'

  Only one offer came close to provoking a reunion, and it was the least lucrative. On the US TV comedy show Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels ridiculed the furore by offering the Beatles $3,000 if they performed together on the show. When that didn't work, he threw in an extra $250 and overnight accommodation. In April 1976 the McCartneys paid one of their periodic visits to the Lennons at the Dakota, and watched Michaels' show. Lennon suggested they take a cab downtown to the studio and surprise Michaels, before he and McCartney decided they couldn't be bothered. Several months later Harrison had his own album to sell, and he agreed to guest-star on Saturday Night Live with Paul Simon. The opening skit showed him bargaining with Michaels, who was explaining patiently that he could only collect the full $3,000 if he brought all the other Beatles with him. Lennon's ego would never have allowed him to satirise himself on TV, while McCartney would have ruined the sketch by hamming it up. Harrison played it deadpan, another sign that he was now prepared to play the public role of the comic Beatle.

  It was Harrison who encouraged his friends Eric Idle and Neil Innes to create their own Beatles reunion in the satirical form of the Rutles. The so-called Pre-Fab Four debuted on Saturday Night Live in October 1976 with a delicious parody of the Beatlemania era, a song entitled 'I Must Be in Love'. 'It wouldn't have happened without George,' commented Innes, who was the Rutles' songwriter and also played the Lennonesque Ron Nasty. 'He was the one thinking it would be great if somebody made fun of all this. Which is why he helped the Rutles . . . he was a fan. He thought the spirit of the Beatles had been passed on to Python. He once said that the Beatles, the Pythons and the Rutles should all get together for one big concert.'

  Idle obtained the finance to make a Rutles movie, which developed into All You Need Is Cash, a wicked pastiche of Neil Aspinall's long-buried visual biography of the Beatles. 'It's a perfect thing for parody, the Beatles,' Harrison admitted. 'Eric chose the right Beatle for the project,' declared their mutual friend Derek Taylor. 'I cannot see Paul or John leaving well so alone – though Ringo, I think, could have fitted in very comfortably.' But Starkey was adrift in alcoholism, leaving Harrison to parody Derek Taylor in a cameo role (as Eric Manchester), preaching the Rutle Corps gospel as Taylor had done for Apple a decade earlier. Some of Idle's script was joyously childish, and some extremely pointed: there was a foreign Rutle wife who wore Nazi uniforms, a terrifying New York manager called Ron Decline and a wide-eyed balladeer addicted to the creation of sentimental cliché. Innes's music was precisely observed and brilliantly conceived; indeed, it evoked the spirit of the Beatles so accurately that the owners of Northern Songs, ATV, sued for plagiarism, and an inevitable legal battle ensued. Innes lost his songwriting royalties, and Lennon/ McCartney now have to be credited as co-writers of such delicious nonsense as 'Cheese and Onions' and 'Piggy in the Middle'. 'George occasionally attempts to get the rights back for me,' Innes revealed in 1996. 'But it's not high up on anyone's agenda. I've stopped sulking about it. It's water under the bridge.' Harrison admitted his own rationale for supporting the project: 'I loved the Rutles because, for the Beatles, the [idea of] the Beatles is just tiresome. It needs to be deflated a bit, and I loved the idea of the Rutles taking that burden off us in a way. Everything can be seen as comedy, and the Fab Four are no exception to that.'

  The Rutles' musical tribute was timely. After several years when it was anathema for new artists to admit being inspired by the Beatles, suddenly there was nothing more commercially acceptable than echoes of the past. ELO, led by Beatles fanatic Jeff Lynne, provided the most blatant homage to their sound, winning applause from John Lennon and rivalling Wings' ubiquity on Top 40 radio. A new wave of punk and power-pop artists was emerging, many of whom betrayed a Beatles influence, from the 1963 stylings of the Jam and the Pleasers (who took their name from the Beatles' first album), to the more frenetic sound of the Ramones, whose name was borrowed from a pseudonym once used by Paul McCartney. The Clash might have promised 'no Elvis, no Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977', but there was a familiar lilt to their ragged vocal harmonies and melodies.

  Some artists were less subtle about their inspiration. In 1976 a pirate radio promoter named Rohan O'Rahilly, who had once collaborated with the Lennons on the launch of a 'Peace Ship', announced the most important musical event of the era: the arrival of 'The New Beatles'. Even before the lawyers had reached for their writs, O'Rahilly renamed his protégés Loving Awareness, with a message to the old Beatles: they should either heal mankind by reuniting or stand aside and bless their successors. So eager were the British public to believe in musical reincarnation that rumours soon spread that Loving Awareness were none other than Lennon and his chums in disguise.

  To prove that you can fool the public as long as they wish to be fooled, four Canadian musicians pulled a similar stunt. Klaatu took their name from a 1950s sci-fi movie – also referenced by Starkey on the cover of his 1974 album Goodnight Vienna. None of the musicians was named or pictured on their debut album, which sounded like the work of people who had exhaustively studied Sgt Pepper. Therefore, with a giant leap of faith, Klaatu must be the Beatles in disguise. The final 'proof ' was that their record appeared on Capitol, the label that had released the Beatles' American hits. By the time Klaatu's more mundane identities were revealed, their album had sold more than 500,000 copies.

  EMI/Capitol had a more direct route to the profits of Beatlemania. In March 1976 all 22 of the group's original hits were reissued in Britain, alongside the first appearance on a UK single of 'Yesterday'. Next, EMI delved into the vaults to discover if there was any previously unheard material that could be released. They began to assemble a double-album entitled Rock 'n' Roll Music, and briefly toyed with unveiling some of the lacklustre oldies that the group had recorded during their January 1969 sessions. Fortunately, artistic discretion prevailed over greed, and the album simply repackaged familiar material. EMI mounted an extravagant publicity campaign, and the set climbed to No. 2 on the US charts. Other retrospectives appeared in the years ahead, including Love Songs, Rarities, Beatles Ballads and Reel Music.

  Richard Starkey voiced the group's misgivings. 'I'd like some power over whoever at EMI is putting out these lousy Beatles compilations,' he complained.

  They can do what they like with all our old stuff, they know that. It's theirs. But Christ, man, I was there. I played on those records, and you know how much trouble we used to go to, just getting the running order right? And those album covers! John rang them up and asked them if he could draw one . . . he told me he was told to piss off. All of us looked at the cover and could hard
ly bear to see it. It was terrible.

  EMI replied that they had attempted to contact Lennon, but that he had failed to reply in time. As a sign of the rising tension between the group and their original record company, battle was rejoined over the royalties from the Let It Be album. The warring parties would soon reserve a regular berth in the London High Court.

  Soon nostalgia was everywhere. Publisher Sean O'Mahony, who had issued the official magazine The Beatles Book between 1963 and 1969, began to reissue all the original copies on a schedule that expired in 1982, allowing him to substitute a brand-new Beatles publication at the moment when EMI were celebrating the group's 20th anniversary. The Beatles Book continued to run until 2001, mocking Paul McCartney's original comment to the publisher: 'What will you find to write about us every month?'

  Certain members of the Beatles were particularly averse to this obsession with the past. When journalist David Wigg planned to issue an album of his late 1960s interviews with the group, Starkey and Harrison attempted to halt the project despite the fact that there was nothing illegal or demeaning about it. They failed, merely stirring up sufficient publicity to carry the package into the UK charts.

  John Lennon found that the simplest way of avoiding the past was to remove himself from the present. Aside from an occasional appearance in public, pushing his son's buggy around Manhattan or shopping in Tokyo's deluxe stores, he remained absent and silent. When journalist

  Roy Carr encountered him at the Americana Hotel, Lennon said that he was concentrating on giving his son Sean the kind of childhood he hadn't enjoyed himself. Another reporter, Chris Charlesworth, asked Lennon for an interview and received a postcard in return: 'No comment was the stern reply! Am invisible.'