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

by Peter Doggett

  But after we'd split with Capitol Records, they acquired the rights to all that material and didn't bother asking us any more about what should be released. We never used to like the tapes of those two concerts, because we always thought all the songs were played much too fast. We also thought it was all out of tune. But nowadays we can't even say if we like the cover artwork or not, it's got nothing to do with us. All those old Beatles repackages smell a bit like a rip-off to me.

  Although McCartney could not prevent the Hollywood Bowl tapes from being released by the company to which he was still signed, Apple felt more optimistic about halting the second project. In December 1962 a fellow Merseybeat musician, Ted 'Kingsize' Taylor, had recorded the Beatles at the Star-Club in Hamburg. He offered his tapes to the group's manager Brian Epstein for a paltry sum, but Epstein wasn't interested. Nine years passed before Taylor collaborated with another key figure from the group's early career, ex-manager Allan Williams, who recognised a commercial opportunity. The tapes had all the clarity of an alarm clock buried in sand, but they captured the group on the cusp of fame, at the last moment when spontaneity still governed their live performances and they had no reputation to lose.

  In August 1973 Williams met Harrison and Starkey at Apple. He played the tapes and offered them to the Beatles for £5,000. The musicians declined, though Harrison tempered the refusal by slipping a present for Williams' wife into his hand: sixteen uncut rubies, which he'd been given by a member of the Krishna community. Undeterred, Williams joined forces with businessman Paul Murphy, who arranged for the tapes to be remixed into a state that was nearly listenable. At Easter 1977 the tiny independent label Lingasong announced that it would be releasing a double album from the tapes.

  Only then did Apple act. On 1 April 1977, one week before the Star-Club album was released, Apple's lawyers served a writ demanding that it should be withdrawn. In reply, Ted Taylor testified that at least one of the Beatles had given him permission to make the tape. That would have counted for nothing had Apple examined the recording logically and recognised the obvious clues that it post-dated the signing of the Beatles' June 1962 contract with EMI. An expert witness was available in the shape of John Lennon, who supplied a detailed letter about the album, noting perceptively, 'The sleeve note, apart from being inaccurate, seems to have been written with a court case in mind.' He added a handwritten postscript: 'THIS IS A FUCKING FAKE!' But by then Apple had already lost its case. The High Court judge not only accepted Taylor's story but pointedly criticised Apple's tardiness in launching the action. The Star-Club album duly appeared, to the enormous benefit of Beatles scholars but to no great commercial effect: it failed to enter the Top 100 chart in the USA or UK, while Live at the Hollywood Bowl reached No. 1 in Britain and No. 2 in America. Paul McCartney sounded less concerned by Lingasong's package than by EMI's: 'On a personal level it's quite nice to have a memory of those days. On a business level it was all very weird. Nevertheless, I don't think it does any harm.' But while the Hollywood Bowl album soon vanished from the Beatles' catalogue and was never issued on CD, the Star-Club tapes were repackaged endlessly over the next 20 years.

  Through the late 1970s exploitation of the Beatles' name supported a healthy if rarely attractive industry. 'They're like leeches or crows, feeding off the Beatles,' George Harrison complained. A Broadway musical called Beatlemania featured imitators reproducing the group's hits, while Robert Stigwood proceeded with his cinematic interpretation of the Sgt Pepper album. Some of the most successful pop stars of the age, including the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, were recruited to form Sgt Pepper's band, who – according to the movie's OfficialScrapbook – become 'entangled in an even more villainous web of greed and meanness spun by an international syndicate with the motto of "We Hate Love, We Hate Joy, We Love Money"'. The scenario must have sounded uncannily like real life to the Beatles, who would have greeted these comments by Bee Gees singer Robin Gibb with some amusement: 'There is no such thing as the Beatles now. They don't exist as a band and never performed Sgt Pepper live in any case. When ours comes out, it will be, in effect, as if theirs never existed.' As Harrison lamented, 'We didn't have any control over that.' But referring to all the unauthorised productions that were under way, he added, 'I don't really think they're supposed to do that, and in fact we've just got together a group of people to go and sue them all.' In September 1979 Apple duly filed a lawsuit against the producers of Beatlemania, who had franchised their musical around America; but it didn't prevent a London presentation from opening three weeks later.

  Like water dripping through plaster, the flow was irregular but infuriating. Film-maker Steven Spielberg produced I Wanna Hold YourHand, a teen drama hinged around a 1964 Beatles concert. Impresario Dick Clark invested in a television movie, The Birth of the Beatles, for which he recruited the group's former drummer Pete Best as consultant. 'People think we're giving all these producers permission to do it,' Harrison complained, 'and that we're making money out of it, but we don't make a nickel.' He added forbiddingly, 'There's not much more we can be sued for, but we can sue a lot of other people.'

  One immediate target was John Lennon's first wife, Cynthia. In June 1978 she published a mild, bittersweet memoir, A Twist of Lennon. The juiciest portions were serialised in the reliably exploitative Newsof the World. Lennon was incensed and issued an injunction to prevent further publication, claiming libel. His ex-wife's defence was simple: she had told the truth. That might be so, Lennon's lawyers replied, but the articles had invaded his privacy – a claim breathtaking in its hypocrisy, given Lennon and Ono's willingness to turn their private lives into art. The presiding judge, Lord Denning, agreed: 'I cannot see that either of these two parties has had much regard for the sanctity of marriage. It is as plain as it can be that the relationship of these parties has ceased to be a private affair.' Publication proceeded, without any serious damage to Lennon's reputation.

  'We've been nostalgia since 1967,' George Harrison contended as he released a self-titled album that was arguably his most consistent work. To reinforce his view, he resurrected a lost Beatles song from 1968, "Not Guilty", in which he had wryly expressed his desire not to 'upset the Apple-cart'. It gently satirised the global obsession with the past, and specifically the era that the Beatles allegedly epitomised. 'It's like Britain has always been hung up about the Second World War,' he said. 'The Beatles were in and out of people's lives in a flash, and yet they're still there 15 years later . . . They've got lots and lots of songs they can play forever. But what do they want? Blood? They want us all to die like Elvis Presley?' Harrison noted, 'Every year we were Beatling was like 20 years . . . We were just four relatively sane people in the middle of madness. People used us as an excuse to trip out . . . That's why they want the Beatles to go on, so they can get all silly again. But they don't have consideration for our well-being.' In any case Harrison still refused to consider the possibility of ever working with Paul McCartney again. 'Paul was very pushy . . . so in that respect it would be very difficult to ever play with him. But we're cool as far as being pals goes.'

  In one area Harrison squarely represented public opinion: he wanted to know what Lennon was doing. 'I myself would be interested to know whether John still writes tunes and puts them on a cassette or does he just forget all about music and not touch the guitar.' Only after Lennon's death did it emerge that during the late 1970s he regularly attempted to compose songs but rarely managed to complete them. 'I know John was desperate to write,' Linda McCartney commented in 1984. 'Desperate. People thought, Well, he's taking care of Sean, he's a house-husband, and all that, but he wasn't happy. He couldn't write, and it drove him crazy. And Paul could have helped him – easily.' But the two men were rarely in contact, and whenever they did talk it usually decayed into a petty argument about their legal ties.

  Authorised and unauthorised accounts of Lennon's life in the late 1970s vary so widely that both are unbelievable. In 1980 he claimed that he had spent the five years since
his son's birth as a full-time carer and part-time baker, exhibiting his fresh loaves with the same pride that he had once devoted to his music. A mysterious open letter from the Lennons, printed as a paid advertisement in several newspapers in May 1979, reinforced the message that the couple were undergoing spiritual and artistic renewal. Yet so-called insiders – his personal assistant and Ono's astrologist and tarot reader – recounted a different narrative: Lennon was embittered, drug-ridden, despairing, lethargic, violent, sometimes suicidal, requiring constant nasal massage to counteract years of cocaine abuse. In an audio diary that he kept sporadically in 1979 Lennon lashed out at his contemporaries, including 'the mighty McCartney', with a degree of venom that hinted at acute envy.*34 Yet the anger could shift abruptly into a deadening depression: he no longer listened to new music, he admitted; 'There doesn't seem any point now.' He lamented the nagging insistence of his sex drive and then confessed to fantasies about sucking his mother's breasts. At least once he flirted with suicide, an experience that later inspired a song, 'You Saved My Soul'. His saviour was Ono, who also 'rescued' him from a brief infatuation with a television evangelist. Whatever was happening in the Dakota between their annual visits to Japan, Lennon sounded anything but fulfilled, creatively, psychologically or sexually. Even at his most positive, he could only describe himself as 'the same but different . . . it's been a long haul'.

  After his death Yoko Ono claimed that around 1978 the couple had planned an autobiographical Broadway musical, inevitably titled TheBallad of John and Yoko. In a book of Lennon's posthumous writings she included an essay of that name, purportedly intended for the theatre programme. It was the most sustained piece of prose writing that Lennon ever attempted, in a literary voice as direct and acerbic as his 1970 Plastic Ono Band album. It ridiculed his fellow Beatles, 'Paul, George and It's Only Ringo'; satirised his adventures in radical politics; and delivered a damning verdict on his career: 'The lesson for me is clear. I've already "lost" one family to produce what? Sgt Pepper? I am blessed with a second chance. Being a Beatle nearly cost me my life, and certainly cost me a great deal of my health . . . I will not make the same mistake twice in one lifetime . . . If I never "produce" anything more for public consumption than "silence", so be it.' It is impossible to reconcile the valedictory tone of these remarks with a man celebrating his own life. More likely these were diary entries never intended for public consumption; the work of an artist who could no longer communicate anything apart from the rejection of his own past.

  Occasionally Lennon attempted to revive his creativity: he visited artist Andy Warhol's studio in late 1979, intending to produce screen prints in the master's style. But it was a rare venture outside the Dakota. As one of their neighbours noted, 'When the Lennons go out, they go to Japan.' 'I enjoyed being the foreigner,' Lennon said of his visits to Ono's homeland. Otherwise they were effectively invisible. They were not short of places to hide. Ono had become a canny speculator in real estate, and the Lennons owned several farms in Delaware County, a beachside residence on Long Island and a holiday home in Florida. Their stake in the Dakota Building increased to six apartments, offering not only residential space and office facilities, but also storage for the exotic fruits of Ono's passion for ancient Egyptian artefacts and that most essential of Upper West Side accoutrements, a world-class collection of fur coats. Lennon's famous line, 'imagine no possessions', grew increasingly ironic.

  In April 1979 he felt guilty enough about his elder son to invite him for a vacation in Florida. Julian was approaching his 17th birthday and was in awe of his father, but Lennon barely knew how to talk to him and was prone to violent surges of anger. 'Julian was constantly on tenterhooks,' his mother reported, 'sensing that an eruption was coming and retreating to his room in the hope of avoiding it.' One minute they might be relaxing like a real family; the next, Lennon would be screaming at one of his sons*35, and a staff member would escort them away. 'One incident in particular did him lasting damage,' Cynthia Lennon explained. 'Julian giggled [and] John turned on him and screamed, "I can't stand the way you fucking laugh! Never let me hear your fucking horrible laugh again." He continued with a tirade of abuse until Julian fled once again to his room in tears. It was monstrously cruel, and has affected him ever since.' It was the last time father and son were together.

  More tender care was lavished elsewhere. While Ono worked extended office hours, Lennon scribbled lists for his staff, specifying his choice of cat food and sugar-free snacks. Helpless as a child, he demanded help with fixing the hi-fi and banging nails in his bedroom wall, and asked his assistant for new albums by McCartney and David Bowie, and a biography of evangelist Billy Graham. 'Remind Y.O. her teeth will be needed in later life (i.e. Dentist's must be visited),' he wrote in one note, presumably afraid to raise the subject himself.

  Lennon had succeeded in removing himself from the media. Ono's financial manoeuvres generated an occasional paragraph – she donated $1,000 to buy flak jackets for New York police, for instance, and sold a prize Holstein cow for the record price of $265,000. Occasionally there would be a wistful rumour that he was about to record an album, but more significant was his decision to dissolve the companies that had handled his avant-garde activities earlier in the decade. Gallery owner John Dunbar had introduced him to the London underground and to Ono, but when Dunbar unexpectedly visited Lennon in spring 1980 'Yoko explained that they'd been going through a period of seeing no one, that John had been like that for about a year, and going anywhere or seeing anyone seemed like a great effort.' So estranged was Lennon from the world around him that he failed to notice when Ono slipped into a period of heroin use. 'I made a mistake,' she admitted later, 'but I'm proud that I conquered it.' Meanwhile, Lennon was writing desultory letters to his relatives in England, telling his cousin, 'I'm 40 next. I hope life begins – i.e. I'd like a little less "trouble" and more – what? I don't know.'

  'How Does a Beatle Live?' Maureen Cleave had asked in the article that sparked the 'bigger than Jesus' fiasco. The question still stood. While Lennon chose isolation, Richard Starkey found another refuge: alcohol. Despite nearly dying in a 1979 attack of peritonitis that required the removal of several feet of intestines, he maintained a resolutely excessive lifestyle. By day he slept or sunbathed, 'and then evenings, all you can do is eat and gamble . . . I like to play blackjack and a little roulette.' Rooted in the shallow earth of Monte Carlo, Starkey inhabited the most vacuous brand of celebrity hedonism. 'I worked hard enough to become a playboy,' he explained defensively. 'And I am a jet-setter. Whatever anyone thinks, and whoever puts it down, I am on planes half the year.' Like many alcoholics, he felt as if he carried the sun on his shoulders: 'Wherever I go, it's a swinging place, man. It's a crazy kind of world.' Unable to hold down a record contract, he regarded work as a distraction and the past as a trap. 'I, personally, don't want us to get together,' he said when asked the inevitable question about a reunion. 'Or they can get together, but I'm not getting together.'

  In May 1979, however, Starkey, McCartney and Harrison made music for the first time since January 1970 – drunken, shambolic music, but together nonetheless. The occasion was the wedding celebration for Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd. Clapton recalled, 'John later phoned me to say that he would have been there too if he had known about it,' but no one thought to invite him. 'It's lucky nobody made a tape,' said McCartney's Wings colleague Denny Laine. 'The music was terrible, absolute rubbish.' Clapton complained that it was impossible to stop Laine's then-wife, Jo Jo, from hogging the limelight. But between the cocktails and the showboaters the three Beatles and assorted friends stumbled through such familiar material as 'Get Back', 'Sgt Pepper' and 'Lawdy Miss Clawdy'. 'I feel that I want to do one like that again,' said Starkey afterwards, 'with just the four of us, once Sean Lennon is five and John starts playing again.'

  George Harrison's wedding to Olivia Arias the previous year had been a much quieter affair, following a month after the birth of their son Dhani. 'He's one of the f
ew morally good people that rock 'n' roll has produced,' said his friend Eric Idle. 'He's extremely generous, and he backs and supports all sorts of people that you'll never, ever hear of.' A typically selfless gesture was his agreement to fund the film Monty Python's Life of Brian. 'George had been thinking about setting up a film company,' recalled director Terry Jones, 'so he talked to Denis O'Brien, his manager.' The pair formed HandMade Films, under the control of O'Brien's Euroatlantic company. 'George paid for the whole thing; he mortgaged his house and raised the money,' Idle said. 'He paid for it because he wanted to see it. The most anybody's ever paid for a cinema ticket in history.' The film was a box-office success, ensuring that the Harrisons were not evicted from their home, though the musician did receive letters from American Christians threatening they would never listen to his music again. The Pythons never forgot the risk that Harrison and O'Brien had taken. 'No wonder they were nervous,' Jones noted.

  Richard Starkey's advisers had arranged a route for his income that involved investment companies in London, the Virgin Islands and the Bahamas – the Caribbean offering copious tax havens. O'Brien appeared to be another financial wizard. When he took over the management of the Python troupe, he dazzled the comedians by talking of 'the bizarre journey that some of our earnings will make, via Holland, Panama and Switzerland', as Michael Palin noted at the time. 'Denis speaks of all this with the zeal of a fiendishly clever scientist who cannot help but be light years ahead of governments and bureaucracy and officialdom . . . When we re-emerge, we have all become accomplices in something most of us don't understand.' George Harrison's business interests enjoyed equally exotic locations, with production companies based in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. The complex corporate map also involved such recherché companies as the Swiss-based Glenbrook Securities Corporation and Harrison's own Clog Holdings, officially resident in another Caribbean hideaway, the Netherlands Antilles. Harrison trusted O'Brien implicitly; as Palin recounted, 'dependable Denis' was introducing all his clients to a 'wonderland of vastly increased wealth'.