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

by Peter Doggett

  The early skirmishes took on a familiar pattern. Apple Corps functioned as a record company again by reissuing the CDs it had prepared during the previous court battle, and Apple Computers continued to astonish the world with its technological innovations. Analysts predicted a truce, whereby Computers would be forced to pay Corps a royalty on all their music-related activities, and the Beatles' music would then appear on iTunes. Apple boss Steve Jobs complained, 'We can't reach an agreement, and the courts could drag on for years . . . The whole thing is unfortunate, because we love the Beatles.' For Apple Corps, Geoff Baker commented, 'We have no plans at the moment to go online.' The inference was plain: what did the timeless Beatles care for such a fly-by-night novelty as the digital download?

  The first battle ended in victory for the Beatles, who won the right for the case to be heard in Britain. By September 2004 informed insiders were predicting that Computers would gracefully admit defeat and deliver the largest compensation payment in legal history. Eighteen months later the case finally reached the High Court. Neil Aspinall played the digital ingénu: 'I am computer illiterate,' he testified. 'I don't even know how to turn one on.' Confronted with the information that the Beatles' own website used Apple Computers software, he pleaded ignorance. Apple Computers' QC said poetically that 'even a moron in a hurry' could tell that his clients were not trying to masquerade as the Beatles – but that was hardly the point, as the issue at stake was the agreement the two sides had made a decade earlier.

  Informed observers universally expected Apple Corps to win the case. But when Mr Justice Mann delivered his verdict on 8 May 2006, he first rejected many of the arguments put forward by Apple Computers and then awarded them victory, on the grounds that they were not using their apple logo on the music they were selling – because it did not exist as a physical object. Many commentators sympathised with Neil Aspinall's stunned response: 'With great respect to the trial judge, we consider he has reached the wrong conclusion.' Aspinall immediately launched appeal proceedings.

  The two sides achieved an out-of-court settlement in February 2007, but the terms of the ceasefire were startling: Apple Corps agreed to cede ownership of all the Apple trademarks to Apple Computers, who in return would license the relevant names back to the Beatles' company. Forty years after it was founded and launched as an alternative to the capitalist system, Apple Corps now only existed by permission of a corporation – which, it could be argued, had kept closer to the Beatles' original philosophy than the group had done themselves.

  One more problem remained. For several years EMI and Apple had – once again – been involved in litigation about royalty payments and ownership of copyrights, fighting the same tired battles that they had been waging for nearly 30 years. But within a month of the Apple vs Apple settlement, it was announced that the Apple vs EMI contest was also ending out of court, with undisclosed consequences. It was perhaps telling that Paul McCartney had chosen to end his contract with EMI – which had endured unbroken in the UK since 1962 – and look for album-by-album deals elsewhere. Now it seemed that all the pieces were in place: the two Apples, EMI and the music. Since the departure of Allen Klein in 1973 Neil Aspinall had been fighting the Beatles' cause in courts around the world. Now all the existing legislation had been concluded, and it was time for Aspinall to reap the commercial benefits.

  Instead, the unthinkable happened. On 4 April 2007 Apple Corps issued a brief statement about the departure of Neil Aspinall, who had been with John, Paul, George and Ringo for a spectacular forty-plus years, during which he played an indispensable role for the four. He was there since the inception of the band in Liverpool and has meant so much to the Beatles' family for all these years and still does. However, he has decided to move on. Apple as a whole, and each member of the company, wishes him great success in whatever endeavour he chooses to pursue in the future.

  It read like corporate gloss, disguising a forced departure. There was no suggestion that Aspinall had been sacked, but there were strong whispers that he had been placed in a position where he felt unable to continue.

  Perhaps he had merely chosen to rest at the age of 65, after a lifetime in the Beatles' service. Paul McCartney insisted, 'Neil was great. Neil was our mate for a long, long time, and nobody could replace Neil, because he was so special, he still is, he's a great guy, but he'd been wanting to retire for quite a while.' That explanation was too simple for the conspiracy-minded. It was suggested that one or more of the Beatles (or their widows) had grown impatient at the delay in making the group's music available for digital download. A team of independent accountants was said to have been employed to calculate exactly how much money Apple could have made if he had been more open to technological innovation. In his defence, Aspinall could legitimately have claimed that he was only acting as the servant of his masters, and that they employed him to say no. Others wondered whether Aspinall might have viewed the settlement with Apple Computers as a disaster, and chosen to fall on his sword like a disgraced Roman general.

  Another widely believed theory was that Aspinall had come under extreme pressure from the Beatles' other representatives to squeeze maximum return from the group's name. This seemed to be supported by comments from former Apple press officer Geoff Baker, who had been sacked by McCartney for 'unstable' behaviour.*44 'I fear for the integrity of the Beatles' legacy without Neil,' Baker said. This scenario envisaged a world in which their image and music would be licensed to anyone who had money in their fist, regardless of artistic or commercial consequences.

  Aspinall's place as director and company secretary of Apple Corps, and CEO of its subsidiaries Apple Charity (UK) Ltd and Apple Washington was taken by Jeff Jones, a former executive at Sony Records. There he had supervised the restoration of the Miles Davis archive, a project which had won almost universal applause. Beatles fans noted his pedigree and looked forward to all the heritage CDs and DVDs that they assumed Aspinall had been hiding from the world. Less heralded was the rise of a chartered accountant, Garth Tweedale, who had helped Harrison to sort out the HandMade Films debacle and now assumed many of Aspinall's financial responsibilities within the Beatles Group of Companies. Meanwhile, day-to-day activities continued to be monitored by Aspinall's loyal second-in-command Jonathan Clyde, another Harrison protégé.

  In 2007 McCartney promised that the Beatles' catalogue would soon be available from iTunes. But it was only in 2009 that the first crack in Apple's wall of silence was audible. More than a decade after their release was first described as 'imminent', the entire catalogue of Beatles CDs was scheduled for reissue on 9 September. Pundits speculated about the millions that Apple had lost by delaying these releases. Even then, there was no immediate confirmation that the group's music would be available for digital download; Apple was said to be considering the merits of exclusively marketing the music itself without the assistance of its American namesake. EMI and Apple were, as ever, reported to disagree, this time about the precise percentages that each party would receive from sales of downloads. In either case, the appearance of the CDs ensured that the Beatles' remastered music would soon be available for free on unofficial file-sharing sites.

  Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the reissue campaign was that it coincided with the release of a Beatle-branded edition of the computer game Rock Band. The project represented the triumph of youth – in the form of Dhani Harrison – over the natural conservatism of Apple. He had succeeded in persuading the Apple board that the Rock Band project would not only be extraordinarily lucrative, but would also consolidate the Beatles' reputation amongst those too young to remember Lennon's death, let alone the first flush of Beatlemania.

  There was a tragic aftermath to the coup within the Apple boardroom. Neil Aspinall had talked happily to friends about working on his autobiography, but soon after his departure from Apple he discovered that he was seriously ill. On 24 March 2008 he died at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. One of his final visitors was Paul McCa
rtney, who was reported to have paid for his treatment. Two weeks later Aspinall's funeral service was held close to his home in Twickenham. Neither of the surviving Beatles attended: Stella and James McCartney represented their father; Barbara Bach stood in for Richard Starkey. Aspinall's onetime adversary, Allen Klein, outlived him by little more than a year, dying in July 2009.

  With Aspinall's death, the final link between the Beatles and the tight-knit organisation that had guided them through the 1960s was severed. Sir George Martin was enjoying well-earned retirement. The other men who had safeguarded the Beatles and their legacy – Brian Epstein, Neil Aspinall, Derek Taylor – were gone. In their place were chartered accountants, entertainment and copyright lawyers, management consultants, wives, children and the prospect of the ever-present, apparently indestructible Yoko Ono guiding the Beatles deep into the 21st century.

  McCartney, Starkey, Ono and Olivia Harrison now controlled a financial empire so complex that it boggled the imagination. Every year their lawyers and accountants advised them to form new companies, to cross-collateralise their tax burden, to shift their source of revenue from one jurisdiction to the next, all in the interests of empire-building and careful guardianship of their wealth. But occasionally someone would remember that the Beatles had once been a pop group, glowing with joy, lust and animal excitement, who had imagined in the late 1960s that they could remake the world in their own image. Now the dream was over, as John Lennon had predicted, and money could still not guarantee them satisfaction or love. Meanwhile Lennon himself had been canonised as a prophet of peace, his song 'Imagine' accepted as a secular hymn, his image wielded by politicians and charities as a symbol of untarnished idealism. All trace of the Lennon who recklessly pursued his freedom from the Beatles in 1969, and recognised salvation in the form of Allen Klein and heroin, had effectively been erased.

  Given a second chance, the Beatles might have plotted a different course out of the Beatles and into their separate lives. Instead, their history is tinged with regret and recrimination. As Derek Taylor noted more than twenty years ago, 'Nothing should have ended that way, should it?' Yet while the story of the Beatles is doomed to end in anticlimax, their music inhabits another, more enduring realm. It survives as the vivid symbol of a golden past, an immediate trigger of nostalgic joy even for those too young to qualify for nostalgia. It breathes youth, hope and possibility, though we know that its creators proved, after all, to be merely mortal, not the protagonists of fairy tale or myth.

  The music needs no mythology: it is both timeless and a staggeringly accurate document of the age from which it came. It is more magical than Magic Alex, more powerful than Allen Klein or the Eastmans, more acerbic than Lennon's wit, more refreshing than McCartney's charm, more solid than Starkey's backbeat, more spiritual than Harrison's psyche; greater, ultimately, than the men who created it or the empire they built around it. The soul of the Beatles turned out to reside not in the boardroom of Apple Corps or the bank accounts of four multimillionaires, but in the instinctive, natural grace of their songs. Their collective genius created something that not even money could destroy.

  1. A final glimpse of unity, during the filming of Magical Mystery Tour in September 1967. Thereafter it was difficult to force the four men into the same frame, let alone expect them to smile.

  2. The Lennons, Harrisons and Jenny Boyd, leaving London in search of spiritual regeneration,

  February 1968. Lennon couldn't dream up a convincing reason why Yoko Ono should accompany them to India.

  3. Revolution in the studio, June 1968: Paul McCartney with Francie Schwartz, while Yoko Ono carries the can for disrupting the Beatles at work.

  4. John Lennon with his past and future collaborators, at the Yellow Submarine premiere, July 1968, before Ono and McCartney realised that their roles were mutually incompatible.

  5.A rare moment of harmony at Apple, 1969: Harrison soon lost patience with the Beatles' utopian dream.

  6. The Beatles on their Apple rooftop, 30 January 1969: making a self-conscious show of togetherness for an invisible global audience.

  7. New York swagger and Liverpudlian loyalty: Allen Klein and Neil Aspinall, the two men entrusted with running Apple.

  8. The Plaintiff and his wife leaving the London High Court after launching a lawsuit against his three closest friends, February 1971.

  9. Two Beatles, one widow, two sons: the Fab Five are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1988.

  10. The Montagues and Capulets stage a brief ceasefire, as John Lennon posthumously enters the same institution, 1994.

  11. There can be no Beatles reunion, George Harrison once declared, 'as long as John Lennon remains dead'. But desperate times provoke desperate measures, as this March 1995 photo proves.

  Footnotes

  *1 Convinced that 9 was his lucky number, Lennon rewrote history to place this meeting on 9 November, and all subsequent chroniclers have followed suit.

  †1 One biography of McCartney, by Christopher Sandford, quoted a source claiming that McCartney and Ono had sex when she arrived at his London home. Though it would add delicious spice to the subsequent history of the Beatles and Apple, there is not the slightest shred of evidence to support this accusation.

  *2 In Eric Idle's recasting of the Beatles' myth, All You Need Is Cash, their manager Leggy Mountbatten tragically moves to Australia.

  *3 The scenario only altered when Ono mumbled quietly into the portable tape recorder that she used as a diary. While the Beatles recorded, she confided her sense of insecurity, and her erotic fantasies about Lennon, to her tape. One recording, completed in private, ended with Ono masturbating to orgasm.

  *4 So was anyone who owned the album. US shops that stocked it were raided; thousands of copies were seized at Newark Airport; and an antique dealer in Doncaster was convicted of staging an indecent exhibition after he placed the cover in his shop window. Police were concerned by the fact that his shop was close to a primary school. In Canada an MP decried the importation of 'foreign-made pornographic material'.

  †2 During her hospital stay, Lennon's divorce from Cynthia was finalised. She claimed to have phoned her husband to discuss the settlement. He told her, 'There's nothing to talk about. My final offer is £75,000. That's like winning the pools.' She eventually received £25,000 to purchase a house and £75,000 maintenance for herself and their son. A further £100,000 was placed in a trust fund, to be shared by Julian with any subsequent Lennon children. Cynthia Lennon remained bitter about the settlement, though her counsel acknowledged that Lennon had made 'generous and proper provision' for his wife and child, who were also allowed to keep 2 per cent of the shares in the music publishing company Northern Songs.

  *5 As late as the mid-1970s People magazine referred to Eastman as 'the Park Avenue groupie'.

  *6 One of the ironies of this reading of Beatles history is that three months after he invited Klein into the drama Lennon was still quite confident that the group would last forever. 'Wait and see,' he said in April 1969. 'We'll be around, we'll be together when we're 60. But we won't be following each other around like sheepdogs.'

  *7 Jagger's girlfriend at the time, Marianne Faithfull, insisted that Jagger wanted Klein to take over the Beatles, in the hope that he might then lose interest in the Stones.

  †3 'No allegation was made of failure to pay any tax,' Klein explained in 1971, claiming that the problem related to paperwork that had inadvertently not been filed by 'a member of my staff ' between 1959 and 1962.

  *8Besides its symbolic importance, the Plastic Ono disguise had financial implications: Lennon earned a higher royalty rate than he would have done with the Beatles.

  *9 Unbeknown to Klein, Lee Eastman was keen to negotiate his own deal for the GetBack film, and was entreating senior Apple staff to back his efforts rather than Klein's.

  *10 The Beatles were giving up less from this deal than it might seem, as Klein agreed that the 5 per cent of North American royalties, around thre
e quarters of total global revenue, would come from his commission rather than from the Beatles' pockets.

  *11 Lennon and McCartney were contractually bound to the company until 1973, and almost all of their Beatles copyrights are still held by Northern.

  *12 Surviving tapes of Starkey composing in the mid-1960s illustrate the limits of his songwriting talent: two guitar chords and melodies borrowed from Johnny Cash country hits.

  *13 This was probably the only occasion on which Harrison and Starkey saw the film before its release in 1970. At this stage it still included footage of Ono jamming with the three-man Beatles on the day of Harrison's departure. Discreet pressure ensured that the clip was removed, but both Harrison and Starkey later talked as if it still featured in the final edit.

  *14 Karma Productions was the Canadian company promoting the Toronto Peace Festival; the song may have been a subtle message to them.

  *15 According to Mal Evans, McCartney was inspired to write the song not by his late mother, whose name appeared in the final lyric, but by a vision he had experienced during meditation of Evans walking towards him, saying 'Let it be, let it be.' 'Mother Malcolm' became 'Mother Mary' for public consumption.

  *16 Spector claimed that it was McCartney who recommended Hewson for the job. He also informed the Beatles in April 1970 that he thought this song would be a more appropriate title track for their album than 'Let It Be'.