Fire and Rain

by David Browne

  EMI had little choice in the matter. The power of the Beatles was such that the corporation had an arm’s-length relationship with Apple, which supplied EMI with release dates, finished artwork, and tapes. Other than employees of the studio on Abbey Road, hardly anyone at the company saw or worked alongside a Beatle. The imminent release of something called Let It Be embodied the lack of interaction between the two companies. When EMI marketing director Paul Watts heard about it, he was confused: What was it, exactly? And had it been recorded before or after Abbey Road?

  The beginning of the end started on March 23. At one studio, Spector began sorting through the pile of tapes from the Twickenham and Apple group sessions; on the same day, he also managed to stretch out “I Me Mine,” the song McCartney, Harrison, and Starr had cut in January, by thirty seconds by repeating the chorus. The same day, “Billy Martin” logged his final day at EMI Studios. And also on March 23, Klein met with East to repeat his demands to postpone McCartney’s album, and East agreed. In a sign of how badly communication had broken down inside the band—and how much resentment had built up toward McCartney after he’d insisted on having the Eastmans represent them—eight days went by after Klein and East’s meeting before anyone reached out to McCartney.

  Finally, on March 31, Lennon and Harrison sent their own letter to East, saying “it would not be in the best interests of the company” for McCartney’s album to be released April 17. The same day, they dashed off another piece of correspondence, this one to McCartney himself. “To: You, From: Us,” it began, followed by: “Dear Paul: We thought a lot about yours and the Beatles LPs—and decided it’s stupid for Apple to put out two big albums within seven days of each other. So we sent a letter to EMI telling them to hold your release date till June 4th (there’s a big Apple-Capitol convention in Hawaii then). We thought you’d come around when you realized that the Beatles album was coming out on April 24th. We’re sorry it turned out like this—it’s nothing personal.” It was signed “Love, John and George.” Extending a particularly thorny olive branch, Harrison added his own postscript: “Hail Krishna. A mantra a day keeps ‘Maya’ away. I hope my friend gets joy from that.”

  As it turned out, McCartney did take it personally. That day, Starr drove to McCartney’s home on Cavendish Avenue to hand-deliver the letter. McCartney greeted his bandmate coldly, then read the letter in his parlor as Starr stood by. As McCartney later affirmed in a court affidavit, “I got really angry when Ringo told me that Klein had told him my record was not ready.” That was an understatement. Appalled by the way Klein and his fellow Beatles had conspired behind his back—even though they only wanted to hold back his record for two months, not kill it altogether—McCartney exploded in a way Starr had rarely seen. “I’ll finish you now!” he yelled. “You’ll pay!” Starr had barely taken his coat off when McCartney told him to put it back on and leave.

  Simultaneously, John Eastman, who had taken over handling McCartney’s day-to-day dealings from his father, heard about the plans to postpone the record during a meeting with executives at Capitol Records in Los Angeles. Furious himself, Eastman calmed a nerve-wracked McCartney, telling him the record would come out one way or another; in fact, Eastman was already thinking about contacting Clive Davis to see if Columbia would take it. When McCartney mentioned this possibility to Harrison, Harrison shot back, “You’ll stay on the fucking label. Hare Krishna.” (As a Beatle associate of the time noted, Harrison, when angry, had a distinct way of making “Hare Krishna” sound like “fuck you.”) In the end, McCartney got his wish: When Starr checked in with Harrison and Lennon after his confrontation with McCartney, he argued they should grant McCartney his wish and release his album on his schedule, and they did.

  Shortly after, Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner flew to London to interview McCartney about the impending album. McCartney asserted Klein wasn’t managing him, talked about the good time he had making a record on his own, and downplayed any rifts with Lennon. Instead of talking about specific songs, he told Wenner that those details and more would be included in a special announcement accompanying the record. “I just filled it out like an essay, like a school thing,” he said. When pressed by Wenner to divulge its contents, McCartney demurred. “It’s much nicer as a surprise,” he said.

  The week of April 6 began inauspiciously enough in the land of the Beatles. In America, “Let It Be,” the elegiac ballad McCartney had written for his mother—a song with the instantly timeless feel of a church hymn composed centuries before—easily floated up to number 1. On Tuesday, April 7, John and Lee Eastman announced that their client Paul McCartney had formed his own production company, sporting the not terribly original name of McCartney Productions. Its first two projects would be an animated film based on Rupert the Bear, a children’s cartoon celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, and the release of an album of his own, McCartney. That day, a meeting was scheduled at Apple Corps for April 10, at which the four Beatles would finally face each other—after months apart—to discuss plans for the release of Let It Be, which would be in theaters in a little over a month.

  That Tuesday, DiLello was in the Press Office at Apple when Derek Taylor casually handed him a typed, four-page letter on Apple stationery. “What’s this?” DiLello wondered.

  The document in DiLello’s hand was an “interview” with McCartney, albeit in description only. McCartney enjoyed being the jovial salesman for the band more than any of the other Beatles, but the thought of having to answer questions about the state of the Beatles appealed to him as much as seeing the frontal nudity on the cover of Lennon and Ono’s Two Virgins. Taylor and Brown suggested McCartney write up his own question-and-answer session and supplied him with typically banal questions: “Why did you decide to make a solo album?” “Did you enjoy working as a solo?” “Were you pleased with Abbey Road?” As Brown watched, McCartney wrote out the answers in the living room of his St. John’s Wood home, after which they were quietly typed up for distribution with the first one hundred British promotional copies of McCartney.

  On the morning of Wednesday, April 8, Ray Connolly, a young music columnist and reporter at the Evening Standard, was at his desk when he received a call from Taylor. Taylor said he was about to messenger over a statement from McCartney, but asked that Connolly and the paper hold off publishing it until Friday, April 10. When the envelope arrived, Connolly flipped through it. The bulk of it was innocuous enough. In it, McCartney talked up his record and commented elliptically on where the Beatles stood as people and creative partners. McCartney said the band was split over “personal differences, business differences, musical differences,” but added, “Temporary or permanent? I don’t know.”

  The document hardly knocked Connolly out of his desk chair. Along with a group of other writers, he’d been granted much access to the Beatles over the previous few years, conducting interviews with them and spending considerable time at Apple headquarters. He’d witnessed his share of bickering and had been in the Press Office when Lennon had bolted from the meeting in Brown’s office the previous September. Connolly had flown to Toronto to cover Lennon’s appearance at the Rock & Roll Revival concert. Arriving at the house of rockabilly icon Ronnie Hawkins, who was lending his home to the Lennons, Connolly heard Lennon shout out his name and ask him to an upstairs bathroom. Still washing his long hair in a sink, Lennon had breathlessly told Connolly he was leaving the Beatles. Stunned by the news, Connolly realized he had the pop scoop of the decade, but Lennon told him not to write about it just yet; he’d tell him the appropriate time to break the story.

  At his desk, Connolly flashed back to that and other tumultuous moments. Thinking McCartney’s statement was simply of a piece with the band’s increasingly public grousing, he filed it away until publication three days later. Besides, it was hard to imagine a world without the Beatles.

  The next morning, Thursday, April 9, Connolly received a call at home from his editors: The Daily Mirror was announcing the Beatles were over. Whe
re was his story? Daily Mirror writer Don Short, a longtime friend of the band, had received the same packet but, unlike Connolly, saw McCartney’s statement as inflammatory. Short particularly focused on one back-and-forth: To the question “Do you foresee a time when Lennon-McCartney become an active songwriting partnership again?” McCartney tersely wrote out, “No.” McCartney never came out and said the band was over or that he was leaving, but Short felt otherwise. “Paul is quitting the Beatles,” he wrote. Disregarding Taylor’s request, his editors ran Short’s piece a day early. Taylor had no comment, while Mavis Smith, who worked in the Press Office with Taylor and DiLello, denied any breakup.

  With the news out prematurely, McCartney went into damage-control mode. For the first time since the fall, he called Lennon at home, telling him he’d finished his album and was leaving the group. By then, Lennon had already heard about the article; Connolly had called him for comment. To McCartney, Lennon sounded relieved, and to another reporter, Lennon joked, “I was happy to hear from Paul. It was nice to find out that he was still alive. Anyway, Paul hasn’t left. I’ve sacked him.”

  Privately, though, Lennon was peeved: He’d wanted to be the first to tell the world the Beatles—and the ’60s, with which he was increasingly disillusioned—were over. Instead, it was McCartney, of all people, who’d done that—the same McCartney so intent on breathing life into the band all those years. To Lennon, the gesture felt like an ambush and a betrayal. The same process took place with Starr and Harrison: McCartney called them, but they too had already heard the news. Mal Evans, another member of the Beatles’ inner circle, was at Friar Park with Harrison and Boyd that night. He left to drive back home—and then returned to the house soon after, ashen faced. A news report on the radio announced McCartney was breaking up the Beatles. Harrison took the news stoically, saying he wanted to write his own songs anyway and retreating upstairs to his bedroom. As if to drive it home further, a London variety show aired a clip of McCartney performing “Maybe I’m Amazed” from his album that night.

  The next morning, Chris O’Dell, then living with the Harrisons at Friar Park, came downstairs to find Harrison and Boyd glumly reading the morning’s papers. Lennon soon came by, and O’Dell watched as the two men talked in the backyard. It was the first time she’d ever seen Lennon without Ono.

  The British music newsweekly Melody Maker called the announcement “the non-event of the year.” After all, so many in the music business knew the Beatles were out of touch with each other. The previous November 11, Connolly had written an Evening Standard article headlined “The Day the Beatles Died,” about the events of the previous fall. The same month, a Life magazine spread meant to put a halt to all the “Paul Is Dead” stories of the time quoted McCartney as saying, “The Beatle thing is over, it has been exploded.”

  Few in the media had picked up those comments then, but not this time. The New York Times’ story, “McCartney Breaks Off with Beatles,” made it into section one, normally the domain of the most urgent national and international stories. Fans converged on Apple, spilling out on Savile Row and casting blame on Klein or, in some cases, Linda McCartney. (“You can’t let a woman do that to a man, can you?” explained one female fan to a reporter, as if Linda had been manipulating her husband far more than Ono had Lennon.) On the front steps of the building, an Apple employee handed out copies of McCartney’s press release. Wearing his usual carefree smile along with a red frilly shirt and jacket, Starr dashed out into a waiting car and was gone. One of many earnest, somber television reporters standing outside Apple intoned, “The event is so momentous that historians may mark it as a landmark in the decline of the British Empire.”

  McCartney was spotted in the backseat of a dark green Rolls Royce tooling around London with Linda, Heather, and their sheepdog Martha, but no further comments were forthcoming from him or the other Beatles. Instead, their colleagues were left trying to explain what had happened. To a Times reporter, Klein asserted that McCartney’s reasons for issuing such a statement were “personal problems.” To another, he twisted a knife: “Unfortunately, he’s obligated to Apple for a considerable number of years.” Past the wrought-iron gates and inside Apple Corps, Taylor sat in his wicker chair and, looking increasingly besieged and sleep deprived, conducted one interview after another to explain the events of the day. “It is certain that at the moment they could not comfortably work together,” he told one camera crew. Taylor wanted to remain optimistic, though: At one point he looked straight into the camera and said, “If the Beatles don’t exist, you don’t exist.”

  Away from the cameras, Taylor sat behind his typewriter, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, and banged out an Apple statement. “Spring is here and Leeds play Chelsea tomorrow and Ringo and John and George and Paul are alive and well and full of hope,” he wrote. “The world is still spinning and so are we and so are you. When the spinning stops—that’ll be the time to worry, not before. Until then, the Beatles are alive and well and the beat goes on, the beat goes on.” Reading it, DiLello had no idea what Taylor meant, but it was so Derek; it said nothing, but with flair. No one knew what to say or how to react, anyway. “It was just another dismal day in a year full of them,” Peter Brown recalled.

  “You didn’t need to do that, you know,” Brown told McCartney the next day.

  “But I wanted to,” McCartney replied. Brown realized the statement was McCartney’s way of explaining the situation to the other Beatles; given the communication breakdown between them, he couldn’t do it any other way. It was also McCartney’s savvy way of promoting his album. EMI was preparing to ship 480,000 copies of McCartney , far less than the last few Beatle albums. How better to publicize it than this?

  Not surprisingly, the scheduled April 10 reunion of the Beatles at Apple Corps failed to materialize. The day before, Eastman cabled Apple to inform the company his client would not be able to make the meeting.

  When Vivian Janov answered the phone in her Los Angeles home, the voice on the line announced it was Yoko Ono, calling from London. Unsure whether it was a prank, Janov handed the phone to her husband, Arthur. Arthur listened as Ono explained to him that someone at his publisher had mailed her and John Lennon a copy of Janov’s three-monthold book, The Primal Scream—Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis. Janov had no idea how that would have happened; he didn’t have the Lennons’ home address. Ono was saying her husband was in need of therapeutic work, and could Janov fly out to London as soon as possible to help him? Janov curtly told her he had seventy-five patients depending on him and hung up.

  A certified psychologist, the curly-haired, movie-star-handsome Janov was riding the wave of the new self-help movement coming into vogue. (Also on the West Coast, another psychologist, Werner Erhard, was about to launch EST, for Erhard Seminars Training.) Forty-six years old, Janov had received a master’s in social work at the University of California, where he met his future wife, Vivian. Starting in the early ’50s, Janov had a private practice but was thinking bigger. Searching for clues to behavior through childhood memories wasn’t Janov’s idea, but he took it one thunderous step further, advocating patients unlock their inner pain and repression by screaming it out. In 1968, the Janovs opened the Primal Scream Institute on Sunset Boulevard. “In the beginning we had so many applications, we couldn’t see all the people who wanted to come,” recalled Vivian. After his book was published in January 1970, Janov was greeted at his office by what he called “all the druggies and lost kids who’d been in the protests against the Vietnam War.”

  Ono immediately called back and made the invitation harder to resist. She and Lennon would pay for the Janovs and their children to fly to London, all expenses covered. When the Janov children heard about the offer, they were so excited they ran up and down the stairs of their home for twenty minutes. With that, the Janovs began making their way to Tittenhurst in early April.

  When their town car dropped them off at the estate, the Janovs were stunned by Tittenhurst’s opulence
and expansiveness. Lennon struck Vivian Janov as funny and charming, although her husband sensed he was also in deep psychic pain. Together, Ono and Lennon appeared earnest and serious, not quite the same playful couple who, on April 1, had issued a fake press release saying they were planning to have “dual sex change operations.” After they all took seats in the kitchen, the Lennons and Janovs mutually decided to start the sessions—$6,000 for three weeks—in the recording studio being built next to the kitchen.

  Still living in one of the estate’s cottages, Dan Richter heard the screams whenever he walked into the kitchen. Richter was cynical about primal scream, but also knew Lennon and Ono needed some form of help—-and that primal scream was probably tied in with their desire to stop snorting smack. “Heroin isn’t easy to kick,” he recalled. “You don’t just stop. It leaves you very empty. You’re left with yourself. That’s why they felt they had to do the Janov thing.” Even with the studio builders coming in and out as he spoke, Lennon talked about his wayward father, the death of his mother, and how upset he was with McCartney and the breakup of the Beatles. “The drugs blew out his defense system,” Janov recalled. “The sessions with the workers going back and forth in this sound room were amazing.” To Janov’s surprise, Lennon’s father, Fred, who seemed like a sad, broken man, showed up one day; Lennon gave him some cash and sent him on his way.

  When the construction noise became too much, the sessions shifted to the London hotel where the Janovs were installed. Janov also welcomed a change in cuisine: He didn’t love what he called the “strange, uncooked fish” the Lennons would serve in their kitchen and was starving most of the time. But the Janovs couldn’t stay in London forever, so it was agreed that the Lennons would visit Los Angeles for several months to continue their therapy. Although Lennon had earlier been denied a visa as a result of his drug bust in 1968, the therapy—medical reasons—allowed him to reenter the States. On April 23, he and Ono boarded a plane for California, leaving the rest of Apple and the world to decipher what had happened about two weeks earlier.