by David Browne
The chilly repercussions extended to the U.K. Just before the murders, Dan Richter was living at the home Lennon had owned before Tittenhurst. Afraid the Lennons were next in line and that the killers might discover where he lived, the Richters moved, at Lennon and Ono’s invitation, to Tittenhurst.
In his opening statement in court, Bugliosi hardly minced words when relaying his theory. “The evidence will show Manson’s fanatical obsession with ‘Helter Skelter,’ a term he got from the English musical group the Beatles,” he told the jury. “Manson was an avid follower of the Beatles and believed that they were speaking to him across the ocean through the lyrics of their songs.” To bolster his case, Bugliosi entered the White Album as evidence, along with a door from Spahn Ranch (where the Family had been living) on which “Helter Skelter” had been scrawled. The lyrics to the songs were read into evidence.
To Bugliosi’s surprise, no public outcry greeted his theory. Leaving the courtroom that day, no reporters besieged him to ask for further details. He didn’t know whether to be shocked or not. Bugliosi himself never heard from any of the Beatles or their representatives. Even if the public, press, or his fellow lawyers thought he was insane, the jury made it clear it took his theory seriously. During the trial, they requested a stereo for the deliberation room along with their own copy of the Beatles’ two-LP set.
For a moment, the Beatles themselves were almost pulled into the case when Manson’s defense team sent a writ to Lennon to testify. “We feel he may want to explain the lyrics,” a member of the team told the Associated Press. Reached for comment by the press, Apple spokesman Derek Taylor was pithy as always. Requesting Lennon’s presence at the trial, he said, was “like summoning Shakespeare to explain Macbeth.” Besides, he added, it was McCartney, not his former band partner, who wrote “Helter Skelter.” The plan ran aground when Manson’s lawyers couldn’t find a way to physically administer summonses to each Beatle. Apparently, none of them knew that, during the jury-selection process that began in mid June, Lennon was in their very city, undergoing primal scream therapy.
Five months later, Rolling Stone’s Wenner asked Lennon about the trial and Manson’s interpretations of some of his songs. “He’s balmy, he’s like any other Beatle kind of fan who reads mysticism into it,” he said of Manson. “ . . . I don’t know, what’s ‘Helter Skelter’ got to do with knifing somebody? I’ve never listened to the words properly, it was just noise.” The trial and the association was just another death knell for his former band.
Although he’d been disturbed at the thought of being disliked by the general public, McCartney was simultaneously doing his best to extricate himself from the Beatles. To move matters along, he reached out to Lennon first. They should “let each other out of the trap,” McCartney argued in a letter sent from Scotland to his one-time bandmate. “How and why?” Lennon wrote back, scribbling his words on a photograph of himself and Ono.
Barely containing his irritation, even by mail, McCartney responded with a new letter: “How by signing a paper which says we hereby dissolve the partnership. Why because there is no partnership.” Lennon’s last response was a postcard in which he suggested McCartney “get the other signatures and I will think about it.”
The irony couldn’t have been lost on McCartney. Almost a year earlier, Lennon had declared to all who could hear that he wanted out of the band—and, on top of it, during a meeting in which McCartney pressed for ways to keep them active. Now, McCartney was the one attempting to talk Lennon into taking legal action to dissolve the partnership, something Lennon wanted more than he—or so it seemed at the time.
As the two men hashed out their Morse Code messages by mail, their once beloved Apple Corps was dying a little more each day. Press Office employee and stalwart Richard DiLello was fired after an unflattering newspaper article about the company appeared in the British press. The phones barely rang. The first week of August, the Apple Press Office was officially shut down. Even though each Beatle was at work on one project or another, there was little to publicize; Lennon by then had hired his own flak. According to the London Evening Standard, Apple was “little more than a center for collecting their royalties and dealing with their private affairs.” The building was almost empty.
Still, gathering those royalties was someone’s increasingly unpleasant job. On June 28, Eastman had informed ABKCO that McCartney needed to be paid royalties for the McCartney album. Finally, over two months later, on September 7, ABKCO wrote to Eastman, informing him his client was owed 391,000 British pounds from EMI for U.S. sales of McCartney. But, as ABKCO noted, the money wasn’t forthcoming since EMI didn’t know whether to send the funds to ABKCO or McCartney’s own company—a matter of confusion that even EMI admitted was true. “We find ourselves in an embarrassing position,” an EMI representative acknowledged in a letter to Eastman. “We have, as you will appreciate, two claimants to the same money.” As a result, the funds were frozen yet again.
Even though he was hunkered down in Scotland, physically removed from the business and any of his associates, McCartney grew more exasperated. Despite the public outcry that accompanied his announcement in April, he decided to be even more explicit about the state of the band. In response to a report in Melody Maker that a reunion was possible, McCartney sent a handwritten letter to the newspaper printed in its August 30 issue: “My answer to the question ‘Will the Beatles get together again?’ is no,” he wrote, a far more candid answer than the one he’d given himself months before. He added it was time “to put out of its misery the limping dog of a news story which has been dragging itself across your pages for the past year.”
As summer began to fade, John Eastman and his wife flew to Edinburgh, Scotland, and drove five hours south, eventually arriving at the McCartneys’ farm in Campbeltown. The trip was grueling but purposeful. During many discussions and several long hikes over four days, Eastman and McCartney talked about the next step in dissolving the Beatles. Both were worried that Klein was spending their money and not paying the required taxes. They talked about McCartney doing the inevitable: suing his bandmates and Klein, how nasty the proceedings could be, and how it would make McCartney look. Always concerned about his image, McCartney was wary but increasingly exhausted.
On another clear, brisk day, standing atop a hill that overlooked a loch, McCartney came to a decision. “Sue Klein—go ahead,” he told Eastman. McCartney appeared calm and relieved. The press release accompanying his album would be far from his only surprise of the year.
CHAPTER 11
Amalie Rothschild, the twenty-three-year-old staff photographer at the Fillmore East, was in the theater’s second-floor office when she heard the noisy rumble outside. “Have you seen the crowd?” one of her coworkers said, beckoning her over to the window.
Looking down upon New York’s Second Avenue, Rothschild saw nothing but bodies swarming over the sidewalk, spilling onto the street, and extending around the corner onto East Sixth Street. Rothschild knew Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were having a moment in the culture; everyone seemed to own a copy of Déjà vu. The critics could debate its worth relative to the work they’d done with their other bands. But something about Déjà vu—the sense of frailty in “4 + 20” and “Helpless,” the addled paranoia of “Almost Cut My Hair,” the urge to escape it all in “Our House”—summed up post-Kent State America. The dark clouds that hovered over the album, the results of the band’s own personal relationships and emotional tumult, also tapped into something larger and beyond their control.
Still, no one expected quite so many people to show up to buy tickets for CSNY’s six consecutive nights at the Fillmore set to begin June 2. The line grew so long, the late spring heat so stifling, that Fillmore owner Bill Graham dispatched employees with water buckets and plastic cups to cool down the masses. Grabbing her camera, Rothschild talked her way onto the roof of a building across the street to commemorate the impromptu rock-fan street carnival in front of the Fillmore.
Decades before, the Fillmore East had been a vaudeville house, then a Loew’s movie theater. In March 1968, after an earlier promoter had renamed it the Village Theater, Graham took over, transforming the building into the Fillmore East, the New York sibling of his Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. The Fillmore’s plush red seats and glass chandelier were reminders of its previous lives. But in a sign of how the culture had changed, its 2,632 seats were now given over to rock and roll: two sets a night with all the accouterments of the time, including a goopyswirly light show and the pungent, lingering scent of dope in the air. After its opening night, which featured Big Brother and the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin) and Tim Buckley, the Fillmore East would play host to nearly every major rock act of its time. In the early months of 1970 alone, the names Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, the Kinks, and Ten Years After were all displayed on the Fillmore’s marquee.
Now it would be Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s turn. At the Warner Brothers soundstage, they’d rehearsed and nailed down a set that accommodated everyone. During the electric set, Stills would have three songs, Young two, and Crosby and Nash one apiece. The rhythm section was itself a compromise, since Barbata was Young’s drummer of choice and Fuzzy Samuels was Stills’ preferred bass player. On May 29, the tour finally resumed, at the Boston Garden. The following night, at the Baltimore Civic Center, a reviewer for the Washington Post wrote that the foursome ”generally sounded mellow.” For the moment, everything was working.
By the time they rolled into the Fillmore East on the afternoon of June 2 for their first soundcheck, Bill Graham had made the band’s status clear to his staff. Gathering them outside his office, Graham explained that CSNY was a major act who expected to be treated a certain way. “He talked about how everything had to be special and that they certainly thought they were special,” recalled Allan Arkush, a New York University film student who worked part time at the theater. Graham referred to the foursome as “the American Beatles” and told the staff to give CSNY anything they wanted.
Graham’s point was rammed home as soon as load-in began. As they had in Europe, CSNY were still carting around their own sound system and lighting rig. Even though the Fillmore’s P.A. was considered one of the sharpest in the business, the band demanded consistency from show to show. After the CSNY trucks arrived, the Fillmore staff, working with the band’s road crew, went begrudgingly to work. To accommodate CSNY’s mighty spotlights, holes had to be punched into the theater’s light booth. To focus as much of the audience’s attention on them as possible, the band passed on the Joshua Light Show—the multi-hued liquidlight backdrop for nearly every performance at the venue—and opted for a dark black curtain. Although CSNY had headlined the Fillmore immediately after Woodstock, the theater’s staff sensed how much had changed in the year since. “They had one attitude before,” said Arkush, “and then they came back with a hit album and had this whole other attitude. They saw themselves as stars.”
At the last minute, the band requested a Persian rug for the stage, which had to be both obtained and hastily scrubbed down. Yet even that requirement wasn’t easily satisfied. “We unrolled the carpet and put equipment on it, and it wasn’t clean enough,” Arkush recalled. In what would become a piece of Fillmore folklore, stage hand John Ford Noonan, who detested the band and everything it stood for musically and economically, ran to a closet in the back of the theater, pulled out an industrial vacuum, rushed back to the stage, and began vacuuming ferociously, all while making sarcastically reverential comments to the band and road manager Leo Makota. Mortified, Bill Graham pretended he had a phone call and darted back to his office. Even Graham, whose hardened, street-wise demeanor reflected a childhood growing up in the Bronx, didn’t want to incur the wrath of CSNY.
As Nash had grown to learn, incurring each other’s ire was equally possible. “Nine o’clock and all’s well, so far,” he told the Fillmore audience near the beginning of one night’s set. Another evening, he remarked, “Hasn’t it been relaxed so far?” Following an electric version of “Helplessly Hoping” onto which Young was now adding a tingling lead guitar, Nash looked out at the audience and said, “We like that one. Didn’t you like that one? We’re really enjoying this. This is fun.”
After the debacle in Denver and the firings of Greg Reeves and Dallas Taylor, Nash sounded as if he were trying to convince both fans and himself that his band wasn’t disintegrating. Structurally, at least, the shows were stable. As ever, they opened with CSN and then Young playing an unplugged set, followed by an electric second half with Samuels and Barbata. The acoustic performances were, as always, a blend of harmony, solipsism, and clowning around—an hour of songs, dope jokes, wisecracks about their previous bands, and references to each other. On June 4, Crosby and Nash broke into “Swanee River,” and Stills cracked, “You guys are crazy,” to which Nash retorted “Why do you think we play with you two guys?” It was the type of cutesy, self-satisfied banter that had caused one earlier critic, Tony Palmer in the London Observer, to grouse, “It was like being at a party where everybody knew everybody except you.”
Just when the shticks became almost unbearable, they’d remind the audience why everyone was there in the first place. His voice surging one minute, dropping to a hushed whisper the next, Crosby would silence the adoring audience with “Triad”—his rationale for having sex with as many partners as he wanted—and Nash would join him for “The Lee Shore,” Crosby’s ode to his boat and the sailing life. The song’s melody bobbed gently, like the Mayan on a tranquil evening, and he and Nash’s counterpoint harmonies circled around each other in ways that expressed their deepening personal bond. Young would attempt the least hip move imaginable—a medley—and pull it off; without the sonic crush of Crazy Horse behind him, “Cowgirl in the Sand,” “Down by the River,” and “Cinnamon Girl” were surprisingly wistful and forlorn. Alone at the piano, Stills performed a medley of his own: a stripped-down “49 Bye Byes”—one of his many Judy Collins laments from Crosby, Stills & Nash—and a stomping, howling update of “For What It’s Worth” with an audience-baiting section that referenced Nixon, Agnew, and “the pigs.” Working himself into a lather each night, Stills always threatened to blow out his voice, but the standing ovation that invariably greeted his segment was his overdue reward.
Although CSNY were ostensibly touring to support Déjà vu, they rarely played songs from it. Only “Teach Your Children” was a regular part of the acoustic set, and “Carry On” in the electric portion. “You gotta keep doing new things all the time,” Crosby—generally sporting the fringe jacket with tassels that was his trademark—told the Fillmore audience one evening. As if they were already moving on—or didn’t want to remind themselves of what went into the making of Déjà Vu—they instead debuted, night after night, a slew of new or as yet unrecorded songs to reflect their tremendous creative waterfall. Nash broke out “Right Between the Eyes,” about an affair he’d had on Long Island during the band’s early days. Young introduced “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” written in London during the first CSNY show and recently cut without them for the album he’d begun in Los Angeles. Stills played “Love the One You’re With” in the acoustic set and a ballad about what he saw as his new maturity, “As I Come of Age,” during the electric. Even though audiences never once heard “Wooden Ships,” “Marrakesh Express,” or “Helpless,” they nonetheless stomped and screamed themselves nuts every night.
During the first soundcheck in the empty theater, immediately after the rug incident, another new song—“Ohio”—made its New York stage premiere. When the band finished rehearsing it that afternoon, the theater’s staff gathered around Young, thanking him for writing it and extolling, “Right on!” Young accepted their praise and told them why he was moved to write the song.
Before it was performed each night, the band would introduce it as “an important song” (Nash) or “sort of a downer” (Young). On cue, the Fillmore staff would all emerge from their offices to watc
h CSNY blast out a song that captured the uncertainty and anger of the moment. Young would begin playing the song’s doomy opening nine notes, Stills joined in, and off they went. By the end—Stills jabbing away, Barbata keeping up the incessant drumbeat, and Crosby shouting out the “How many—how many more?”—the song served as both rage and release.
All week long in New York, emotions ran high onstage and off, like thermometer mercury unexpectedly rising and plummeting. Stills dedicated “49 Bye Byes” to “Clark and his mother”—Collins, who was in the audience—while Nash sang his newly written “Simple Man,” about his breakup with Mitchell, as Mitchell sat watching him in the theater. During the Fillmore nights and the remainder of the tour, Nash couldn’t bring himself to play “Our House,” afraid he would burst into tears while singing a song about his now-finished life with Mitchell.
On the second night, June 3, Bob Dylan—who’d moved from Woodstock to nearby MacDougal Street—decided to see what everyone was talking about. Slipping into the Fillmore, he took a seat in the sound booth to avoid recognition.2 Wanting to impress him, Stills played four songs during his segment, including “4 + 20” and a rare solo acoustic take on Buffalo Springfield’s “Bluebird.” But those were two more songs than everyone had agreed upon. In the break before the electric second half, the band trudged quietly up the Fillmore’s winding stairs to the small, funky dressing rooms on the upper floors. All four of them, along with Roberts, Barbata and Samuels, piled into one room and closed the door, and Nash began lacing into Stills: “Who do you think you are, doing another song?” Crosby and Young stood with their heads down, silently supportive of Nash’s tongue-lashing. Stills, holding a beer can, said nothing. To signify his sputtering rage, he kept squeezing the can until the foam spilled out over his right hand and onto the floor.