Fire and Rain

by David Browne

  During the same month of October, the band and Spector dashed off a very different project, Ono’s own Plastic Ono Band. Again, Spector stayed largely out of the way, allowing Lennon and Ono to call the shots. If Lennon’s record of the same name was his way of exorcizing his personal demons, Ono’s album was Lennon’s way of exercising his musical ones. The music was feral and ferocious (“Why”) or defiantly eccentric (“Why Not,” which sounded like country blues from outer space, thanks to the strings sticking to the magnets on Lennon’s National slide guitar). Ono’s voice, a quivery siren wail one minute or a delicate coo the next, rode roughshod over it all. The music was entirely improvised, and even Starr, who kept any self-indulgent tendencies as a drummer in check, let loose from time to time.

  When the packaging was finished, Lennon and Ono intentionally chose a shot of Lennon leaning on Ono for his cover, and Ono in Lennon’s lap for her own. To Richter, the idea was “classic John and Yoko. And it was a very Yoko idea, of a man and woman as yin and yang.” The choice of photographs also spoke to what Lennon told Richter were his masculine and his feminine sides, the intertwining of men and women that Ono championed.

  Lennon was justly proud of both albums and knew his record especially was far more accessible than previous projects with Ono, like the sound collages of Life with the Lions. When executives at EMI and Apple saw the dual covers and heard the music, though, their guards went up. Why wasn’t Lennon’s face on the cover? “Can’t you talk to him?” a label executive said to Richter one day, pulling him aside. “This is going to ruin his career. It’s another nail in the coffin.” In particular, they were concerned that the albums, especially Lennon’s own, didn’t have “that Beatles sound.” What was he thinking, they thought? And why did Ono have to put out her own album too?

  At the very least, the Lennons had one attentive audience. In Los Angeles, Arthur and Vivian Janov received a copy and played it for one of their group sessions at the Primal Scream Institute. Everyone, including the Janovs, listened raptly. Few could believe they were listening to a John Lennon album whose thoughts and concepts had originated in that very room on Sunset Boulevard.

  In honor of Lennon’s thirtieth birthday, October 9, Harrison saluted his friend in song: “It’s Johnny’s Birthday,” a silly, playful sing-along, sounded like a carousel speeding up and slowing down. (Harrison liked it so much he included it on All Things Must Pass.) Despite all that had transpired and collapsed over the past year, Harrison, Lennon, and Starr remained close. Lennon stopped by at least once during the All Things Must Pass sessions, and Alan White found himself in the mind-boggling position of jamming with two Beatles while a third, Starr, whacked a tambourine. White asked Starr to play drums, but Starr demurred.

  The odd Beatle out remained McCartney, who’d spent much of the year in Scotland and had also taken his family on vacation to Barbados. Needing another change of scenery, he, Linda, Heather, and baby Mary relocated to New York City in early fall. In Manhattan, he and Linda melted into the city woodwork, taking long, unencumbered walks through Central Park and horseback-riding in the Hamptons with Peter Brown. Nothing if not prolific, eager to work as much as possible, McCartney already had a new group of songs he wanted to start recording. During the first week of November, he rented out the SS France and jammed with members of the Rascals, the New York pop-soul band who’d had a string of hits (“Good Lovin’,” “People Got to Be Free,” “Groovin’”) almost as long as the Beatles’ own. Drummer Dino Danelli’s moptop bangs and babyface even resembled McCartney’s.

  In at least one slim regard, McCartney shared one concern with his former Beatles. The previous year, the first bootleg LP—Great White Wonder, a collection of unreleased Dylan recordings from several stages in his career—had started mysteriously appearing in independent record stores. No one knew how the bootleggers had obtained the rare tapes, but clearly a new illicit industry had been launched. Fearing any further leaks, Charlie Daniels became the courier for Dylan’s Nashville tapes to New York City. The Beatles and their representatives were also on their guard, especially when Lennon’s complete set at the Toronto Rock & Roll Revival and the Beatles’ 1965 Shea Stadium show became two of the next boots to slip out. In the spring, John Eastman had personally delivered McCartney to Capitol Records in the States. Now, in late October, Harrison and Boyd flew to New York with the master tapes for All Things Must Pass in hand—the one way to ensure the record didn’t end up in the hands of an unauthorized middleman.

  In general, money was far from a pressing concern; all the Beatles were profiting from the unflagging business of the band. In September, the Beatles, by way of EMI, received a check for $10,738,198, representing royalties for American sales of Beatle records between September 1, 1969, and June 3, 1970. Still, little had been resolved financially between them. McCartney wasn’t yet seeing any earnings from his solo album, nor were he and his team receiving what they considered fair treatment. In November, John Eastman called William Bernstein, the general counsel of United Artists, the film company that had distributed Let It Be. To Eastman’s frustration, Bernstein refused to give any confirmation of how much the film had made or how much McCartney was owed; even if money was forthcoming, Bernstein said McCartney’s “adversary position” (in Bernstein’s words) with Allen Klein stood in the way.

  Confusion over the royalties from the McCartney album dragged on. On November 12, four months after his initial inquiry, Eastman wrote to EMI, saying he thought the issue had been resolved and his client would be paid. On December 1, EMI informed Eastman that, at long last, the funds would be sent to Apple, thereby bypassing Klein. By then, the amount had grown to 487,000 British pounds. Yet the fact that McCartney and Eastman had had to endure such frustrations and foot-dragging only made them feel they’d made the right decision about how to resolve it all. By then, Eastman had brought in two other attorneys to map out an airtight strategy. In drawing up a list of possible complaints and gripes for a lawsuit, the New York-based Eastman flew back and forth to London so frequently that Pan Am knew to save him four seats in the back so he could sleep. His morning shaves took place at Heathrow.

  During his visit to New York City, Harrison reached out to McCartney by phone. What began as a friendly chat turned, once again, into a shouting match. When asked for comment by a reporter, Klein denied any such conversation had occurred. But to Brown, Klein’s vehement denial only confirmed that something ugly had indeed taken place and that the gashes wouldn’t heal for some time.

  Everyone, not merely the four Beatles, was scattering. Feeling he had little further role in the Beatles’ affairs, Brown left Apple Corps Ltd. in the fall. Robert Stigwood, the manager and music magnate who’d worked with the Bee Gees and Eric Clapton, offered Brown a job in his New York office, and Brown, who felt Klein wanted him gone anyway, took it. Quickly and quietly, Brown, one of the Beatles’ key advisors and insiders for the previous three years, was out of the picture.

  In search of a new line of work, Richard DiLello, the “house hippie” fired from Apple’s Press Office, decided to try his hand at photography. At a festival in a small town outside London, he shot two new bands, Black Sabbath and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, whose first albums were released that fall. The music—thundering, intentionally ugly fury from Birmingham in the former, a merger of classical music chops and arena bombast in the latter—was new to many, especially DiLello. After listening to and photographing both, DiLello sensed a cultural shift around the corner. “I suddenly realized music was changing radically,” he recalled. “It was a very different vibe from what the Beatles had given off. I thought we were entering a darker period.”

  Like a bleak murder of crows, other signs of a generational shift were circling above and around them. Lennon and Starr were both now thirty, with Simon, Garfunkel, and Crosby soon to follow in the coming year. In September, Melody Maker published the results of its annual readers poll. For the eight consecutive years prior, the Beatles had taken first place.
Now they were usurped by Led Zeppelin. Zeppelin was rooted in the ’60s—its founder, Jimmy Page, was an ex-Yardbird, and singer Robert Plant had fronted a hippie-folkie band, Band of Joy—but its monolithic music was louder and more domineering than any rock that had come before. It sternly lorded over its audience—the next generation of rock fans, the teenagers who had only faint memories of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. As DiLello realized, Black Sabbath, along with Grand Funk Railroad and Led Zeppelin, were the disquieting sound of a new era. It was the rise of a generation for whom the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel, among others, were their older siblings’ quaint relics from the previous decade.

  When it arrived in record stores in late September, Starr’s country album, Beaucoups of Blues, looked the way many Beatle fans felt by year’s end. On the cover, Starr sat forlornly, chin in palm and cigarette in hand. The photograph evoked the disconsolate quality of the record’s downand-out Nashville ballads, but intentionally or not, it also bespoke something about Starr’s own state of mind after six uncertain months.

  To help pay his bills, Starr withdrew 69,000 British pounds (about $200,000) from his Apple savings—not as much as Lennon, who’d taken out 77,000 pounds, but more than Harrison, who used a mere 19,000, and McCartney, who opted for 20,500. Although The Magic Christian hadn’t turned him into a movie star, other roles beckoned; already, Starr was lined up to star as a heavy in Blindman, a violent homage to spaghetti Westerns, to begin filming the following year. His third child, a daughter named Lee, arrived in mid November.

  Along with “It Don’t Come Easy,” he wrote and recorded another song, “Early 1970,” that took playful digs at the other Beatles. The song devoted verses to McCartney’s time on his farm, the Lennons’ primal scream therapy, Harrison’s gardening, and Starr’s own limited musical chops. “When I come to town, I want to see all three,” he sang optimistically at the end, as if the events of the previous year hadn’t happened.

  Yet many aspects of his career felt uncertain, his future far fuzzier than that of the other Beatles. The reviews of Beaucoups of Blues were warmer than those for Sentimental Journey—Starr sounded far more at ease and natural singing lachrymose country songs than sophisticated standards—yet it sold less. In America, Beaucoups of Blues limped to number 65 on the charts, more than forty spots lower than Sentimental Journey . According to Voormann, Starr had been unnerved during the recording of Lennon’s and Ono’s albums. “John and Yoko were sitting on chairs together and walking together,” Voormann recalled. “You couldn’t part them. That was very sad for Ringo. He felt he lost a friend. It was very strange for him, and he didn’t feel comfortable.”

  As always, Starr betrayed little of his uncertainties to others; to everyone, he remained agreeable, easy-to-be-with Ringo, the man with a ready if sometimes sad smile and few cares in the world. On certain nights he could be found at Tramp, a members-only London watering hole that had opened the previous year. Starr’s friend Peter Sellers was a regular, as were musicians and actors from Keith Moon to Joan Collins. In the early-morning hours of December 3, Starr ran into a friend. Greetings and champagne were shared. For both, the world was a different place than it was when they’d met ten months before. Both Starr and the friend, Stephen Stills, were now on their own.

  CHAPTER 14

  Thanks to a thick, crusty snowfall, the early morning of September 22 wasn’t the ideal moment for a photo shoot at the Roosevelt National Forest park in northern Colorado. Nonetheless, Stephen Stills, in work boots and jeans, headed outside a rented mountain cabin with his friend Henry Diltz to snap shots for the cover of the record Stills had started in London in the winter.

  No sooner had they begun than Stills told Diltz to stop; he needed something inside. Darting back in, he returned with a stuffed animal, a spotted purple giraffe, that he set in the snowdrift next to him as he began playing guitar. He didn’t tell Diltz anything other than he wanted it featured in the photo that would grace the album cover. With its long neck, the giraffe was both a message to someone and a reminder of her. “I have a thing for long, tall slender women,” he recalled. “She wasn’t that tall, but she looked like she was.” As summer gave way to fall, she was also one of the reasons Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were finished.

  Although Rita Coolidge had entered their lives three months earlier, everyone in the Los Angeles music scene already seemed to know her. Born and raised in Tennessee, the daughter of a Cherokee preacher, Coolidge had begun her career singing jingles at a company in Memphis and had had a regional hit, “Turn Around and Love You.” The industry still being small, one of her friends, producer Don Nix, touted her to his friend Leon Russell, then playing with Delaney and Bonnie. Before Coolidge knew it, she was driving across the country to Los Angeles with Russell, now her boyfriend, to sing on a Delaney and Bonnie album.

  With her slender figure, warm smile, and waterfall of dark hair, Coolidge had a modest, unaffected magnetism, and her voice, with its touch of sultry smokiness, was equally unfussy and soulful. “She was a very charismatic girl, in a weirdly quiet way,” recalled drummer Jim Keltner, who played with Delaney and Bonnie. “She was really beautiful when she made herself out to be. At other times, she looked like a little squaw with braids and everything.” After recording and touring with Delaney and Bonnie from the fall of 1969 into early 1970, she was recruited by Russell to join the backup choir on Joe Cocker’s “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” tour in the spring.

  Once that tour wrapped up, Coolidge was back in Los Angeles, working on a record of her own. During those sessions, produced by her brother-in-law, organist Booker T. Jones of Booker T. and the MG’s, she met Stills. Their first encounter was less than auspicious. “One night, he made it clear to me that the real magic of the record had nothing to do with me,” Coolidge recalled. “It was because the two great musical minds of the decade, him and Booker, had come together. I thought he was arrogant.” But Coolidge had to admit to herself that Stills was, in her words, “totally adorable.” (When he smiled, his recessed upper-left tooth made him look down-home and less hard-boiled.)

  Stills was immediately intrigued. As soon as she left the studio that day, he stayed behind and wrote and recorded a song about her, “Cherokee.” Set to Jones’ churning organ, it had the feel of an after-hours confessional in a smoke-drenched bar. (To lend the song an exotic twang, Stills rented an electric sitar to play on it.) He then invited her to be part of a backup choir he’d assembled for “Love the One You’re With,” which he’d begun recording in London and was now finishing up in Los Angeles. The track had been transformed from a solo guitar workout to a pulsating groove with congas and steel drums. At the late June session, Coolidge found herself gathered around a microphone with Crosby, her sister Priscilla Jones, the Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian, and another new acquaintance, Graham Nash.

  Like Stills, Nash was struck by Coolidge’s voice and looks—so much so that he asked her to accompany him to the CSNY show at the Los Angeles Forum the following night, June 25. Since he was staying at Stills’ house in Laurel Canyon, Nash gave Coolidge Stills’ number and told her to call him to make arrangements. “And then,” Coolidge recalled, “all the nonsense began.”

  According to Coolidge, Stills answered when she phoned the next day and told her that Nash said he’d made a mistake and couldn’t take her after all—but that he, Stills, would love to drive her to the show instead. Unaware of the band’s complex dynamics and only interested in seeing them perform, Coolidge said yes, and Stills picked her up at her home on Wilshire. Backstage at the show, the once-friendly Nash barely looked at her.

  Stills and Coolidge began seeing each other soon after. Stills’ passion was instantaneous. In quick order, he wrote and recorded another song, “Sit Yourself Down,” that captured the conflicting sides of his personality, his internal conflict between taking stock and pushing himself. The ruminative lyrics talked about aging, maturing, slowing down, and buying land. The music, particularly its fervent ch
orus propelled by his galloping piano, a choir (again with Coolidge), and a lead guitar line that kept tugging at the melody, was anything but calm. Stills was so optimistic about his and Coolidge’s budding relationship that in the song he envisioned the two of them living “on a patch of ground” later in life.

  Coolidge wasn’t so sure. When she met Stills, she was still recovering from her first encounter with hard-core show business insanity. The spring 1970 Joe Cocker tour was, in her words, a dose of the new brand of “rock and roll university, really tough.” Every night, she’d watch as the seemingly fragile Cocker tossed down whatever pills or drugs anyone handed him as he walked onstage. She’d witnessed Cocker’s band members scoring heroin at a seedy farm. Cocaine was everywhere. Walking into the lobby of one hotel, she saw half the tour members, musicians and crew alike, lining up to get shots for venereal disease. Even scarier was Cocker’s drummer, Jim Gordon, whom Coolidge had dated before the tour. Watching TV one night in a hotel room, Gordon—a boyishly handsome and kinetic drummer—said he needed to talk to her outside. As soon as they stepped into the hallway, Gordon punched her so hard she fell unconscious to the floor. Later, Keltner saw a huge black shiner on her face but didn’t ask what happened.3

  Stills was nowhere near as explosive as Gordon, who was later diagnosed with schizophrenia after murdering his mother with repeated blows of a hammer. But Stills was intense in his own way: He liked to race horses at local tracks to clear his head, he indulged more than Coolidge could tolerate, and he would spend long hours, often midnight to dawn, in studios, working on his music. (At three o’clock one morning, he called a sleeping Johnny Barbata and asked him to come down, but Nash advised the drummer to pass, given how many hours Barbata would inevitably end up spending with Stills.) Almost from the start, the CSNY universe itself was too much for Coolidge. One night at Stills’ house, she cooked him, Crosby, and Nash a dinner of beans and cornbread. Feeling sleepy afterward, Crosby accused her of dosing the food with acid—when, in fact, he was merely sleepy from eating so many beans. “Graham was the most elegant human being,” she recalled. “The other two were pretty wacky.”