From Wikipedia
The break-up of the Beatles, one of the most popular and influential musical groups in history, has become almost as much of a legend as the band itself or the music they created while together. The Beatles were active from their formation in 1960 to the disintegration of the group in 1970.
The break-up of the Beatles, one of the most popular and influential musical groups in history, has become almost as much of a legend as the band itself or the music they created while together. The Beatles were active from their formation in 1960 to the disintegration of the group in 1970.
The break-up itself was a cumulative process throughout 1968–70, marked by rumours of a split and ambiguous comments by the Beatles themselves regarding the future of the group. Although in September 1969 John Lennon privately informed the other Beatles that he was leaving the group, there was no public acknowledgement of the break-up until Paul McCartney announced on 10 April 1970 he was quitting the Beatles.
There were sporadic collaborative recording efforts among the band members (most notably Ringo Starr's 1973 album Ringo, the only time that the four – albeit on separate tracks – appeared on the same album post-break-up), although all four Beatles never simultaneously collaborated as a recording or performing group again; Starr's 1976 album Ringo's Rotogravure is the last post-break-up album on which all four Beatles contribute and are credited: besides Starr's drumming and songwriting contributions, Lennon, McCartney and George Harrison all composed one track apiece. After Lennon's death in 1980, McCartney and Starr appeared on Harrison's single "All Those Years Ago", and the trio reunited for the Anthology project in 1994, using two unfinished Lennon demos – "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love" – for what would be new songs to be recorded and released as the Beatles.
There were numerous causes for the Beatles' break-up. It was not a single event but a long transition, including the cessation of touring in 1966, and the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, in 1967, meaning the Beatles were personally involved in financial and legal conflicts. Conflict arose from differences in artistic vision. Both Harrison and Starr temporarily left the group at various points during 1968–69 and all four band members had begun working on solo projects by 1970 as they all realised the likelihood the band would not regroup. Ultimately, animosity made it impossible for the group to continue working together in the years following.
Brian Epstein's death
Arguably the most influential person in launching and promoting the band's worldwide popularity, Brian Epstein also managed to hold the group together, as his management style was to let the group pursue their musical notions and projects while often mediating when there was a conflict. However, this role began to diminish after the band stopped touring in 1966, although he still exercised a strong influence, settling disputes among members and, most importantly, handling the group's finances. When he died of a medical drug overdose in August 1967, there was a void left in the band. John Lennon had the closest personal relationship with Epstein and was the most affected by his death. Paul McCartney likely sensed the precarious situation and sought to initiate projects for the group. Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr progressively became perturbed by his growing domination in musical as well as other group ventures. Lennon later reflected that McCartney's efforts were important for the survival of the band, but he still believed that McCartney's desire to help came from McCartney's own misgivings about pursuing a solo career.
The foundation of Apple Corps was initiated under the oversight of Epstein as a tax shelter endeavour. His unexpected death left the future of Apple Corps in doubt. The lack of Epstein's supervision and the Beatles' inexperience as businessmen led to an unexpectedly chaotic venture that only added to stress when the band returned to the studio to produce their 1968 double album The Beatles, also known as the White Album. Epstein's role as band manager would never be replaced, and ultimately the lack of strong managerial leadership would be a major cause of the break-up.
The foundation of Apple Corps was initiated under the oversight of Epstein as a tax shelter endeavour. His unexpected death left the future of Apple Corps in doubt. The lack of Epstein's supervision and the Beatles' inexperience as businessmen led to an unexpectedly chaotic venture that only added to stress when the band returned to the studio to produce their 1968 double album The Beatles, also known as the White Album. Epstein's role as band manager would never be replaced, and ultimately the lack of strong managerial leadership would be a major cause of the break-up.
George Harrison's emergence as a songwriter
Another factor behind the Beatles' eventual split was Harrison's growth as a composer during the second half of their career. In the early years, Lennon and McCartney were the band's primary songwriters and vocalists, as Harrison and Starr took more supporting roles. Lennon and McCartney would often compose one song per album for Starr to sing, while Harrison would either cover an old standard or record one of his own compositions. From 1965 onwards, Harrison's compositions started to mature and become more appealing in their quality. Gradually, the other band members acknowledged his potential as a songwriter.
Although Harrison emerged as a talented songwriter and producer, he nonetheless continued to have many of his song ideas rejected by Lennon and McCartney, especially from 1968 onwards. While this was partly indicative of the increased competition for space on album sides, with three songwriters in the band, Harrison's frustration fostered in him a sense of alienation from the Beatles. He was the first member of the group to release a solo album, with Wonderwall Music, much of which was recorded in Bombay in January 1968 and featured Indian classical musicians such as Aashish Khan, Shankar Ghosh and Shivkumar Sharma. Speaking to Melody Maker in September 1969, Lennon said: "The trouble is we've got too much material. Now that George is writing a lot, we could put out a double album every month …".
Although Harrison emerged as a talented songwriter and producer, he nonetheless continued to have many of his song ideas rejected by Lennon and McCartney, especially from 1968 onwards. While this was partly indicative of the increased competition for space on album sides, with three songwriters in the band, Harrison's frustration fostered in him a sense of alienation from the Beatles. He was the first member of the group to release a solo album, with Wonderwall Music, much of which was recorded in Bombay in January 1968 and featured Indian classical musicians such as Aashish Khan, Shankar Ghosh and Shivkumar Sharma. Speaking to Melody Maker in September 1969, Lennon said: "The trouble is we've got too much material. Now that George is writing a lot, we could put out a double album every month …".
Difficulty in collaboration
After the band had stopped touring in August 1966, each of the members, to varying degrees, began to pursue their own musical tastes. When the group convened to record Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in November 1966, there was still a camaraderie and desire to collaborate as musicians. However, their individual differences were becoming more apparent. To a greater extent than the others, McCartney maintained a deep interest in the pop musical trends and styles emerging both in Britain and the United States, whereas Harrison developed an interest in Indian music and Lennon's compositions became more introspective and experimental. Consequently, McCartney began to assume the role of the initiator and leader of the artistic projects of the Beatles.
Each band member began to develop individual artistic agendas, which eventually compromised the enthusiasm among the musicians. Soon, each band member became impatient with the others. This became most evident on the White Album, in which personal artistic preferences began to dominate the recording sessions, which in turn further undermined the band's unity.
Each band member began to develop individual artistic agendas, which eventually compromised the enthusiasm among the musicians. Soon, each band member became impatient with the others. This became most evident on the White Album, in which personal artistic preferences began to dominate the recording sessions, which in turn further undermined the band's unity.
Yoko Ono
Lennon was in a fragile state of mind after returning from the band's sojourn in India in early 1968. He was disillusioned and resentful that their Transcendental Meditation guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, had not fulfilled his expectations. Coupled with renewed drug use and deterioration in his marriage and family life, Lennon's personal identity and artistic role within the Beatles was a source of discontent. He began to develop an intense interest in the work of Yoko Ono, a Japanese-American conceptual artist whom he had first met at one of her exhibitions in 1966. The pair maintained a platonic relationship until the spring of 1968. In May that year, they spent time together in his home studio while his wife, Cynthia, was away on holiday. They recorded an avant-garde tape that would eventually be released as Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins, before consummating their new relationship. From that point on, the two were almost always together, even as Lennon was working with the rest of the band in the studio. This violated a previous tacit agreement between the members not to let wives or girlfriends into the studio. In addition, as Lennon's artistic infatuation with Ono grew, he desired that she would be allotted artistic input into the band's recordings.[20] Frequently, Ono would comment or make suggestions in the recording studio, which only served to increase the friction between her and Lennon's bandmates. Ono's intrusive presence was a source of rancour to Harrison, in particular, after his and Lennon's shared experimentation with LSD and Indian spirituality – two experiences that McCartney had approached with a level of caution – had united the pair since 1965.
The Beatles double album
The White Album
The White Album
In May 1968, the band met at Harrison's home in Esher to record demos of some of the songs that would be released in November as The Beatles. Contemporaneous reviews and retrospective commentary by the Beatles acknowledged that the double album reflected the development of autonomous composers, musicians and artists. Rolling Stone described it as "four solo albums in one roof".
Lennon and McCartney's artistic venues for the Beatles became more disparate, with McCartney disapproving of Lennon and Ono's experimentalsound collage "Revolution 9", and Lennon contemptuous of light-hearted McCartney songs such as "Martha My Dear" and "Honey Pie". Harrison continued to develop as a songwriter, yet he received little support from within the band during the sessions. Feeling resentment from Lennon and McCartney for his role in leading the Beatles to the Maharishi, Harrison's composition "Not Guilty" reflected his state of mind after their return from India. Starr began to develop and pursue acting opportunities during this period, yet as a drummer, he was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the standard of his playing; according to author Mark Hertsgaard, this was "a feeling that [McCartney] in particular had done much to encourage". Distressed also by the sour and tense atmosphere that was characteristic of the recording sessions, Starr felt so isolated that he left the band for several weeks and holidayed with his family in Sardinia. He returned in early September to find his drum kit decorated with flowers, which were a gift from Harrison.
The strain of recording the White Album also took its toll on EMI recording engineer Geoff Emerick. Like Starr, he left during the sessions, which commenced in June and concluded in October. These were the first signs of the group's emerging disunity and antipathy. Upon completion and release of The Beatles, the band no longer gave collective interviews or recorded appearances. The public relations were carried out individually. Other evidence of the group's collective alienation came with the release of their 1968 Christmas fan club recording. The contributions were entirely individual and Lennon made disparaging remarks about his bandmates' apparent disdain for Ono.
Lennon and McCartney's artistic venues for the Beatles became more disparate, with McCartney disapproving of Lennon and Ono's experimentalsound collage "Revolution 9", and Lennon contemptuous of light-hearted McCartney songs such as "Martha My Dear" and "Honey Pie". Harrison continued to develop as a songwriter, yet he received little support from within the band during the sessions. Feeling resentment from Lennon and McCartney for his role in leading the Beatles to the Maharishi, Harrison's composition "Not Guilty" reflected his state of mind after their return from India. Starr began to develop and pursue acting opportunities during this period, yet as a drummer, he was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the standard of his playing; according to author Mark Hertsgaard, this was "a feeling that [McCartney] in particular had done much to encourage". Distressed also by the sour and tense atmosphere that was characteristic of the recording sessions, Starr felt so isolated that he left the band for several weeks and holidayed with his family in Sardinia. He returned in early September to find his drum kit decorated with flowers, which were a gift from Harrison.
The strain of recording the White Album also took its toll on EMI recording engineer Geoff Emerick. Like Starr, he left during the sessions, which commenced in June and concluded in October. These were the first signs of the group's emerging disunity and antipathy. Upon completion and release of The Beatles, the band no longer gave collective interviews or recorded appearances. The public relations were carried out individually. Other evidence of the group's collective alienation came with the release of their 1968 Christmas fan club recording. The contributions were entirely individual and Lennon made disparaging remarks about his bandmates' apparent disdain for Ono.
Twickenham and Apple Studio recording sessions
By the end of 1968, the Beatles' status as a group entity was in limbo. McCartney suggested a group project involving rehearsing, recording and performing the songs in a live concert. The project soon adopted a working title of Get Back but would eventually see official release as the Let It Be album and film in 1970. Although the sessions for their double album had involved a degree of ensemble playing, the band were ill-prepared to settle comfortably back into this mode; in particular, Lennon had descended into heroin addiction, leaving him variously incommunicative or highly critical of the venture. On 10 January 1969, eight days after filmed rehearsals commenced at Twickenham Film Studios, Harrison's frustration and resentment peaked and he informed his bandmates that he was leaving. Having enjoyed rewarding collaborations outside the Beatles during much of 1968, particularly with Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and the Band, the combined patronising by McCartney and estrangement from Lennon had taken its toll. The band were therefore on the verge of potential collapse and at an impasse. In 2003, Rolling Stonemagazine cited a recording that exists from the Twickenham sessions the day after Harrison's departure in which Lennon suggests inviting Clapton to take over lead guitar duties.
Ultimately, complicated negotiations brought Harrison back into the group's activities. At Harrison's insistence, McCartney's plans for a full concert were abandoned and the project was relocated to the band's Apple Studio in Savile Row, with the focus now on merely completing a new album of some of the songs rehearsed at Twickenham. The Beatles gave their last public performance on the rooftop of Apple's headquarters on 30 January 1969, as a substitute for an audience-based concert.
Ultimately, complicated negotiations brought Harrison back into the group's activities. At Harrison's insistence, McCartney's plans for a full concert were abandoned and the project was relocated to the band's Apple Studio in Savile Row, with the focus now on merely completing a new album of some of the songs rehearsed at Twickenham. The Beatles gave their last public performance on the rooftop of Apple's headquarters on 30 January 1969, as a substitute for an audience-based concert.
Business quagmire: Allen Klein, Lee and John Eastman, and ATV-Northern Songs
Apple Corps during this period was plagued by business problems. Lennon and Ono met with Allen Klein regarding managerial advice. Subsequently, Lennon requested that Klein represent his business interests in the band. Harrison and Starr acquiesced, while McCartney had ambiguous feelings about Klein's managerial potential. McCartney's growing relationship with Linda Eastmanopened the opportunity for lawyers Lee and John Eastman, Linda's father and brother, respectively, to become involved in advising the band's financial and legal decision-making. However, the band members' quarrels and disharmony over musical matters soon permeated their business discussions.
Dick James, who held substantial rights to Northern Songs (the Lennon–McCartney song catalogue), became increasingly concerned over the band's dissension and resentment towards him. Without informing the Beatles, he inconspicuously entertained offers to sell his substantial shares in Northern Songs. Klein and the Eastmans were caught off guard and their attempts to reclaim control of the Beatles (via Maclen Music) failed. It soon became evident that the Eastmans and Klein had developed an adversarial relationship given their disparate advice and counsel. This further aggravated the underlying mistrust and antipathy experienced within the band. McCartney felt that the four members' evolution from musicians to businessmen was the central reason for the band's breakup.
Dick James, who held substantial rights to Northern Songs (the Lennon–McCartney song catalogue), became increasingly concerned over the band's dissension and resentment towards him. Without informing the Beatles, he inconspicuously entertained offers to sell his substantial shares in Northern Songs. Klein and the Eastmans were caught off guard and their attempts to reclaim control of the Beatles (via Maclen Music) failed. It soon became evident that the Eastmans and Klein had developed an adversarial relationship given their disparate advice and counsel. This further aggravated the underlying mistrust and antipathy experienced within the band. McCartney felt that the four members' evolution from musicians to businessmen was the central reason for the band's breakup.
Departures
With the troubled Get Back/Let It Be project put on hold, the group continued to record together sporadically during the spring and early summer of 1969. Otherwise, the band members became increasingly involved in activities outside the band; among these, Lennon launched an international peace campaign with Ono, spearheaded by their single "Give Peace a Chance", Harrison continued to focus on producing Apple Records signings, including Jackie Lomax, Billy Preston and Radha Krishna Temple (London), and Starr began to establish himself as a film actor. Their occasional sessions together over the first half of the year ultimately paved the way for the Beatles' last studio recording project, Abbey Road.
Lennon's departure
Soon after the sessions for Abbey Road, Lennon's heroin use inspired him to record "Cold Turkey" with his and Ono's conceptual group, the Plastic Ono Band, after the Beatles had rejected the song for release as a single. The formation of the Plastic Ono Band was conceived as an artistic outlet for Lennon and Ono, but the enthusiastic reception afforded their performance at theToronto Rock and Roll Revival in September 1969 ostensibly crystallised Lennon's decision to leave the Beatles.[citation needed] During a band meeting at Apple on 20 September, he informed McCartney, Starr and Klein of his decision. That same month, the band signed a renegotiated recording contract with Capitol Records, guaranteeing them a higher royalty rate. This was the group's last, transient demonstration of unity, and the sensitivity of the negotiations with Capitol led to Klein and McCartney urging Lennon to keep his announcement private, which Lennon agreed to do.
McCartney's announcement.
McCartney's announcement.
Having long attempted to maintain cohesiveness within the Beatles, McCartney secluded himself with his new family at his Scottish farm, distraught at Lennon's departure.[44] After being tracked down by reporters from Life magazine in late October, McCartney publicly acknowledged that "the Beatle thing is over", although the full meaning of this remark was ignored. In early January 1970, he, Harrison and Starr briefly reconvened at Abbey Road Studios to record Harrison's "I Me Mine" and complete work on McCartney's song "Let It Be". Both tracks were needed for the Let It Be album, as the threat of legal action by American film company United Artists led to a decision to finally prepare the Get Back recordings and footage for release.[49] This project was then allowed to languish as before, until producer Phil Spector was invited to revisit the tapes. Although McCartney has claimed that he was unaware of Spector's involvement until receiving an acetate of the Let It Be album in April, Peter Doggett writes of work being delayed for "several weeks" until McCartney returned "a string of messages" requesting his approval for Spector to start working on the tapes.
Effectively estranged from his bandmates and deeply depressed, McCartney had begun making a series of home recordings in London during December 1969. Operating under strict secrecy, McCartney privately agreed a release date for this proposed solo album, titled McCartney, with Apple Records executive Neil Aspinall. The release was set for 17 April 1970. Once Lennon, Harrison and Starr became aware of it, however, the date was immediately deemed as problematic, due to the existing items on the Apple release schedule – Let It Be and Starr's own solo debut, Sentimental Journey. On 31 March, Starr went to McCartney's house to tell him personally of the decision to delay the release of McCartney, news to which he reacted badly, dismissing Starr from his home, and refusing to cede the date agreed to with Aspinall. Stunned at his bandmate's outburst, Starr relayed the situation to Harrison and Lennon, and McCartney's album was reinstated on the release schedule for 17 April.
McCartney's bitterness over this episode contributed to him public announcing his departure from the band during the second week of April 1970. He has also cited Spector's treatment of some songs on the Let It Be album, particularly "The Long and Winding Road", as another factor. The chronological relevance of the latter claim is disputed by Starr, however, who stated that, when acetates of the album were sent out for each of the Beatles' approval, on 2 April: "We all said yes. Even at the beginning Paul said yes. I spoke to him on the phone, and said, 'Did you like it?' and he said, 'Yeah, it's OK.' He didn't put it down."
McCartney's announcement came via a press release distributed to select UK journalists on 9 April, with advance copies of McCartney. The press release took the form of a Q&A in which McCartney discussed his album and, with Lennon's exit still being withheld from the public (for business reasons), matters pertaining to the Beatles' immediate future. While McCartney did not state that the group had broken up, he talked of his "break with the Beatles" and having no plans to work with the band in the future; he also emphasised his distance from Klein's management and ruled out the likelihood of ever writing songs with Lennon again. Although McCartney has said that Apple's press officer, Derek Taylor, submitted the questions, Taylor later insisted that those concerning the Beatles were added by McCartney. On 10 April, having been among the recipients of the Q&A, Don Short of The Daily Mirror reported on McCartney's departure from the Beatles, after which newspapers around the world interpreted McCartney's remarks as an announcement that the band had broken up.
Effectively estranged from his bandmates and deeply depressed, McCartney had begun making a series of home recordings in London during December 1969. Operating under strict secrecy, McCartney privately agreed a release date for this proposed solo album, titled McCartney, with Apple Records executive Neil Aspinall. The release was set for 17 April 1970. Once Lennon, Harrison and Starr became aware of it, however, the date was immediately deemed as problematic, due to the existing items on the Apple release schedule – Let It Be and Starr's own solo debut, Sentimental Journey. On 31 March, Starr went to McCartney's house to tell him personally of the decision to delay the release of McCartney, news to which he reacted badly, dismissing Starr from his home, and refusing to cede the date agreed to with Aspinall. Stunned at his bandmate's outburst, Starr relayed the situation to Harrison and Lennon, and McCartney's album was reinstated on the release schedule for 17 April.
McCartney's bitterness over this episode contributed to him public announcing his departure from the band during the second week of April 1970. He has also cited Spector's treatment of some songs on the Let It Be album, particularly "The Long and Winding Road", as another factor. The chronological relevance of the latter claim is disputed by Starr, however, who stated that, when acetates of the album were sent out for each of the Beatles' approval, on 2 April: "We all said yes. Even at the beginning Paul said yes. I spoke to him on the phone, and said, 'Did you like it?' and he said, 'Yeah, it's OK.' He didn't put it down."
McCartney's announcement came via a press release distributed to select UK journalists on 9 April, with advance copies of McCartney. The press release took the form of a Q&A in which McCartney discussed his album and, with Lennon's exit still being withheld from the public (for business reasons), matters pertaining to the Beatles' immediate future. While McCartney did not state that the group had broken up, he talked of his "break with the Beatles" and having no plans to work with the band in the future; he also emphasised his distance from Klein's management and ruled out the likelihood of ever writing songs with Lennon again. Although McCartney has said that Apple's press officer, Derek Taylor, submitted the questions, Taylor later insisted that those concerning the Beatles were added by McCartney. On 10 April, having been among the recipients of the Q&A, Don Short of The Daily Mirror reported on McCartney's departure from the Beatles, after which newspapers around the world interpreted McCartney's remarks as an announcement that the band had broken up.
Events leading up to the Beatles' dissolution in the British High Court
Doggett writes that, amid the uproar following his announcement, McCartney returned to the issue of Spector's work on Let It Be "like a dog obsessively licking a wound". McCartney had conceived of "The Long and Winding Road" as a simple piano ballad, but Spector overdubbed orchestral and female choral accompaniment. On 14 April, McCartney sent a sharply worded letter to Klein demanding that the new instrumentation be reduced, the harp part removed, and added: "Don't ever do it again." Arriving twelve days after Spector had distributed the acetates with a request for any of the Beatles to contact him immediately with proposed changes, McCartney's demands went unheeded. Klein claimed to have sent McCartney a telegram in reply to the 14 April letter, since McCartney had changed his telephone number without informing Apple, but he received no response. Klein therefore went ahead with manufacturing the new Beatles album.
On 31 December 1970, McCartney filed a lawsuit against the other three Beatles in London's High Court for dissolution of the Beatles' contractual partnership, and subsequently a receiver was appointed. The legal process and negotiations were lengthy and the formal dissolution of the partnership took place on 9 January 1975.
On 31 December 1970, McCartney filed a lawsuit against the other three Beatles in London's High Court for dissolution of the Beatles' contractual partnership, and subsequently a receiver was appointed. The legal process and negotiations were lengthy and the formal dissolution of the partnership took place on 9 January 1975.
From Rolling Stone
It was a cold January in 1969, and the Beatles were seated on a vast, even colder, soundstage at London's Twickenham Film Studios, in the company of the last people in the world they wanted to be with: the Beatles. They had been trying for days to write and rehearse new material for a scheduled upcoming live show – their first since August 1966 – but the task wasn't going well. The only one among them who had any sense of urgency was Paul McCartney. "I don't see why any of you, if you're not interested, got yourselves into this," he said to the other Beatles. "What's it for? It can't be for the money. Why are you here? I'm here because I want to do a show, but I don't see an awful lot of support."
Paul looked at his bandmates, his friends of many years – John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – and they looked back at him with no expression. Moments later he said, "There's only two choices: We're gonna do it or we're not gonna do it, and I want a decision. Because I'm not interested in spending my fucking days farting around here, while everyone makes up their mind whether they want to do it or not."
Paul waited, but he got no response. Again, the other Beatles just stared back.
It was far from the worst moment they would go through in those days. The Beatles in their death throes were one of the most mysterious and complicated end-of-romance tales of the 20th century, as well as the most dispiriting. The Beatles hadn't just made music – they had made their times, as surely as any political force, and more beneficently than most. Why, then, did the Beatles walk away? There were many who blamed the Beatles' end on the machinations of Yoko Ono, the legendary love of John Lennon's life, and on the deviousness of Allen Klein, the band's new manager who was also a favorite of Lennon's, but whom McCartney could not abide. But it wasn't that simple.
"I don't think you could have broken up four very strong people like them," Ono said later, "even if you tried. So there must have been something that happened within them – not an outside force at all." Indeed, the true causes were much closer at hand. They had been there for a long time, in a history as full of hurts as it was of transcendence.
These sessions, for what would become both the film and album Let It Be, had started from an inspired place, but there was too much going wrong by the time McCartney issued his plea. For the last year, the Beatles' partnership had been fraying. The long friendship of John and Paul, in particular, was undergoing volatile change. Lennon, the band's founder, had in some ways acquiesced leadership of the band; more important, he was beginning to feel he no longer wanted to be confined by the Beatles, whereas McCartney loved the group profoundly – it was what he lived for. These two men had been the band's central force – theirs was the richest songwriting collaboration in all of popular music – but at heart, the adventure of the Beatles was forged by John Lennon's temperament and needs: He had formed the band as a way to lessen his sense of anxiety and separation, after his mother, Julia, gave up custody of him to her sister, and his father walked out of his life altogether.
The 16-year-old Lennon first met the 15-year-old McCartney in the summer of 1957 while playing with his band the Quarry Men at a parish church near Liverpool, and was impressed with Paul's facility for playing the music of Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. Just as important, the two were also bonded by deep loss: McCartney's mother, Mary, died of breast cancer in October 1956, and Lennon's mother was killed when she was struck by a car in July 1958. Working together, John and Paul found a new mooring in the world. For a long time, they wrote songs together, trading melodic and lyrical ideas, and even after they began writing separately, each still counted on the other to help finish or improve a song. They were, however, men with strikingly different approaches to making music. McCartney was orderly and meticulous, and placed a high premium on craft; Lennon was unruly, less prone to lingering over a song, and despite his cocky front, less secure in his work than his writing partner. The contrasts grew even more stark as the years went on. McCartney increasingly composed everyman narratives and celebratory calls; Lennon was writing from what he saw as a more authentic and troubled personal viewpoint. "Paul said, 'Come and see the show,'" Lennon said later. "I said, 'I read the news today, oh boy.'"
Because Lennon and McCartney dominated the Beatles' songwriting and singing, they, in effect, led the band, though Lennon had always enjoyed an implicit seniority. Even so, the Beatles abided by a guiding policy of one-man, one-vote, which figured significantly when, in 1966, after years of touring, John, George and Ringo persuaded Paul that they should stop performing their music live. For about three months, all four went their separate ways, and as they did, John Lennon felt sharp apprehensions: "I was thinking, 'Well, this is the end, really. There's no more touring. That means there's going to be a blank space in the future…' That's when I really started considering life without the Beatles – what would it be? And that's when the seed was planted that I had to somehow get out of [the Beatles] without being thrown out by the others. But I could never step out of the palace because it was too frightening."
Shortly afterward, the band reassembled for its most eventful work, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band – but that was also when the Beatles' inner workings turned strangely complex, even subterranean. The album's concept had been McCartney's idea, and though Lennon was primarily responsible for Sgt. Pepper's best song, "A Day in the Life," he later said he saw his contributions to the album as veiled reflections of despair: "I was still in a real big depression in Pepper, and I know Paul wasn't at that time. He was feeling full of confidence… I was going through murder." In part, this is how Lennon worked – he either rose or sank by way of crises – but he was truly at a turning point. He believed himself trapped in a loveless and staid domestic life – loveless on his part, that is, because his wife, Cynthia, loved him deeply – and was feeling outdistanced by McCartney, who was an unconstrained and famous man living in London, attending the city's cutting-edge cultural events and exposing himself to a wide range of avant-garde music and arts. If Lennon didn't pursue that outer life, he certainly pursued an inner one, taking LSD frequently, to the point that some worried he was erasing his identity. George Harrison later said, "In a way, like psychiatry, acid could undo a lot – it was so powerful you could just see. But I think we didn't really realize the extent to which John was screwed up ."
In August 1967, leadership in and around the Beatles shifted more decidedly after their manager, Brian Epstein, was found dead in his London town house from an unintentional overdose of drugs. Epstein had been depressed for some time, but he'd remained utterly devoted to the band, and many of the group's insiders felt that it was Epstein who kept the Beatles grounded and protected. "I knew that we were in trouble then," Lennon later said. "I didn't really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music, and I was scared. I thought, 'We've fuckin' had it.'"
McCartney, though, didn't see it that way. Five days after Epstein's death, Paul convinced the others to undertake a film and music fantasia, Magical Mystery Tour. The band spent the late summer into early winter filming odd reveries and recording music to accompany those scenes, and while it was ostensibly a free-form collaborative project by all four Beatles, there was no mistaking that, in the end, Magical Mystery Tour had been primarily McCartney's invention. The film debuted on the BBC the day after Christmas in 1967, and the next day it was savaged by critics. ("Blatant rubbish," wrote London's Daily Express.) Lennon was reportedly somewhat pleased to see McCartney stumble for once.
In February 1968, the Beatles went to study Transcendental Meditation at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in Rishikesh, India. The sojourn was in part the result of Harrison's effort to gain more influence on the band's direction – he was the first among the Beatles to gain an interest in Indian music and philosophies – though at first all the Beatles felt the need to reappraise the purposes of their success. "I think we were all a bit exhausted, spiritually," McCartney said later. "We'd been the Beatles, which was marvelous … but I think generally there was a feeling of 'Yeah, well, it's great to be famous, it's great to be rich – but what's it all for?'" However, unease soon set in. When Harrison suspected that Lennon and McCartney might be using the retreat as a haven for songwriting, he grew displeased. "We're not here to talk music," he complained. "We're here to meditate!" Paul's reply was "Oh, yeah, all right, Georgie boy. Calm down, man." Ringo Starr and his wife, Maureen, left two weeks after arriving (Starr, who had stomach troubles, couldn't handle the Indian cuisine), and McCartney and his girlfriend, actress Jane Asher, followed two weeks later. McCartney found the setting too much like school. Harrison and Lennon stayed until Lennon realized he wasn't any closer to solving the troubles he felt in his heart: the need to renew both his marriage and his artistic purposes. After hearing a rumor that the Maharishi had made sexual advances toward a young woman at the ashram, Lennon became incensed, and demanded that he and Harrison leave immediately.
Something about the whole venture seemed to transform Lennon in ways that nobody readily understood; after that, according to insiders, he always seemed angry. The truth is, he was in great despair; all he had to save him was his art, and even that wasn't relief. "Although … I was meditating about eight hours a day," he later said, "I was writing the most miserable songs on Earth."
Back in London, Lennon soon abandoned Cynthia to begin a serious relationship and artistic collaboration with Yoko Ono, whom he'd met in November 1966. Though Ono has been characterized as an ambitious woman who pursued Lennon indomitably, she went through her own hurt and disappointment in the upheaval that followed, losing access to her daughter, Kyoko, and sidelining her promising art career at Lennon's behest. As she later said, "We sacrificed everything." The press and the fans treated her with derision: She was called "Jap," "Chink" and 'Yellow" in public, and Lennon sometimes had to shield her from physical harm.
All of this judgment certainly fed into Lennon's rage, but it paled in comparison to what developed when Lennon brought Ono directly into the Beatles' world. The group had rarely allowed guests into the studio, and never tolerated anyone other than producer George Martin or perhaps a recording engineer, such as Geoff Emerick, to offer input about a work in progress. (The one time Brian Epstein offered a suggestion during a recording session, John Lennon humiliated the manager in front of everybody.) But Lennon didn't bring Ono into the Beatles as a guest; he brought her in as a full-fledged collaborator. When the Beatles began work in May 1968 on their first new LP since Sgt. Pepper, Yoko sat with John on the studio floor; she conversed with him continually in a low voice, and accompanied him every time he left the room. The first time she spoke in the studio, offering John advice on a vocal, the room fell silent. Then Paul said, "Fuck me! Did somebody speak? Who the fuck was that? Did you say something, George? Your lips didn't move!"
Lennon wasn't somebody who would back off. "He wanted me to be part of the group," Ono later said. "He created the group, so he thought the others should accept that. I didn't particularly want to be part of them." Instead, Ono made her own recordings with Lennon, such as the notorious Two Virgins – an album of experimental electronic music that bore nude photos of the couple. If some found Lennon and Ono's collaborations indulgent or farcical, McCartney realized that Ono emboldened Lennon. "In fact, she wanted more," he said. "Do it more, do it double, be more daring, take all your clothes off. She always pushed him, which he liked. Nobody had ever pushed him like that." But McCartney probably also understood the true meaning of a record like Two Virgins: That John Lennon had an unstoppable will that, unchecked, could redeem or destroy his life, or could undo the Beatles. When the group learned that Lennon and Ono had started using heroin, the Beatles didn't know what to do about it. "This was a fairly big shocker for us," McCartney said, "because we all thought we were far-out boys, but we kind of understood that we'd never get quite that far-out."
Lennon's new partnership with Ono meant that he and McCartney would rarely collaborate as composers again. Even so, as the band began work on its only double album, The Beatles (better known as the White Album), the uncommon writing and singing skills of both men had never been stronger or more diverse. In contrast to what he viewed as his own sporadic and inconsistent work during 1967, Lennon was now writing at full force, his creativity apparently revivified by the relationship with Ono. (Such songs as "Dear Prudence," "Julia," "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" and "Revolution" were clearly among his best work.) Harrison, too, had flowered – even Ringo was writing songs – but none of these men was now willing to allow the others to overshadow or direct his work. They had so much material to record, and so much distaste for each other, that they were recording in three studios, sometimes 12 hours a day. Each of the Beatles treated the others as his supporting musicians – which made for some spectacular performances and some explosive studio moments: Lennon storming out on the tedium of recording McCartney's "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da"; Ringo quitting the group for almost two weeks after Paul berated his drumming on "Back in the U.S.S.R."; Harrison bringing in his friend, guitarist Eric Clapton, just to win rightful consideration for "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"; McCartney, in a shocking display, telling off George Martin in front of the band; and Geoff Emerick finally walking out, quitting his work with the Beatles over their turbulent and nasty behavior. When it was finished, The Beatles was regarded as a disjointed masterpiece, the sound of a band in top form that nonetheless no longer had hope. In later years, McCartney would refer to it as "the Tension Album."
In the meantime, the Beatles pushed ahead with launching their new record label, Apple. In truth, Apple had started as an investment shelter, but it quickly became something else. Many other things, in fact: an umbrella corporation with film, electronics, real estate, educational, publishing and music divisions – and, most interestingly, an experiment in socialism. "We're in the happy position of not needing any more money," McCartney said in May 1968, "so for the first time the bosses aren't in it for a profit… a kind of Western communism." In practice, the company's chief directive became to cultivate new talent. Apple indeed discovered or helped to develop some worthy music artists – includingJames Taylor, Badfinger, Mary Hopkin, Jackie Lomax, Billy Preston and Doris Troy (the label also considered signing the Rolling Stones, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Chicago, Queen, and Delaney and Bonnie), but since the Beatles themselves weren't truly Apple artists, the label didn't reap the full benefits of their income. They set August 11th, 1968, as the debut of Apple Records, with four singles to be released that day, including Mary Hopkin's "Those Were the Days" and the Beatles' own "Hey Jude." McCartney had written "Hey Jude" as a paean to Lennon's son, Julian, as his parents divorced, but it took on other meanings as well. McCartney had recently separated from his girlfriend of several years, Jane Asher, after she caught him with another woman, and he was now entering a serious relationship with photographer Linda Eastman, whom he had known since 1967; for Paul, the song came to stand as an anthem of faith in love, of taking risks. When Lennon heard "Hey Jude," though, he received it as a benediction from his songwriting partner: "The words 'go out and get her' – subconsciously – [Paul] was saying, 'Go ahead, leave me.' On a conscious level, he didn't want me to go ahead," he told Playboy near the end of his life. "The angel in him was saying, 'Bless you.' The devil in him didn't like it at all, because he didn't want to lose his partner." Then, the Beatles played "Hey Jude" on David Frost's television show in early September 1968 – their first performance before an audience in more than two years. As the audience joined in on the extended singalong ending, "Hey Jude" became an expression of something bigger, of the sort of possibilities of community that the band, at its best, signified to the world outside.
Inspired by that moment, the Beatles realized they had a hunger to play before a live audience again – Lennon especially seemed excited about the prospects – and they arranged for a January date at London's Roundhouse, the site of several of the city's famous underground rock & roll extravaganzas in the summer of 1967. They also decided to film the concert's rehearsals for TV broadcast, and they invited Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who had made promos for "Rain" and "Paperback Writer" with the band years before, to direct the filming.
There was something else at work in the idea as well: The Beatles saw this as an opportunity to discard the image that they had epitomized in Sgt.Pepper (Lennon had been looking for a way to disavow the album ever since its success, seeing Pepper as an empty show masterminded by McCartney). This new music would herald their return to the simpler formations that had inspired their love of rock & roll in the first place, back in the 1950s.
The new music being made by Bob Dylan's sometime backing group, the Band, had special bearing on what the Beatles were now after. Harrison had recently spent time with the group and with Dylan in Woodstock, New York, and he came back smitten by the collective spontaneous spirit they achieved in the recordings known as The Basement Tapes. Seeking that sort of feeling, Lennon told George Martin, "I don't want any of your production shit. We want this to be an honest album ... I don't want any editing …overdubbing. We just record the song and that's it." Years later, Lennon's implicit repudiation still stung Martin. "I assumed all their albums had been honest," Martin commented in The Beatles, by Bob Spitz. McCartney brought in a second producer, Glyn Johns, which proved something of a relief to Martin: To get the "inartificial" performances the Beatles were now after would require endless rehearsals for an acceptable single-take recording, and Martin found it so tedious that he rarely attended these rehearsals.
From the outset, problems plagued the project. Because the Beatles intended to film the rehearsal sessions, which became known as the "Get Back" sessions after the original title of the album that was finally released as Let It Be, they set up at Twickenham Film Studios, which meant conforming to union filming hours, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. – hardly the Beatles' hours. None of this would have been so bad if they had retained enthusiasm for the idea, but by the morning of January 2nd, 1969, when rehearsals began, nobody but McCartney seemed to remember why they were there. Though the sessions would be uncommonly productive in one sense – the Beatles played 52 original songs in that month of January 1969, several of which would soon make up Abbey Road and would also appear as some of the best material on the group members' early solo albums – all the bad feelings that had been festering for some time would come to the fore. McCartney tried to keep the others on track, but it was a thankless task. The others found his cajoling noxious and condescending. To them, it had become another Paul McCartney affair, with him telling everybody what notes and tempo to play, even telling the film director how to direct. "Paul would want us to work all the time," Ringo said, "because he was the workaholic." George Martin felt McCartney had little other choice. "Paul would be rather overbossy, which the other boys would dislike," he said. "But it was the only way of getting together ... It was just a general disintegration."
There is a famous scene in the Let It Be film in which McCartney worries that his musical guidelines are irritating Harrison too much, and Harrison replies that he'll play whatever Paul wants from him, even if it means playing nothing. "You're not annoying me anymore," Harrison says, with palpable annoyance. The scene has been taken to represent the crux of the sessions' problem: that McCartney was pushy and insensitive, and that Harrison got fed up with it all. To be sure, Harrison had legitimate grievances. He had long been relegated to the role of sideman by Lennon and McCartney. But Harrison was troubled by other matters. He had come to dislike intensely the idea of a live show – and as the time grew closer, his protests grew bolder. By then, the Roundhouse date had fallen through, and when Lindsay-Hogg suggested a bigger or more exotic setting, such as a show in a Roman amphitheater, Harrison was sickened. "It would be just our luck to get a load of cunts in there," he said.
The most dangerous tensions during January, though, passed between Harrison and Lennon. After being sidelined for years, Harrison now found that Yoko Ono sometimes had a voice in band matters that equaled or even bested his. Worse, though, Lennon and Ono were now practicing what was known as "heightened awareness" – based on a belief that verbal communication was unnecessary between people "tuned in" to larger truths. Its real effect, however, was to shut down any meaningful or helpful interactions. When crucial issues came up, Lennon would say nothing, deferring to whatever Ono thought – which drove his bandmates crazy. McCartney had developed an equanimity about it all. There were only two options, "to oppose Yoko and get the Beatles back to four or to put up with her." He opted for the latter, because he didn't want to lose John. In addition, he said, he felt he had no place in telling John to leave Yoko at home. It did, however, always rankle McCartney when Ono would refer to the Beatles without "the" – as in, "Beatles will do this, Beatles will do that." Paul tried to correct her – "Actually, it's the Beatles, luv" – to no avail.
Finally, Harrison reached a breaking point. Early in the afternoon of January 10th, Harrison and Lennon got into a fight that they had to later deny came to blows (though George Martin would tell Lennon biographer Philip Norman that the argument indeed became physical, but "was hushed up afterwards"). The moments of that confrontation are among the few that Lindsay-Hogg was unable to capture for posterity. He did, however, manage to film Harrison apparently quitting the Beatles. "I'm out of here," he said, packing up his guitar. "Put an ad in [the papers] and get a few people in. See you 'round the clubs."
McCartney and Starr seemed shocked, but Lennon was unruffled, launching into a version of the Who's "A Quick One, While He's Away," essentially mocking Harrison's anguish. Later that day, Ono took George's place, picked up a microphone and launched into a wordless blues, as the remaining Beatles joined in, not sure what else to do if they wanted to keep Lennon from bolting as well. (It is, in fact, a fairly remarkable performance.)
Later that afternoon, Lennon suggested recruiting Eric Clapton to replace Harrison: "The point is, George leaves, and do we want to carry on as the Beatles? I certainly do."
On Sunday, January 12th, all four Beatles met at Starr's house to try to resolve their differences, but when Ono persisted in speaking out on Lennon's behalf, Harrison walked out. The Beatles finally reached an accord days later, but Harrison imposed stiff terms: No more talk about any major live concerts, and no more work at Twickenham studios. Ono, however, would remain in attendance at all sessions, alongside John. "Yoko only wants to be accepted," Lennon said. "She wants to be one of us." When Starr replied, "She's not a Beatle, John, and she never will be," Lennon dug in his heels. "Yoko is part of me now. We're John and Yoko, we're together."
Almost two weeks after George's walkout, the Beatles resumed playing, this time in a studio in the basement of the Beatles' Apple headquarters on Savile Row. That same day, Harrison brought in organist Billy Preston, whom the Beatles had met in Hamburg, Germany, in 1962, and who later played with Sam Cooke and Ray Charles. Preston played on the remaining sessions, and his improvisational and professional skills brought a new and badly needed dignity to the final rehearsal days. Lennon found Preston so vitalizing that he wanted to add him immediately as a bona fide, permanent member of the group, a fifth Beatle. McCartney's response was adamant. "It's bad enough with four," he said.
Time was running out on the project. Starr was obliged to begin filming The Magic Christian within days, and it was plain by the end of January that there was no longer time to plan a concert anywhere. Still, the Beatles and Lindsay-Hogg wanted an ending for the film they had begun, and on January 29th, somebody – some say Ringo, others claim it was Paul or even Lindsay-Hogg – suggested staging a concert the next afternoon on the rooftop of Apple's offices. The following afternoon, waiting in the stairwell just below the roof, Harrison and Starr suddenly weren't sure they wanted to go through with the venture, but at the last instant, Lennon said, "Oh, fuck, let's do it," and he and the others, accompanied by Preston, stepped onto their makeshift stage, overlooking London's tailoring district. This was the Beatles' only concert-style performance since August 1966, and it would be their last. That it was also the finest of their live shows says much about the collective power of the musicianship and charisma that they had nurtured over the years, and that even mutual recriminations couldn't nullify. As they played for that near-hour in the bitter cold, triumphing by way of matchless instincts, Lennon and McCartney trading smiles at every keen or botched moment, their best truth became plain: The Beatles were a true kinship – a family with a shared history that spoke a language they would never forget. Those moments, though, weren't enough to redeem what was about to happen.
Reportedly, the earlier fight between Harrison and Lennon started with a remark Lennon had made in an early-January newspaper article, in which he said that if Apple kept losing money at its present rate, he – and therefore the Beatles – would be bankrupt by midyear. It was perhaps an overstatement, but Apple was in fact running out of control, and neither Harrison nor McCartney appreciated Lennon spreading that news.
As a result of all the artist signings, and the price of buying the Savile Row building plus paying high salaries to friends and executives, Apple's expenses soared. Like all the Beatles, McCartney was an Apple director, but in the company's crucial first year, he was the only one who took a daily interest in the business. (Harrison, always the first to sour on anything, told confidants he hated Apple and its "rooms full of lunatics… and all kinds of hangers-on.") In those first months, McCartney tried to curb the company's outlay, but he was met with the other Beatles' resistance; they had no real conception of economic realities, since they simply spent what they needed or desired, and had Apple pick up the bills. When Paul warned them of the financial problems, he was confronted with the view that worry over money matters was an outmoded mind-set. "It was like a traitorous utterance," he said. "It was a rather un-communist thing to do … and anything I said seemed to come out wrong." McCartney recalled trying to alert Lennon that he in particular was spending far too much. "I said, 'Look, John. I'm right.' And he said, 'You fucking would be, wouldn't you? You're always right, aren't you?'"
Matters finally hit a critical point when an accountant quit, leaving behind a blunt memo: "Your personal finances are in a mess." Both McCartney and Lennon now felt that Apple needed a firm hand – that perhaps it was time for the Beatles to acquire a new manager. They approached various financiers and consultants, and McCartney soon believed he had found the ideal solution close at hand: Linda Eastman's father, Lee, and her brother, John, were New York attorneys specializing in artist representation. McCartney believed that the Eastmans could manage Apple and save the band's fortunes, but the other Beatles were leery. All three felt that McCartney already exercised enough sway over the band's fate, and they did not want his potential in-laws also overseeing their business. John, in particular, thought he couldn't allow his partner such an upper hand.
For years, New York accountant Allen Klein had been looking for an entree with the Beatles. A brusque and tenacious man, Klein was known for uncovering lost royalties for music artists, and he had managed singer Sam Cooke before his death. More recently, he had been the business manager for such English acts as Herman's Hermits, Donovan and the Rolling Stones. However, Klein also had a reputation for questionable ethics and was under investigation by U.S. financial authorities. Even so, more than anything, he wanted the Beatles. He had once offered to help Brian Epstein make the band bigger fortunes, but Epstein had declined even to shake Klein's hand.
After reading Lennon's comments about the Beatles running the risk of going broke, Klein managed to inveigle a reluctant Peter Brown, a director of Apple, into arranging a formal introduction to Lennon. On January 28th, 1969, two days before the Beatles' Apple rooftop performance, Klein met Lennon and Ono at a London hotel, and charmed both. He knew the Beatles' music inside out – and he knew how to get on Lennon's good side: lauding Lennon's particular contributions to various songs, and vouchsafing to Lennon Ono's validity as an artist in her own right. Just as important, Klein convinced Lennon that they shared a similar sensibility – both were streetwise men who had made their own way in a hard world. By the evening's end, John and Yoko were won over: Lennon and Klein signed a letter of agreement, and Lennon informed EMI and the Beatles the next day. "I don't give a bugger who anybody else wants," Lennon said. "But I'm having Allen Klein for me."
This set off the conflagration that killed the Beatles. McCartney still tried to advance Lee and John Eastman to represent the group's interests, and arranged a meeting for all the central players. But Allen Klein turned the encounter into a trap, baiting Lee Eastman, accusing him essentially of being a secretive Jew (Eastman had abandoned the family surname Epstein years before), and Lennon joined in. finally, Eastman exploded in fury, calling Klein "a rodent." then he and McCartney left the meeting. "I wouldn't let [Eastman] near me," Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. "I wouldn't let a fuckin' animal like that near me who has a mind like that." The worse Klein behaved and the more that Eastman impugned his character, the more Lennon and Ono championed him as the Beatles' rescuer, and Harrison and Starr soon agreed. "Because we were all from Liverpool," Harrison said in the mid-1990s, "we favored people who were street people. Lee Eastman was more of a class-conscious type of person. As John was going with Klein, it was much easier if we went with him too." Though Mick Jagger, who no longer trusted Klein at all, tried to dissuade the Beatles – "Don't go near him," he wrote in a note to McCartney – it was no use.
This disagreement came at the worst possible time for the Beatles, when everything was happening too fast. In a matter of months, the Beatles lost their chance to commandeer Brian Epstein's former management firm, NEMS (costing them a fortune), and, more crucially, Lennon and McCartney lost the rights to Northern Songs, their music publisher. In the course of it all, McCartney married Linda Eastman on March 12th, 1969. and Lennon and Ono married on March 20th, in Gibraltar. In addition, on the same day as McCartney's wedding, Harrison and his wife, Pattie, were arrested for marijuana possession (Lennon and Ono had been arrested on a similar charge by the same police officer months before, and the disposition of that case affected Lennon's life for years). Klein had been of no benefit in any of the business debacles, despite his assurances, and yet Lennon, Harrison and Starr remained supportive of him.
On the evening of May 9th, 1969, at a recording session at Olympic Sound Studios, Allen Klein waited outside while Lennon, Harrison and Starr, at his behest, demanded that McCartney sign a three-year management deal with Klein immediately. McCartney wouldn't do it. He told the others that Klein's 20 percent fee was too high, but in truth he simply couldn't reconcile himself to the reality of Allen Klein as the Beatles' manager. The others grew furious, but McCartney held his ground. "The way I saw it, I had to save the Beatles' fortunes," he said. "They said, 'Oh, fuck off!' and they all stormed off, leaving me with the session at Olympic."
This was essentially a battle between Lennon and McCartney; these were men fated to prevail, and neither could afford to lose. McCartney eventually succumbed, though with a fine subterfuge: When the Beatles signed their contract with Klein, McCartney refused to put his signature on the document. Neither Klein nor the others believed this mattered – the Beatles had a majority-rule understanding. But in that moment of dissent, Paul McCartney pulled off the only brilliant maneuver that anybody accomplished during the Beatles' whole sorry endgame: By withholding his signature, McCartney would later convince a court that he was no longer contractually bound to remain with the Beatles and had never been bound to Klein.
By this time, McCartney had lost his heart for Apple, the company that had resulted largely from his vision. In fact, he now hated the place, and stopped visiting the Savile Row offices. When McCartney would try to reach Klein, the Beatles' nominal manager would sometimes refuse the call."Tell him to call back Monday," Klein told his receptionist.
Despite the travail of the "Get Back" sessions, the Beatles reconvened to make another album. Myth later had it that the Beatles knew they were ending and wanted to make a final record worthy of their reputation, but the truth is, no matter their troubles, the Beatles still liked the music they made together, even if they didn't like one another. They had already been recording intermittently since the January sessions, and had produced "The Ballad of John and Yoko" (with just Lennon and McCartney) and Harrison's "Old Brown Shoe" (with the full band). McCartney persuaded George Martin to return to the production helm and also brought back Geoff Emerick, under assurances that the Beatles would work on their best behavior. Lennon had to delay his arrival at the sessions after wrecking a car that he, Ono, Julian and Kyoko were riding in, on July 1st, 1969. When Lennon arrived at Abbey Road, he had a bed installed on the studio floor, so his wife could rest and offer commentary. None of the other Beatles dared protest. "The three of them were a little bit scared of him," recalled EMI engineer Phil McDonald. "John was a powerful figure, especially with Yoko – a double strength."
There were still disagreements, including Lennon barging into McCartney's house one day when Paul had missed a session, and in a shouting rage, breaking a painting he'd given McCartney. At another point, John wanted his and Paul's songs relegated to separate sides of the vinyl album. In the end, a compromise was reached – most of the stand-alone songs on one side, and the suite (known as "The Huge") on the other. Just as important, Harrison finally enjoyed some long-overdue prominence when his two contributions, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun," were recognized as among the best work the Beatles recorded during the summer of 1969. The resulting album, Abbey Road, provided a sweeping display of the band's mature strengths and a perspective on its history, whether the Beatles intended it that way or not. Lennon would later renounce Abbey Road as "something slick" that McCartney fashioned "to preserve the myth," but Lennon had the habit of not appreciating anybody's depths but his own. McCartney had been watching the Beatles come apart, and he was grieving over it. Talking about the closing segments of Abbey Road's suite with Barry Miles, in Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, McCartney said, "I'm generally quite upbeat but at certain times things get to me so much that I just can't be upbeat anymore and that was one of the times ... Carry that weight a long time: like forever! That's what I meant."
By the time Abbey Road was released on September 26th, the Beatles' fellowship had effectively ended. On September 13th, John Lennon and Yoko Ono performed at the Toronto Rock & Roll Revival, with a makeshift group that included Eric Clapton, and the experience convinced Lennon that he could no longer withstand the confines of his old band. A week later, during a meeting at Apple – with Klein, the Beatles and Ono in attendance – McCartney tried once more to persuade his bandmates to undertake a tour and return to the stage. "Let's get back to square one and remember what we're all about," he told them. Lennon responded, "I think you're daft. I wasn't going to tell you, but I'm breaking the group up. It feels good. It feels like a divorce."
The people in the room didn't know whether to be shocked or to take the claim as another show of bravado on Lennon's part. Nobody – including Ono – knew this would happen on this day. "Our jaws dropped," McCartney said. For once, McCartney and Klein were in agreement: They persuaded Lennon to hold off on any announcement for at least a couple of months. Klein had just finished a new deal that won the Beatles a substantial increase in royalty rates, and he didn't want to spook EMI with the knowledge that the band was breaking up. Plus, both Klein and McCartney believed that Lennon might reconsider; it wasn't uncommon for him to swing between extremes. But Ono knew better, and she was as unhappy as anybody else in that moment.
"We went off in the car," she later told Philip Norman, "and he turned to me and said, 'That's it with the Beatles. From now on, it's just you – OK?' I thought, 'My God, those three guys were the ones entertaining him for so long. Now I have to be the one to take the load.'"
Lennon would in fact send mixed signals in the months that followed. In comments to Rolling Stone and New Musical Express in early 1970, Lennon said the Beatles might record again and might play at a summer peace festival in Canada. Harrison, too, had been talking about a possible new Beatles tour. "It'll probably be a rebirth, you know, for all of us," Lennon said. But McCartney now felt shattered; the band – the life he had been a part of since he was 15 – had been cut off from him. "John's in love with Yoko," he told London's Evening Standard, "and he's no longer in love with the other three of us." Paul stayed at home with Linda, her daughter Heather, and their infant, Mary, and began drinking in evenings and mornings alike. He stopped writing music altogether, and his temper flared easily. He'd fallen into a paralyzing depression, until Linda could take no more. "Here I am ... married to a drunk who won't take a bath," she told a friend, according to Peter Carlin's Paul McCartney: A Life. "You don't have to take this crap," she finally told Paul. "You're a grown man." During Christmas week 1969, McCartney took his wife's advice and started work on his first album as an independent artist. He called Lennon in March 1970 and informed him that he too was now leaving the Beatles. "Good," his longtime partner replied. "That makes two of us who have accepted it mentally."
Any lingering chance of reconciliation was cut short by a series of blunders that Lennon, Klein and Harrison committed in the early months of 1970. By then, the January 1969 rehearsal and recording sessions had been edited, and Klein wanted an album to accompany the film, which was now called Let It Be, after a song by McCartney. (Though Abbey Road was recorded later than Let It Be, it had already been released in September 1969.) Glyn Johns had tried to assemble an album in 1969; Paul indicated he was OK with it, but John hated what he heard. Ironically, the results were too close to the rough-and-raw recording aesthetic that Lennon had originally insisted on, and by early 1970 Klein wanted something more commercially appealing. In March, Lennon turned over the January 1969 tapes – which he described as "the shittiest load of badly recorded shit with a lousy feeling to it ever" – to legendary "Wall of Sound" producer Phil Spector, who had produced Lennon's "Instant Karma!" single in January 1970. (Neither Klein nor Spector wanted George Martin involved. "I don't consider him in my league," Spector said. "He's an arranger, that's all.") The changes that Spector brought to Let It Be were, at best, for the worse, stifling both McCartney's title song and his heartfelt ballad, "The Long and Winding Road," with overlayers of orchestration. (Spector's modifications of "The Long and Winding Road" seemed so perverse at one point that Starr, who attended the overdubbing session, dragged the producer from the studio by the arm and reprimanded him.) During this time, Spector never consulted McCartney about the changes he was making, which may have been Klein and Lennon's intention. After finally hearing Spector's new mixes, McCartney requested changes, but Klein told him it was too late. (In late 2003, McCartney and Starr would issue a new version of Let It Be called Let It Be…Naked, free of Spector's arrangements and the jokey asides that Lennon had pushed for.)
The final affront came when Klein, Harrison and Lennon determined that McCartney couldn't release his debut solo album on April 17th, 1970, as originally planned, but had to push back the date to June 4th to allow room for Let It Be, which was now set for April 24th. When Lennon and Harrison sent Starr as an emissary to McCartney's home to deliver a letter to that effect, McCartney reacted with uncharacteristic vehemence; just as the argument might have turned physical, he tossed Ringo from his house. When Starr returned, he felt bad for what they were doing to Paul and asked that they let McCartney keep his album's original release date. Harrison and Lennon consented, pushing Let It Be to May, but they resented McCartney. The feeling had turned mutual. "We're all talking about peace and love," McCartney told a newspaper at the time, "but really we're not feeling peaceful at all." None of them, though, anticipated what McCartney ended up doing. "I couldn't just let John control the situation," he later said. In April, when Paul released his first solo work, McCartney, he also issued a self-interview, in which he made some matters plain:
Q: Did you miss the Beatles ?
A: No.
Q: Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles?
A: No.
Long before John Lennon told the world, "The dream is over," Paul McCartney had already delivered the news. Lennon took his partner's statement as an unacceptable usurpation. "I wanted to do it and I should have done it," Lennon said. "I was a fool not to do it, not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record." But the resentment went deeper than that. The Beatles had originally been John Lennon's band, and in his heart its fate depended on him. "I started the band, I disbanded it. It's as simple as that," he said. Lennon, it seemed, was upset that it was McCartney who had been seen as leaving him, and not the other way around. "I think it was just straightforward jealousy," Paul told Barry Miles. At the time, McCartney told a newspaper, "Ringo left first, then George, then John. I was the last to leave! It wasn't me!"
The end of the Beatles, however, had only entered a new and strange phase that would go on for years. McCartney wanted out of Apple altogether – he didn't want Allen Klein to have anything to say about his music or to share in his profits – but when he called Harrison, seeking consent to be released from his arrangement, George said, "You'll stay on the fucking label. Hare Krishna." McCartney wrote Lennon long letters, begging to leave the Beatles' organization, but Lennon fired back one- or two-line noncommittal replies. McCartney threatened to sue, and Klein laughed at him. On December 31st, 1970, McCartney sued to dissolve the Beatles. (Klein later admitted that he was caught completely off guard.) The other three Beatles were unified in their response to the court: There was no need to end the group – things weren't that bad, they could still make music together. The only problem was Paul and his domineering ways.
The judge decided that McCartney's request for dissolution was proper, and consigned the Beatles' considerable earnings to a receivership until the varying details of separation – the divorce that Lennon had wanted – could be worked out. In 1973, the remaining Beatles' contract with Klein ended, and they did not renew it; they had grown tired of him. Soon, Harrison, Lennon and Starr would sue their former manager (Lennon admitted to an interviewer that McCartney perhaps had been right all along about Klein), and in a separate, Apple-related matter, Klein would be sentenced to two months in a U.S. prison for fraud. When the Klein debacle was over, Harrison said he wouldn't mind re-forming the Beatles. When the time came for the Beatles to gather and sign the final dissolution to the old partnership, Lennon refused to appear. He was worried that the other Beatles would end up with more money than he would, and somebody close to him at the time said that he panicked, because this meant that the Beatles were truly over with. Maybe he had never really meant to disband the group after all.
Certainly, though, his caprices and rage had destroyed the band. In the same meeting in which he said he was leaving the Beatles, Lennon had also vented years worth of self-doubt and discontent, and placed it all at McCartney's feet. Paul, he felt, had always eclipsed him, taking more time to realize the sounds he wanted in the studio, winning more approval from George Martin for his easy melodicism. Plus, Paul had simply written too damn much, in John's estimation. By the time they got to the Magical Mystery Tour sessions, Lennon said, "You'd already have five or six songs, so I'd think, 'Fuck it, I can't keep up with that.' So I didn't bother, you know, and I thought, 'I don't really care whether I was on or not.' I convinced myself it didn't matter, and so for a period if you didn't invite me to be on an album personally, if you three didn't say, 'Write some more songs 'cause we like your work,' I wasn't going to fight." But, Lennon added, "There was no point in turning 'em out – I didn't have the energy to turn 'em out and get 'em on [an album] as well."
It was a remarkable confession. John Lennon – who until Abbey Road and Let It Be had written most of the Beatles' masterpieces and defined their greatest depths – could no longer bear to divide up his brilliance with Paul McCartney. The Beatles could withstand whatever tensions Yoko Ono brought them. They might have endured Allen Klein. But the Beatles could not survive John Lennon. His anxiety was simply too vast.
So the Beatles ended, never to gather again in the lifetimes of these men. Lennon, Harrison and Starr played together in various configurations over the years, though only rarely did they record with McCartney; once, when Eric Clapton married Harrison's former wife, Pattie Boyd, Paul, George and Ringo played live for a few impromptu minutes. Also, once, John and Paul played music together at somebody's Los Angeles studio in 1974, and Paul took a significant role in reuniting John and Yoko when they were separated during that same period. Lennon and McCartney, the most important songwriting team in history, repaired their friendship somewhat over the years, though they stayed distant and circumspect, and never wrote together again.
Lennon was murdered in 1980. McCartney, Harrison and Starr reunited again as the Beatles in the mid-1990s to play on some unfinished John Lennon tracks for The Beatles Anthology. Harrison died of lung cancer in 2001. Paul McCartney, with the help of Lee and John Eastman, went on to become the richest man in show business, and Linda McCartney died of breast cancer in 1998.
Does this feel like a love story? Does love lose all validity for how it ends? It might, of course, though endings don't easily erase history; rather, they seal it.
The story of the Beatles was always in some ways bigger than the Beatles, both the band and its individuals: It was the story of a time, of a generation reaching for new possibilities. It was the story of what happens when you reach those possibilities, and what happens when your best hopes come apart. Yes, it was a love story – and love is almost never a simple blessing. Because as much as the Beatles may have loved their communion, the world around them loved it even more. That was the love that, more than anything, exalted the Beatles but also hemmed them in with one another, and they could not withstand it. John Lennon, in particular, felt he had to break that love, and Paul McCartney hated to see it torn asunder. Once it was done, though, it was done. Everything it made – every wonder – still resonates, but the hearts that made it happen also unmade it, and never truly recovered from the experience. "It was all such a long time ago," George Harrison said years later. "Sometimes I ask myself if I was really there or whether it was all a dream."
Paul looked at his bandmates, his friends of many years – John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – and they looked back at him with no expression. Moments later he said, "There's only two choices: We're gonna do it or we're not gonna do it, and I want a decision. Because I'm not interested in spending my fucking days farting around here, while everyone makes up their mind whether they want to do it or not."
Paul waited, but he got no response. Again, the other Beatles just stared back.
It was far from the worst moment they would go through in those days. The Beatles in their death throes were one of the most mysterious and complicated end-of-romance tales of the 20th century, as well as the most dispiriting. The Beatles hadn't just made music – they had made their times, as surely as any political force, and more beneficently than most. Why, then, did the Beatles walk away? There were many who blamed the Beatles' end on the machinations of Yoko Ono, the legendary love of John Lennon's life, and on the deviousness of Allen Klein, the band's new manager who was also a favorite of Lennon's, but whom McCartney could not abide. But it wasn't that simple.
"I don't think you could have broken up four very strong people like them," Ono said later, "even if you tried. So there must have been something that happened within them – not an outside force at all." Indeed, the true causes were much closer at hand. They had been there for a long time, in a history as full of hurts as it was of transcendence.
These sessions, for what would become both the film and album Let It Be, had started from an inspired place, but there was too much going wrong by the time McCartney issued his plea. For the last year, the Beatles' partnership had been fraying. The long friendship of John and Paul, in particular, was undergoing volatile change. Lennon, the band's founder, had in some ways acquiesced leadership of the band; more important, he was beginning to feel he no longer wanted to be confined by the Beatles, whereas McCartney loved the group profoundly – it was what he lived for. These two men had been the band's central force – theirs was the richest songwriting collaboration in all of popular music – but at heart, the adventure of the Beatles was forged by John Lennon's temperament and needs: He had formed the band as a way to lessen his sense of anxiety and separation, after his mother, Julia, gave up custody of him to her sister, and his father walked out of his life altogether.
The 16-year-old Lennon first met the 15-year-old McCartney in the summer of 1957 while playing with his band the Quarry Men at a parish church near Liverpool, and was impressed with Paul's facility for playing the music of Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. Just as important, the two were also bonded by deep loss: McCartney's mother, Mary, died of breast cancer in October 1956, and Lennon's mother was killed when she was struck by a car in July 1958. Working together, John and Paul found a new mooring in the world. For a long time, they wrote songs together, trading melodic and lyrical ideas, and even after they began writing separately, each still counted on the other to help finish or improve a song. They were, however, men with strikingly different approaches to making music. McCartney was orderly and meticulous, and placed a high premium on craft; Lennon was unruly, less prone to lingering over a song, and despite his cocky front, less secure in his work than his writing partner. The contrasts grew even more stark as the years went on. McCartney increasingly composed everyman narratives and celebratory calls; Lennon was writing from what he saw as a more authentic and troubled personal viewpoint. "Paul said, 'Come and see the show,'" Lennon said later. "I said, 'I read the news today, oh boy.'"
Because Lennon and McCartney dominated the Beatles' songwriting and singing, they, in effect, led the band, though Lennon had always enjoyed an implicit seniority. Even so, the Beatles abided by a guiding policy of one-man, one-vote, which figured significantly when, in 1966, after years of touring, John, George and Ringo persuaded Paul that they should stop performing their music live. For about three months, all four went their separate ways, and as they did, John Lennon felt sharp apprehensions: "I was thinking, 'Well, this is the end, really. There's no more touring. That means there's going to be a blank space in the future…' That's when I really started considering life without the Beatles – what would it be? And that's when the seed was planted that I had to somehow get out of [the Beatles] without being thrown out by the others. But I could never step out of the palace because it was too frightening."
Shortly afterward, the band reassembled for its most eventful work, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band – but that was also when the Beatles' inner workings turned strangely complex, even subterranean. The album's concept had been McCartney's idea, and though Lennon was primarily responsible for Sgt. Pepper's best song, "A Day in the Life," he later said he saw his contributions to the album as veiled reflections of despair: "I was still in a real big depression in Pepper, and I know Paul wasn't at that time. He was feeling full of confidence… I was going through murder." In part, this is how Lennon worked – he either rose or sank by way of crises – but he was truly at a turning point. He believed himself trapped in a loveless and staid domestic life – loveless on his part, that is, because his wife, Cynthia, loved him deeply – and was feeling outdistanced by McCartney, who was an unconstrained and famous man living in London, attending the city's cutting-edge cultural events and exposing himself to a wide range of avant-garde music and arts. If Lennon didn't pursue that outer life, he certainly pursued an inner one, taking LSD frequently, to the point that some worried he was erasing his identity. George Harrison later said, "In a way, like psychiatry, acid could undo a lot – it was so powerful you could just see. But I think we didn't really realize the extent to which John was screwed up ."
In August 1967, leadership in and around the Beatles shifted more decidedly after their manager, Brian Epstein, was found dead in his London town house from an unintentional overdose of drugs. Epstein had been depressed for some time, but he'd remained utterly devoted to the band, and many of the group's insiders felt that it was Epstein who kept the Beatles grounded and protected. "I knew that we were in trouble then," Lennon later said. "I didn't really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music, and I was scared. I thought, 'We've fuckin' had it.'"
McCartney, though, didn't see it that way. Five days after Epstein's death, Paul convinced the others to undertake a film and music fantasia, Magical Mystery Tour. The band spent the late summer into early winter filming odd reveries and recording music to accompany those scenes, and while it was ostensibly a free-form collaborative project by all four Beatles, there was no mistaking that, in the end, Magical Mystery Tour had been primarily McCartney's invention. The film debuted on the BBC the day after Christmas in 1967, and the next day it was savaged by critics. ("Blatant rubbish," wrote London's Daily Express.) Lennon was reportedly somewhat pleased to see McCartney stumble for once.
In February 1968, the Beatles went to study Transcendental Meditation at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in Rishikesh, India. The sojourn was in part the result of Harrison's effort to gain more influence on the band's direction – he was the first among the Beatles to gain an interest in Indian music and philosophies – though at first all the Beatles felt the need to reappraise the purposes of their success. "I think we were all a bit exhausted, spiritually," McCartney said later. "We'd been the Beatles, which was marvelous … but I think generally there was a feeling of 'Yeah, well, it's great to be famous, it's great to be rich – but what's it all for?'" However, unease soon set in. When Harrison suspected that Lennon and McCartney might be using the retreat as a haven for songwriting, he grew displeased. "We're not here to talk music," he complained. "We're here to meditate!" Paul's reply was "Oh, yeah, all right, Georgie boy. Calm down, man." Ringo Starr and his wife, Maureen, left two weeks after arriving (Starr, who had stomach troubles, couldn't handle the Indian cuisine), and McCartney and his girlfriend, actress Jane Asher, followed two weeks later. McCartney found the setting too much like school. Harrison and Lennon stayed until Lennon realized he wasn't any closer to solving the troubles he felt in his heart: the need to renew both his marriage and his artistic purposes. After hearing a rumor that the Maharishi had made sexual advances toward a young woman at the ashram, Lennon became incensed, and demanded that he and Harrison leave immediately.
Something about the whole venture seemed to transform Lennon in ways that nobody readily understood; after that, according to insiders, he always seemed angry. The truth is, he was in great despair; all he had to save him was his art, and even that wasn't relief. "Although … I was meditating about eight hours a day," he later said, "I was writing the most miserable songs on Earth."
Back in London, Lennon soon abandoned Cynthia to begin a serious relationship and artistic collaboration with Yoko Ono, whom he'd met in November 1966. Though Ono has been characterized as an ambitious woman who pursued Lennon indomitably, she went through her own hurt and disappointment in the upheaval that followed, losing access to her daughter, Kyoko, and sidelining her promising art career at Lennon's behest. As she later said, "We sacrificed everything." The press and the fans treated her with derision: She was called "Jap," "Chink" and 'Yellow" in public, and Lennon sometimes had to shield her from physical harm.
All of this judgment certainly fed into Lennon's rage, but it paled in comparison to what developed when Lennon brought Ono directly into the Beatles' world. The group had rarely allowed guests into the studio, and never tolerated anyone other than producer George Martin or perhaps a recording engineer, such as Geoff Emerick, to offer input about a work in progress. (The one time Brian Epstein offered a suggestion during a recording session, John Lennon humiliated the manager in front of everybody.) But Lennon didn't bring Ono into the Beatles as a guest; he brought her in as a full-fledged collaborator. When the Beatles began work in May 1968 on their first new LP since Sgt. Pepper, Yoko sat with John on the studio floor; she conversed with him continually in a low voice, and accompanied him every time he left the room. The first time she spoke in the studio, offering John advice on a vocal, the room fell silent. Then Paul said, "Fuck me! Did somebody speak? Who the fuck was that? Did you say something, George? Your lips didn't move!"
Lennon wasn't somebody who would back off. "He wanted me to be part of the group," Ono later said. "He created the group, so he thought the others should accept that. I didn't particularly want to be part of them." Instead, Ono made her own recordings with Lennon, such as the notorious Two Virgins – an album of experimental electronic music that bore nude photos of the couple. If some found Lennon and Ono's collaborations indulgent or farcical, McCartney realized that Ono emboldened Lennon. "In fact, she wanted more," he said. "Do it more, do it double, be more daring, take all your clothes off. She always pushed him, which he liked. Nobody had ever pushed him like that." But McCartney probably also understood the true meaning of a record like Two Virgins: That John Lennon had an unstoppable will that, unchecked, could redeem or destroy his life, or could undo the Beatles. When the group learned that Lennon and Ono had started using heroin, the Beatles didn't know what to do about it. "This was a fairly big shocker for us," McCartney said, "because we all thought we were far-out boys, but we kind of understood that we'd never get quite that far-out."
Lennon's new partnership with Ono meant that he and McCartney would rarely collaborate as composers again. Even so, as the band began work on its only double album, The Beatles (better known as the White Album), the uncommon writing and singing skills of both men had never been stronger or more diverse. In contrast to what he viewed as his own sporadic and inconsistent work during 1967, Lennon was now writing at full force, his creativity apparently revivified by the relationship with Ono. (Such songs as "Dear Prudence," "Julia," "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" and "Revolution" were clearly among his best work.) Harrison, too, had flowered – even Ringo was writing songs – but none of these men was now willing to allow the others to overshadow or direct his work. They had so much material to record, and so much distaste for each other, that they were recording in three studios, sometimes 12 hours a day. Each of the Beatles treated the others as his supporting musicians – which made for some spectacular performances and some explosive studio moments: Lennon storming out on the tedium of recording McCartney's "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da"; Ringo quitting the group for almost two weeks after Paul berated his drumming on "Back in the U.S.S.R."; Harrison bringing in his friend, guitarist Eric Clapton, just to win rightful consideration for "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"; McCartney, in a shocking display, telling off George Martin in front of the band; and Geoff Emerick finally walking out, quitting his work with the Beatles over their turbulent and nasty behavior. When it was finished, The Beatles was regarded as a disjointed masterpiece, the sound of a band in top form that nonetheless no longer had hope. In later years, McCartney would refer to it as "the Tension Album."
In the meantime, the Beatles pushed ahead with launching their new record label, Apple. In truth, Apple had started as an investment shelter, but it quickly became something else. Many other things, in fact: an umbrella corporation with film, electronics, real estate, educational, publishing and music divisions – and, most interestingly, an experiment in socialism. "We're in the happy position of not needing any more money," McCartney said in May 1968, "so for the first time the bosses aren't in it for a profit… a kind of Western communism." In practice, the company's chief directive became to cultivate new talent. Apple indeed discovered or helped to develop some worthy music artists – includingJames Taylor, Badfinger, Mary Hopkin, Jackie Lomax, Billy Preston and Doris Troy (the label also considered signing the Rolling Stones, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Chicago, Queen, and Delaney and Bonnie), but since the Beatles themselves weren't truly Apple artists, the label didn't reap the full benefits of their income. They set August 11th, 1968, as the debut of Apple Records, with four singles to be released that day, including Mary Hopkin's "Those Were the Days" and the Beatles' own "Hey Jude." McCartney had written "Hey Jude" as a paean to Lennon's son, Julian, as his parents divorced, but it took on other meanings as well. McCartney had recently separated from his girlfriend of several years, Jane Asher, after she caught him with another woman, and he was now entering a serious relationship with photographer Linda Eastman, whom he had known since 1967; for Paul, the song came to stand as an anthem of faith in love, of taking risks. When Lennon heard "Hey Jude," though, he received it as a benediction from his songwriting partner: "The words 'go out and get her' – subconsciously – [Paul] was saying, 'Go ahead, leave me.' On a conscious level, he didn't want me to go ahead," he told Playboy near the end of his life. "The angel in him was saying, 'Bless you.' The devil in him didn't like it at all, because he didn't want to lose his partner." Then, the Beatles played "Hey Jude" on David Frost's television show in early September 1968 – their first performance before an audience in more than two years. As the audience joined in on the extended singalong ending, "Hey Jude" became an expression of something bigger, of the sort of possibilities of community that the band, at its best, signified to the world outside.
Inspired by that moment, the Beatles realized they had a hunger to play before a live audience again – Lennon especially seemed excited about the prospects – and they arranged for a January date at London's Roundhouse, the site of several of the city's famous underground rock & roll extravaganzas in the summer of 1967. They also decided to film the concert's rehearsals for TV broadcast, and they invited Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who had made promos for "Rain" and "Paperback Writer" with the band years before, to direct the filming.
There was something else at work in the idea as well: The Beatles saw this as an opportunity to discard the image that they had epitomized in Sgt.Pepper (Lennon had been looking for a way to disavow the album ever since its success, seeing Pepper as an empty show masterminded by McCartney). This new music would herald their return to the simpler formations that had inspired their love of rock & roll in the first place, back in the 1950s.
The new music being made by Bob Dylan's sometime backing group, the Band, had special bearing on what the Beatles were now after. Harrison had recently spent time with the group and with Dylan in Woodstock, New York, and he came back smitten by the collective spontaneous spirit they achieved in the recordings known as The Basement Tapes. Seeking that sort of feeling, Lennon told George Martin, "I don't want any of your production shit. We want this to be an honest album ... I don't want any editing …overdubbing. We just record the song and that's it." Years later, Lennon's implicit repudiation still stung Martin. "I assumed all their albums had been honest," Martin commented in The Beatles, by Bob Spitz. McCartney brought in a second producer, Glyn Johns, which proved something of a relief to Martin: To get the "inartificial" performances the Beatles were now after would require endless rehearsals for an acceptable single-take recording, and Martin found it so tedious that he rarely attended these rehearsals.
From the outset, problems plagued the project. Because the Beatles intended to film the rehearsal sessions, which became known as the "Get Back" sessions after the original title of the album that was finally released as Let It Be, they set up at Twickenham Film Studios, which meant conforming to union filming hours, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. – hardly the Beatles' hours. None of this would have been so bad if they had retained enthusiasm for the idea, but by the morning of January 2nd, 1969, when rehearsals began, nobody but McCartney seemed to remember why they were there. Though the sessions would be uncommonly productive in one sense – the Beatles played 52 original songs in that month of January 1969, several of which would soon make up Abbey Road and would also appear as some of the best material on the group members' early solo albums – all the bad feelings that had been festering for some time would come to the fore. McCartney tried to keep the others on track, but it was a thankless task. The others found his cajoling noxious and condescending. To them, it had become another Paul McCartney affair, with him telling everybody what notes and tempo to play, even telling the film director how to direct. "Paul would want us to work all the time," Ringo said, "because he was the workaholic." George Martin felt McCartney had little other choice. "Paul would be rather overbossy, which the other boys would dislike," he said. "But it was the only way of getting together ... It was just a general disintegration."
There is a famous scene in the Let It Be film in which McCartney worries that his musical guidelines are irritating Harrison too much, and Harrison replies that he'll play whatever Paul wants from him, even if it means playing nothing. "You're not annoying me anymore," Harrison says, with palpable annoyance. The scene has been taken to represent the crux of the sessions' problem: that McCartney was pushy and insensitive, and that Harrison got fed up with it all. To be sure, Harrison had legitimate grievances. He had long been relegated to the role of sideman by Lennon and McCartney. But Harrison was troubled by other matters. He had come to dislike intensely the idea of a live show – and as the time grew closer, his protests grew bolder. By then, the Roundhouse date had fallen through, and when Lindsay-Hogg suggested a bigger or more exotic setting, such as a show in a Roman amphitheater, Harrison was sickened. "It would be just our luck to get a load of cunts in there," he said.
The most dangerous tensions during January, though, passed between Harrison and Lennon. After being sidelined for years, Harrison now found that Yoko Ono sometimes had a voice in band matters that equaled or even bested his. Worse, though, Lennon and Ono were now practicing what was known as "heightened awareness" – based on a belief that verbal communication was unnecessary between people "tuned in" to larger truths. Its real effect, however, was to shut down any meaningful or helpful interactions. When crucial issues came up, Lennon would say nothing, deferring to whatever Ono thought – which drove his bandmates crazy. McCartney had developed an equanimity about it all. There were only two options, "to oppose Yoko and get the Beatles back to four or to put up with her." He opted for the latter, because he didn't want to lose John. In addition, he said, he felt he had no place in telling John to leave Yoko at home. It did, however, always rankle McCartney when Ono would refer to the Beatles without "the" – as in, "Beatles will do this, Beatles will do that." Paul tried to correct her – "Actually, it's the Beatles, luv" – to no avail.
Finally, Harrison reached a breaking point. Early in the afternoon of January 10th, Harrison and Lennon got into a fight that they had to later deny came to blows (though George Martin would tell Lennon biographer Philip Norman that the argument indeed became physical, but "was hushed up afterwards"). The moments of that confrontation are among the few that Lindsay-Hogg was unable to capture for posterity. He did, however, manage to film Harrison apparently quitting the Beatles. "I'm out of here," he said, packing up his guitar. "Put an ad in [the papers] and get a few people in. See you 'round the clubs."
McCartney and Starr seemed shocked, but Lennon was unruffled, launching into a version of the Who's "A Quick One, While He's Away," essentially mocking Harrison's anguish. Later that day, Ono took George's place, picked up a microphone and launched into a wordless blues, as the remaining Beatles joined in, not sure what else to do if they wanted to keep Lennon from bolting as well. (It is, in fact, a fairly remarkable performance.)
Later that afternoon, Lennon suggested recruiting Eric Clapton to replace Harrison: "The point is, George leaves, and do we want to carry on as the Beatles? I certainly do."
On Sunday, January 12th, all four Beatles met at Starr's house to try to resolve their differences, but when Ono persisted in speaking out on Lennon's behalf, Harrison walked out. The Beatles finally reached an accord days later, but Harrison imposed stiff terms: No more talk about any major live concerts, and no more work at Twickenham studios. Ono, however, would remain in attendance at all sessions, alongside John. "Yoko only wants to be accepted," Lennon said. "She wants to be one of us." When Starr replied, "She's not a Beatle, John, and she never will be," Lennon dug in his heels. "Yoko is part of me now. We're John and Yoko, we're together."
Almost two weeks after George's walkout, the Beatles resumed playing, this time in a studio in the basement of the Beatles' Apple headquarters on Savile Row. That same day, Harrison brought in organist Billy Preston, whom the Beatles had met in Hamburg, Germany, in 1962, and who later played with Sam Cooke and Ray Charles. Preston played on the remaining sessions, and his improvisational and professional skills brought a new and badly needed dignity to the final rehearsal days. Lennon found Preston so vitalizing that he wanted to add him immediately as a bona fide, permanent member of the group, a fifth Beatle. McCartney's response was adamant. "It's bad enough with four," he said.
Time was running out on the project. Starr was obliged to begin filming The Magic Christian within days, and it was plain by the end of January that there was no longer time to plan a concert anywhere. Still, the Beatles and Lindsay-Hogg wanted an ending for the film they had begun, and on January 29th, somebody – some say Ringo, others claim it was Paul or even Lindsay-Hogg – suggested staging a concert the next afternoon on the rooftop of Apple's offices. The following afternoon, waiting in the stairwell just below the roof, Harrison and Starr suddenly weren't sure they wanted to go through with the venture, but at the last instant, Lennon said, "Oh, fuck, let's do it," and he and the others, accompanied by Preston, stepped onto their makeshift stage, overlooking London's tailoring district. This was the Beatles' only concert-style performance since August 1966, and it would be their last. That it was also the finest of their live shows says much about the collective power of the musicianship and charisma that they had nurtured over the years, and that even mutual recriminations couldn't nullify. As they played for that near-hour in the bitter cold, triumphing by way of matchless instincts, Lennon and McCartney trading smiles at every keen or botched moment, their best truth became plain: The Beatles were a true kinship – a family with a shared history that spoke a language they would never forget. Those moments, though, weren't enough to redeem what was about to happen.
Reportedly, the earlier fight between Harrison and Lennon started with a remark Lennon had made in an early-January newspaper article, in which he said that if Apple kept losing money at its present rate, he – and therefore the Beatles – would be bankrupt by midyear. It was perhaps an overstatement, but Apple was in fact running out of control, and neither Harrison nor McCartney appreciated Lennon spreading that news.
As a result of all the artist signings, and the price of buying the Savile Row building plus paying high salaries to friends and executives, Apple's expenses soared. Like all the Beatles, McCartney was an Apple director, but in the company's crucial first year, he was the only one who took a daily interest in the business. (Harrison, always the first to sour on anything, told confidants he hated Apple and its "rooms full of lunatics… and all kinds of hangers-on.") In those first months, McCartney tried to curb the company's outlay, but he was met with the other Beatles' resistance; they had no real conception of economic realities, since they simply spent what they needed or desired, and had Apple pick up the bills. When Paul warned them of the financial problems, he was confronted with the view that worry over money matters was an outmoded mind-set. "It was like a traitorous utterance," he said. "It was a rather un-communist thing to do … and anything I said seemed to come out wrong." McCartney recalled trying to alert Lennon that he in particular was spending far too much. "I said, 'Look, John. I'm right.' And he said, 'You fucking would be, wouldn't you? You're always right, aren't you?'"
Matters finally hit a critical point when an accountant quit, leaving behind a blunt memo: "Your personal finances are in a mess." Both McCartney and Lennon now felt that Apple needed a firm hand – that perhaps it was time for the Beatles to acquire a new manager. They approached various financiers and consultants, and McCartney soon believed he had found the ideal solution close at hand: Linda Eastman's father, Lee, and her brother, John, were New York attorneys specializing in artist representation. McCartney believed that the Eastmans could manage Apple and save the band's fortunes, but the other Beatles were leery. All three felt that McCartney already exercised enough sway over the band's fate, and they did not want his potential in-laws also overseeing their business. John, in particular, thought he couldn't allow his partner such an upper hand.
For years, New York accountant Allen Klein had been looking for an entree with the Beatles. A brusque and tenacious man, Klein was known for uncovering lost royalties for music artists, and he had managed singer Sam Cooke before his death. More recently, he had been the business manager for such English acts as Herman's Hermits, Donovan and the Rolling Stones. However, Klein also had a reputation for questionable ethics and was under investigation by U.S. financial authorities. Even so, more than anything, he wanted the Beatles. He had once offered to help Brian Epstein make the band bigger fortunes, but Epstein had declined even to shake Klein's hand.
After reading Lennon's comments about the Beatles running the risk of going broke, Klein managed to inveigle a reluctant Peter Brown, a director of Apple, into arranging a formal introduction to Lennon. On January 28th, 1969, two days before the Beatles' Apple rooftop performance, Klein met Lennon and Ono at a London hotel, and charmed both. He knew the Beatles' music inside out – and he knew how to get on Lennon's good side: lauding Lennon's particular contributions to various songs, and vouchsafing to Lennon Ono's validity as an artist in her own right. Just as important, Klein convinced Lennon that they shared a similar sensibility – both were streetwise men who had made their own way in a hard world. By the evening's end, John and Yoko were won over: Lennon and Klein signed a letter of agreement, and Lennon informed EMI and the Beatles the next day. "I don't give a bugger who anybody else wants," Lennon said. "But I'm having Allen Klein for me."
This set off the conflagration that killed the Beatles. McCartney still tried to advance Lee and John Eastman to represent the group's interests, and arranged a meeting for all the central players. But Allen Klein turned the encounter into a trap, baiting Lee Eastman, accusing him essentially of being a secretive Jew (Eastman had abandoned the family surname Epstein years before), and Lennon joined in. finally, Eastman exploded in fury, calling Klein "a rodent." then he and McCartney left the meeting. "I wouldn't let [Eastman] near me," Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. "I wouldn't let a fuckin' animal like that near me who has a mind like that." The worse Klein behaved and the more that Eastman impugned his character, the more Lennon and Ono championed him as the Beatles' rescuer, and Harrison and Starr soon agreed. "Because we were all from Liverpool," Harrison said in the mid-1990s, "we favored people who were street people. Lee Eastman was more of a class-conscious type of person. As John was going with Klein, it was much easier if we went with him too." Though Mick Jagger, who no longer trusted Klein at all, tried to dissuade the Beatles – "Don't go near him," he wrote in a note to McCartney – it was no use.
This disagreement came at the worst possible time for the Beatles, when everything was happening too fast. In a matter of months, the Beatles lost their chance to commandeer Brian Epstein's former management firm, NEMS (costing them a fortune), and, more crucially, Lennon and McCartney lost the rights to Northern Songs, their music publisher. In the course of it all, McCartney married Linda Eastman on March 12th, 1969. and Lennon and Ono married on March 20th, in Gibraltar. In addition, on the same day as McCartney's wedding, Harrison and his wife, Pattie, were arrested for marijuana possession (Lennon and Ono had been arrested on a similar charge by the same police officer months before, and the disposition of that case affected Lennon's life for years). Klein had been of no benefit in any of the business debacles, despite his assurances, and yet Lennon, Harrison and Starr remained supportive of him.
On the evening of May 9th, 1969, at a recording session at Olympic Sound Studios, Allen Klein waited outside while Lennon, Harrison and Starr, at his behest, demanded that McCartney sign a three-year management deal with Klein immediately. McCartney wouldn't do it. He told the others that Klein's 20 percent fee was too high, but in truth he simply couldn't reconcile himself to the reality of Allen Klein as the Beatles' manager. The others grew furious, but McCartney held his ground. "The way I saw it, I had to save the Beatles' fortunes," he said. "They said, 'Oh, fuck off!' and they all stormed off, leaving me with the session at Olympic."
This was essentially a battle between Lennon and McCartney; these were men fated to prevail, and neither could afford to lose. McCartney eventually succumbed, though with a fine subterfuge: When the Beatles signed their contract with Klein, McCartney refused to put his signature on the document. Neither Klein nor the others believed this mattered – the Beatles had a majority-rule understanding. But in that moment of dissent, Paul McCartney pulled off the only brilliant maneuver that anybody accomplished during the Beatles' whole sorry endgame: By withholding his signature, McCartney would later convince a court that he was no longer contractually bound to remain with the Beatles and had never been bound to Klein.
By this time, McCartney had lost his heart for Apple, the company that had resulted largely from his vision. In fact, he now hated the place, and stopped visiting the Savile Row offices. When McCartney would try to reach Klein, the Beatles' nominal manager would sometimes refuse the call."Tell him to call back Monday," Klein told his receptionist.
Despite the travail of the "Get Back" sessions, the Beatles reconvened to make another album. Myth later had it that the Beatles knew they were ending and wanted to make a final record worthy of their reputation, but the truth is, no matter their troubles, the Beatles still liked the music they made together, even if they didn't like one another. They had already been recording intermittently since the January sessions, and had produced "The Ballad of John and Yoko" (with just Lennon and McCartney) and Harrison's "Old Brown Shoe" (with the full band). McCartney persuaded George Martin to return to the production helm and also brought back Geoff Emerick, under assurances that the Beatles would work on their best behavior. Lennon had to delay his arrival at the sessions after wrecking a car that he, Ono, Julian and Kyoko were riding in, on July 1st, 1969. When Lennon arrived at Abbey Road, he had a bed installed on the studio floor, so his wife could rest and offer commentary. None of the other Beatles dared protest. "The three of them were a little bit scared of him," recalled EMI engineer Phil McDonald. "John was a powerful figure, especially with Yoko – a double strength."
There were still disagreements, including Lennon barging into McCartney's house one day when Paul had missed a session, and in a shouting rage, breaking a painting he'd given McCartney. At another point, John wanted his and Paul's songs relegated to separate sides of the vinyl album. In the end, a compromise was reached – most of the stand-alone songs on one side, and the suite (known as "The Huge") on the other. Just as important, Harrison finally enjoyed some long-overdue prominence when his two contributions, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun," were recognized as among the best work the Beatles recorded during the summer of 1969. The resulting album, Abbey Road, provided a sweeping display of the band's mature strengths and a perspective on its history, whether the Beatles intended it that way or not. Lennon would later renounce Abbey Road as "something slick" that McCartney fashioned "to preserve the myth," but Lennon had the habit of not appreciating anybody's depths but his own. McCartney had been watching the Beatles come apart, and he was grieving over it. Talking about the closing segments of Abbey Road's suite with Barry Miles, in Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, McCartney said, "I'm generally quite upbeat but at certain times things get to me so much that I just can't be upbeat anymore and that was one of the times ... Carry that weight a long time: like forever! That's what I meant."
By the time Abbey Road was released on September 26th, the Beatles' fellowship had effectively ended. On September 13th, John Lennon and Yoko Ono performed at the Toronto Rock & Roll Revival, with a makeshift group that included Eric Clapton, and the experience convinced Lennon that he could no longer withstand the confines of his old band. A week later, during a meeting at Apple – with Klein, the Beatles and Ono in attendance – McCartney tried once more to persuade his bandmates to undertake a tour and return to the stage. "Let's get back to square one and remember what we're all about," he told them. Lennon responded, "I think you're daft. I wasn't going to tell you, but I'm breaking the group up. It feels good. It feels like a divorce."
The people in the room didn't know whether to be shocked or to take the claim as another show of bravado on Lennon's part. Nobody – including Ono – knew this would happen on this day. "Our jaws dropped," McCartney said. For once, McCartney and Klein were in agreement: They persuaded Lennon to hold off on any announcement for at least a couple of months. Klein had just finished a new deal that won the Beatles a substantial increase in royalty rates, and he didn't want to spook EMI with the knowledge that the band was breaking up. Plus, both Klein and McCartney believed that Lennon might reconsider; it wasn't uncommon for him to swing between extremes. But Ono knew better, and she was as unhappy as anybody else in that moment.
"We went off in the car," she later told Philip Norman, "and he turned to me and said, 'That's it with the Beatles. From now on, it's just you – OK?' I thought, 'My God, those three guys were the ones entertaining him for so long. Now I have to be the one to take the load.'"
Lennon would in fact send mixed signals in the months that followed. In comments to Rolling Stone and New Musical Express in early 1970, Lennon said the Beatles might record again and might play at a summer peace festival in Canada. Harrison, too, had been talking about a possible new Beatles tour. "It'll probably be a rebirth, you know, for all of us," Lennon said. But McCartney now felt shattered; the band – the life he had been a part of since he was 15 – had been cut off from him. "John's in love with Yoko," he told London's Evening Standard, "and he's no longer in love with the other three of us." Paul stayed at home with Linda, her daughter Heather, and their infant, Mary, and began drinking in evenings and mornings alike. He stopped writing music altogether, and his temper flared easily. He'd fallen into a paralyzing depression, until Linda could take no more. "Here I am ... married to a drunk who won't take a bath," she told a friend, according to Peter Carlin's Paul McCartney: A Life. "You don't have to take this crap," she finally told Paul. "You're a grown man." During Christmas week 1969, McCartney took his wife's advice and started work on his first album as an independent artist. He called Lennon in March 1970 and informed him that he too was now leaving the Beatles. "Good," his longtime partner replied. "That makes two of us who have accepted it mentally."
Any lingering chance of reconciliation was cut short by a series of blunders that Lennon, Klein and Harrison committed in the early months of 1970. By then, the January 1969 rehearsal and recording sessions had been edited, and Klein wanted an album to accompany the film, which was now called Let It Be, after a song by McCartney. (Though Abbey Road was recorded later than Let It Be, it had already been released in September 1969.) Glyn Johns had tried to assemble an album in 1969; Paul indicated he was OK with it, but John hated what he heard. Ironically, the results were too close to the rough-and-raw recording aesthetic that Lennon had originally insisted on, and by early 1970 Klein wanted something more commercially appealing. In March, Lennon turned over the January 1969 tapes – which he described as "the shittiest load of badly recorded shit with a lousy feeling to it ever" – to legendary "Wall of Sound" producer Phil Spector, who had produced Lennon's "Instant Karma!" single in January 1970. (Neither Klein nor Spector wanted George Martin involved. "I don't consider him in my league," Spector said. "He's an arranger, that's all.") The changes that Spector brought to Let It Be were, at best, for the worse, stifling both McCartney's title song and his heartfelt ballad, "The Long and Winding Road," with overlayers of orchestration. (Spector's modifications of "The Long and Winding Road" seemed so perverse at one point that Starr, who attended the overdubbing session, dragged the producer from the studio by the arm and reprimanded him.) During this time, Spector never consulted McCartney about the changes he was making, which may have been Klein and Lennon's intention. After finally hearing Spector's new mixes, McCartney requested changes, but Klein told him it was too late. (In late 2003, McCartney and Starr would issue a new version of Let It Be called Let It Be…Naked, free of Spector's arrangements and the jokey asides that Lennon had pushed for.)
The final affront came when Klein, Harrison and Lennon determined that McCartney couldn't release his debut solo album on April 17th, 1970, as originally planned, but had to push back the date to June 4th to allow room for Let It Be, which was now set for April 24th. When Lennon and Harrison sent Starr as an emissary to McCartney's home to deliver a letter to that effect, McCartney reacted with uncharacteristic vehemence; just as the argument might have turned physical, he tossed Ringo from his house. When Starr returned, he felt bad for what they were doing to Paul and asked that they let McCartney keep his album's original release date. Harrison and Lennon consented, pushing Let It Be to May, but they resented McCartney. The feeling had turned mutual. "We're all talking about peace and love," McCartney told a newspaper at the time, "but really we're not feeling peaceful at all." None of them, though, anticipated what McCartney ended up doing. "I couldn't just let John control the situation," he later said. In April, when Paul released his first solo work, McCartney, he also issued a self-interview, in which he made some matters plain:
Q: Did you miss the Beatles ?
A: No.
Q: Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles?
A: No.
Long before John Lennon told the world, "The dream is over," Paul McCartney had already delivered the news. Lennon took his partner's statement as an unacceptable usurpation. "I wanted to do it and I should have done it," Lennon said. "I was a fool not to do it, not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record." But the resentment went deeper than that. The Beatles had originally been John Lennon's band, and in his heart its fate depended on him. "I started the band, I disbanded it. It's as simple as that," he said. Lennon, it seemed, was upset that it was McCartney who had been seen as leaving him, and not the other way around. "I think it was just straightforward jealousy," Paul told Barry Miles. At the time, McCartney told a newspaper, "Ringo left first, then George, then John. I was the last to leave! It wasn't me!"
The end of the Beatles, however, had only entered a new and strange phase that would go on for years. McCartney wanted out of Apple altogether – he didn't want Allen Klein to have anything to say about his music or to share in his profits – but when he called Harrison, seeking consent to be released from his arrangement, George said, "You'll stay on the fucking label. Hare Krishna." McCartney wrote Lennon long letters, begging to leave the Beatles' organization, but Lennon fired back one- or two-line noncommittal replies. McCartney threatened to sue, and Klein laughed at him. On December 31st, 1970, McCartney sued to dissolve the Beatles. (Klein later admitted that he was caught completely off guard.) The other three Beatles were unified in their response to the court: There was no need to end the group – things weren't that bad, they could still make music together. The only problem was Paul and his domineering ways.
The judge decided that McCartney's request for dissolution was proper, and consigned the Beatles' considerable earnings to a receivership until the varying details of separation – the divorce that Lennon had wanted – could be worked out. In 1973, the remaining Beatles' contract with Klein ended, and they did not renew it; they had grown tired of him. Soon, Harrison, Lennon and Starr would sue their former manager (Lennon admitted to an interviewer that McCartney perhaps had been right all along about Klein), and in a separate, Apple-related matter, Klein would be sentenced to two months in a U.S. prison for fraud. When the Klein debacle was over, Harrison said he wouldn't mind re-forming the Beatles. When the time came for the Beatles to gather and sign the final dissolution to the old partnership, Lennon refused to appear. He was worried that the other Beatles would end up with more money than he would, and somebody close to him at the time said that he panicked, because this meant that the Beatles were truly over with. Maybe he had never really meant to disband the group after all.
Certainly, though, his caprices and rage had destroyed the band. In the same meeting in which he said he was leaving the Beatles, Lennon had also vented years worth of self-doubt and discontent, and placed it all at McCartney's feet. Paul, he felt, had always eclipsed him, taking more time to realize the sounds he wanted in the studio, winning more approval from George Martin for his easy melodicism. Plus, Paul had simply written too damn much, in John's estimation. By the time they got to the Magical Mystery Tour sessions, Lennon said, "You'd already have five or six songs, so I'd think, 'Fuck it, I can't keep up with that.' So I didn't bother, you know, and I thought, 'I don't really care whether I was on or not.' I convinced myself it didn't matter, and so for a period if you didn't invite me to be on an album personally, if you three didn't say, 'Write some more songs 'cause we like your work,' I wasn't going to fight." But, Lennon added, "There was no point in turning 'em out – I didn't have the energy to turn 'em out and get 'em on [an album] as well."
It was a remarkable confession. John Lennon – who until Abbey Road and Let It Be had written most of the Beatles' masterpieces and defined their greatest depths – could no longer bear to divide up his brilliance with Paul McCartney. The Beatles could withstand whatever tensions Yoko Ono brought them. They might have endured Allen Klein. But the Beatles could not survive John Lennon. His anxiety was simply too vast.
So the Beatles ended, never to gather again in the lifetimes of these men. Lennon, Harrison and Starr played together in various configurations over the years, though only rarely did they record with McCartney; once, when Eric Clapton married Harrison's former wife, Pattie Boyd, Paul, George and Ringo played live for a few impromptu minutes. Also, once, John and Paul played music together at somebody's Los Angeles studio in 1974, and Paul took a significant role in reuniting John and Yoko when they were separated during that same period. Lennon and McCartney, the most important songwriting team in history, repaired their friendship somewhat over the years, though they stayed distant and circumspect, and never wrote together again.
Lennon was murdered in 1980. McCartney, Harrison and Starr reunited again as the Beatles in the mid-1990s to play on some unfinished John Lennon tracks for The Beatles Anthology. Harrison died of lung cancer in 2001. Paul McCartney, with the help of Lee and John Eastman, went on to become the richest man in show business, and Linda McCartney died of breast cancer in 1998.
Does this feel like a love story? Does love lose all validity for how it ends? It might, of course, though endings don't easily erase history; rather, they seal it.
The story of the Beatles was always in some ways bigger than the Beatles, both the band and its individuals: It was the story of a time, of a generation reaching for new possibilities. It was the story of what happens when you reach those possibilities, and what happens when your best hopes come apart. Yes, it was a love story – and love is almost never a simple blessing. Because as much as the Beatles may have loved their communion, the world around them loved it even more. That was the love that, more than anything, exalted the Beatles but also hemmed them in with one another, and they could not withstand it. John Lennon, in particular, felt he had to break that love, and Paul McCartney hated to see it torn asunder. Once it was done, though, it was done. Everything it made – every wonder – still resonates, but the hearts that made it happen also unmade it, and never truly recovered from the experience. "It was all such a long time ago," George Harrison said years later. "Sometimes I ask myself if I was really there or whether it was all a dream."
From the Washington Post
There are no bad Beatles albums, unless you count the concoctions like “Something New” or “Beatles VI” that were thrown together for the American market during the height of Beatlemania. To the bitter end, the Beatles produced great music (and, yes, I’m mentally blocking out a lot of weak songs and outright abominations — you know, “Mr. Moonlight” and so on). By breaking up in 1970, not long after completing “Abbey Road,” they left us wanting more. They generated a decade’s worth of fantasies about a Beatles reunion, until a gunman in New York City rendered that impossible.
The break-up spared us from listening to albums that were unlikely to be as good as their best work. We would have heard the erosion of their genius — because that is what happens with musical prodigies, as a general rule, and because they’d been diverging in their musical interests and instincts for several years already.
No one should bemoan the breakup of the Beatles. They had no choice. They had to break up because no one hangs out forever with his or her teenage pals. They’d been together since they were young teenagers. Look it up: John Lennon was 16 when he asked Paul McCartney to join his new band in the summer of 1957. Paul had just turned 15. George Harrison was 15 when he joined.
The Beatles “invaded” America in February 1964, and as we remember and celebrate the arrival of Beatlemania and their first performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” let’s just remember that they’d already been hacking away at this rock-and-roll stuff for nearly seven years. They’d performed a thousand times in clubs in England and Germany before anyone had heard of them. There is no better example of the virtues of hard work. John Lennon vowed that his band would be bigger than Elvis — and he said that in 1962, before the faintest shimmy of Beatlemania.
Malcolm Gladwell uses the Beatles as a prime example of the rule that there are no naturals when it comes to cognitively demanding work and you probably need 10,000 hours of practice to be very good at an elite level (Gladwell: “There’s a reason the Beatles didn’t give us ‘The White Album’ when they were teen-agers”). I made a related point in a 1995 essay in The Post:
The problem with “genius” is that it doesn’t give the great talents their due for working hard and plodding through difficult problems and taking chances and knowing which ideas to dump and which to deliver. Geniuses create the same way total ding-dongs create. Geniuses still have to put on their paint one stroke at a time.
So “Genius” is a tad overrated, at least in comparison with pluck, luck, energy and perseverance. A corollary is that genius won’t protect you from the ravages of age, disillusion, drugs, fatigue, and general lack of inspiration. It’s not a secret sauce you can add forever to your dish. It is possible that the missing Beatles albums of the 1970s would have been pretty good (go ahead and combine the solo work in some fashion and you can put together some plausible collections in the first few years of that decade), but they wouldn’t have put a scare into “Sgt. Pepper’s.”
Back in 1990, when Paul McCartney was about to perform in Miami, I did along article on the Beatles for Tropic, the Herald’s Sunday magazine. The Herald has kindly agreed to put that article back online. I’ll excerpt some of it below, but first, here’s one passage I want to highlight:
What cannot be underestimated is the importance of the audience. The Beatles were creatures of a generational movement. They were a product of the times. They caught a huge wave not of their own making. “Creativity is not the property of a person,” says Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor who studies creativity. “You can’t just say that a person is creative or noncreative per se. When you refer to creativity it always refers to a dialectic between a person and what I call the field, basically, knowledgeable individuals who judge whether something is good or not.” There were more teen-agers alive in 1964 than ever before in history. Cheap transistor radios from Asia had flooded the market. Rock ‘n’ Roll’s great idea -a pounding backbeat that made you want to shake and shout- had been corporatized and denatured. The radio was starved for something other than Frankie Avalon. The scene craved a new sound. So many millions of kids where turned on to Rock ‘n’ Roll by Elvis that the odds dictated that Something New would happen.
No one should bemoan the breakup of the Beatles. They had no choice. They had to break up because no one hangs out forever with his or her teenage pals. They’d been together since they were young teenagers. Look it up: John Lennon was 16 when he asked Paul McCartney to join his new band in the summer of 1957. Paul had just turned 15. George Harrison was 15 when he joined.
The Beatles “invaded” America in February 1964, and as we remember and celebrate the arrival of Beatlemania and their first performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” let’s just remember that they’d already been hacking away at this rock-and-roll stuff for nearly seven years. They’d performed a thousand times in clubs in England and Germany before anyone had heard of them. There is no better example of the virtues of hard work. John Lennon vowed that his band would be bigger than Elvis — and he said that in 1962, before the faintest shimmy of Beatlemania.
Malcolm Gladwell uses the Beatles as a prime example of the rule that there are no naturals when it comes to cognitively demanding work and you probably need 10,000 hours of practice to be very good at an elite level (Gladwell: “There’s a reason the Beatles didn’t give us ‘The White Album’ when they were teen-agers”). I made a related point in a 1995 essay in The Post:
The problem with “genius” is that it doesn’t give the great talents their due for working hard and plodding through difficult problems and taking chances and knowing which ideas to dump and which to deliver. Geniuses create the same way total ding-dongs create. Geniuses still have to put on their paint one stroke at a time.
So “Genius” is a tad overrated, at least in comparison with pluck, luck, energy and perseverance. A corollary is that genius won’t protect you from the ravages of age, disillusion, drugs, fatigue, and general lack of inspiration. It’s not a secret sauce you can add forever to your dish. It is possible that the missing Beatles albums of the 1970s would have been pretty good (go ahead and combine the solo work in some fashion and you can put together some plausible collections in the first few years of that decade), but they wouldn’t have put a scare into “Sgt. Pepper’s.”
Back in 1990, when Paul McCartney was about to perform in Miami, I did along article on the Beatles for Tropic, the Herald’s Sunday magazine. The Herald has kindly agreed to put that article back online. I’ll excerpt some of it below, but first, here’s one passage I want to highlight:
What cannot be underestimated is the importance of the audience. The Beatles were creatures of a generational movement. They were a product of the times. They caught a huge wave not of their own making. “Creativity is not the property of a person,” says Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor who studies creativity. “You can’t just say that a person is creative or noncreative per se. When you refer to creativity it always refers to a dialectic between a person and what I call the field, basically, knowledgeable individuals who judge whether something is good or not.” There were more teen-agers alive in 1964 than ever before in history. Cheap transistor radios from Asia had flooded the market. Rock ‘n’ Roll’s great idea -a pounding backbeat that made you want to shake and shout- had been corporatized and denatured. The radio was starved for something other than Frankie Avalon. The scene craved a new sound. So many millions of kids where turned on to Rock ‘n’ Roll by Elvis that the odds dictated that Something New would happen.
Here’s more of the story, from the top:
The mating call of the Aeolian cadence
The mating call of the Aeolian cadence
Nineteen hundred and sixty-five was a good year for the Shazam method of songwriting. A scruffy rocker who called himself Keith Richards woke in the night in a road-trip hotel room with an incredible riff in his head. He knew it was a hot guitar lick. What he didn’t know was that it would become the superstructure of one of the greatest hit singles of the rock era. Shazam! Satisfaction.
That same year, Paul McCartney rolled out of bed one morning with a beautiful melody on the brain. It was like a found object, so perfectly realized he figured he must have heard it somewhere. He fumbled with it on the piano. It had a classic melodic arc: A short phrase of two notes, answered by a longer phrase that soars to a high note before meandering back down the keyboard to another short phrase and a little jump at the end, a satisfying roller-coaster loop. Never much with words he sang, “Scrambled egg . . . da da da da da da scrambled egg . . . ”
McCartney was just 23 (and just Paul to most of the world) and his band, The Beatles, had conquered the world as surely as Alexander or Charlemagne. More than your average pop idols, they were angelic majesties, living gods, the acme of cool. They had achieved intensities of popularity that no one had known existed and probably weren’t sanitary. With the King off in Hollywood in arrested animation, they were suddenly bigger even than Elvis. Legend has it that during the hour they first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 not a single crime in America was committed by a teenager.
The only asterisk by their name in 1965 was the taint of teenybopperdom. For adults The Beatles were still a guilty pleasure. This tune in Paul’s head would change all that.
Yesterday, the descendant of Scrambled Egg, is the world’s most popular song, recorded by more artists than any other in history, spun 5,000 times a week on DJ turntables in the United States even today. The critic Wilfrid Mellers tried to describe in technical terms why the song works so splendidly:
“The first bar, with its gentle sigh, seems separated, stranded, by the abrupt modulation; and although the troubles ‘return to stay’ with a descent to the tonic, the anticipated modulation sharpwards is counteracted when the B natural is flattened to make an irresolute plagal cadence.”
Gibberish to Paul. His songwriting partner and best friend John Lennon likewise couldn’t have made sense of such language. They were musical savages, holy barbarians, proof that that you can graduate summa cum laude from the University of Rock-n-Roll without being able to decipher sheet music. A tonic was something that went with gin. They took glee in the labored exegesis of their music by high brow types, like when William Mann, critic for The Times of London, swooned, “One gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches, so natural in the Aeolian cadence at the end of Not A Second Time (the chord progression that ends Mahler’s Song of the Earth).”
Aeolian cadences? Sounds like a type of bird, said John.
They were on a roll like none before. In early 1964, when movie producer Walter Shenson told John and Paul he needed four fast songs and two ballads for the upcoming film starring the band, the songs immediately appeared as if pulled from a back pocket. As filming neared completion, Shenson realized he needed another fast song to play during the opening credits, and that it should be called A Hard Day’s Night, to fit the movie title. That night he asked John Lennon for the extra song. Shortly after 10 p.m. John felt the muse. The next morning at 8 a.m., Shenson was summoned to the dressing room. John and Paul were there with two guitars, and a pack of matches was propped up on the mirror with some tiny words written inside the cover. John sang the first 16 bars, Paul the middle 8. The song went to number one on the charts.
That same year, Paul McCartney rolled out of bed one morning with a beautiful melody on the brain. It was like a found object, so perfectly realized he figured he must have heard it somewhere. He fumbled with it on the piano. It had a classic melodic arc: A short phrase of two notes, answered by a longer phrase that soars to a high note before meandering back down the keyboard to another short phrase and a little jump at the end, a satisfying roller-coaster loop. Never much with words he sang, “Scrambled egg . . . da da da da da da scrambled egg . . . ”
McCartney was just 23 (and just Paul to most of the world) and his band, The Beatles, had conquered the world as surely as Alexander or Charlemagne. More than your average pop idols, they were angelic majesties, living gods, the acme of cool. They had achieved intensities of popularity that no one had known existed and probably weren’t sanitary. With the King off in Hollywood in arrested animation, they were suddenly bigger even than Elvis. Legend has it that during the hour they first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 not a single crime in America was committed by a teenager.
The only asterisk by their name in 1965 was the taint of teenybopperdom. For adults The Beatles were still a guilty pleasure. This tune in Paul’s head would change all that.
Yesterday, the descendant of Scrambled Egg, is the world’s most popular song, recorded by more artists than any other in history, spun 5,000 times a week on DJ turntables in the United States even today. The critic Wilfrid Mellers tried to describe in technical terms why the song works so splendidly:
“The first bar, with its gentle sigh, seems separated, stranded, by the abrupt modulation; and although the troubles ‘return to stay’ with a descent to the tonic, the anticipated modulation sharpwards is counteracted when the B natural is flattened to make an irresolute plagal cadence.”
Gibberish to Paul. His songwriting partner and best friend John Lennon likewise couldn’t have made sense of such language. They were musical savages, holy barbarians, proof that that you can graduate summa cum laude from the University of Rock-n-Roll without being able to decipher sheet music. A tonic was something that went with gin. They took glee in the labored exegesis of their music by high brow types, like when William Mann, critic for The Times of London, swooned, “One gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches, so natural in the Aeolian cadence at the end of Not A Second Time (the chord progression that ends Mahler’s Song of the Earth).”
Aeolian cadences? Sounds like a type of bird, said John.
They were on a roll like none before. In early 1964, when movie producer Walter Shenson told John and Paul he needed four fast songs and two ballads for the upcoming film starring the band, the songs immediately appeared as if pulled from a back pocket. As filming neared completion, Shenson realized he needed another fast song to play during the opening credits, and that it should be called A Hard Day’s Night, to fit the movie title. That night he asked John Lennon for the extra song. Shortly after 10 p.m. John felt the muse. The next morning at 8 a.m., Shenson was summoned to the dressing room. John and Paul were there with two guitars, and a pack of matches was propped up on the mirror with some tiny words written inside the cover. John sang the first 16 bars, Paul the middle 8. The song went to number one on the charts.
Shazam!
What was the secret? Who gave them that gift? These semi- educated street scufflers from Liverpool performed a strange alchemy that turned almost everything they touched into a gold record. They rose to stardom on a profusion of upbeat two-minute songs that stuck to pop music convention with their 8 bar strains, rigidly linked in an A-A-B-A-B-A construction. They were a standard four-instrument band, two guitars, a bass and drums.
If you diagram a Beatles song it looks just like the songs of all those other bands that haven’t sold a billion discs and tapes and aren’t in the Guiness Book of World Records. (Paul McCartney, specifically, is the most successful composer of all time, with 74 gold records with the Beatles and solo. He has hit the No. 1 spot on the singles charts 32 times in the U.S., his only competition being John Lennon, with 26.)
Tomorrow marks the 20 anniversary of Paul’s announcement that The Beatles had broken up, yet the music thrives, not only in terms of sales and daily Beatle Breaks on the radio but also as the subject of Beatleology. At least 40 major books have looked at the band, each one trying to tweeze the material into finer pieces. There are serious books, tattletale books, books that recycle other books, ex-wife books, ex-girlfriend books, ex-friend books, fired drummer books, even a book by a guy who had the chance to sign the Beatles to a contract and blew it. For sheer obsessive detail the blue ribbon goes to a book that provides documentary notes of the band’s recording sessions, describing how many takes each song required.
Every couple of years there is supposedly a new band on the scene that will recapture the glory of The Beatles. There was much hope in the 1970s for the British group Squeeze, with their sweet McCartneyish vocals. Then came The Bangles in the 1980s. The closest thing to white-hot Beatlemania has been the ascent of Michael Jackson, but he’s more in the tradition of Elvis, an entertainer with good stage moves who sings music written by others. The proper heirs of The Beatles have been Billy Joel, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, The Police, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and Talking Heads, songwriters and bands with vast commercial and critical appeal, but none of these have put a scare into The Beatles’ sales records.
What is it that people heard that made them so love The Beatles?
Was there genius in the mix? What was it? Who did it?
Was it Paul? Was it John?
Are the songs really that superior or is it just a marketing coup? How much of it is nostalgia, the backround radiation from the Beatlemania explosion?
What’s genius, anyway? What’s artistry? What’s talent?
And finally, this: Out of all the millions of kids who grew up wanting to be Beatles, who wanted to ascend to the toppermost of the poppermost, why hasn’t any succeeded? Why doesn’t anyone write Hey Jude anymore? Why does even Paul McCartney seem like a pale imitation of Beatle Paul?
Obvious questions. Now for the tricky answers.
From TheBeatlesNumber9.com
If you diagram a Beatles song it looks just like the songs of all those other bands that haven’t sold a billion discs and tapes and aren’t in the Guiness Book of World Records. (Paul McCartney, specifically, is the most successful composer of all time, with 74 gold records with the Beatles and solo. He has hit the No. 1 spot on the singles charts 32 times in the U.S., his only competition being John Lennon, with 26.)
Tomorrow marks the 20 anniversary of Paul’s announcement that The Beatles had broken up, yet the music thrives, not only in terms of sales and daily Beatle Breaks on the radio but also as the subject of Beatleology. At least 40 major books have looked at the band, each one trying to tweeze the material into finer pieces. There are serious books, tattletale books, books that recycle other books, ex-wife books, ex-girlfriend books, ex-friend books, fired drummer books, even a book by a guy who had the chance to sign the Beatles to a contract and blew it. For sheer obsessive detail the blue ribbon goes to a book that provides documentary notes of the band’s recording sessions, describing how many takes each song required.
Every couple of years there is supposedly a new band on the scene that will recapture the glory of The Beatles. There was much hope in the 1970s for the British group Squeeze, with their sweet McCartneyish vocals. Then came The Bangles in the 1980s. The closest thing to white-hot Beatlemania has been the ascent of Michael Jackson, but he’s more in the tradition of Elvis, an entertainer with good stage moves who sings music written by others. The proper heirs of The Beatles have been Billy Joel, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, The Police, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac and Talking Heads, songwriters and bands with vast commercial and critical appeal, but none of these have put a scare into The Beatles’ sales records.
What is it that people heard that made them so love The Beatles?
Was there genius in the mix? What was it? Who did it?
Was it Paul? Was it John?
Are the songs really that superior or is it just a marketing coup? How much of it is nostalgia, the backround radiation from the Beatlemania explosion?
What’s genius, anyway? What’s artistry? What’s talent?
And finally, this: Out of all the millions of kids who grew up wanting to be Beatles, who wanted to ascend to the toppermost of the poppermost, why hasn’t any succeeded? Why doesn’t anyone write Hey Jude anymore? Why does even Paul McCartney seem like a pale imitation of Beatle Paul?
Obvious questions. Now for the tricky answers.
From TheBeatlesNumber9.com
Though the common census is that Yoko Ono and to a lesser degree Linda Eastman, killed the Beatles, there is a bit more to it than that.
John, Paul and George met in their late teens in the late 1950s and performed together for the next ten or so years. They also saw each other nearly every day for ten years straight. "Ringo" Richard Starsky came onto the scene in the early sixties, just as the Beatles were starting to gather a following. Ringo was also the only Beatle that consistently managed to stay on good terms with the three other ex-bandmates, in the post-Beatles era.
Beatlemania officially took over the world in 1964, somewhere in between the infamous "Ed Sullivan Show" appearance and the completion of their first U.S. tour. It was also John, Paul, George and Ringo’s first trip to the U.S. The Beatles were excited and overwhelmed. They no longer had any privacy. But they did have lots and lots of (pre-taxes) money, girls, and drugs. And they had their music.
George and John were the first to publicly complain about Beatlemania. Though Paul may have felt the same, he was also completely infatuated with the Beatles and their success so he kept his mouth shut and his smiles big.
After a year or so of relentless touring and chaos, the Beatles decided to stop touring. In the wake of JFK’s death, safety was also a concern. Their last official live concert was at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, on August 29, 1966.
They had a bit of a break before they returned to the studio. During their break, John flew to Spain to work on the movie How I Won the War. In later interviews, John said that this was when he first started thinking about going solo. It was also during this period that "Strawberry Fields Forever" first began to take shape.
Back in the studio, "Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band
" was mostly Paul’s baby. He came up with a majority of the ideas, and sometimes had to push the other Beatles to work (rather than take holiday). Needless to say, Paul was thrilled with the critical praise Sergeant Pepper received when it was released in June of 1967. Fellow rock ‘n rollers were also impressed—Jimmy Hendrix memorized one of the songs off the album in a day so he could perform it in time for a concert.
The same month, Paul publicly admits that he has experimented with LSD. Though he was the last to try it, he is the first to admit it. When a reporter asked him about his LSD use, he decided he was sick of lying. He tried to place the blame on the media by saying that it was their choice to broadcast it. If they felt his admonition would promote LSD use, then he told them they shouldn’t use it.
At the urging of George’s wife Patti, the Beatles took up transcendental meditation. Beatles Manager Brian Epstein died of a drug overdose that same month, on August 27, 1967—almost a year to the date of the Beatles last concert. Though his death was deemed accidental, speculation of a suicide still persists. Some people claim that being in the closet was too much for Brian; others say he was depressed because he felt like the Beatles no longer needed him.
In the wake of Brian’s death, the Beatles didn’t quite know what to do with themselves. On August 31st, the Beatles announced that they would be managing themselves from then on. But in Brian the Beatles not only lost a friend, but a peacekeeper and a manager. Almost immediately, Paul took up Brian’s position. In September they filmed the critical and commercial disaster Magical Mystery Tour. John later commented that if nothing else, at least it got them working again.
In late 1967, John and Paul created Apple Records. The company continued on into the mid 1970s due to legal issues, but it really ended in the summer of 1968. None of the Beatles were business men and it showed, though Apple did manage to discover James Taylor and Badfinger.
At the end of December the psychedelic color-friendly Magical Mystery Tour was released on the BBC in black and white. It was time for a break.
In early 1968, the Beatles set out on a meditative journey for India. Ringo couldn’t handle the food and was the first to leave, followed not long after by a disillusioned John and Paul. George and Patti stayed on a bit longer. Nonetheless, 32 new songs returned to England with them, along with a newly spiritual George. Thus, the White Album was born.
Yoko and Linda first came into the picture when the Beatles were working on the White Album. Paul felt threatened by John’s close relationship to Yoko, who had quickly become his muse and creative partner. Meanwhile, Paul was also busy falling in love. He had met Linda at a club called the Bag ‘O Nails in 1967 and went to visit her in mid 1968 on a U.S. business trip. A month later, Jane Asher publicly announced that her engagement to Paul is off. In November the White Album came out, and John is officially granted a divorce from Cynthia.
Tensions in the studio make Ringo walk out of a White Album session. He returns to flowers and apologies. Later on when recording Let It Be, George would also walk out on a session. Both frustrations with Paul’s bossiness and a fight with John have been sited as reasons for the walk-out. A tiff with Paul was recorded in the movie Let It Be, but John can also be heard during the session, angrily commenting on the fact that they will have to get Eric Clapton to fill in for George because George is being difficult.
In early 1969 Paul wants to do another movie, but no one else does. They settle on a documentary that ends up recording the beginnings of the Beatles break-up.
Musically, the Beatles have also grown apart. John, Paul and George often prefer to record their own songs alone. Paul is upset with the way new producer Phil Specter handles his song "Let It Be." George is upset that he still isn’t treated as serious as a song-writer as John and Paul are, especially by John and Paul. In his frustration, he produces some of his most beautiful songs. Ringo also would have liked more of a chance to write his own songs, but was often too insecure to bring it up. With George’s help he writes "Octopus’s Garden." He also wrote the ironically entitled "Don’t Pass Me By"—a song that didn’t make it on to an album until the White Album, though Ringo can be heard asking the other Beatles to mention his song to the press as early as 1964. They also all begin on their own solo projects.
Both Linda and Yoko stop by during the sessions, though Linda does not sleep on a mattress underneath a piano or scream out John’s name at odd times like Yoko does. Yoko’s constant presence makes the other three uncomfortable, though John didn’t notice anything at the time. Later he explains that they just wanted to be together all the time. Once the Beatles are officially over, Paul does the same thing with Linda. Though hard to believe, Yoko actually had musical training, however, unlike Linda.
Paul marries Linda on March 12, and John and Yoko follow in suit eight days later.
Surprisingly, the Beatles decide to record one more album, this time with their original producer, George Martin. The Beatles do their best to put their differences aside and fight as little as possible.
The Beatles also fought over their new business manager Allen Klein. John introduces the Beatles to Allen Klein in early 1969, and George and Ringo take a liking to him. Paul does not. He would prefer that Linda’s lawyer father and brother handle their finances. In May, Paul refuses to sign an official business contract with Allen Klein. The other three sign the contract.
In September, Abbey Road is released and John officially announces to the rest of the Beatles that he is calling it quits. He does not publicly announce it, however, because business and contract negotiations were still in the works. In the end, it was Paul that announced the break-up, just as he had announced their LSD use.
In April 1970, Paul’s first solo album "McCartney" was released. Several days later he publicly announces that he left the Beatles. Less than a month later Let It Be the album, followed by Let It Be the movie, is released.
The other Beatles did not publicly confirm the break-up until December 31, 1970, when Paul filed a lawsuit against John, George and Ringo in order to dissolve the Beatles. By then the Beatles had not recorded together in more than a year. They continued to go their separate ways.
Three years later, John, George and Ringo split with Allen Klein and sued him.
All four went on to solo careers.
~Rachael Stillman © beatlesnumber9
Beatlemania officially took over the world in 1964, somewhere in between the infamous "Ed Sullivan Show" appearance and the completion of their first U.S. tour. It was also John, Paul, George and Ringo’s first trip to the U.S. The Beatles were excited and overwhelmed. They no longer had any privacy. But they did have lots and lots of (pre-taxes) money, girls, and drugs. And they had their music.
George and John were the first to publicly complain about Beatlemania. Though Paul may have felt the same, he was also completely infatuated with the Beatles and their success so he kept his mouth shut and his smiles big.
After a year or so of relentless touring and chaos, the Beatles decided to stop touring. In the wake of JFK’s death, safety was also a concern. Their last official live concert was at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, on August 29, 1966.
They had a bit of a break before they returned to the studio. During their break, John flew to Spain to work on the movie How I Won the War. In later interviews, John said that this was when he first started thinking about going solo. It was also during this period that "Strawberry Fields Forever" first began to take shape.
Back in the studio, "Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band
" was mostly Paul’s baby. He came up with a majority of the ideas, and sometimes had to push the other Beatles to work (rather than take holiday). Needless to say, Paul was thrilled with the critical praise Sergeant Pepper received when it was released in June of 1967. Fellow rock ‘n rollers were also impressed—Jimmy Hendrix memorized one of the songs off the album in a day so he could perform it in time for a concert.The same month, Paul publicly admits that he has experimented with LSD. Though he was the last to try it, he is the first to admit it. When a reporter asked him about his LSD use, he decided he was sick of lying. He tried to place the blame on the media by saying that it was their choice to broadcast it. If they felt his admonition would promote LSD use, then he told them they shouldn’t use it.
At the urging of George’s wife Patti, the Beatles took up transcendental meditation. Beatles Manager Brian Epstein died of a drug overdose that same month, on August 27, 1967—almost a year to the date of the Beatles last concert. Though his death was deemed accidental, speculation of a suicide still persists. Some people claim that being in the closet was too much for Brian; others say he was depressed because he felt like the Beatles no longer needed him.
In the wake of Brian’s death, the Beatles didn’t quite know what to do with themselves. On August 31st, the Beatles announced that they would be managing themselves from then on. But in Brian the Beatles not only lost a friend, but a peacekeeper and a manager. Almost immediately, Paul took up Brian’s position. In September they filmed the critical and commercial disaster Magical Mystery Tour. John later commented that if nothing else, at least it got them working again.
In late 1967, John and Paul created Apple Records. The company continued on into the mid 1970s due to legal issues, but it really ended in the summer of 1968. None of the Beatles were business men and it showed, though Apple did manage to discover James Taylor and Badfinger.
At the end of December the psychedelic color-friendly Magical Mystery Tour was released on the BBC in black and white. It was time for a break.
In early 1968, the Beatles set out on a meditative journey for India. Ringo couldn’t handle the food and was the first to leave, followed not long after by a disillusioned John and Paul. George and Patti stayed on a bit longer. Nonetheless, 32 new songs returned to England with them, along with a newly spiritual George. Thus, the White Album
was born.Yoko and Linda first came into the picture when the Beatles were working on the White Album. Paul felt threatened by John’s close relationship to Yoko, who had quickly become his muse and creative partner. Meanwhile, Paul was also busy falling in love. He had met Linda at a club called the Bag ‘O Nails in 1967 and went to visit her in mid 1968 on a U.S. business trip. A month later, Jane Asher publicly announced that her engagement to Paul is off. In November the White Album came out, and John is officially granted a divorce from Cynthia.
Tensions in the studio make Ringo walk out of a White Album session. He returns to flowers and apologies. Later on when recording Let It Be, George would also walk out on a session. Both frustrations with Paul’s bossiness and a fight with John have been sited as reasons for the walk-out. A tiff with Paul was recorded in the movie Let It Be, but John can also be heard during the session, angrily commenting on the fact that they will have to get Eric Clapton to fill in for George because George is being difficult.
In early 1969 Paul wants to do another movie, but no one else does. They settle on a documentary that ends up recording the beginnings of the Beatles break-up.
Musically, the Beatles have also grown apart. John, Paul and George often prefer to record their own songs alone. Paul is upset with the way new producer Phil Specter handles his song "Let It Be." George is upset that he still isn’t treated as serious as a song-writer as John and Paul are, especially by John and Paul. In his frustration, he produces some of his most beautiful songs. Ringo also would have liked more of a chance to write his own songs, but was often too insecure to bring it up. With George’s help he writes "Octopus’s Garden." He also wrote the ironically entitled "Don’t Pass Me By"—a song that didn’t make it on to an album until the White Album, though Ringo can be heard asking the other Beatles to mention his song to the press as early as 1964. They also all begin on their own solo projects.
Both Linda and Yoko stop by during the sessions, though Linda does not sleep on a mattress underneath a piano or scream out John’s name at odd times like Yoko does. Yoko’s constant presence makes the other three uncomfortable, though John didn’t notice anything at the time. Later he explains that they just wanted to be together all the time. Once the Beatles are officially over, Paul does the same thing with Linda. Though hard to believe, Yoko actually had musical training, however, unlike Linda.
Paul marries Linda on March 12, and John and Yoko follow in suit eight days later.
Surprisingly, the Beatles decide to record one more album, this time with their original producer, George Martin. The Beatles do their best to put their differences aside and fight as little as possible.
The Beatles also fought over their new business manager Allen Klein. John introduces the Beatles to Allen Klein in early 1969, and George and Ringo take a liking to him. Paul does not. He would prefer that Linda’s lawyer father and brother handle their finances. In May, Paul refuses to sign an official business contract with Allen Klein. The other three sign the contract.
In September, Abbey Road
is released and John officially announces to the rest of the Beatles that he is calling it quits. He does not publicly announce it, however, because business and contract negotiations were still in the works. In the end, it was Paul that announced the break-up, just as he had announced their LSD use.In April 1970, Paul’s first solo album "McCartney
" was released. Several days later he publicly announces that he left the Beatles. Less than a month later Let It Be the album, followed by Let It Be the movie, is released.The other Beatles did not publicly confirm the break-up until December 31, 1970, when Paul filed a lawsuit against John, George and Ringo in order to dissolve the Beatles. By then the Beatles had not recorded together in more than a year. They continued to go their separate ways.
Three years later, John, George and Ringo split with Allen Klein and sued him.
All four went on to solo careers.
~Rachael Stillman © beatlesnumber9
CAN WE KNOW WHY THE BEATLES BROKE UP?
©davidholmes
Lot's of people ask why The Beatles broke up, as if it's not miraculous enough that they ever came together in the first place. Much has been written about how the four met and much has been written about their history. Sort of glossed over is the break up. It's painful to talk about for those involved, I'm sure. And no one, not even the Beatles, could possibly touch on all the dynamics that brought about The End. But a big part of what broke up The Beatles was the tremendous egos and differences of the four, and particularly the two main players Lennon and McCartney. In my humble opinion The Beatles started to die after Paul wrote and released "Yesterday." That was the peek of the roller coaster and it was followed by the extreme rush down the hill to oblivion. (And Yesterday would not have happened without George Martin). But to the world, and especially Lennon, it was a McCartney solo hit.
It's hard to understand why John seemed to be more miserable the bigger The Beatles got. Fame isn't as glorious as it seems to a teenager. It was not a glamorous and fun time for John. But one must try to understand Lennon's wounded psych. He was extremely insecure. That's why he needed a band around him. And as youngsters the ones he picked fed his ego, were generally younger, and basically played yes men to John's dream of how the game should be played. He needed this, and conversely the others needed him. He was the undisputed leader of the band. But don't for one minute, despite his mega fame, think he was not extremely bothered by Paul being "The Cute" one, and that he wasn't hurt when Paul's music did better than his own. This songwriting competition led to the rapid creation of the best songs in song writing history, but by it's very nature was doomed. In the very beginning they really did sit across from each other and write together. Later the extent of their collaboration was trying to out do the other.
(And call me nuts if you want, but I really hear John and Paul talk to each other through their music. Maybe John was the Fool On The Hill and maybe Paul was the subject of Hey! Bull Dog). But we're limited in space here and I'm not writing a book. There's enough books out there now. I just want to understand the break up of The Beatles a little better.
It is now well known how much they hated the boy band image, but it was smooth sailing till the band, and mostly John, decided to change their image and writing style. Unfortunately, John made his first major, (though innocent enough at the time), mistake by saying The Beatles were bigger than Jesus. (Read Beatlesnumber9's Bigger Than Jesus piece). This didn't raise an eye brow in Britain, but 5 months later this quote was taken out of it's original context and splattered across the American press in a way to demonize The Beatles. I'll avoid the hypocrisy of America in this article. Suffice it to say I'm ashamed of the United States and especially it's self-righteous lynch 'em attitude - right wing, self- righteous religious bible thumpers.
But the fact is, Lennon began receiving death threats. Lots of them! The Beatles were boycotted and the KKK protested outside their concerts. They were harshly beaten by the southern bible belt and John was EXTREMELY paranoid. Though the other three stood by John, they privately resented John for putting his foot in his mouth. Out of this fear John decided to quit touring, and George hopped aboard this decision. Paul to this day thrives on touring and wasn't happy about 'never' again touring. Maybe he thought things would pass and eventually they would resume touring. But for the time being they began an amazing stint as studio recording artists. John was losing his role as the leader, and Paul gladly picked up the slack (the void left by the death of Brian Epstein only sped up this inevitability). By the time Sgt Pepper was recorded Paul was the leader of the Beatles, and John in turn hated this new Beatles. He resented the whole charade and all his old childhood anger resurfaced. He wanted out of it. I think he brought Yoko in only to sabotage the group. And it worked. John played dirty. Paul played just as dirty, and the dream was over. There just is no one person to point the finger at. Lennon and McCartney lost control of their egos and crashed. Not a total surprise for working class Liverpudlian's. Competition turned fierce and it destroyed the group. Everything else is arm chair psychiatry. I will say this; The Beatles made it to the top not by trying to impress us, but by trying to impress each other. The what ifs and what next is for people through out the rest of history to wrestle with. I do it. I read about their childhoods and try to put the pieces of the puzzle together. The books are out there. Go grab some and play arm chair shrink. All human nature, warts and all, can be seen in the story of The Beatles.
For Paul's part, as the newly bearded father figure, he certainly made his share of bad choices. Not the least of which was his idea to 'Get Back.' He didn't see there was no going back, only forward. To make a documentary on film at the height of their fighting was a rotten idea. George walked out, John is seen sitting next to Yoko usually mocking Paul, and Paul is shown trying to rally the troops, but only as side men to McCartney songs. This period, and the film caused Harrison so much pain the film was taken out of print at his request in 1981 and only allowed to be re-released after his death. We're still waiting....
John fought hard, I think too hard, to destroy the 'boy band' image, and Paul fought hard, I think also too hard to hold on to a pop image. Musically we ended up with the two extremes after the break up. No Beatle magic there. Some Time In New York was John's crap recording and Silly Love Songs summed up Paul's idea of rock 'n' roll. It was never so obvious how desperately they needed each other. We can clearly see how the combination of these two egos created magic, and had they taken a much needed break from each other perhaps the split could have been avoided. But it seems as though Paul was under the spell of his in-laws and was angered that his brother and father in law weren't made managers of The Beatles. John pointed out that much earlier on they agreed to never let relatives be their managers (a wise decision), but the war raged on.
Somewhere along the way Paul got it in his head to sue the others and make a legal break up (Hmmm, his in laws were lawyers....not a lot of thought need be put into this). Leaving aside all opinions about this and that, one could simply say 'Paul broke up The Beatles'. The others had each quit, but never publicly. By all accounts the others had plans to record as The Beatles again. Paul's lawsuit and announcement that he was leaving The Beatles surprised John, George and Ringo as much as it did the world.
Now here's the twist. The break up was a disaster for all four Beatles. Lennon and McCartney's early solo efforts were still very much collaborations/competitions. Paul was writing for John even on his solo albums (Too Many People, "You took your lucky break and broke it in two...". I wonder, did John break his lucky break?) And John's "How Do You Sleep?" was a direct communication to Paul. Paul hasn't released anything memorable since John died (I will say Chaos and Creation in the Backyard is a long over due decent recording). You know, the sad thing is by most accounts John and Paul were planning to record again. There was a Beatles Anthology on the drawing board, and both had agreed to play on Ringo's new album. Most of this was sabotaged by Yoko, who obviously had her own agenda. And then Dec 8, 1980 happened. We're left with educated guesses and wishful thinking. But one thing is undeniable. The thing that made the Beatles what they were was each one was 25% of the whole. What destroyed them was egoism. And like anything, it could have been mended, I believe it was being mended, and in time they'd have done something again. But that's the one thing we weren't granted. More time...
HOW CLOSE DID THE BEATLES COME TO NOT BREAKING UP?
(And call me nuts if you want, but I really hear John and Paul talk to each other through their music. Maybe John was the Fool On The Hill and maybe Paul was the subject of Hey! Bull Dog). But we're limited in space here and I'm not writing a book. There's enough books out there now. I just want to understand the break up of The Beatles a little better.
It is now well known how much they hated the boy band image, but it was smooth sailing till the band, and mostly John, decided to change their image and writing style. Unfortunately, John made his first major, (though innocent enough at the time), mistake by saying The Beatles were bigger than Jesus. (Read Beatlesnumber9's Bigger Than Jesus piece). This didn't raise an eye brow in Britain, but 5 months later this quote was taken out of it's original context and splattered across the American press in a way to demonize The Beatles. I'll avoid the hypocrisy of America in this article. Suffice it to say I'm ashamed of the United States and especially it's self-righteous lynch 'em attitude - right wing, self- righteous religious bible thumpers.
But the fact is, Lennon began receiving death threats. Lots of them! The Beatles were boycotted and the KKK protested outside their concerts. They were harshly beaten by the southern bible belt and John was EXTREMELY paranoid. Though the other three stood by John, they privately resented John for putting his foot in his mouth. Out of this fear John decided to quit touring, and George hopped aboard this decision. Paul to this day thrives on touring and wasn't happy about 'never' again touring. Maybe he thought things would pass and eventually they would resume touring. But for the time being they began an amazing stint as studio recording artists. John was losing his role as the leader, and Paul gladly picked up the slack (the void left by the death of Brian Epstein only sped up this inevitability). By the time Sgt Pepper was recorded Paul was the leader of the Beatles, and John in turn hated this new Beatles. He resented the whole charade and all his old childhood anger resurfaced. He wanted out of it. I think he brought Yoko in only to sabotage the group. And it worked. John played dirty. Paul played just as dirty, and the dream was over. There just is no one person to point the finger at. Lennon and McCartney lost control of their egos and crashed. Not a total surprise for working class Liverpudlian's. Competition turned fierce and it destroyed the group. Everything else is arm chair psychiatry. I will say this; The Beatles made it to the top not by trying to impress us, but by trying to impress each other. The what ifs and what next is for people through out the rest of history to wrestle with. I do it. I read about their childhoods and try to put the pieces of the puzzle together. The books are out there. Go grab some and play arm chair shrink. All human nature, warts and all, can be seen in the story of The Beatles.
For Paul's part, as the newly bearded father figure, he certainly made his share of bad choices. Not the least of which was his idea to 'Get Back.' He didn't see there was no going back, only forward. To make a documentary on film at the height of their fighting was a rotten idea. George walked out, John is seen sitting next to Yoko usually mocking Paul, and Paul is shown trying to rally the troops, but only as side men to McCartney songs. This period, and the film caused Harrison so much pain the film was taken out of print at his request in 1981 and only allowed to be re-released after his death. We're still waiting....
John fought hard, I think too hard, to destroy the 'boy band' image, and Paul fought hard, I think also too hard to hold on to a pop image. Musically we ended up with the two extremes after the break up. No Beatle magic there. Some Time In New York was John's crap recording and Silly Love Songs summed up Paul's idea of rock 'n' roll. It was never so obvious how desperately they needed each other. We can clearly see how the combination of these two egos created magic, and had they taken a much needed break from each other perhaps the split could have been avoided. But it seems as though Paul was under the spell of his in-laws and was angered that his brother and father in law weren't made managers of The Beatles. John pointed out that much earlier on they agreed to never let relatives be their managers (a wise decision), but the war raged on.
Somewhere along the way Paul got it in his head to sue the others and make a legal break up (Hmmm, his in laws were lawyers....not a lot of thought need be put into this). Leaving aside all opinions about this and that, one could simply say 'Paul broke up The Beatles'. The others had each quit, but never publicly. By all accounts the others had plans to record as The Beatles again. Paul's lawsuit and announcement that he was leaving The Beatles surprised John, George and Ringo as much as it did the world.
Now here's the twist. The break up was a disaster for all four Beatles. Lennon and McCartney's early solo efforts were still very much collaborations/competitions. Paul was writing for John even on his solo albums (Too Many People, "You took your lucky break and broke it in two...". I wonder, did John break his lucky break?) And John's "How Do You Sleep?" was a direct communication to Paul. Paul hasn't released anything memorable since John died (I will say Chaos and Creation in the Backyard is a long over due decent recording). You know, the sad thing is by most accounts John and Paul were planning to record again. There was a Beatles Anthology on the drawing board, and both had agreed to play on Ringo's new album. Most of this was sabotaged by Yoko, who obviously had her own agenda. And then Dec 8, 1980 happened. We're left with educated guesses and wishful thinking. But one thing is undeniable. The thing that made the Beatles what they were was each one was 25% of the whole. What destroyed them was egoism. And like anything, it could have been mended, I believe it was being mended, and in time they'd have done something again. But that's the one thing we weren't granted. More time...
HOW CLOSE DID THE BEATLES COME TO NOT BREAKING UP?
What broke up the Beatles was Paul's public announcement on April 10th, 1970, that the Beatles would never work together again, and the subsequent lawsuit he filed against the other three on December 31, 1970.
Until then, no matter what they said privately to each other, all their public statements conveyed the message that the partnership was to continue indefinitely. In the fall of 1969, _after_ "Abbey Road" was released, John told Melody Maker that "after 'Get Back' is released in January, we'll probably . . . do another one." In February of 1970, he told _Rolling Stone_, "We still might make Beatles product . . . but we need more room--The Beatles are just too limited., that's where the trouble is." He told the New Musical Express, "It just depends on how much we all want to record together." He said that trying to accomodate everyone's songs on one album was the main problem.
Ringo told NME in March of 1970, "Everything's fine. I've got things to do and George has got things to do and Paul has his solo album and John has his peace thing. We can't do everything at once." George said, in the same article, "Say we've got unity through diversity, because that's what it is . . . we had to find ourselves, individually, one day."
When John Eastman (Paul's brother-in-law and attorney) announced on April 7th that the release of Paul's solo album, "McCartney," was coming out and it meant, in essence, the end of The Beatles, Apple spent three days denying it before it reluctantly released, on Paul's demand, the "self-interview" (subsequently was included in UK copies of "McCartney") that made the split official.
On that day (April 10), Apple also released a statement on behalf of the Beatles that read, "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. The Beatles are alive and well and the beat goes on. The beat goes on."
Even after the April 10th announcement, the remaining three Beatles were still publicly stating that the Beatles, as an entity, still existed and this was a temporary hiatus. A few weeks after Paul's statement, Ringo told a reporter, "I just feel it in my bones that we'll probably all be recording together again before very long." George said, "There is every prospect" that the Beatles eventually would work together again. "Everyone this year is trying to do his individual album, but after that, I am ready to go back to work together again." In early summer, George, while working on "All Things Must Pass", again said he'd expect the Beatles to be working together, possibly by the end of the year.
John initially had little response to Paul's announcement, saying only, "Paul phoned me to say 'I've decided to leave The Beatles.' It was good to hear from him, now that I know he's not dead [a reference to the "Paul is dead" hoax that broke the previous fall]."
In the May 14 edition of Rolling Stone, John made his feelings clearer: "It's the simple fact that [Paul] can't have his own way, so he causing chaos. I put out four albums last year, and I didn't say a fucking word about quitting."
In June, Paul, through his attorney, began the slow process of disolving the partnership, raising the issue with John via a letter later that summer. John refused to discuss the issue. Paul again raised it during a meeting with the other three in New York that October. They refused to address it then, either.
McCartney filed suit against the Allen Klein and the other three Beatles on December 31, 1970, asking that The Beatles and Co. be legally dissolved that that a receiver be appointed in the meanwhile.
With that, the Beatles were no more.
Say what you will about the various arguments over guitar leads, drum breaks and girlfriends, but make no mistake, the facts are these: Paul went public and ignited the press firestorm that immediately erupted thereafter. He insisted on an immediate legal disolution of the partnership, igniting almost a decade of vitriolic court battles.
It is important to note that all of John's statements regarding the breakup, such as the fact that he'd actually left first, et cetera, were made after Paul's public announcement and the subsequent hard feelings it generated.
The bitter statements against Paul by the other three that appear in the court affidavits leave no doubt whatsoever as to who "broke up the Beatles."
The ironic thing is that, a mere three years later, John, George and Ringo split with Allen Klein and sued him. If Paul had bided his time, he'd have gotten what he'd wanted (the problem, of course, was Klein; Paul wanted Eastman to manage the group), and the Beatles might have been back in the recording studio in 1975.
Or maybe not.
(From the article, "'Unity Through Diversity'--How Close Did The Beatles Come To Not Breaking Up?" by William P. King, published in _Beatlefan_, #93 (Vol 16, No 3), March-April, 1995. For more information, refer to that article; also see _Apple To The Core_, McCabe and Schonfeld, Pocket Books, 1972.)
John Lennon blamed Sir Paul McCartney's hatred of his wife Yoko Ono for the break up of The Beatles, according to a previously unheard interview with the Imagine star recorded in 1970.
In the revealing conversation, which was recorded by Rolling Stone magazine journalist Jann Wenner in the aftermath of The Beatles' split, Lennon reveals he felt compelled to choose between his wife and his bandmates - and he had no regrets about his decision.
Lennon says in the interview, "It seemed that I either had to be married to them or Yoko. I chose Yoko and I was right.
"They despised her. They insulted her and still do... they can go stuff themselves."
Lennon also displays extreme hostility to McCartney's treatment of the rest of the band following the death of their manager Brian Epstein in 1967.
He continues, "Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us when we went round in circles?
"Paul had the impression we should be thankful for what he did, for keeping The Beatles going. But he kept it going for his own sake. Not for my sake did Paul struggle."
SIR PAUL McCARTNEY planned to reunite THE BEATLES a year before JOHN LENNON was murdered, according to a newly released record contract.
In a 1979 deal with CBS Records, McCartney claimed he could again make music with Lennon, GEORGE HARRISON and RINGO STARR under the banner of The Beatles.
Details of the $10.8 million (GBP6 million) contract have been released to coincide with the 25th anniversary of Lennon's death on 8 December 1980 later this week.
An industry insider comments, "This is the earliest evidence of any Beatle making formal overtures towards a reunion."
Until then, no matter what they said privately to each other, all their public statements conveyed the message that the partnership was to continue indefinitely. In the fall of 1969, _after_ "Abbey Road" was released, John told Melody Maker that "after 'Get Back' is released in January, we'll probably . . . do another one." In February of 1970, he told _Rolling Stone_, "We still might make Beatles product . . . but we need more room--The Beatles are just too limited., that's where the trouble is." He told the New Musical Express, "It just depends on how much we all want to record together." He said that trying to accomodate everyone's songs on one album was the main problem.
Ringo told NME in March of 1970, "Everything's fine. I've got things to do and George has got things to do and Paul has his solo album and John has his peace thing. We can't do everything at once." George said, in the same article, "Say we've got unity through diversity, because that's what it is . . . we had to find ourselves, individually, one day."
When John Eastman (Paul's brother-in-law and attorney) announced on April 7th that the release of Paul's solo album, "McCartney," was coming out and it meant, in essence, the end of The Beatles, Apple spent three days denying it before it reluctantly released, on Paul's demand, the "self-interview" (subsequently was included in UK copies of "McCartney") that made the split official.
On that day (April 10), Apple also released a statement on behalf of the Beatles that read, "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. The Beatles are alive and well and the beat goes on. The beat goes on."
Even after the April 10th announcement, the remaining three Beatles were still publicly stating that the Beatles, as an entity, still existed and this was a temporary hiatus. A few weeks after Paul's statement, Ringo told a reporter, "I just feel it in my bones that we'll probably all be recording together again before very long." George said, "There is every prospect" that the Beatles eventually would work together again. "Everyone this year is trying to do his individual album, but after that, I am ready to go back to work together again." In early summer, George, while working on "All Things Must Pass", again said he'd expect the Beatles to be working together, possibly by the end of the year.
John initially had little response to Paul's announcement, saying only, "Paul phoned me to say 'I've decided to leave The Beatles.' It was good to hear from him, now that I know he's not dead [a reference to the "Paul is dead" hoax that broke the previous fall]."
In the May 14 edition of Rolling Stone, John made his feelings clearer: "It's the simple fact that [Paul] can't have his own way, so he causing chaos. I put out four albums last year, and I didn't say a fucking word about quitting."
In June, Paul, through his attorney, began the slow process of disolving the partnership, raising the issue with John via a letter later that summer. John refused to discuss the issue. Paul again raised it during a meeting with the other three in New York that October. They refused to address it then, either.
McCartney filed suit against the Allen Klein and the other three Beatles on December 31, 1970, asking that The Beatles and Co. be legally dissolved that that a receiver be appointed in the meanwhile.
With that, the Beatles were no more.
Say what you will about the various arguments over guitar leads, drum breaks and girlfriends, but make no mistake, the facts are these: Paul went public and ignited the press firestorm that immediately erupted thereafter. He insisted on an immediate legal disolution of the partnership, igniting almost a decade of vitriolic court battles.
It is important to note that all of John's statements regarding the breakup, such as the fact that he'd actually left first, et cetera, were made after Paul's public announcement and the subsequent hard feelings it generated.
The bitter statements against Paul by the other three that appear in the court affidavits leave no doubt whatsoever as to who "broke up the Beatles."
The ironic thing is that, a mere three years later, John, George and Ringo split with Allen Klein and sued him. If Paul had bided his time, he'd have gotten what he'd wanted (the problem, of course, was Klein; Paul wanted Eastman to manage the group), and the Beatles might have been back in the recording studio in 1975.
Or maybe not.
(From the article, "'Unity Through Diversity'--How Close Did The Beatles Come To Not Breaking Up?" by William P. King, published in _Beatlefan_, #93 (Vol 16, No 3), March-April, 1995. For more information, refer to that article; also see _Apple To The Core_, McCabe and Schonfeld, Pocket Books, 1972.)
John Lennon blamed Sir Paul McCartney's hatred of his wife Yoko Ono for the break up of The Beatles, according to a previously unheard interview with the Imagine star recorded in 1970.
In the revealing conversation, which was recorded by Rolling Stone magazine journalist Jann Wenner in the aftermath of The Beatles' split, Lennon reveals he felt compelled to choose between his wife and his bandmates - and he had no regrets about his decision.
Lennon says in the interview, "It seemed that I either had to be married to them or Yoko. I chose Yoko and I was right.
"They despised her. They insulted her and still do... they can go stuff themselves."
Lennon also displays extreme hostility to McCartney's treatment of the rest of the band following the death of their manager Brian Epstein in 1967.
He continues, "Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us when we went round in circles?
"Paul had the impression we should be thankful for what he did, for keeping The Beatles going. But he kept it going for his own sake. Not for my sake did Paul struggle."
SIR PAUL McCARTNEY planned to reunite THE BEATLES a year before JOHN LENNON was murdered, according to a newly released record contract.
In a 1979 deal with CBS Records, McCartney claimed he could again make music with Lennon, GEORGE HARRISON and RINGO STARR under the banner of The Beatles.
Details of the $10.8 million (GBP6 million) contract have been released to coincide with the 25th anniversary of Lennon's death on 8 December 1980 later this week.
An industry insider comments, "This is the earliest evidence of any Beatle making formal overtures towards a reunion."
No comments:
Post a Comment