Paul McCartney (51 page)

Meanwhile, John had returned from his trans-European nuptial odyssey with a new song which temporarily drove everything else from his mind. Titled ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’, it was a piece of musical reportage chronicling the search for a wedding-venue that had first taken the couple to Southampton and Paris, their eventual nuptials in Gibraltar, their Amsterdam Bed-In and subsequent trip to Vienna, where they’d given a press conference with bags over their heads. It was clever, witty and self-mocking: in fact, everything that people thought John Lennon had forgotten how to be.

His proposal to make it the Beatles’ next single–so confirming Yoko’s election to the band–looked like yet another guaranteed source of dissent. However, both George and Ringo happened to be out of London when he was ready to record it. And, despite their recent battles over the management question, he still instinctively turned to Paul to bring it to fruition. On 14 April, they completed it together at Cavendish, then went round to Abbey Road and recorded it on their own with George Martin, assisted by Geoff Emerick, the gifted engineer whom their bickering had driven away from the White Album.

To Paul, the song was about everything that spelt disaster for the Beatles, while its chorus of ‘Christ, you know it ain’t easy’, and references to John’s being ‘crucified’, threatened to drag them into another more-popular-than-Jesus furore. Yet he gave it his all, playing bass, drums, piano and maracas, adding his sweet top-line harmony to ‘bag’, ‘drag’ and ‘crucify me’. The two hadn’t played as a duo since appearing as the Nerk Twins at Paul’s cousin’s pub, and they joked around as if the intervening years and mobs and millions had never been. ‘Go a bit slower, Ringo,’ John quipped as Paul laid down his drum-part. ‘Okay, George,’ came the answer.

‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’, credited to Lennon and McCartney, became the Beatles’ eighteenth and last UK number one single. In America, where it reached number eight, a picture cover showed the band as a quintet, with Yoko in rock ‘n’ roll black leather and blue denim. But by then, a second ‘Bed-In for Peace’, this time in Montreal, Canada, had shown beyond any doubt what the next verse would be.

So important was the battle with ATV for control of Northern Songs that Lee Eastman flew to London to take over the lead from his son. Coincidentally, the same moment to cross the Atlantic was chosen by Allen Klein’s long-standing notoriety in New York.

On 13 April, the Sunday Times’s famous Insight investigative team published the first detailed survey of Klein’s business methods to appear in the British press. Headlined ‘The Toughest Wheeler-Dealer in the Pop Jungle’, it examined his alleged shady share-dealing over the Cameo-Parkway record label, the many and varied litigants currently ranged against his ABKCO company and his mounting problems with the Internal Revenue Service. The juiciest revelation concerned his most famous exploit as a scourge of record companies and miracle-worker for his clients–the $1.25 million advance he had secured for the Rolling Stones from Decca Records in 1965. According to Insight, that mythic sum had never found its way into the Stones’ pockets, but gone straight into their manager’s.

Lee Eastman thus arrived at this first face-to-face meeting with the Beatles and Klein primed with new ammunition against his rival. But Klein struck first. He had discovered that Lee came from a Jewish immigrant background as humble as his own and had started life with the surname of Epstein, the same as the manager whom the band were having such a hard job to replace. This might have seemed a recommendation, but was held up by Klein as evidence that Lee was ‘a phoney’.

The usually calm, measured celebrity lawyer lost his cool–though not because of the Epstein taunt, his son John believes. ‘I wasn’t there, but I know my dad would never have been bothered by something like that. It was more likely because Klein was criticising me behind my back.’ The meeting ended with Lee shouting at Klein while John threw petrol on the flames by addressing him as ‘Mister Epstein’ and Paul looked on in an embarrassment that can only be guessed at.

Paradoxically, there was no disagreement between the rival advisers on how to save Northern Songs from takeover by Lew Grade. The Beatles would offer £2 million to the investment group known as the Consortium for the crucial 14 per cent shareholding that would give them control, so turning the public company back into a private one. The money was to be borrowed from a merchant bank, Henry Ansbacher & Co., on collateral provided by Apple shares, plus John’s entire holding of 644,000 shares in Northern Songs.

But this last detail caused an even worse scene at a second meeting with Lee Eastman, on 18 April. Klein suggested that Paul, too, should put up his Northern shares as collateral for the bank loan, but Lee told him not to think of it. Klein then revealed that Paul had recently substantially increased his holding without telling any of his fellow Beatles. At this, their aide Peter Brown later recalled, John ‘flew into a rage’ and seemed about to attack Paul physically.

Lee’s visit to London, as he himself recognised, had been a disaster. Afterwards, he received a letter signed by John, George and Ringo, terminating his appointment as the band’s general counsel–but acknowledging that Eastman & Eastman in the person of John Eastman would continue to represent Paul alone. Again, Paul’s embarrassment can only be guessed.

Those recent boardroom scenes might have been expected to kill off any remaining creative spark between Lennon and McCartney. But on both of them, as ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’ had shown, music acted as a kind of healing amnesia. On 30 April, they were back in the studio together, finishing off ‘You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)’, a comedy track that had been hanging around since 1967. It had no commercial potential whatsoever, and went nowhere beyond repeating the title in a series of funny voices, yet they still devoted hours to it, singing into a single microphone, coughing, spluttering and doing Goon Show accents, for all the world like the teenage pals and co-conspirators of long ago in Liverpool. Paul would later remember it as his favourite Beatles session of all.

Outside the studio, as before, rapprochement melted away. Having seen off Lee Eastman, Allen Klein was ready to claim his prize and he now drafted a three-year management agreement beween the Beatles and his company, ABKCO Industries. This would give him 20 per cent of their earnings, as opposed to Brian’s 25 per cent (and Colonel Tom Parker’s 50 per cent of Elvis Presley). Record royalties were excluded unless he negotiated a higher rate, in which case he would receive only a percentage of the increase.

The agreement assumed the Beatles would stay together, putting out singles and albums on the cycle they had been locked into since 1963. That they might fall apart at the very moment he won them was something Klein didn’t allow himself to think. In those days, no one imagined that the break-up of a band might not necessarily be the end of it.

On 9 May, the Beatles met at Olympic Studios in Barnes. The ostensible reason was to talk to producer Glyn Johns about the formless mass of tapes, recorded the previous January, which Johns had been tasked with moulding into an album called Get Back. But that discussion did not progress far.

John, George and Ringo had already signed Klein’s management agreement and wanted Paul to follow suit there and then. He did not refuse outright, but said they ought to negotiate further, perhaps offering a lower commission than 20 per cent (just as, years earlier, they’d tried to beat Brian down from 25 to 20). The others said there was no time: Klein was flying back to New York that night to have the agreement ratified by his board at ABKCO.

Paul alone recognised this as a ploy to rush them. Klein’s company consisted solely of Klein and his wife, Betty (as could be read from its initials), and had no ‘board’. He further pointed out that, today being Friday, nothing further was likely to happen with the agreement until after the weekend. The others told him in unison to ‘fuck off’, then did so themselves.

Glyn Johns at the time was producing an album for the American Steve Miller Band, whose leader Paul knew and liked. After John, George and Ringo’s exit, he found Miller working alone on a track and volunteered to sit in on drums–a providential way of giving vent to his feelings–for which he’d later be credited, under his Silver Beatles alias of ‘Paul Ramon’. The song’s title, for him, was to prove only too fitting: ‘My Dark Hour’.

In mid-June, George Martin received a surprise phone call from Paul. It wasn’t the bad news about the Beatles that Martin expected, however, but a plea for further healing amnesia.

Six months after the band had finished recording their Get Back album, Paul said, there still were no plans for its release. Glyn Johns had put together a 16-song version, leaving in all their false starts, fluffs and ad-libs–‘us with our trousers down’, as John called it–which all four were unanimous in rejecting. But, far from terminally sickening them of albums, it had made them want to go back into the studio to make a whole new one from scratch. And they wanted Martin to work with them, as Paul put it, ‘the way we used to do it’.

Martin had no wish to return to the fraught atmosphere of Twickenham Studios the previous January, and of the White Album before that. ‘If the album’s going to be the way it used to be,’ he replied with a touch of his old schoolmasterly sternness, ‘then all of you have got to be the way you used to be’–meaning hard-working, focused, good-humoured; above all, friends with each other. Paul promised that they would be. And, incredibly enough, they were.

On the sunny morning of 8 August, the four met in Abbey Road, that tree-lined north London boulevard whose name had long been usurped by their recording studio and now would be all over again by the album nearing completion. They were there to pose for a cover picture sketched out in advance by Paul: in that department, at least, his views still carried weight.

A few metres south of EMI’s studios was a black and white pedestrian crossing to the junction with Grove Road. Photographer Iain Macmillan positioned a small stepladder in the middle of Abbey Road and from that slight elevation took several shots of the Beatles walking over the crossing in single file, both from right to left and left to right.

Every one showed them in the same order: John first, then Ringo, Paul and George, in a military ‘quick march’ in which only Paul was out of step. His dress was similarly nonconformist–a double-breasted dark blue pinstripe suit just like the ones his father used to wear to work at Liverpool Cotton Exchange throughout the Forties and Fifties. Undercutting this period formality were an open-necked shirt, a cigarette, thongy sandals without socks and–in some shots, including the one chosen for the album cover–bare feet.

The image could hardly have been more mundane. Yet in years to come, any other band aspiring to greatness would replicate that four-figure tableau marching over similar broad black and white bars. And each day in Abbey Road, there wouldn’t be a moment when the crossing was without a quartet of pilgrims strung across it, risking the highly dangerous traffic to be photographed à la Beatles–one of them barefoot and carefully out of step with his companions.

‘Paul is still with us’

The three most notable celebrations of 1960s youth culture all took place in the golden summer of the decade’s final year, almost as if responding to a mass desire to squeeze the very most out of its every remaining minute.

On 5 July, a crowd of 250,000 watched the Rolling Stones memorialise their late guitarist, Brian Jones, with a free concert in London’s Hyde Park. Between 15 and 19 August, 500,000 spectators swamped a muddy pasture near Woodstock, New York, for a 32-act programme that included Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, the Who and Jimi Hendrix. Two weeks later, a different half-million descended on the sleepy Isle of Wight, off England’s south coast, for another three-day Anglo-American rock marathon, culminating in Bob Dylan’s first performance since his near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1966.

At each event, communing with the elite of contemporary rock in the open air meant extreme discomfort, overcrowding, bad sanitation, hunger and thirst, yet at all three the audience remained overwhelmingly law-abiding and good-humoured. This recurrent phenomenon of young people congregating in vast numbers, without violence or disorder, could not but impress even their bitterest critics among the older generation. For a hallucinatory moment, the hippy credo of love and peace truly seemed to have become a force capable of changing the world for the better.

Sadly, the musicians who had done most to create this mood of freedom and goodwill were nowadays locked up in endless acrimonious business meetings. Compared with Mick Jagger gyrating in a frilly dress under Hyde Park’s oaks, or Jimi Hendrix playing an ironic ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock, the Beatles even seemed a touch passé. Yet, as so often before, it was they who created the quintessential summer sounds, albeit late in the season and with a hint of chill autumn to come.

The Abbey Road album, released in Britain on 26 September, seemed to banish all the recent rumours of their imminent disintegration. After the sprawling, fragmented White Album, it was a return to the top form of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper; a one-disc collection whose every track was an indispensable gem. A new step forward, indeed, as it contained two songs by George that were the equal of any from John or Paul (‘Here Comes the Sun’ and ‘Something’) plus one by Ringo (‘Octopus’s Garden’). Most reassuring of all were vocal harmonies sweeter and closer than any since ‘This Boy’ or ‘Here, There and Everywhere’. What George said on one of his two surprise tours de force really seemed true: ‘Here comes the sun… it’s all right’.

Paul’s pledge of good behaviour to George Martin on the others’ behalf had been kept way beyond Martin’s expectations. They had succeeded in forgetting their business differences and turned back into musicians who still knew no better company than one another. In the boardroom they might be drifting irretrievably apart, but this last time together in the studio they’d never seemed more united. The poignancy that underscores every track–smiles hiding tears, polish masking pain, a seeming fresh start that’s really a dead end–would ultimately make Abbey Road the bestselling Beatles album ever.