The Beatles (150 page)

Meanwhile back at home
too many Pakistanis

Living in a council flat

Candidate Macmillan tell me what your plan is

Won’t you tell me where it’s at

It was a good piece of social parody, but Paul and John worried it would be misconstrued and used to paint the Beatles as racists. After 1970 most of John’s songs, in particular, would bristle with topical references, but for now their artistic energies were directed elsewhere.

Another of Paul’s contributions, the spare, engaging “Two of Us,” set up another duet with John, and although it was a paean to Linda Eastman, the boys’ perfectly balanced harmonies, with voices wrapped around each other like security blankets, established a disarming performance that recalls the synergy of earlier albums.

There seemed to be a renewed sense of teamwork in the friendlier setting. But as the week wore on, as competition revived and the stakes were raised, egos collided anew. Yoko’s interference continued to make a bad situation worse. More than ever, according to George, she was
putting out “negative vibes
.” Between the Beatles’ takes, John withdrew further from the group fold, whispering in studio corners with Yoko, missing cues, often not showing up on time for a session and refusing to apologize for it. His mood vacillated wildly between the wittiness of previous occasions and the dark self-doubts fed and fueled by Yoko. Throughout the recording he was increasingly nervous and apprehensive. “
It was a very tense period
,” Paul recalled. He attributed much of John’s erratic behavior to heroin use “and all the accompanying paranoias.” In vastly different interviews about the period, both Paul and George used the identical phrase to describe the situation, saying John was “out on a limb,” dangling dangerously above the abyss, headed for a certain fall. “Don’t Let Me Down,” Paul believed, was “
a genuine plea
… a genuine cry for help.” (In fact, John said, “
That’s me singing about Yoko
.”) With his painfully thin frame, gaunt face, stringy, unkempt hair, and bloodshot eyes, John looked demonic, like a zombie had claimed his tormented soul. He needed help—just not from the Beatles; he wouldn’t accept their assistance, it was out of the question. “
I don’t think he wanted much
to be hanging out with us,” George explained, “and I think Yoko was pushing him out of the band.”

Of that, there seems little doubt. For someone who desired more interaction with the Beatles, Yoko acted resentful, even scornful toward them. She found
the band to be “very childish
.” As different as it seemed to mainstream ears, to her there was nothing daring about it, and she hooked right into John’s own lingering doubts about his creative powers and self-fulfillment.

For months he’d been questioning the limits of his potential, wondering how much he’d sacrificed by blending into a group. Though John continued to participate in group decisions and record with the Beatles, their sound was something
he “didn’t believe in
” anymore. He was just going through the motions, “
just [doing] it like a job
,” he explained. Musically, he was “
fed up with the same old shit
.”
He felt constrained
by the simplicity
and limited format of the pop song. Somehow, he’d abandoned the element of risk. Yoko may not have been much of a musician, but she had the scene down cold and knew what to say in order to discredit it in his eyes. She told John exactly what he wanted to hear: that he was a genius, “
better than Picasso
”;
the others were “insecure
”; they weren’t “
sophisticated, intellectually
”; they were dead, artistically; they were holding him back. What, she wanted to know, was he going to do
next?

Not since Elvis Presley had anyone held such power over John—but Yoko, unlike a symbol, was in a position to use it. “
Yoko had him under
her spell,” recalls Tony Bramwell. “She was always in his ear, telling him what to do, how to sing. If she couldn’t get into the act, she was certainly going to influence it through John.” Out of these discussions, many of them in the studio, many of them while high on a dangerous drug, John’s antipathy toward the Beatles solidified.

John quickly changed the atmosphere in the studio. Once again the Beatles started banging heads; “
they started picking on
each other,” according to John, or rather, picking one another apart. All of them, except perhaps Ringo, belittled the others’ suggestions, complaining about someone’s contribution—“You’re not playing that right” or “That doesn’t go there”—blaming one another for the failings of a song. “
I started to feel it wasn’t
a good idea to
have
ideas,” Paul recalled, although he certainly did his share to inflame the situation.

George tried to defuse the explosive tension by bringing in a guest musician, the way he’d done with Eric Clapton on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” On January 19 he and Clapton had gone to a Ray Charles concert at the Festival Hall and recognized a young musician sent out to warm up the crowd. George hadn’t seen Billy Preston since Hamburg, when he was a sixteen-year-old wunderkind in Little Richard’s backup band. The Beatles had always been fond of Billy. George knew they’d get a kick out of seeing him again, so he invited Billy to sit in with them at Apple Studios the following day.

What George thought he was doing is impossible to say. He may have been hoping Billy’s presence would help generate some civility or at least “
offset the vibes
,” the negative vibes, that had been directed at him. Then again, he’d listened to the lethargic playbacks from their first few efforts and no doubt figured Billy’s keyboard might light up the band. Hoping to redirect the Beatles’ focus and sharpen their lackluster performance, Martin rolled Billy right into their work on “Get Back,” which seemed to mobilize the detached elements with a playful complement of electric
piano figures, bringing a whole new energy to the song. Ringo appreciated how, when Billy joined the session, “
the bullshit went out the window
”; otherwise, he felt there was little upside to bringing him into the recording process. Paul welcomed the contribution—at first. He thought Billy “played great” and helped stabilize, however temporarily,
his crumbling relationship with John
. “
It was like having a guest
in the house,” he explained, “someone you put your best manners on for…. It might have helped us all behave better with one another on the sessions.” But as with any guest, as time wore on, Paul felt Preston overstayed his welcome.
Billy turned up at the studio
day after day, participating in everything from the direction of the music to deciding where, or even whether, they would stage a concert. Paul found this intrusion “
a little bit puzzling
,” to say nothing of presumptuous. Sitting in with the Beatles was one thing;
joining
them was another. Although many had claimed the title—Brian Epstein, George Martin, and Murray the K, to name a few—there was no room in the band for a “fifth Beatle.” Paul felt the same way when John had suggested replacing George with Eric Clapton; he never would have agreed to it—
never.
The Beatles had a legacy to protect. As far as he cared, they were—and always would be—John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

By the end of January, working together on the project had become completely unmanageable. During lunch at Apple on January 29, the Beatles, along with Glyn Johns and Michael Lindsay-Hogg, sat around the well-appointed conference table, debating how to finish the film, when the discussion turned to the office’s resident charm. In the course of conversation, Ringo mentioned that there was a wonderful open roof they intended to turn into a garden. “
Oh, that’s fantastic
,” Johns remembered saying. Catching Lindsay-Hogg’s eye, he said, “I have an idea. We should go up and look at this roof.”

The roof, as it turned out, held the answer to all their problems. It became obvious from the minute they climbed the stairs. The unanimous opinion: “What a great idea it would be to play on the roof—play to the whole of the West End.” The Beatles could give a concert from the comfort of their own building, without any of the hassle that usually bogged down such affairs. They wouldn’t have to deal with promoters, tickets, security, fans, press, jelly babies—nothing. Just head upstairs, plug in the instruments, and let ’er rip. Brilliant. “
Nobody had ever done that
,” George recalled, “so it would be interesting to see what happened when we started playing up there.”

The whole thing was to be very spontaneous, a secret. Not even the
Apple staff was given advance warning. The next morning, a cold, cloud-streaked day, Mal and Neil set up the Beatles’ equipment while the film crew, working with a stripped-down unit, staked out territory along the outer retaining walls. The Beatles, along with Billy Preston, Yoko, and Linda, assembled in the basement, going over material. Not since the live broadcast for “All You Need Is Love” had they felt as excited—or more like a band.

Just before noon the haze burned off unexpectedly, the clouds rolled back, and the sun broke through. Before the first song, a breathless version of “Get Back,” had even ended, the music had attracted a small lunchtime crowd of onlookers, and word began to circulate that the Beatles—the beloved Beatles, who hadn’t entertained in England for more than three years—were playing in public. People working in the surrounding buildings, mostly a district of tailors and haberdashers, felt the music before they heard it. Windows rattled, floors shook, and a symphony of horns blared from the caravan of traffic that had drawn to a standstill along Savile Row. All around, neighbors rushed into the street or raced to their own roofs to see what all the racket was about.

One interested establishment was the Savile Row police station, only three hundred yards off, at the bottom of the street. Manning a bank of four phones, they’d fielded endless irate complaints since the first notes blared through the streets. A confrontation was inevitable. Shortly after 1:15 the fireworks started. The Beatles had just run through “One After 909” when two uniformed policemen strolled into Apple’s reception area and requested that the music be lowered. Mal Evans greeted them, steering the conversation toward one side of the room. “
The Beatles had arranged for a camera
to be hidden in a booth in the reception area for exactly such a situation,” recalls Jack Oliver, who worked in the press office. “Mal wanted to make sure it picked up all the action.”

If they’d expected a raid or something comparable, it was a disappointment. The police were friendly but insistent: “
Honestly, the music has got
to go down, or there’s going to be some arrests,” they avowed. No one was being threatened, they assured Mal. “But can you please turn it down? Can you turn it off, please? Thank you.”

Please and thank you—what a colossal letdown. Ringo was especially crestfallen. “
When [the police] came up
, I was playing away and I thought, ‘Oh, great. I hope they drag me off,’ ” he recalled. Ringo fantasized about being physically restrained “because we were being filmed and it would
have looked really great, kicking the cymbals and everything.” No such luck, but they still achieved their purpose by having the police interrupt the concert. The Beatles against the establishment: it would look great on film.

“I’d like to say thanks on behalf of the group and ourselves,” John mugged into the camera, “and I hope we passed the audition.”

Even though the concert was cut short, the Beatles managed to play just enough material to cover a full performance. In a little under forty minutes, they ran through “Get Back” several times, as well as “Don’t Let Me Down,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “One After 909,” “I Dig a Pony,” and a brief, whimsical version of “God Save the Queen.” “With a bit of doctoring, we’ll be good,” Lindsay-Hogg assured them.

Still, George was incensed that the police had the temerity to legislate the playing of music. “
If anybody wants to sing
and play on their roof, what’s the law say as to why you can’t do that?” he wondered.

John responded decisively, “Disturbing the peace.” But his answer, even though convincing, resonated with ambiguity.

As Apple’s financial fabric unraveled, so, too, did the delicate peace that for all these months had kept the Beatles from self-destructing.

John’s comments to
Disc
—that the Beatles would “be broke in six months”—undid the first knot. Whether it was true or not, Paul felt that their privacy had been breached, and he tore into
Disc
’s gentle columnist Ray Coleman for his role in disseminating potentially harmful information. “
You know this is a small
and young company, just trying to get along,” he roared at Coleman in front of a dozen openmouthed Apple employees outside of Ron Kass’s office. “And you know John always shoots his mouth off. It’s not that bad. We’ve got a few problems, but they’ll be sorted out.” The diminutive Coleman, who was on the verge of tears, hugged the wall as Paul, for whom he had great respect, continued the dressing-down. “I’m surprised it was you—we thought we had a few friends in the press we could trust.”

Paul’s determination to keep their financial difficulties out of the papers was providential. Within hours of reading John’s remarks, a tough little scorpion named Allen Klein attacked the phones in an attempt to contact John about handling the Beatles’ assets. Klein, who managed the
Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Bobby Vinton, Herman’s Hermits, and Donovan, had been circling the Beatles for years, just waiting for the opportunity to pounce. Klein, at the time a sharp-mouthed thirty-eight-year-old dynamo from Newark, New Jersey, who spoke with an almost comical truck driver brogue and bore “
a distant resemblance to Buddy Hackett
,” had spent part of his childhood in a Jewish orphanage before learning to survive on the streets by his wits. He taught himself the essentials necessary to be an accountant, earning a degree by attending night classes at Upsala College, and began an apprenticeship in the New York entertainment industry, where he became known for rooting through record-company ledgers in search of unpaid royalties. In the process, he unearthed a gold mine: because of the slipshod nature of the way records were kept, every audit revealed discrepancies. He wasted no time in impressing Bobby Darin with his sleuthing tactics. In 1962, at a party celebrating Darin’s unprecedented deal with Capitol Records, Klein introduced himself to the singer and handed him a check for $100,000. According to legend, Darin stared puzzlingly at the check and asked what it was for. “For nothing,” Klein supposedly replied, delighted with the impression he’d left. Two years later he performed the same feat at RCA for Sam Cooke, solidifying his reputation among artists as a financial gunslinger.