The Beatles (154 page)

The Beatles raised the stakes by pledging their own shares in the company, as well as those held by Pattie Harrison, and Suba Films (a division of Apple that had produced
A Hard Day’s Night, Help!,
and
Yellow Submarine
), as collateral against a loan from Henry Ansbacher and Company strong enough to beat back ATV’s bid. Even Allen Klein stepped up, adding his 145,000 shares of MGM stock to the war chest. It was a powerful countermeasure—John referred to their gambit as playing “
Monopoly with real money
.”

But on the advice of John Eastman, who felt “there was no point in putting out cash to get control of the company,” Paul refused to commit his shares as part of the collateral package, touching off what one source called “
a monumental row
.” Paul obviously assumed—Eastman had probably led him to assume—that ATV would ultimately reconsider its position, give up, and sell its 35 percent stake to the Beatles rather than risk losing Paul’s and John’s services. In any case, Paul believed that no matter what happened, there would always be plenty of income from those songs regardless of ownership; so secure was he in this belief that he hadn’t even consulted John before pulling the plug.
It was a tremendous mistake
. He came off as disunited, antagonistic, and high-handed. John’s, George’s, and Ringo’s patience had just about run out. Despite their entreaties, Paul continued to refuse to sign the agreement with Allen Klein. And now he’d bailed out on them with ATV.

“
Paul actually stopped coming
into the office,” recalls Peter Brown. “Once Klein took charge, it soured things for Paul and, for a time, even the others wanted nothing to do with him.” John and Yoko saw it as an opening and rushed to fill the void, demanding “the best office in the building,” the room Ron Kass had recently vacated. The once-elegant space, decorated in an array of expensive white Italian furniture, white television console, and an oversize chrome-and-leather desk, became the headquarters for their new venture, Bag Productions, formed exclusively to promote an exuberant line of John and Yoko vehicles. The building became an “ever-changing John and Yoko exhibition.” The couple plunged ahead, launching
one crazy project after another, hoping to make up in shock value for what they lacked in direction.

For their first press conference in Vienna, John and Yoko lay obscured inside a large white sack, singing and humming, promoting a process they called “
total communication
.” A second album of experimental recordings—
Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions
—was released with another controversial cover (grainy photos depicting Yoko’s hospital stay on one side, their drug arraignment on the other); aside from the usual discordant gibberish, one track contained a four-minute segment of the heartbeat of the baby Yoko miscarried. Derek Taylor, in classic understatement, described their behavior as “
very fast living
in the mad lane.” They filmed hours of self-indulgent documentaries, gobbled down drugs, staged loony press conferences (usually to announce a scheme whose “premise” was ostensibly to promote world peace but wound up promoting a Yoko Ono happening), and scheduled more bed-ins. John jabbered incessantly in a thickening Liverpool brogue, but incoherently, like a lunatic, and his appearance reflected it; he looked gaunt, sickly, from the heroin he ingested, his hair long, unkempt, and stringy.
Variety
reported
that two producers were pursuing him to star in a thirteen-part television series,
Jesus of Nazareth,
a report later discredited, though he certainly looked the part. (Months later he actually was approached by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice to play the title role in
Jesus Christ Superstar,
but they lost their interest when he said: “If I do it, I would want Yoko Ono to play Mary.”) Loyal fans, to say nothing of his closest friends, found him bizarre. “
I don’t know what people think
of John at the moment,” Ringo said, puzzled. “Maureen was in Liverpool and I know a lot of people there are saying that he has gone a bit crazy…. [T]hey think he has gone off his head.”

In Barry Miles’s biography,
Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now,
Paul attributes much of John’s behavior to the heroin and “
paranoia
,” which he believed was covered up well by John’s so-called genius. But the paranoia didn’t lead to the antics. Within days after the first bed-in, John announced their next move, Acorns for Peace: sending envelopes “
containing two acorns
to the head of state of every country in the world” so they could plant trees instead of bombs. Later in the year they would take over billboards in eleven world cities, declaring “The War Is Over.”
Then, on April 22
John assembled a small gathering of friends and reporters on the roof of Savile Row and officially changed his middle name from Winston, which he hated, to Ono. Yoko insisted that it was politically
motivated, based on a conversation they had after their wedding. “
How would
you
like it
if you had to change your name upon marriage to Mr. John Ono?” she demanded of him. Admitting it was “unfair,” John declared: “I do not feel patriotic enough to keep the name [Winston, after Churchill]. I am John Ono Lennon.”

John was having so much fun stirring up trouble, manipulating the press with Yoko, that nothing, not even money and legal hassles, was important enough to distract him. Occasionally, when Allen Klein managed to corral his attention, John dealt with matters that affected the Beatles’ well-being; once, at a point when the negotiations for control of Northern Songs were going down the tubes, he even attended regular meetings with his Liverpool bandmates. But they belonged to the past, and he rarely socialized with them anymore.

As the Beatles stumbled toward summer, there was still no consensus on a manager, and the prospects for hammering out an agreement—any agreement—seemed bleak. Even so, Allen Klein negotiated a new long-term contract with EMI that gave the Beatles an impressive 25 percent royalty on their albums, paid directly to Apple. With this commitment from the label and infused with newfound enthusiasm, Paul persuaded the others to return to Abbey Road to continue work on a new studio album.

Whether John, George, and Ringo were inclined to record with Paul, they recognized the importance of putting some product in the pipeline. The tapes from earlier in the year that would eventually become
Let It Be
languished in the can, abandoned, a victim of haste and sloppy execution. “
[They] were so lousy
and so bad,” according to John—“
twenty-nine hours of tape
… twenty takes of everything”—that “none of us would go near them….
None of us could face remixing
them; it was [a] terrifying [prospect].” “
It was laying [sic] dormant
and so we decided, ‘Let’s make a
good
album again,’ ” George recalled.

A good album.
He obviously meant with carefully crafted songs and diligent production, both hallmarks of the Beatles’ legacy. Either of those conditions, however, would require a top-flight producer—or a referee. Paul phoned George Martin to inquire whether he’d be available, or even willing, to make
a Beatles album “like we used to
.” The request, although routine, caught Martin off guard. Considering the way they were arguing, to say nothing of the way he’d been ignominiously shunted aside for the
Let It Be
sessions, Martin assumed he’d worked his last with the Beatles.
Still, no one excited, challenged, or delivered for him like the boys. Would he do it? Indeed, in a heartbeat, but… “
Only if you let me produce it
the way we used to,” he told Paul. John also had to agree, he insisted, but Paul assured him their decision was unanimous.

John was actually psyched to record. When the vast snarl of red tape that had been occupying so much of the past five months finally began to unravel, the drive to make music was so fierce that he couldn’t wait for the other Beatles. Yoko had exhorted him repeatedly to “get it down,” arguing that he didn’t need Paul, George, or Ringo to validate his talent. He was brimming with material, real edgy stuff. Pages of lyrics were strewn conspicuously on a coffee table in his house, their imaginative stanzas and middle eights a constant reminder of his personal output. But Yoko was only partly right. In a pinch, John still relied on Paul to polish a song with potential, as he had with “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” which he’d written while on his honeymoon in Paris. On the evening of April 14 only Paul was available (George was in the States; Ringo was preoccupied filming
The Magic Christian
), and ready to rock, the two estranged mates, working like master craftsmen, recorded and mixed the entire song in a fast-paced, productive seven-hour session at Abbey Road. John handled all guitar parts, while Paul filled out the rhythm track, adding piano, bass, and drums, and the two men harmonized beautifully on the chorus, as though they’d been doing it all their lives (which, of course, they had), in a way that truly exemplified
Beatlesque.

John had also recorded the anthemic “Give Peace a Chance” in a makeshift hotel-room studio staged at a bed-in for peace in Montreal.
His original plan had been
to get to the United States, where an entourage consisting of Yoko, Ringo, Maureen, Derek Taylor, and his wife, Joan, Terry Southern, Peter Sellers, and Denis O’Dell would pull off a doozy of a press event intended to protest the Vietnam War. On May 16, however, as they were about to set sail from Southampton on the newly christened
QE2,
John was turned back at dock, having been denied an entry visa by U.S. Customs as an “
inadmissible immigrant
” based on his drug conviction in December.
Declassified internal FBI memos
reveal that J. Edgar Hoover had long had his eye on John, as had Richard Nixon and a number of American conservative bureaucrats who feared the Beatles’ influence in their vocal opposition to the war. This was their petty revenge.

Now John approached the forthcoming session with great enthusiasm. To a music journalist, during a rare moment of détente, he confessed that songwriting was “something that gets in your blood” and forced him
to put aside old conflicts. “
I think I could probably write
about thirty songs a day,” he bragged in the course of the interview. “As it is, I probably average about twelve a night. Paul, too—he’s mad on it…. I’ve got things going around in my head right now, and as soon as I leave here I’m going round to Paul’s place and we’ll sit down and start [to] work.”

In fact, he was taking Paul
the rudiments of “Because,” which he’d sketched out only earlier that afternoon. As for his inspiration: “Yoko was playing some classical bit [on the piano], and I said, ‘play that backwards,’ and we had a tune.” According to Paul, he recognized the melody’s debt to Beethoven’s
Moonlight Sonata,
identifying Yoko’s influence from lyrical themes lifted “
straight out of
Grapefruit.
” Even so, it was a gorgeous reinterpretation—“
one of the most beautiful things
we’ve ever done,” George recalled—with three-part harmonies that were as sweet and tight as anything the Beatles ever attempted.

Throughout May and into July they blazed through most of the album’s basic tracks. Beginning with
George’s masterpiece, “Something
,” the Beatles laid the groundwork for an intensely stirring romantic ballad that would challenge “Yesterday” and “Michelle” as one of the most recognizable songs they ever produced. In John’s opinion, George’s songwriting “
wasn’t in the same league
[as his and Paul’s] for a long time,” but that opinion changed after “Something.” Even George Martin admitted being “
surprised that George had it in him
.” There was a sense of structure they could no longer overlook, an instinct for atmosphere and emotion that was absent in his earlier songs.
Time,
in its review, called “Something” simply “the best song on the album.” Paul, delivering a somewhat backhanded compliment, felt it “
came out of left field
,” but he was struck by its “very beautiful melody” and suggested releasing it as a single.

It was an odd segue into “You Never Give Me Your Money,” which Paul wrote, he said, “
lambasting Allen Klein’s attitude
toward [the Beatles]: no money, just funny paper, all promises, and it never works out.” The song was written immediately after
Let It Be
finished filming, when Paul’s emotions were at their most brittle, and as such, the lyric is infused with stinging bitterness. “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight” was another acid-tipped barb aimed in Klein’s direction and came next, although it was drawn from a nursery rhyme by a seventeenth-century playwright, Thomas Dekker, whom Paul discovered in a songbook belonging to his new stepsister, Ruth:
^*

Golden slumbers kiss your eyes
/ Smiles awake when you rise, Sleep pretty wantons do not cry / And I will sing a lullaby.

“
I liked the words
so much,” Paul recalled. “I thought it was very restful, a very beautiful lullaby, but I couldn’t read the melody, not being able to read music. So I just took the words and wrote my own music.” By contrasting it against “Carry That Weight,” he sewed a quiet fury into its lining. Only the tone of the song had changed, not the context of his feelings. He remained furious at his mates, oppressed by the “heavy” atmosphere Klein had brought upon Apple.

John was curiously missing throughout the sessions for the caprice (“Golden Slumbers” and “Carry That Weight” were recorded as one song). On July 1, while on a cross-country vacation in Scotland with Yoko, Julian, and Kyoko, he drove his white Austin Maxi off a road into a steeply graded ditch. “
He was driving for the first time
in his life,” recalled his cousin Stanley Parkes, who had entertained the entourage for a few blissful days in Edinburgh just prior to the accident. Stanley fretted over seeing John behind the wheel, knowing from experience how he “wasn’t a competent driver at all.” John was headed north, to visit a spectacular glacial bay situated in the Highlands at the Kyle of Tongue, via a weave of roads that Parkes considered dangerous under ideal conditions. A myopic, happily stoned Beatle spelled catastrophe from the outset. He warned John before leaving: “Remember, you’re on single-track roads up here. Be very, very careful.” But John wasn’t listening. Stubbornly, he waved Stanley off. “Oh, I know. Okay, okay.” But rounding a jagged bend near Golspie, John encountered another car head-on. “I didn’t know what to do,” he explained from a bed at Lawson Memorial Hospital, where he was taken after the incident, “so I just let go of the steering wheel,” sending the car careening over an embankment and nearly demolishing it. Miraculously, no one was killed, but
John required seventeen stitches
to close a facial wound, with Yoko and Kyoko suffering similar, if slightly less severe, injuries. Julian, who was traumatized and in shock, recuperated at his aunt Elizabeth’s house in Durness.