Disturbing the Peace Disturbing the PeaceAfter six years’ work, for the most part of which you have been at the very top of the music world, in which you have given pleasure to countless millions throughout every country where records are played, what have you got to show for it?… Your personal finances are a mess. Apple is a mess….”
Thus began a five-page letter of resignation sent to each of the Beatles on October 23, 1968, by Stephen Maltz, their young and levelheaded in-house accountant. It was a nervy piece of criticism, a blistering indictment of their business practices, which he said had been carelessly conducted almost from the day Apple opened its doors. The company was “a debacle,” Maltz avowed, a mosaic of disarray and incompetence. There was so much waste, so much unscrupulous recordkeeping, so much outright stealing, that it was a wonder there was anything left in the till for operating expenses.
Throughout the months that followed, troubling details about the Beatles’ finances began to emerge. Because of payment cycles snafued by byzantine accounting procedures and slipshod deals, the Beatles had earned virtually nothing in 1968, a “pitiful £78,000.” That would not even begin to cover their personal expenses, which had no restrictions. “The deal among the Beatles was: you just charged what you need,” according to Peter Brown, who rubber-stamped their vouchers. “The boys used to get cash every week, as they needed it, plus their bills would just be paid for by the accountants, no questions asked.” Meanwhile, everyone borrowed against a seemingly bottomless Apple loan account. “John was the biggest spender; he had no sense of money at all. Ringo was next: houses, cars, toys, presents for Maureen.” Maltz tried repeatedly to warn them about the enormous tax bite that required ratepayers in the Beatles’ bracket to earn almost £120,000 for every £10,000 they spent. What he didn’t tell them was that the often disgraceful way they behaved made them a target for criminal investigation.
The final straw came a few days before Maltz’s resignation, on October 18, when John and Yoko were busted for possession. It was a seedy, shameful affair at the Montagu Square flat, with a dozen police swarming in windows and doors to search for illegal drugs. John, who had been tipped off before the raid, thanks to a call from Don Short, scoured the place from top to bottom, “flushing handfuls of pills down the toilet,” according to Pete Shotton, and madly “hoovering the carpets because Jimi Hendrix and Ringo had lived there.” But John was no match for the dogs that sniffed out marijuana residue in a binocular case on the mantel and in a rolling machine stashed in the bathroom. The press had a field day, snapping roll after roll of photos as John and Yoko, looking nervous and disheveled, were marched outside to a paddy wagon idling at the curb.
If the bust signified anything, it demonstrated that the press and police had finally taken off the gloves. Until now, according to Ray Connolly, who was the Evening Standard’s pop columnist, the Beatles had been lionized by the press. “It was a measure of their popularity that no bad word was ever written about them in the daily papers,” he says. “It was an unspoken contract. The press was rooting for them—and protecting them.” Connolly included. He recalls visiting with John one afternoon at the Harrow Road Clinic, a few days before Yoko’s miscarriage. “Suddenly, a character called Michael X turned up, a real bad guy [who was later hanged for his part in a murder]. He opened this huge suitcase and took out enough grass to turn on the entire city of Westminster. Now, I’m a member of the press. Do I ever mention it? No, nor would John expect me to. That was the deal at the time.” And an exclusive deal, if contingencies were any indication. The Stones were routinely hounded by the press and police, as were other rock bands with a bad-boy image. “Never the Beatles. They were considered untouchable, by the police also. No one wanted to spoil the party.”
But that phase of the party, it seemed, was over. John’s outrageous public affair, Yoko’s out-of-wedlock miscarriage, the scandalous Two Virgins cover, even the escapades with the Maharishi—for respectable fans, it was too much to accept. They could deal with John’s outbursts, his rebellious nature, his opinions about the war. But with Yoko, apparently, he had crossed the line. No one knew better than John how grim the situation had become. Toward the end of the year, he told friends that everyone—the press, the police, even the fans—“were out to get” him. Convinced that the bust “was a frame-up,” he worried that the authorities would relentlessly pursue him from now on, destroying his reverie with Yoko.
As the volatile year 1968 drew to a close, the prevailing mood among the Beatles was both melancholy and uncertain. The complexion of the band had changed, it was in upheaval. The boys’ relationship to one another was being drastically realigned. Even their personal issues demanded a break with the past.
On November 8 John’s divorce from Cynthia was finalized by the courts.* Earlier, in June, Paul ended his five-year relationship with Jane Asher in much the same fashion that John had dispatched his wife. That summer, with their engagement more or less in limbo, both Paul and Jane sensed that things were going nowhere. Like the Beatles, they’d changed and grown in opposite directions. Paul, especially, knew it had to end. But—how? Who would initiate the break? Ultimately, as was custom, Paul just forced her hand.
As soon as Jane went on tour with the Bristol Old Vic, it was virtually inevitable that he would find, if only temporarily, a replacement. Everyone at Apple detected the familiar symptoms. “When Paul got bored,” says Peter Brown, “his dick got twitchy.” It was dispiriting coming home from the studio each day to an empty house. He craved some kind of nurturing, some intimacy. In the meantime, Paul entertained himself with an American girl who’d arrived on Apple’s doorstep seeking help to finance a screenplay and wound up, instead, with one of the Beatles. Through early June they were seen around town together, dining at restaurants or camped out at one of the clubs. “It wasn’t anything serious,” says Alistair Taylor, who heard enough of the office gossip to appreciate the situation, “just the usual distraction with a pretty bird.” But when Jane arrived home unexpectedly and discovered Paul and the girl in bed together, that was the line in the sand. The relationship was “broken off, finished,” as she described it on a popular TV chat show.
No sooner had Jane removed her things from Cavendish Avenue than Paul’s interest in Linda began to heat up. In September, Paul invited her to London as the Beatles were putting the finishing touches on the White Album. Then, after the record had been delivered to EMI, they flew to New York together, where the courtship turned serious—and seriously fun. “I loved [it in] New York,” he recalls, brimful with lasting memories of those weeks. “Linda had a cool little flat on Lexington and Eighty-third… and we’d go around a lot.” Unlike those surreal New York experiences during Beatlemania, when he was a prisoner in the Plaza and the Delmonico, they trolled the city streets unnoticed, whirling in and out of local galleries and clubs in an effort to take it all in. New York in October was even more magical than he’d remembered. For Paul, life began and ended on those city streets. Together, he and Linda explored every neighborhood, from Chinatown to Harlem, where Paul lingered in local record shops disguised in army-navy surplus and “a big beard, like Ratso out of Midnight Cowboy.” In a way, it was the culmination of a dream. These were among the rare times when he was absolutely relaxed, in a place he considered the music capital of the world. “Linda eventually took me to the Apollo,” Paul recalls. “We just went on our own, took a cab.” It was one of those chaotic Wednesday-night talent free-for-alls with Billy Stewart headlining, and they rooted for a soulful little girl in a gray dress who lit up the jaded crowd.
One night, wandering through Chinatown, a feeling crept up on Paul without warning. “Linda was showing me around,” he recalls, “and we passed a sign that said, ‘Come in now and get a Buddhist wedding.’ ” He drew a breath and without giving it much thought said, “C’mon, Linda—what about it?” The traffic, the street sounds, the buzz of voices, her heartbeat—everything stopped. He was serious, she gathered. Paul McCartney was asking her to marry him, right now. He watched as she ran through a whole laundry list of emotions, grinned broadly, and said, “No, no! I can’t do that.”
Later, Paul insisted that he’d only been kidding, but she wasn’t so sure of that. And neither was he.
In any case, something important had taken hold that week, something that opened a window onto the future. Paul had fallen deeply in love with Linda Eastman: “her womanliness”; her daughter, Heather (from a brief marriage); her extended family; her “slight rebelliousness”; her seemingly normal life—the whole package. She turned him on in so many ways. She was organized, but in a relaxed way, as opposed to Jane’s more rigid manner. There was no pretense, none of the uncertainty. Everything just felt right.
One unusually cool and crisp October afternoon, after a serene stroll shopping on the Upper East Side, Paul suggested to Linda that she and Heather return to London with him—permanently. It was Linda’s nature to be spontaneous, but even she had to admit this was fairly extreme. It meant packing up everything she had and moving from a comfortable home. She dreaded leaving New York. “It was great living how I lived [there],” she said, recalling how it felt less “restrained” in New York than in stately England. Her career was in New York, as well as her family, her friends.
By November 1, with their time together rapidly expiring, Linda decided with startling swiftness. She took Paul up on his offer and moved into his house on Cavendish Avenue. A month later the obstacles were ancient history. Prior to leaving for a weeklong holiday to Portugal, Linda discovered she was pregnant and felt “amused” that important decisions were being made naturally for them.
Finally, on a sunny, windswept beach in the Algarve, straining to be heard above the surf as it crashed against the rocky shore, Paul confirmed the rumors for a gathering of short-sleeved reporters that, indeed, he’d fallen in love with an American girl. What he did not tell them was that it was more than a run-of-the-mill rock ’n roll romance. In fact, they had already decided to get married.
The White Album sold faster than any of their previous records (in the United States alone, Capitol had shipped 3.5 million copies to record stores, which were still having trouble keeping it in stock). But as Maltz had warned the Beatles, Apple was draining their resources at a distressingly swift rate. There was nothing coming in from the company’s dormant subdivisions: Apple Films, Apple Electronics, Apple Publishing, and Apple Merchandising. The record company struck early gold, but expenses far outpaced future profits. And as far as underwriting dreams went, not a single investment—and there were several hundred—produced so much as a bankable fantasy. “Apple wasn’t being run,” Ringo said, “it was being run into the ground.”
It was time to take some aggressive, remedial measures. But with nerves from the White Album sessions still badly frayed, none of the Beatles felt like making plans for the future. They were exhausted by the constant bickering, by the demands on them to be productive, by having to justify themselves to the public. For the first time in memory, they couldn’t even bear to spend Christmas together.
The hang-up, the Beatles agreed, had less to do with music than with their plunging business interests. It infuriated them that the people who worked for them, their loyal entourage—Peter Brown, Alistair Taylor, and Derek Taylor, among others—“were all just living and drinking and eating like fuckin’ Rome.” They were disgusted at the situation and at themselves for letting it degenerate into such an appalling mess. John remained convinced that Apple did not have to rake in vast profits to function as a viable enterprise, but, as he told Disc and Music Echo, “if it carries on like this, all of us will be broke in the next six months.” By his calculations, Apple was costing the Beatles £18,000 or £20,000 a week. The company, he said, was sinking fast. “Somehow,” he said, “[we] needed a firm hand to stop it.”
John had already consulted the basset-hound-eyed, jowly, and irascible Lord Beeching, an old-school industrialist who had helped reorganize—some say wreck—Britain’s ailing railway system, in the hope of bringing him on to streamline Apple’s sagging fortunes. But Beeching’s initial enthusiasm was short-lived after a few days spent examining the company’s books. Offering only a few words of advice, Beeching warned John to “stick to music.” The Beatles also, according to Peter Brown, courted a handful of unlikely merchant-banking heavyweights—John dismissed them collectively as “animals”—none of whom materialized as saviors.
Fortunately for the Beatles, Linda Eastman had the inside track on a more-than-suitable candidate. Her father, Lee, specialized in international copyright law and represented a slew of important music publishing catalogues, among other prestigious clients. With his son, John, he ran one of the glitziest entertainment law firms in New York, Eastman and Eastman, with the power and resources to stabilize the Beatles’ affairs. The Eastmans had impeccable credentials and knew the industry front to back, extending into every area of the arts. Lee himself was a force to be reckoned with. Like his future son-in-law, he was an extraordinarily cagey man. He was fond of saying, “I’m just a country lawyer,” to reassure those who just met him that he wasn’t as slick as he appeared. “But you always knew the moment he entered a room that he was a tough character and in total control,” says Peter Brown, “which underscored the fact that he had a brilliant legal mind.”
Lee’s mistake—and a critical one, as it turned out—was sending his son, John, to lay the groundwork. A recent NYU law school graduate, John dressed informally, in the everyday college uniform of light blue oxford shirt, chinos, and loafers, with a personality to match. “He was this nice-looking all-American kind of guy, very Kennedyesque,” recalls Brown, “a preppy, chirpy person roughly about our age.” What Eastman proposed was a series of simple guidelines: get rid of all the distractions—the side businesses, like electronics and film—and concentrate on building a music empire, for which they’d already shown great skill. He parroted his father’s cardinal rule: do everything you can to control your copyrights and manage your own publishing company. Today, that philosophy is standard practice for most self-sufficient rock artists, but at the time it was fairly revolutionary and undertaken at considerable risk. It meant buying out Dick James and the Epstein family, which controlled Brian’s share through NEMS. And while they were at it, Eastman advised them to buy NEMS as well, which collected the Beatles’ record royalties from EMI, pocketing 25 percent off the top. Clive Epstein, desperately in need of cash to pay Brian’s estate taxes and weary of the day-to-day headaches involved with NEMS’ operation, had been dangling the company out to potential investors as a way of gauging its worth. He’d already been offered in the area of £800,000 from Triumph Investment Trust, one of London’s preeminent merchant-banking firms. Eastman proposed the Beatles pay 1 million pounds for NEMS, which EMI agreed to lend them against future royalties.
The Beatles liked what they heard, and engaged John Eastman’s services as their general counsel, giving him the green light to open negotiations on the propositions he outlined. John, however, remained leery. He didn’t want to be coddled and cultivated by Joe College. And, truthfully, he suspected that the Eastmans would give Paul an unfair advantage over him. Nevertheless, John agreed to go along with the others, if only because he wasn’t “presented with a real alternative.” At the time, John Eastman was the only game in town. But that, too, was about to change.
Nothing defined the Beatles’ discord as clearly as a business meeting among the four musicians that took place toward the end of 1968 in the conference room at Apple. On one side of the yacht-size rosewood table, George, Paul, and Ringo sat puffing impatiently on cigarettes. Across the way, facing them like legal adversaries, sat John and Yoko, characteristically smug and disapproving.
During the process of reviewing report after report of the company’s blunders, Paul, attempting to stem the rising tempers, made an incredible suggestion.
“I think we should get back on the road,” he said, “small band, go and do the clubs. Let’s get back to square one and remember what we’re all about.”
There was an agonizing stretch of silence while everyone, shifting nervously in his chair, waited to hear John’s response. He sat there impassively, glancing at Yoko, their heavily lidded eyes darting back and forth in some wordless exchange, until, at long last, he said: “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.”
This little firecracker hit the other Beatles with megaton force. They had weathered the strained feelings during the White Album sessions, although, admittedly, a vestige of resentment still lingered. They had survived the intrusion of Yoko and her destructive airs. It seemed as though they were on the right track when it came to cutting away Apple’s soft spots. But breaking up the Beatles had never crossed their minds. Paul recalled: “Our jaws dropped…. No one quite knew what to say.” They all had their differences, he insisted, but the Beatles were larger than any one of their individual gripes. They were a household name in every free country in the world. It was necessary for them to put aside personal issues. They owed it to one another to do what was best for the group.
Paul’s cheerleading only made John more indignant. John didn’t have a sentimental bone in his body when it came to the Beatles. Their financial interests were one thing, but nostalgia—nostalgia for “the good ol’ days”—repulsed him. It was so typical of Paul to try to hold the group together, to organize projects, to paint rosy pictures, and to search for easy solutions, like magical mystery tours—or playing clubs!—to make their personal problems disappear. There was no way John wanted to be involved in any more Beatles escapades. The energy was gone, the magic, the motivation. He and Yoko had been all over this already. No, no, no—he wasn’t interested anymore! The group was over as far as he was concerned.
They went back and forth like that for another hour, and eventually John backed down. He agreed to “give it a couple of months” so that they could work out some kind of strategy and to keep an open mind about the group in general. Everyone recognized how bound together they were by business interests. It was more crucial than ever that they remain unified financially and do something that improved their erratic cash flow. Again and again, Paul hammered away at doing some kind of concert—perhaps to air as a TV special. It would bring them instant income, as well as promote their records. Even though privately he had no intention of remaining one of the Beatles, John expressed a willingness, however grudgingly, to participate in such a performance. Part of it may have been a result of seeing Elvis Presley’s recent “Singer Special,” in which he appeared on TV with a stripped-down band, singing in front of a live audience. “The thing I miss most,” John recalled later, “is just sitting down with a group and playing.” He hated to admit it, but he’d rather enjoyed shooting a promotional film for “Hey Jude” on September 4, in which they’d played in front of a live audience at Twickenham Studios. If the others insisted, he’d go along with them.
George, however, “scoffed at” the idea of going back onstage. He’d had all he was going to take of the screaming and jelly babies. After Candlestick Park in 1966, that was it, as far as George was concerned. But Paul was adamant. He kept reminiscing about what a great live band the Beatles were. People had forgotten how hot their shows had been in Hamburg, how tight they were as musicians and as friends—and how much fun they’d had bashing about night after night. Beatlemania had killed that part of it for them. And yet, Paul believed they could recapture some of the earlier excitement by going back onstage. If they could no longer communicate as friends, then maybe they could do it as musicians. “I’d hoped that by playing like this in live performance,” he said, “… everything would sort itself out.”
By the end of 1968, he began circulating stories to the press that it was “virtually absolutely definite” that the Beatles would perform together again about Christmas. But come Christmas, plans to hold the concert were shelved until after the New Year. “It will definitely be free,” Paul announced, “and we may now do the show in a television studio.” But a television studio sounded so exclusive, too contrived. The thrill was gone.
Frantically, the Beatles scrambled to salvage the situation. To pull the show off at all, it would have to be even more spectacular than promised. Everything from the ridiculous to the sublime was proposed: a spontaneous appearance at a provincial pub, perhaps, or a rave-up in an exotic location. “I think the original idea was… to pick some songs, pick a location, and record [an] album of the songs in a concert,” George recalled. Paul suggested they “go on an ocean liner and get away from the world,” but that sounded too hoity-toity and rendered them inaccessible to fans. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who had directed the “Hey Jude” clip, offered another possibility: a Roman amphitheater in Libya. This appealed to the Beatles’ sense of grandeur and allure. They even envisioned a scenario in which a tribe of Bedouins arrive at the empty arena, followed by people of all nationalities who fill up the seats in a powerful display of brotherhood. But that, too, along with an outdoor extravaganza at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, was scotched by George as “being very expensive and insane.”
The search for a proper venue was growing increasingly desperate. Banking on the fact that a suitable location would materialize, the Beatles began rehearsing at Twickenham Studios on January 2, 1969, with a film crew shooting enough candid footage in case they wanted to include it as part of a future television documentary. “The idea was that you’d see the Beatles rehearsing, jamming, getting their act together, and then finally performing somewhere in a big end-of-show concert,” Paul recalled.
Whether out of haste or oversight, Twickenham proved a horrible decision. For one thing, it was too much of a hike for the Beatles and wedged them in a perpetual traffic nightmare around the London airport. For another, the soundstage in January was cold and damp; it was horribly impersonal, like “a big barn,” according to Ringo. It wasn’t conducive to making music—it didn’t have the right feel. The climate inside the studio turned even frostier the moment they began running down songs. Paul, as usual, attempted to run the show, which angered the others, who began dragging their feet in response. “To be fair, no one had much enthusiasm for this idea,” says an observer, “but Paul was determined to motivate them, which made him come off as controlling and bossy.” For everyone concerned, it had disastrous consequences.
By the second week of rehearsals, tensions were at an all-time high. A “general disenchantment” had come to pass, no thanks to the circumstances and the two 16mm cameras buzzing like mosquitoes just near their heads. At the best of times, Ringo and George acted bored, but there were moments punctuated by outrage and contempt. Paul, despite considerable cajoling, could not get John to concentrate. Yoko was all over him, distracting him with kisses whenever possible or whispering in his ear. By John’s own admission, he was “stoned all the time… on H” and “just didn’t give a shit.” After all, how could he get behind something that seemed so patently insincere? The music sucked; having not jammed in such a long time, the Beatles were rusty and out of sync. Their conversation was stilted. It disturbed him that they were “going to try and create something phony.”
Once again, it was rapidly shaping up as a Paul McCartney project. He was directing the cameramen, choosing the songs, blocking the arrangements as if they were classical scores. He worked frantically trying to fire up enthusiasm. But the way he controlled every aspect didn’t allow anyone else to contribute. “We put down a few tracks, but nobody was in[to] it at all,” John said.
George, especially, found it “stifling.” He had been growing frustrated and disillusioned with the interactions of the group for some time. As usual, the songs he’d written were being ignored. But nothing galled him more than his loss of creativity as a musician. George felt he absorbed more than the others what an insufferable dictator Paul had become, instructing him exactly what to play, as well as how and when to play it, indifferent to his or anyone else’s input. John would simply tell Paul to fuck off, but so far George was not up to the task. “I had always let him have his own way,” he recalled, “even when this meant that songs, which I had composed, were not being recorded.” In fact, on the last few albums, he’d played as a relative sideman for Paul, a role he cited as being particularly “painful.” He’d been promised that playing “live,” so to speak, would eliminate such heavy-handedness. But by the second week of rehearsals, Paul was cracking the whip and George’s patience had gone.
On January 10 there was a tense and hostile morning session during which Paul badgered George about how to play a simple guitar solo. George glared at him, lighting a cigarette in the interim while the anger and frustration building over the past ten days finally boiled to the surface. “Look, I’ll play whatever you want me to play, or I won’t play at all,” he grunted between clenched teeth. “Whatever it is that’ll please you, I’ll do it!” Later, on the lunch break, the two Beatles squared off in the studio canteen. George had taken enough shit and refused to continue recording in the same manner. It was too degrading, too painful. Paul, as usual, dismissed his grievances as “petty.” As their tempers rose, the movie cameras moved in for close-ups, right in their faces, filming the miserable confrontation as though part of a soap opera. “What am I doing here?” George wondered. All the niggling directions—play it slower, come in sooner, hit it harder—seemed suddenly unbearable. He fought the futility of it with rage. “I’m not doing this anymore. I’m out of here.” He packed up his guitar, snapping the case shut with sharp, angry blows. “That’s it,” he said, struggling into his jacket and heading toward the door, “see you ’round the clubs.”
When the recording session resumed that afternoon, sans George Harrison, the remaining three Beatles started to jam, a really violent, off-key bashing meant to take the edge off their frustration. The intensity of it was impossible to ignore. They pummeled and tore at their instruments as never before. Ferocious strains of feedback and distortion surged through the damp soundstage. “Our reaction was really, really interesting at the time,” Ringo noted. How else could they process all that had happened? Was it realistic to expect them to produce meaningful music without George? Yoko didn’t wait for an invitation to fill the void. She immediately laid claim to George’s chair and blue cushion. Looking quite pleased with the ominous events, flashing a fierce, tenacious smile, she jumped into the smoky spotlight, clutching the mike with both hands and screeching into it like a wounded animal. Reflexively, the high-strung musicians turned up the heat. For the moment, the Beatles served as her chastened backup band. Some bystanders stared in disbelief. The others, especially Paul and Ringo, may have missed the implication of Yoko’s grand triumph, but they understood her well enough to know that it had nothing to do with music.
George did not return at all that Friday, or the next day. Paul and Ringo expressed concern that he was calling it quits, whereas John suffered no such sympathy. “I think if George doesn’t come back by Monday or Tuesday,” he told Michael Lindsay-Hogg, “we’ll ask Eric Clapton to play. Eric would be pleased…. [H]e’d have enough scope to play the guitar. The point is, George leaves and do we want to carry on the Beatles? I certainly do.” When Lindsay-Hogg suggested they explain George’s absence by saying he was sick, John only hardened his position. “If he leaves, he leaves, you know…. If he doesn’t come back by Tuesday, we get Clapton…. We should go on as if nothing’s happened.”
On Sunday, January 12, all four Beatles met at Ringo’s house to discuss the apparent impasse. It was essential, they all decided, to bury the hatchet. Halfway through their talk, however, negotiations broke down and George stomped out, slamming the door as he left. A few hours later he was in the car, heading to Liverpool for a visit.
At first, the rest of the Beatles tried to shrug it off as a passing emotional outburst, throwing themselves dutifully into another round of rehearsals. But by Tuesday, things had reached a critical stage. Paul, unsure of what they should do, dismissed the film crew “as a matter of policy.” It was pointless for them to continue without George. In a heated five-hour meeting the next day, at the Savile Row offices, George laid down the terms for his return. If they wanted him to finish the record, they’d have to abandon all plans for a live concert and leave Twickenham. He had no intention of participating in either fiasco.
Without much choice, the other Beatles caved in to his demands. Logistics for the concert had become too much trouble anyway, and they agreed that Twickenham wasn’t working out as expected. But they dreaded returning to Abbey Road. The punishing White Album sessions were too fresh in their mind. They’d felt like prisoners there during those contentious five months. A new record required new, upbeat surroundings, some place different, some place with no history of conflict, a fresh slate where the Beatles could concentrate on doing what they did best: making music. But where? Every studio in the city was booked through the spring.
The right studio—the only studio, in John’s opinion—was their own, the one Magic Alex was building for them in the basement of Apple. Wasn’t that, after all, what they had commissioned it for? Besides, it would be like working at home. They wouldn’t have to travel; their staff was right upstairs; they could keep an eye on the business. The suggestion must have sounded like an ideal solution. Typically, no one questioned its feasibility. After talking it over with about as much detail as they’d give to, say, ordering dinner, the matter was settled. On January 20, with a week off to get everything in order, they would begin recording a new album in a place that not only felt like home but bore the family name: Apple Studios.
But Apple Studios, as it turned out, was nothing more than a name. Alex’s seventy-two-track marvel was, in George’s words, “the biggest disaster of all time.” The place was a shambles, with all of Alex’s wildest schemes woven into the loose, laid-back fabric of Apple’s tapestry. Somehow, seventy-two tracks had dwindled down to a neat, sweet sixteen—twice the number available at Abbey Road—patched together by a dense thicket of wires that snaked across the floor. The accompanying speakers were nailed haphazardly to the walls. “We bought some huge computers from British Aerospace… and put them in my barn,” recalled Ringo, “… but they never left that barn” and were eventually sold for scrap. According to George Martin’s AIR studio manager, “the mixing console was made of bits of wood and an old oscilloscope. It looked like the control panel of a B-52 bomber.” The building’s ancient heating system, conveniently located in a closet next door, rumbled through the walls, no doubt to complement the “very nasty twitter” from the air-conditioning unit. There was no soundproofing, and Alex had somehow forgotten to invent the invisible sonic screen that he promised would replace the trusty old studio baffles needed to prevent sound leakage into the mikes.
When George Martin arrived to inspect the facilities, he was stunned by the condition of the studios. “They were hopeless,” he declared, traipsing from room to room as though inspecting a recent bomb site. “In fact, Magic Alex, for all his technical expertise, had forgotten to put any holes in the wall between the studio and control room,” which made it impossible to run the necessary electrical cables for the recording equipment.
Despite Alex’s epic failure, the Beatles seemed more determined than ever to utilize their own studio. “You’d better put some equipment in, then,” they instructed Martin, who, always eager to indulge them, borrowed a pair of mobile four-track mixing consoles from EMI and installed them in Apple’s basement.
The proposed album itself was another matter. For the purpose of focus and vitality, the Beatles decided to scrap the twenty-nine hours of tape recorded at Twickenham and start from scratch. Even with the benefit of the rehearsals, the Beatles were still experimenting with concepts, trying to hit on an interesting approach that would provide the necessary edge. This much they knew: it had to be stripped down and largely spontaneous to give the illusion of a live performance without terrorizing the band. And more than ever they endeavored to delve into their past to get the old magic back, the long-suppressed authentic sound of rock ’n roll. Emphasizing that point for George Martin, John warned rudely: “I don’t want any of your production shit. We want this to be an honest album.” Martin, who was offended by the implication, managed to hold his tongue. With no idea how to proceed—“I assumed all their albums had been honest,” he quipped wryly—he merely asked John to describe their idea of an honest album and was told: “I don’t want any editing. I don’t want any overdubbing. It’s got to be like it is. We just record the song and that’s it.”
Martin’s role was tenuous enough without imposing more restrictions. Insecure about their future and eager to appear in control of it, the Beatles now sought to distance themselves from anyone tethered to the past. There was a growing suspicion among the four musicians that members of the old entourage were living off them, not only financially but creatively as well. This rap could hardly be applied to George Martin, who earned practically nothing from their records, nor sought to capitalize on their fame. But they feared that his ever-growing celebrity as their producer was creating a false impression about his contribution to their success. Recently John had grumbled to the press that Martin was more or less a cipher and argued against “all those rumors that he actually was the brains behind the Beatles.” It also enraged him that Martin filled up the Yellow Submarine album with bland instrumental interludes—John dismissed them as “terrible shit”—that were composed for orchestra. And later he complained to Rolling Stone about people, “a bit like Martin, who think they made us.” As a result, Paul invited überproducer Glyn Johns, who had worked with the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, and Traffic, to “assist” as a balance engineer during the new sessions, a maneuver that drove Martin ignominiously to the sidelines. If he was stung or humiliated, Martin refused to let it show, although it is clear that he was absent for many of the sessions, either by necessity or by choice.
Recording began in earnest on January 22, 1969, and rolled on for nearly a week in a knockabout fashion. A series of bluesy, impromptu jams paced the daily sessions, with the Beatles running through a lineup of old Liverpool and Hamburg standbys that reverberated through the halls. They played “Save the Last Dance for Me,” “Bye Bye Love,” “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” “Kansas City,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Miss Ann,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Tracks of My Tears,” and “Not Fade Away,” all of which received a thoroughly modern update. The interaction was far more animated than it had been earlier in the month. Part of the upbeat atmosphere could be attributed to the studio’s feeling like an informal clubhouse. “The facilities at Apple were great,” Ringo recalled. “It was so comfortable and it was ours, like home.”
As the week progressed, their rising outlooks coalesced into an album. Paul and John both brought in a fair number of original songs that ignited the Beatles to play tighter and harder. “Get Back” was an obvious crowd-pleaser, a “kickass track,” in Ringo’s estimation, that presented itself as a shuffle but ultimately demolished the form with accented rhythmic jabs and reversals that charge the groove with irrepressible force. Paul had written most of the melody the week before, during breaks at Twickenham. The playfulness of it immediately attracted John’s interest, and he collaborated on the words, seizing on the rising racial hostility in England between Pakistani immigrants and the National Front. Behind the good-timey boogie of licks and leaps lies a spikey little lyric as barbed as any of the Beatles’ sharp asides. One line—“Don’t dig no Pakistani taking all the people’s jobs”—was deemed too hot, while an abandoned third verse, especially, caught the inflammatory mood:
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.
With the Beatles, Klein’s timing was impeccable. He’d met John once before and only in passing, in December 1968, at the taping of the ill-fated “Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus” TV special. The Stones’ manager interrupted a noisy transatlantic phone call to introduce himself with unusual gentility. When Klein mentioned that he was also an accountant, John pulled a face and joked how he did not “want to end up broke, like Mickey Rooney.” The look that came over Klein “was orgasmic,” said one observer. “To him, John’s words seemed fraught with some extraordinary personal message.” But it seemed impossible for him to gain entrée; the layers of protection around the Beatles were airtight. No matter how Klein tried to make contact, he was rebuffed at every juncture.
In his exuberant biography, Fifty Years Adrift, Derek Taylor admitted giving Allen Klein the introduction he longed for so that the Beatles “could determine whether the reputed coldness of his methods outweighed his undoubted capacity for securing the greatest deals for his clients.” On the evening of January 28, two days before the Beatles’ roof concert at Savile Row, John and Yoko met Allen Klein in the lavish Harlequin Suite at the Dorchester Hotel, where they formed a mutual, if snakebit, admiration society. Despite the fact that John and Allen, both extremely headstrong and volatile individuals, acted “very nervous… nervous as shit,” they were immediately drawn to each other for a multitude of reasons. If John Eastman came off as being suave and pretentious, Allen Klein was his polar opposite—ordinary, almost boorish, a real salt-of-the-earth type—in fact, not so much salt as salty, lacing his conversation with ripe, juicy expletives. Forget about uptight preppie attire; Klein was dressed less than casually, in a baggy sweater over blue jeans and beat-up old sneakers. After Brian Epstein’s sartorial refinement, John thought this was almost too good to be true. Later, John would call Klein “the only businessman I’ve met who isn’t gray right through his eyes to his soul,” and that about nailed his instant attraction. Klein was colorful. More than colorful: the man was gaudy, positively kaleidoscopic. “One of the… things that impressed me about Allen—and obviously it was a kind of flattery as well,” John said, “he went through all the old songs we’d written and he really knew which stuff I’d written.” Klein wasn’t the average myopic manager, with a single fix on the bottom line. Music informed every move he made.
“I knew right away he was the man for us,” John recalled. Even after the meeting John could barely contain his enthusiasm. “I wrote to Sir Joseph Lockwood that night. I said: ‘Dear Sir Joe: From now on Allen Klein handles all my stuff.’ ”*
It might have helped matters if John had discussed his selection with the other Beatles first, but John was angry, emotional, impulsive. His decision wasn’t based on what was good for the Beatles; it was personal and intuitive: him against Paul, rock ’n roll against pop, “a human being” against “an animal.”
Besides, Yoko had weighed in. Klein had reeled Yoko carefully into the negotiations, soliciting her views and listening with rapt attention. Furthermore, he promised that Apple would support Yoko’s experimental film projects and persuade United Artists to distribute them, sweetening the deal with a million-dollar advance. A day or two later, when Paul confronted John about selecting Allen Klein as his manager, John sheepishly admitted it was more her decision than his, saying, “Well, he’s the only one Yoko liked.”
That sounded more like a convenient dodge, except for one thing: Yoko was clearly pulling John’s strings. Since they became an item, at her insistence John never strayed more than a few inches from her side. Everything he did, everything he said, filtered through her for approval. There was no resistance on his part, primarily because of what she gave him—confidence and control—and because he was so clearly damaged by drugs and his past. No one was going to derail her grand design, especially now that she had a weapon like John Lennon in her arsenal. John was her insurance policy, her safeguard. He gave her instant credibility as a media star.
Now she also had Allen Klein. A man like Klein wouldn’t back down to the McCartney-Eastman alliance. Indeed, he’d enjoy wresting John from the grasp of those smoothies, those “big-headed uptight people” (John’s description), and kicking some ass in the process. And Klein would aid in her crusade against Paul. No matter how Yoko might deny it, Paul remained her lone nemesis, her obstacle to claiming complete control over John. Paul was the one responsible for holding the Beatles together, for lashing John to that frothy pop confection, “all that Beatle stuff,” as she called it. From the outset, she convinced herself that Paul wanted her out of the picture. “Paul began complaining that I was sitting too close to them when they were recording,” Yoko said, “and that I should be in the background.” The background! Never. Paul discouraged her from attending business meetings with the other Beatles. Never. He demeaned and insulted her, scoffed at her style of art. She would destroy him. She had to.
As far as Paul knew, the Eastmans seemed like a shoo-in to represent Apple. They’d even begun negotiations with Clive Epstein about purchasing a majority interest in NEMS. John’s unconscionable act of maneuvering behind his back smacked of something insidious, something personal. Whether he realized it or not, it had Yoko’s fingerprints all over it. Maintaining his cool, Paul agreed with the others to at least meet with Allen Klein and to keep an open mind, but in fact he had no intention of aligning himself with such a tawdry figure. Paul got around, he’d heard the scuttlebutt; he was familiar with Klein’s reputation and wanted no part of it.
George and Ringo, on the other hand, were intrigued. They liked Klein’s straight talk, his unconventional appearance, his painless solutions to their problems. “Because we were all from Liverpool, we favored people who were street people,” George said, free of irony. Despite Allen’s ritzy Dorchester suite and chauffeured limousine, George felt “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.”
Paul opposed Klein’s intervention, confident that the group’s democratic stopgap would prevail on his behalf. In the past, a one-for-all, all-for-one policy would have scotched the deal. But when the smoke cleared and the votes were tallied, it was three against one for the first time in eleven years. Without much choice, Paul gave in. He agreed to grant Klein authority to perform an audit on the Beatles’ behalf, delving into every financial arrangement they had, as long as the Eastmans were appointed as their general counsel. It was a compromise of sorts, but ultimately pointless. The fox had gained the keys to the henhouse, and on February 3, 1969, Allen Klein moved into the Apple offices, where he proceeded to secure his berth for a long, eventful stay.
For the most part, the audit of the Beatles’ finances produced fairly unastonishing results. The sorry shape of their business affairs was already a known quantity. Klein quickly deduced they’d been “fucked around by everybody.” The terms of their contract with EMI were grossly inadequate, leaving them enslaved to the record label for another ten years; the management agreement allowed NEMS to continue collecting 25 percent of the Beatles’ royalties for the next seven years, even though the company no longer performed any significant service; dreadful merchandising deals had cost the Beatles a small fortune; and Apple, while profiting somewhat as a boutique record label, was still hemorrhaging money—hundreds of thousands of pounds—on myriad useless salaries and expenses.
On the surface, this scenario may have seemed like a nightmare, but none of these handicaps presented Allen Klein with sleepless nights. With time, he could perform whatever surgery was necessary to correct or renegotiate each disadvantage. The record sales for the White Album were through the roof (it remained the top-selling album in Britain throughout most of the winter); some basic belt-tightening would put the Beatles’ finances back on solid ground. The audit did, however, turn up one ticklish spot. In the process of examining John and Paul’s publishing deal with Dick James, Klein discovered that Paul, unbeknownst to John, had been quietly buying shares of Northern Songs for his portfolio.
On the surface it seemed harmless. “What better way to invest our money than in ourselves?” Paul offered unctuously, sidestepping the real issue: that he and John were supposed to be equal partners. But if Paul was impervious to the disclosure, his collaborator and partner was not. John regarded it as out-and-out treachery, underhanded, a covert attempt to wrest control of their copyrights. No matter how Paul justified it, “it belied his innocence and honesty,” says Peter Brown, who had been ordered by Paul to purchase the additional shares. Brown knew John wasn’t being told—and foresaw the inevitable outcome. “They confronted each other in the office, where John flew into a rage. At one point, I thought he was actually going to hit Paul, but he managed to calm himself down before really laying into him. ‘You’re a fucking arsehole! You pretend to be this honest and straightforward guy—and you’re not!’ ”
Try though he might, Paul didn’t deny it. It would have just added more fuel to an already roaring fire. Besides, there were other serious flare-ups that required more diplomacy.
The most important concern was their precarious management situation. No one was steering the listing ship. And at times it seemed as though the Eastmans and Allen Klein were working at cross-purposes. The Beatles knew it was time to harness their cocaptains. “Let’s get them both together,” George recalled saying, and at that time it must have sounded like a reasonable suggestion. But the powwow itself was more like Waterloo. Bloodthirsty and bellicose, both factions squared off in Klein’s Dorchester suite, erupting with accusations and expletives. Reaching a consensus no longer mattered—if it ever had. First of all, John had brought Yoko, who had no business attending the meeting. Then Allen went to work, picking apart all of the Eastmans’ proposals as though they were nonsense. No pretense was made of respect or civility. According to Peter Brown, he dismissed their idea to buy NEMS as “a piece of crap” and ridiculed John Eastman as “a fool” and “a shithead,” implying in his most patronizing voice that only a dilettante would act so feebly for his clients. Eastman, under fire, derided Klein as “a perfect asshole.”
A week later, in an attempt to salvage Paul’s position, Lee Eastman flew to London to confront Klein himself, but John and his bodyguard were ready for him. John’s list of grievances against Eastman, both real and imagined, had reached new heights of rancor. He had had enough of what he perceived to be Eastman’s “class snobbery.” He refused to associate, he said, with someone who “despises me because of what I am and what I look like,” who thinks “I’m some kind of guy who got struck lucky, a pal of Paul’s.” But nothing grated on John’s nerves more than hearing “a charlatan” like Eastman say, “I can’t tell you how much I’ve admired your work, John,” because beneath the smooth tone it had the ring of phoniness. He wasn’t about to let some flashy New York lawyer, some “middle-class pig” who had no instinct for rock ’n roll, exert power over him or, worse, “con” him with lofty references to Kafka (Eastman apparently referred to the Beatles’ recording deal as being Kafkaesque), Picasso, and de Kooning. John had learned from Neil Aspinall that Lee Eastman had changed the family name from Epstein, and he convinced Allen they should address him as such throughout the meeting. All that afternoon John picked at the name, dripping acid when he pronounced it, as if it were an open wound. “How Lee kept his cool was beyond me,” recalls Peter Brown, in whose office they met. “Even Yoko, who wasn’t supposed to be there, called him Epstein, daring him to respond.”
Joining in, Klein continued to taunt Eastman in other ways, “interrupting everything he said with a string of the most disgusting four-letter words he could tick off his tongue.” As soon as Klein took a breath, Yoko barreled in, challenging Eastman’s judgment and assailing him for condescending to John. “Will you please stop insulting my husband,” she snarled. “Don’t call my husband stupid.” Lee Eastman sat on his hands while his fury mounted, but the tag-team effect took its toll. The whole meeting had been a trap, he concluded. Klein had deliberately baited him, attempting to humiliate him. Unable to take another word of abuse, he finally snapped. He leaped to his feet, exploding in righteous indignation, and tore into the snickering accountant. “You are a rodent,” he roared, “the lowest scum on earth!”
Unwittingly, of course, he had played right into John’s hands. “We hadn’t been in there more than a few minutes when Lee Eastman was having something like an epileptic fit and screaming at Allen,” he told Rolling Stone, liberally editing the facts to shape his argument. “He had a fuckin’ fit…. This was supposed to be the guy who was taking over the multimillion-dollar corporation…. I wouldn’t let Eastman near me. I wouldn’t let a fuckin’ animal like that who has a mind like that near me.” One can only imagine how he described it for Ringo and George, but whatever the case, it served to ice John’s position. Eastman was out; Allen Klein was their man.
The Beatles may have found a captain for Apple, at last, but he was at the helm of a slowly sinking ship.