The Beatles

Though the Beatles had dodged questions about the bubble bursting ever since they first landed in America, they couldn’t help but feel the pressure mounting toward the inevitable, ugly bang. By March 1969, John, Paul, George, and Ringo knew the end was near. Months of bickering had steadily dispirited them. The last-ditch, desperate effort to carry on as a group only estranged them further and brought their squabbles more visibly into the open. To ease the tension, they each became involved in personal projects: John and Yoko finished production of an avant-garde film for Austrian TV titled Rape; Paul attempted to jump-start Mary Hopkin’s anemic career; Ringo accepted a role opposite Peter Sellers in the film adaptation of Terry Southern’s send-up The Magic Christian; George recorded a solo album, Electronic Sounds, at his home and groomed Billy Preston for stardom. But still, they behaved as itinerant Beatles, clinging to the legacy as one might a security blanket until they summoned the means to resolve their differences—or the courage to go their separate ways.

Marrying off the “last bachelor among the Beatles” was big news, and despite appeals that “Paul and Linda want it simple” and a cold, driving rainstorm, nothing kept the fans from staging a crazy mob scene. Indeed, the wedding resembled a page torn from the Beatlemania scrapbook. On the morning of March 12, a few minutes before ten, an ashen-faced Linda, clutching her daughter, Heather, by the arm, “plunged through a mob of weeping teenagers” outside the Marylebone Registry while Paul waved and threw purple-wrapped candies into the crowd, inciting a mad scramble for souvenirs. John, who had expressed “surprise” at the marriage, found the scene stage-managed. “It was just Paul being Paul,” he told Peter Brown, “playing to the crowd.”

Unknown to Paul, George spent the wedding day lounging in Derek Taylor’s office at Apple, where he was paged around 5:00 by his wife, Pattie. There was a team of police at their home, she reported, tossing the place in preparation for a drug bust. They had already found a hefty chunk of hash stowed in a box on the mantel. (George insisted that the police had planted it.) Some grass would later turn up as well. (This was his private stash.) In any case, there was going to be an arrest, and when it came it would vie with Paul’s wedding for the morning headlines.

Pete Shotton, who lived nearby, was at Esher when George, dressed in a flamboyant yellow suit, arrived in a stretch limousine with Taylor and a lawyer. The indiscriminate atmosphere in the parlor resembled nothing if not “a party.” Several cops were slouched in armchairs with their feet propped up, watching television. Others drank coffee and thumbed through George’s record collection, while a police dog clad in a beet-red neckerchief nosed through the bedroom closets. George scanned the scene with a sweep of his head, at which point his eyes went blank. Shotton had seen George riled up before, often, and he could be mean. But this was different. “I’d never seen George so angry in my life,” Shotton recalls. “He came into the house—and went berserk.” He would have told the police where his dope was stashed, but they seemed more interested in playing out the bust, as though it, too, were being stage-managed—which, in a way, it was: even the press had been tipped off to chronicle their handiwork. When a photographer popped out of the front hedge, that was the final straw. “George chased him murderously around the garden,” recalls Shotton, who couldn’t help laughing at the improbable scene. “George was chasing him; the police were chasing George. It was like something out of the Keystone Kops.” Leaping over garden ornaments and bushes, George kept shouting: “I’ll kill you! I’ll fucking kill you!” Later, being led away by Derek Taylor, he pointed at a reporter and yelled: “The fox has its lair, the bird has its nest. This is my fucking house!”

“John made it clear that he didn’t want to get married like Paul [had],” Brown recalls. “That is, he did not want crowds; they wanted to get married quietly.” But Brown delivered bad news: Holland, like most countries, required a two-week minimum residency. According to the (London) Times, England was also out of the question because of “difficulties over Yoko’s citizenship” and her recent divorce from Tony Cox. They’d even tried getting married on a cross-Channel ferry, but their car broke down in Basingstoke on the breakneck drive to Southampton, and they were forced to turn back. What were the lovebirds to do?

Brown put Apple’s lawyers on the question and discovered that the only place without a residency requirement was Gibraltar, which, as a British possession, recognized John as a citizen. Gibraltar? All anyone knew was that it was a rock. But if John and Yoko turned up there bearing the proper papers, they would be married in whatever fashion—and speed—was requested.

Brown arranged for them to fly to Paris, where Alistair Taylor met them with the papers and “a load of money.” On Tuesday, March 20, John and Yoko arrived in Gibraltar at 8:30 in the morning and were immediately spotted by other tourists. They’d made no effort at all to be inconspicuous, let alone subtle. “Yoko stood out like a sore thumb, dressed in this funny, white knitted miniskirt outfit, with a floppy white hat,” says Brown, who met them at the plane. John, who appeared to be very nervous, wore a long white corduroy jacket over a white polo sweater, white trousers, and sneakers. “You had to be blind to miss them.”

Even in a location as remote as Gibraltar, there were already photographers surrounding the plane. “Intellectually, we didn’t believe in getting married,” John told them. “But one doesn’t love someone just intellectually. For two people, marriage still has the edge over just living together.” Everyone scrambled aboard for the flight back to Paris, where John and Yoko planned to relax for a few days. Springtime in Paris—it sounded so romantic to the small entourage, who envisioned a traditional, old-fashioned honeymoon. But John and Yoko weren’t traditional by any stretch of the imagination. “We had our honeymoon before we got married,” John explained. No, they had something else up their sleeve, something calculated, something more intriguing.

Before John had left for Paris, he huddled with Allen Klein in an attempt to “rationalize” the situation at Apple. Klein determined that everyone on the payroll was riding what John referred to as the “gravy train,” even Neil and Mal, who “were living like kings… like fucking emperors,” thanks to the Beatles’ deep pockets. After much prodding, Peter Brown turned over the employee records to Klein and pleaded for leniency, but to no avail. Many of those in the first wave to be fired were obvious choices. Magic Alex got the early thumb along with Denis O’Dell, whose film division lay dormant; Tony Bramwell; the chefs; and much of the extraneous staff. But the number one name on Klein’s hit list raised a few eyebrows: Alistair Taylor. “He’d been with us since 1962,” says Brown, who’d been appointed as Klein’s hatchet man. “He was an honorable employee through all those years, Paul’s gofer, his mate. Whenever any of the boys needed something done, Alistair always saw to it.” Brown trembled as he delivered the news. “It was terrible, terrible. Having to do this was the worst,” he recalls. Taylor received a “generous” severance: three months’ pay as well as rent toward his flat, but he had to leave the premises at once. It was a cruel finale for the man who’d accompanied Brian Epstein to the Cavern on the day he first saw the Beatles. Crueler still was the scene that followed. Shocked and indignant, Alistair called Paul at his home to commiserate and say good-bye. “But Paul refused to come to the phone,” he recalls. “Nothing in my life ever hurt as much as that.”

Brown was ordered to oust Peter Asher as well. Since the days of Paul’s residency at his parents’ house, Peter had made quite a name for himself, first as half of the hit-making duo Peter and Gordon, then more recently developing talent as Apple’s chief A&R man. After producing James Taylor’s debut, Asher was in great demand, with a dozen acts vying for his services. But to Allen Klein, this power was intimidating. Asher, who went on to become one of the most successful producers in the music business, refused to give Klein the satisfaction of sacking him, and resigned.

At the time of the Apple staff liquidation, John Lennon had been staging a seven-day bed-in for peace in the Presidential Suite at the Amsterdam Hilton, ostensibly “as a protest against violence everywhere,” though anyone who knew John and Yoko understood that this was mostly an opportunity for them to capture the world’s headlines and promote their recent marriage, which appeared grotesque to the public eye.

The couple, convinced they’d be prevented from having a proper private honeymoon, decided to turn the tables on the annoying press and stage the postmarriage function as an international event. “Instead of fighting it,” as John explained, “we joined it,” choosing “to make maximum use of” the interest for their own purposes. Up to sixty newsmen at a time gained access to their bedroom any time of the day or night, as long as John and Yoko could lobby for a personal cause. A “plea for peace,” they believed, was the perfect attention-grabber.

As to what had motivated him to begin preaching peace, all John could say was that “it’s no good working for money, and there’s nothing else to do but work—so working for peace is an objective.” But the real motivation may have simply been that John and Yoko craved attention. They loved using the media to stir up controversy, loved the way it painted them as incorrigible rebels, loved the exasperated reactions, loved the power it gave them. “It came at a perfect time in his life,” John’s biographer Ray Coleman would write, “with the Beatles at a crossroads.” Peace—and its power “to force people to re-act”—gave him another imposing vehicle, another public platform from which to reshape and sharpen his image. “We are trying to make Christ’s message contemporary,” John told an openmouthed audience at one of the Amsterdam press conferences. “What would He have done if He had advertisements, records, films, TV, and newspapers? Well, the miracle today is communications. So let’s use it!”

[II]

At Apple, each week, each day, it seemed, brought new and unexpected departures, along with division consolidations: Apple Retail was shut down, as was Apple Electronics, Apple Films, Apple Publishing, and other offshoots that produced little or no income.

Yet, with so many hands still in the pot, there were too many things that could go wrong—many of which did. On the heels of Allen Klein’s remarks that buying NEMS was inadvisable, John Eastman, in his overzealousness as the Beatles’ legal counsel, wrote to Clive Epstein in an attempt to stall the negotiations:

Richenberg, however, called Klein’s bluff. He kicked Allen out of his office and refused to meet with the Beatles as long as their acting manager was involved in the negotiations. For his part, Klein answered him threat for threat. He notified EMI in writing that from that time forth, the label was to pay the Beatles’ own merchant bankers “all royalties payable by you directly or indirectly to Beatles and Co. or Apple Corps.” Otherwise, it was implied, the Beatles would fulfill the remainder of their recording contract by singing various versions of “God Save the Queen.” With more than £1.3 million of royalties owed the Beatles, the company was damned no matter who it sided with. The whole sordid matter was referred to the courts.

The next theater of battle developed on the music publishing front. On March 28, during the Amsterdam bed-in, John opened the newspaper to discover that Dick James and his partner, Charles Silver, were selling their controlling interest in Northern Songs to ATV, the entertainment empire owned by Lew Grade, for roughly £1.2 million. John felt ambushed. He knew their songs effectively belonged to a publicly held corporation, which meant they were somewhere out there in the ozone, somewhere beyond his control, but he hadn’t expected a betrayal from what should have been a devoted ally, a grateful ally. The Beatles made Dick James. His entire mini-empire was established on their northern backs.

The Beatles felt James had ripped them off. They hated him—and now this. James should have offered Northern Songs to the Beatles at the same price. But he was poised for the quick hit. He was afraid of the Beatles—afraid of their eccentricity, afraid of their instability, afraid of their unpredictability and increasingly weird behavior. He was also tired of taking the Beatles’ abuse, which had grown harsher since Brian’s death. Their behavior, too much of a liability, put his investment at risk, providing even more justification for the sale.

John Eastman spoke for everyone at Apple when he called James “a bastard.” The Beatles were determined not to let Northern Songs slip away. But how to do battle with the Herculean ATV? There was one clever solution: have the Beatles declared “a national treasure”: under those conditions, they should be protected by statute. Hoping to win such designation, they appealed to a group of London city institutions heavily invested in Northern Songs for control of their blocks of shares. It was a wild long shot—but successful. When combined with the Beatles’ own holdings, these pledged shares, totaling about 14 percent, would give them majority interest in the company and a chance at genuine recovery. But as agreements were being signed, John grew suspicious—or paranoid—of his benefactors in the business establishment, whom he proceeded to denounce in the press. “I’m not going to be fucked around by men in suits, sitting on their fat arses in the city,” he fumed. It was a bizarre outburst, and in a somewhat stunned response the shares were promptly withdrawn, thus torpedoing the deal.

Throughout April and early May, the war for Northern Songs raged on between the Beatles, ATV, and a consortium of investors who rushed into the deal at the last minute, hoping to play spoiler. Meanwhile, the Beatles had their hands full on other fronts. There was still internal conflict over who would handle their business affairs—Allen Klein or the Eastmans—and hostilities between all the parties escalated as the legal consequences sharpened.

“We had great arguments with Paul,” Ringo remembered, but none that compared with a confrontation that ultimately determined Klein’s fate.

On the night of May 9, 1969, the Beatles were booked into Olympic Sound for a recording session that had been ongoing since mid-April. In the midst of such protracted turmoil, the band managed to agree that making music helped clear the atmosphere, and they were laying down basic tracks for what would eventually become Abbey Road. Since the beginning, they had loosely structured “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” “Oh! Darling,” “Octopus’s Garden,” “Something,” and “You Never Give Me Your Money,” all of which would be reworked throughout the summer. On this night, however, they were due to polish the forthcoming Get Back LP under George Martin’s direction when Paul was confronted with an ultimatum. John, Ringo, and George wanted his signature on Klein’s three-year management contract—right away. Klein was outside, waiting for it to be hand delivered.

In essence, Paul had already agreed to the representation, but he hated like hell to formalize it. Now the contract, rolled loosely in his hand, made it official. He couldn’t do it; he couldn’t put his name on it. The fee to Klein—20 percent across the board—was too rich, Paul told them. “He’ll take fifteen percent.” This last-minute obstacle enraged the other Beatles. “You’re just stalling,” they complained. Paul insisted: “No, I’m working for us. We’re a big act—the Beatles. He’ll take fifteen percent.”

They went back and forth over the percentages, neither side budging from its position, until Paul threw up his hands. It was growing late, a Friday evening. “We could easily do this on Monday. Let’s do our session instead,” he proposed. The others wouldn’t hear of it. Voices were raised, threats leveled. The hotter tempers got, the further Paul withdrew. Finally, he’d heard enough: he was waiting until Monday, at which time his lawyer would be present. For the others, that was it. “Oh, fuck off!” they bellowed, before storming out of the studio.

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:^*

“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.

In his absence, George Harrison had been on fire. “I think that until now, until this year, our songs have been better than George’s,” Paul admitted to John during a break. “Now this year his songs are at least as good as ours.” George insisted he “didn’t care if [Paul] liked them or not”—all their arrogance and self-complacency seemed suddenly, annoyingly, meaningless. “Here Comes the Sun,” which George wrote while meandering around the garden of Eric Clapton’s house one gorgeous afternoon in June, increased his currency. No lightweight throwaway, on the order of “Blue Jay Way” or “You Like Me Too Much,” it held its own against the Lennon and McCartney songs already on the album, standing out from the pack for its wispy, rolling simplicity and irregular guitar lick that seems to stutter behind the vocal: “Sun, sun, sun—here it comes.”

With John’s reappearance in the studio came Yoko, back at his side, ever conspicuous as an intruder; however, this time there was an even more offensive twist. Yoko was pregnant again, with strict orders from her doctor to remain in bed while recovering from the car crash. In a characteristically aggravating gesture, she had Harrods deliver a double bed to the studio and instructed an EMI electrician to suspend a microphone above her head that would adequately furnish her comments to the band.

In an inspired, if eerie, touch, John leaned into the mike and delivered a breathy accent that sounded like “shoooook” against the downbeat, repeating the effect at the bridge tying each bar together. Paul must have tried from the beginning to mask the sound with his bass, knowing they’d catch hell if a careful listener caught on—because at the end of each line, John sang the phrase “shoot me!” Geoff Emerick, who’d only just returned as the Beatles’ engineer, noted how they were up to their old shenanigans. “On the finished record, you can really only hear the word ‘shoot,’ ” he said, explaining how “the bass guitar note falls where the ‘me’ is.”

“Shoot me!” The taunt was indicative of the way John was feeling at the time. If Yoko helped reinforce his contempt for Paul, the heroin made their differences more irrational. Convinced that Paul was stealing his thunder, if not his soul, John fought his resentment with numbness. In John’s eyes, any attempt to function as “a group thing… really means more Paul.” Abbey Road, he concluded, was a perfect example, merely Paul’s way of producing “something slick to preserve the myth.” Not only that, he despised Paul his self-importance, dismissed his shameless indulgences with the press, and deeply resented what he called “those airs.”

John’s fury made everything harder. As engineer Phil McDonald recalled: “People would be walking out, banging instruments down, not turning up on time and keeping the others waiting three or four hours, then blaming each other for not having rehearsed or not having played their bit right.” Yet even though relations among the boys were “getting fairly dodgy,” as Paul recalled, the music remained sharp and daring “even though this undercurrent was going on.” The band worked intently throughout the summer of 1969, utilizing every available hour, if not every square inch, in the warren of EMI studios. They crisscrossed regularly between Studios One, Two, and Three, like the cast of a British drawing-room comedy, where different phases of the recording process were simultaneously under way, often communicating with one another or the engineers by walkie-talkie to coordinate the proceedings. “There was a great sort of theater to it,” recalled one of the resident technicians, who watched in amazement as the Beatles conducted their tour de force. Not content with just the limited studio facilities, they also took over isolated offices and storage areas where special effects, by remote linkup, were produced.

For example, in Room 43, at the top of a second-floor staircase, they had stashed a cumbersome futuristic-looking machine called a synthesizer—“a fantastic toy,” as someone close to them described it—which George attempted to program, laboring over it like a demented scientist. The size of a small truck, with “hundreds of jackplugs and two keyboards,” it had taken him months of fiddling with the apparatus just to get it switched on. “There wasn’t [even] an instruction manual,” George recalled, frustrated by his initial inability to get any music out of it. But eventually they figured it out, and the Beatles were the first popular group to record with a synthesizer, incorporating it into the solo on “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and the instrumental track of “Because.” John also used it to create a deliberate white-noise effect during the last three minutes of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” a jarring little surprise, which he added to disrupt the final version.

By August 8, with the battle still raging around them, the Beatles had completed most of the basic tracks for the album and decided, almost on the spur of the moment, to shoot a photograph for its cover. They had originally contemplated calling the album Everest, after the brand of cigarettes that Geoff Emerick smoked. It was typically vague, much like Rubber Soul or Revolver, typically catchy, typically Beatlesque. That title became so fixed, according to engineer John Kurlander, that by July “someone mentioned the possibility of the four of them taking a private plane over the foothills of Mount Everest to shoot the cover photograph.” When they finally came to their senses, however, it was decided to simplify matters completely: “just go outside, take the photo there, call the LP Abbey Road and have done with it.” Abbey Road: it was perfect, a tribute to the studio where they had made almost all their incredible music. On a sheet of white typing paper, Paul roughed out a few sketches that he thought might be appropriate: just an understated picture of the four of them, walking along the crossing in the road outside the studio. None of the other Beatles objected. Even John obliged without the usual huffy debate, and sometime after ten o’clock that Friday morning, they marched companionably onto the street to shoot the now-famous cover photo.

As Paul recalled, “it was a very hot day.” All of the Beatles, except George, had worn suits for the occasion, which they regretted in a matter of minutes, courtesy of the brutal overhead sun and the soaring humidity. Iain Macmillan, the photographer, intent on grabbing the shot as quickly as possible, lined them up in the most eye-pleasing order: John, “all leonine” in a resplendent white suit and tennis shoes at the head of the pack; Ringo, dressed funereally, in black tails, just behind him; Paul, wearing navy blue and an open-necked oxford shirt trailing in third place; and George, looking very much like a prisoner from a work-release program in a blue jean outfit, bringing up the rear. John, impatient as ever, urged the process forward. “Come on, hurry up now, keep in step,” he muttered, thinking, “Let’s get out of here. We’re meant to be recording, not posing for Beatle pictures.” But there were obstacles, most notably a yellow Volkswagen—a Beetle, of all things—parked at the curb in the middle of the shot. “It had been left there by someone on holiday,” Macmillan recalled. “A policeman tried to move it away for us, but he couldn’t.” The VW would stay, along with three other bystanders who had drifted into the scene.

Finally, with all the distractions and everyone’s patience growing thin, they lined up for a final take, as Macmillan climbed a ladder in the middle of the street. At the last minute, Paul kicked off his sandals and rejoined the procession. “Barefoot, nice warm day, I didn’t feel like wearing shoes,” he remembered. Accordingly, he lit a cigarette and carried it at his side.

The ordeal was over after six quick shots, but the scene that morning would linger for posterity. Aside from being perhaps the most famous cover shot ever taken, it inspired a bizarre episode—another bizarre episode—in the extraordinary Beatles saga.

When Abbey Road was released on September 26, 1969, it touched off a feeding frenzy unusual even for Beatles albums. While the record itself received only lukewarm praise—Newsweek, for example, called it “a pleasant but unadventurous collection of basically low-voltage numbers,” while the New York Times considered it “sincere” but “rather dull”—fans swept up copies at a rate that surpassed all precedent. In Britain, advance orders topped out at 190,000 copies, breaking all previous records for an LP, while in the States the album went gold even before its release. There was no indication that the fans were losing interest; if anything, the Beatles’ popularity seemed to be exploring new heights. Their fame had begun to feed on itself. Having survived a tumultuous seven years that won them legendary status, they stood poised to cross into a new decade riding an improbable wave of success.

As always, with the success came the madness. On Friday, October 10, a Detroit disc jockey named Russ Gibb went on the air at WKNR-FM and astonished his listeners with news that Paul McCartney was dead. In fact, he had been dead for several years, Gibb insisted, since at least November 1966, when “at 5 o’clock on a rainswept morning… [Paul] was out for a spin in his Aston-Martin; the car crashed and the Beatle was killed.” How did he know this? Gibb reached this incredible conclusion after reading a review of Abbey Road by a University of Michigan student named Fred LaBour in which elaborate clues were presented as proof that Paul had died and was replaced by a stand-in. The Abbey Road cover alone provides rich evidence. On it, Gibb argued, Ringo is dressed in a mortician’s outfit, while Paul walks behind him, barefoot, in the manner of a corpse prepared for burial in Italy. In fact, the picture itself resembles a funeral procession. The Volkswagen’s license plate was another tip-off: it reads 281 F, suggesting that Paul would be twenty-eight if he had lived. (That the plate’s number was 28 IF didn’t daunt this conspiracy theory.) There was more. On the back cover photo of Magical Mystery Tour, Paul wears a black carnation, while John, George, and Ringo wear red ones; meanwhile, Paul is dressed in black, the other Beatles in white; inside the album, a picture reveals Paul, in costume as a soldier, standing above a sign that proclaims “I Was You.” This particularly convinced Gibb, who recalled a Paul McCartney look-alike contest two years earlier in which a contestant named William Campbell was chosen the winner. No doubt with a little plastic surgery and minimal makeup, the imposture was completed.

While Paul is dead brought the Beatles all kinds of financial rewards, for the subject in question it soon became “a bloody nuisance.” He couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without some busybody making a federal case out of it. “Can you spread it around that I am just an ordinary person and want to live in peace?” he pleaded with a LIFE correspondent who tracked him down in the flesh at his farm in Scotland. “For the record: Paul is not dead.

[III]

In late August 1969, John, Paul, George, and Ringo sold their remaining shares in NEMS Enterprises, officially ending all ties to the company they had joined in January 1962. Then, on September 25 they finally lost the yearlong battle with ATV for control of their Northern Songs catalogue; Paul and John held on to about 30 percent of their songs, but the takeover signaled that the identity they had fought so dearly to preserve was slipping from their hands. Impatient to divest themselves of the equity, they sold their remaining shares in Northern Songs to a reluctant ATV board based on Lew Grade’s recommendation that “the songs in Northern will live on forever.”

With Northern Songs off the table, John, reeling from shock, finally expressed his wish to leave the Beatles. “I told Allen I was leaving” in September, he explained, but Klein warned him against announcing it publicly. “He didn’t want me to tell Paul even.” But telling Paul was the least of his worries. On the verge of negotiating a new contract with EMI designed to give the Beatles a larger cut of the wholesale price of record sales, Klein wanted nothing to rock the boat. Any outburst from John would surely threaten that deal. Klein had already failed in his attempts to buy back NEMS and gain control of Northern Songs, as promised. It would justify his worth to the Beatles—and, more important, to Paul, his lone adversary—to close the EMI agreement fast and without a hitch.

John may have held off any announcement of a breakup as a favor to Klein, but his actions spoke louder than words. If he couldn’t leave the Beatles outright, he’d simply form another band. Accepting an invitation to perform at the Toronto Rock ’n Roll Revival Festival on September 13 alongside “all the great rockers” who had influenced the Beatles—Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, and Bo Diddley—John cobbled together a group of sidemen that included Klaus Voormann, Eric Clapton, and Alan White and set out for Canada as the Plastic Ono Band. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t even rehearsed together. Everyone knew the old standards he’d selected: “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Dizzy Miss Lizzie,” and “Money,” along with fairly straightforward rockers like “Yer Blues.” There was also a new song he’d just written called “Cold Turkey.” “We tried to rehearse on the plane,” John recalled, “but it was impossible.” Over the Atlantic, he and Clapton huddled in the galley behind the last row of seats, attempting to go over key signatures and arrangements. Clapton remembered: “We picked out chords on the guitar, which you couldn’t hear because we had nowhere to plug in, and, of course, Alan didn’t have his drums on the plane with him.” It also didn’t help matters that both John and Clapton were strung out, fighting off waves of nausea from withdrawal symptoms.

Be that as it may, he didn’t intend to play with any of the Beatles again. On the way back to London, he reiterated his desire to leave the group, going so far as to announce it on the plane to a stunned, if disbelieving, entourage. In separate conversations with Klaus Voormann and Eric Clapton, John confided his plans privately and offered them roles in his new group. The two musicians, perhaps out of uncertainty, chose not to reveal this fact to anyone else. But once back in London, John couldn’t slow his momentum. He had to tell the other Beatles. But how? His assistant, Anthony Fawcett, recalled in a memoir that “it was not an easy decision…. I watched him agonize for days over it—irritable, chain-smoking, and impossible to be around, skulking in his bedroom, losing himself in sleep or drugging himself with television.” Clearly John was conflicted, alternately loathing the group identity and trying to preserve its vaunted existence. The thought of pulling the plug on the Beatles for good terrified him.

In October, during a meeting at the Apple offices at which the Beatles had gathered to sign their new Capitol Records contract, John and Paul went head-to-head over an offer for a TV special. Paul pressed to accept it; John flatly refused. Neither man would give an inch; as their tempers flared, John broke the angry impasse with an unexpected outburst, blurting out his intention to seek a divorce. According to John, Paul, extremely distressed, asked, “What do you mean?” to which he responded: “I mean the group is over. I’m leaving.”

The others, for the most part, may have written this off to another of John’s overheated threats. George admitted dismissing it as bluster at the time. “Everybody had tried to leave” the band at one time or another, he recalled, “so it was nothing new.” But John believed “they knew it was for real—unlike Ringo and George’s previous threats to leave.” Recalled Paul, “Everyone blanched except John, who colored a little, and said, ‘It’s rather exciting. It’s like I remember telling Cynthia I wanted a divorce.’ ”

Moments after the blowout, a colleague working downstairs in his private office recalled how “John burst into the room, red in the face and fuming with rage. ‘That’s it—it’s all over!’ he shouted.” It seemed long overdue, but so damn incredible, so final.

And in a way, as Ringo noted, it felt like “a relief.” The way he recalled it, “we knew it was [a] good [decision],” interpreting John’s dismissal favorably to mean leaving the Beatles intact as a corporate entity, while breaking up the band. The constant sniping and infighting among “the lads” had disturbed Ringo’s gentle soul. But still the breakup was “traumatic,” and he spent time immediately after the climactic meeting sitting in his garden, “wondering what the hell to do with [his] life.” George, on the other hand, wasted no time in regret. “I wanted out myself,” he recalled. “I could see a much better time ahead being by myself, away from the band. It had ceased to be fun, and it was time to get out of it.”

To Paul’s relief, he and Allen Klein persuaded John not to announce the breakup of the Beatles publicly. Klein, having only just gotten his hands on the Beatles, stood to lose the sweet flow of cash they were about to put into the pipeline. It had taken him a long time, longer than anyone realized, to gain control of their empire. A breakup now would throw their affairs into chaos and ultimately derail his management agenda. As for Paul, his entire world, “since I’d been seventeen,” he acknowledged, had been wrapped up in the group. He had so much invested in it, emotionally and personally. He loved the music they made, loved the recognition and adulation. And privately he held out hope that John would eventually come around. Announcing that the Beatles had broken up added too much of an obstacle. John knew Paul was trying to buy more time, but for whatever it was worth, John agreed to keep the breakup private. Nothing, however, altered his decision.

Whether or not Paul felt encouraged by John’s compromise, he was deeply disturbed by subsequent events. In the days that followed, everyone went his own way, which only heightened the feeling that the Beatles had indeed disbanded. He lapsed into a depression—“a withdrawal,” he called it in retrospect—that swung between two emotional extremes. Some days he really missed the band, the guys and their horseplay, but there were also times he despised them. “Anger, deep, deep anger sets in,” he recalled, “… with yourself, number one, and with everything in the world, number two.” He felt cheated, abused. “And justifiably so because I was being screwed by my mates.”

This sudden retreat did nothing to staunch the rumors of Paul’s death, which were still swirling in the press and expounded on by a legion of conspiracy theorists determined to prove the grand hoax. Nor did it solve his own deepening malaise. The emptiness and anger continued to consume him. At some point his anger turned to despair. He spent hours, days, weeks, trying to make sense of the breakup, lashing out at anyone who attempted to draw him out of the funk. When he could motivate himself at all, instead of writing music, he spent long hours outside “just planting trees” or helping Linda renovate the old farmhouse, making it suitable for a family.

It never occurred to Paul just how much he missed John. More than anyone else, John had been his friend for ten years, to say nothing of his collaborator, his sidekick, his shadow. Not only had they played music together, they’d hung out together, dreamed together, fucked together, become famous together. Grown up together. “We were each other’s intimates,” he acquiesced. By the barest accounts, the relationship had given him “security, warmth, humor, wit, money, fame…. ” At first Paul held out hope that the separation was temporary, admitting that “nobody”—especially himself—“quite knew if it was just one of John’s little flings and that maybe he was going to feel the pinch in a week’s time and say, ‘I was only kidding.’ ” But as the weeks, then months, ticked away, Paul finally realized it wasn’t a joke. Convinced that John was now abandoning him, increasingly jealous of his relationship with Yoko—and Allen Klein—Paul atoned for the loss with anger. He was angry at the Beatles, but even angrier at John. It took another six months for him to admit the extent of his heartbreak. “John’s in love with Yoko,” Paul confessed to a reporter from the Evening Standard, “and he’s no longer in love with the other three of us.” But for all intents and purposes, he might as well have been talking about himself.

John was another story altogether. By late fall his and Yoko’s life together had become a traveling carnival of put-ons and misbehavior, rhetoric, and activism. No opportunity to grab headlines, no matter how inane or scandalous, went unexplored. After Yoko suffered yet another miscarriage that nearly took her life, the couple went on a tear of public misadventure that stretched out into the following year. To set the scene, they staged a four-hour retrospective of their self-produced films at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Under cover of darkness, a “frequently perplexed audience” watched unending footage from Two Virgins, John and Yoko’s Honeymoon, Rape, and Self-Portrait, the latter of which featured John “smiling beatifically while bird, traffic, and airline noises are heard on the soundtrack.” A week later they announced plans to help fund and launch the Peace, a 570-ton Dutch freighter converted into a pirate radio station that was to anchor outside the territorial waters of Israel and Egypt, from where it would broadcast news, political commentary, and music. And following that, they released The Wedding Album, a lavishly decorated box set of mementos from their marriage ceremony along with an LP that contained one whole side of John and Yoko screaming each other’s name.

It didn’t stop there. Despite John’s concerns that the Beatles were going broke, he gave away Dor Inis, an island off County Mayo in Ireland that he bought as an investment in 1966, offering it free to a group of “dropouts and nonconformists” called the London Street Commune. He and Yoko “donated” tens of thousands of pounds to the Black House, the London headquarters of the militant black power movement, via his drug dealer Michael X.

Then, in perhaps the most unexpected and bizarre twist, John sent his chauffeur, Les Anthony, to Buckingham Palace to return his Order of the British Empire to the Queen, accompanied by a flippant note typed on Bag Productions stationery that read: “I am returning the M.B.E. in protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts.” British citizens were outraged by his gesture, which they considered a public relations gimmick at the most, and at the very least, disrespectful. A diabolical-looking picture of John and Yoko, smugly holding an identical letter sent to Prime Minister Wilson that appeared in every major newspaper the next day, only boosted public scorn. John told a BBC correspondent that he’d been “mulling it over for a few years.” In an eerily delivered rejoinder, he muttered: “Really shouldn’t have taken it. Felt I had sold out. I must get rid of it. I kept saying, ‘I must get rid of it.’ So I did. Wanted to get rid of it by 1970 anyway.” He said he had been waiting for “an event to tie up with it,” and while he sided with neither Nigeria nor Biafra, he was “beginning to be ashamed of being British.”

By saying that, John had finally crossed the line. Even George Harrison admitted the public now viewed John as “a lunatic or something.” If he wasn’t off his rocker, as many suspected, he had lost their unconditional respect. The Daily Mirror went so far as to name John “Clown of the Year” for 1969.

Perhaps there was still hope for that as well. John’s enthusiasm over the single led Allen Klein to hire Spector to remix the tapes of Let It Be. “None of us could face remixing them,” John recalled. They’d been moldering in the can, untouched, for almost a year. Letting Spector have a pass at them, “to tidy up some of the tracks,” so to speak, might salvage the abandoned session. George and Ringo voiced no objection, and since Paul hadn’t signed the management agreement, they saw no reason to seek his approval. In fact, Paul knew nothing about it until a remixed test pressing of “The Long and Winding Road,” which Allen Klein chose as the first single, arrived at his house along with a note from Klein explaining that the changes were necessary. “I couldn’t believe it,” Paul told Ray Connolly in an interview published shortly thereafter in the Evening Standard. It was the same acoustic track he’d written and sung on, but “with harps, horns, an orchestra, and women’s choir added.” Someone had come in and tampered with his music—the first time that had ever happened.

Paul was offended by it and enraged, not only by the remix but that it had been done behind his back. He threatened to sue Klein until John Eastman advised him that it was pointless. To make matters worse, Paul was informed in a handwritten memo from John and George that his solo album, which had been given an April 17 release date, would have to be pushed back to June 4 to make room for Let It Be and its accompanying documentary film, which United Artists was releasing the following month. “It’s stupid for Apple to put out two big albums within 7 days of each other,” they wrote him, “so we sent a letter to EMI telling them to hold your release date…. It’s nothing personal.”

Still, it didn’t end there. With the release date now only weeks away, the others decided they had to confront Paul directly in an effort to change his mind. One of them was recruited to go ring his doorbell and reach a compromise. “Unfortunately, it was Ringo,” Paul recalled. The gentlest of the Beatles, the only one who never uttered a bad word about his bandmates, who genuinely loved the others and wanted only their love in return, Ringo appeared at Cavendish Avenue with a letter from the group. “We want you to put your release date back, it’s for the good of the group,” he told Paul, who went blind with rage. Paul finally snapped and in an interview a week later said, “I called him everything under the sun.” He gave poor Ringo a royal tongue-lashing, backing him helplessly against a wall and shaking a finger in his face as all the bitterness and frustration came hurling out. Paul has said in subsequent interviews that it almost came to blows—“it was near enough,” he admitted—but just before things reached that point, he came to his senses and simply threw Ringo out.

An alternative offer, although generous, put Paul in an untenable position: in order to release his solo album first, the Beatles insisted he sign the management contract. He flat-out refused. Finally, Ringo threw up his hands in surrender. George Harrison, perhaps out of frustration, also relented. He persuaded the others to let Paul have his way. But overall, George stuck to his belief that Paul “was just trying to grab a bit of the momentum,” much as he’d always done. He was just being Paul, an egomaniac, out for himself.

Paul, however, couldn’t resist. Peter Brown was pressing Paul to do some selective interviews for the launch of his new solo album, to no avail. Paul was bitter, despondent. He wasn’t in any mood to put a good face on the Beatles’ breakup and he didn’t want to face the press with anything but his best. He couldn’t bear to answer the same nagging question: Are you happy? Even hearing it, he admitted, “almost made me cry.” In lieu of interviews, Brown suggested an old Brian Epstein tactic: a homemade questionnaire. He’d pose a series of mundane questions that Paul could answer, with some forethought and at his leisure.

Of course, Paul went him one better: they would include it along with the album’s liner notes, as an insert, perhaps, in copies that were sent out for review. Little did Brown suspect what Paul was really up to.

Q: Do you foresee a time when Lennon-McCartney becomes an active songwriting partnership again?

A: No.

Q: Have you plans for live appearances with the Beatles?

A: No.

Q: Is your break with the Beatles temporary or permanent, due to personal differences or musical ones?

A: Personal differences, business differences, but most of all because I have a better time with my family. Temporary or permanent? I don’t know.

Q: Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles?

A: No.

Q: Do you miss the Beatles and George Martin? Was there a moment, e.g. when you thought, “Wish Ringo was here for this break?”

A: No.

For an instant, Paul’s announcement brought everything to a standstill. A lucid stillness filled the void. The music fell silent. All the tension melted away, the demands of unimaginable superstardom ceased. For the moment, the world as they knew it stopped spinning, seemed perfectly at peace. As the Beatles, they had been to the toppermost of the poppermost. They had encountered the crowds, heard the screams, felt the love. Saw the light. In a brief and shining interval, they had lived a dream that no Liverpool lad could imagine—a magical, fabulous dream, like out of a fairy tale. An unforgettable dream. “It was wonderful and it’s over,” John affirmed to all those waiting for a sign. “And so, dear friends, you’ll just have to carry on. The Dream Is Over.”

Chapter 37 And in the End…

[I]

[II]

[III]