And in the End

by Ken McNab

  *

  Sporadic conversations recorded between McCartney and Starr in the canteen at Twickenham before John and Yoko’s arrival often revealed McCartney’s frustration at being trapped in a nowin situation and his desperate attempts even then to try and find some kind of compromise. All his well-founded attempts to hold The Beatles together after Epstein’s death were in serious danger of rupture. His partner, and the man whose validation he cherished above everything else, had replaced him with someone he couldn’t quite fathom out. And he knew that confrontation would mean only one thing – Lennon would tell him to screw The Beatles. Bubbling under the surface, of course, was also the sight of a decaying Apple. But twenty-four hours after the meeting at Starr’s house broke up in acrimony and the same day that Lennon’s comments to Coleman became public knowledge, there was no way of avoiding the elephant in the room.

  ‘Yoko’s very much to do with it and she’s very much to do with it from John’s angle,’ McCartney declared in a hushed conversation with ‘Get Back’ director Michael Lindsay-Hogg during a break in the session. ‘There’s only two answers. One is to fight it and fight her and try to get The Beatles back to four people without Yoko and ask Yoko to sit down at [Apple] board meetings. Or the other thing is just to realise she’s there and he’s not to split with her for our sakes. But it’s really not that bad, they want to stay together, so it’s alright, let the young lovers stay together, you know. But it shouldn’t be “can’t operate under these conditions, boy”. It’s like we’re striking because work conditions aren’t right. Fuck that then. And John knows that. If it came to push between Yoko and The Beatles, it’s Yoko . . . okay, so they’re going overboard but John always does. But maybe if I can compromise they will compromise and maybe bend towards me a bit. But it’s silly neither of us compromising.’

  Joining in the discussion, Lindsay-Hogg and Linda Eastman both got to the kernel of the problem – a lack of honest communication between all four. Lindsay-Hogg added: ‘It really would be terribly dispiriting if it doesn’t get together.’ Unwittingly, McCartney had touched on an issue that had been overlooked – John and Yoko were a couple in love and like any young lovers (John was still in his twenties, after all) they wanted to be free to show affection without feeling judged by others.

  Harrison, meanwhile, away from the studio poured all his anger into a new song, ‘Wah-Wah’. Written on the day he walked out, the lyrics mined the same vein of frustration about the band as ‘I Me Mine’. When the song was heard on his debut album, All Things Must Pass, eighteen months later, no one was under any illusions about the target of his vitriol.

  Sessions continued over the next couple of days, but little work was done. McCartney and Lennon finally realised that they had belittled Harrison once too often. Now it was Harrison who had the future of The Beatles in his hands. His ally, Derek Taylor, used all his charm to persuade him that he would be ‘doing the decent thing’ by coming home and at least completing ‘Get Back’. But he was not ready to return quietly.

  At a second band meeting on Wednesday, 15 January, which lasted five hours, an uneasy truce was reached, provided everyone agreed to Harrison’s rules: No more crazy talk of a live show in far-flung foreign shores. And definitely no more Twickenham. This time no one faced him down. McCartney reputedly apologised for his authoritarian behaviour. Lennon kept quiet, for now. Another five days would pass before all four were in the same room again.

  The one thing they all agreed on was not to return to EMI Studios in Abbey Road, which for them had become little more than a sound-proofed prison. The obvious solution was to opt for the new, 72-track state-of-the-art studio being constructed in the basement of the Apple offices by Alex Mardas. But when they saw the studio, it was clear that it was not fit for even the simplest purpose. Glyn Johns summed it up as a ‘disaster area’. Engineer Dave Harries said, ‘They actually tried a session on this desk, just one take, but when they played the tape back it was all hum and hiss.’

  The band sent an SOS to George Martin, the man they had largely frozen out of the ‘Get Back’ project, to use his influence to let them borrow a mobile recording unit from EMI. On 21 January, all four were back in the round in the Apple basement. That same day, Starr was buttonholed by Daily Express showbiz reporter David Wigg for BBC Radio’s Scene and Heard programme, and responded to media claims of fist fights and bitter arguments amongst the band.

  Were they all still as close? ‘Yes. You know, there’s that famous old saying, you’ll always hurt the one you love,’ he said. ‘And we all love each other and we all know that. But we still sort of hurt each other, occasionally. You know . . . where we just misunderstand each other and we go off, and it builds up to something bigger than it ever was. Then we have to come down to it and get it over with, you know. Sort it out. And so we’re still really very close people.’

  He also downplayed Lennon’s comments that Apple was a corporate basket case. ‘We have spent a lot of money, because we don’t earn as much as people think. Coz if we earn a million then the government gets ninety per cent and we get a hundred thousand. And we, we didn’t sort of realise how much we were spending, you know. Like, someone pointed out, to spend ten thousand you have to make a hundred and twenty. But we just spent it as a hundred and twenty.

  ‘So what we’re doing now is tightening up on our own personal money and on the company’s money, you know. We’re not just giving as much away on handouts and things like that, you know, and as many projects. We’re gonna cut down a bit till we’ve sorted ourselves out again and do it properly as a business . . . but it’s not that we’re broke. On paper we’re very wealthy people. Just when it gets down to pound notes, we’re only half wealthy.’

  The twenty-first of January was an ad hoc session that passed without incident, but the next day saw things kick into a higher gear thanks to a happy accident. A few months earlier, attending a Ray Charles concert at the Royal Festival Hall, Harrison had caught sight of a faintly familiar pianist hammering out funky R&B solos.

  Billy Preston looked nothing like the scrawny kid from Houston whom Harrison had last seen in 1962 in Hamburg in the days of The Savage Young Beatles. Then, he and Preston, the youngest member of Little Richard’s band, had established a rapport. Now, seven years later, Preston was a key (and physically imposing) part of Ray Charles’ band.

  Harrison put out the word for him to get in touch, unaware that Preston had already decided to catch up with his old friends from Hamburg. He rang Apple and was invited to 3 Savile Row. Footage shows him arriving at the studio on 22 January and being greeted warmly by The Beatles. Out of shot, Harrison might have been seen smirking.

  Preston’s presence immediately saw an improvement in behaviour – the same way Clapton had put everyone on point when Harrison brought him in to play lead guitar on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ for the White Album. Preston might have been unaware of the band’s internal strife but he was not in the least fazed by their fame. He was simply delighted to get the chance to join in the jams on a no-questions-asked basis. His natural chirpiness was instantly infectious and spread itself to the band.

  ‘I think they had lost a bit of the joy of making music,’ he reflected later. ‘There wasn’t much bickering in the studio, because they were concentrating on music. But when we’d break for lunch, they’d start to talk about business. I was surprised to learn they’d gotten ripped off so many times. I learned a lot from them about that kind of thing.’

  Preston could play anything from straightforward rock ’n’ roll to blues-tinged gospel songs to syncopated jazz. Those sessions were not the most relaxed that The Beatles had ever played, but Preston’s effervescence and instinctive playing did much to enliven it. ‘Billy was brilliant – a little young whizz-kid,’ McCartney recalled in The Beatles Anthology. We’d always got on very well with him. He showed up in London and we all said, “Oh, Bill! Great – let’s have him play on a few things.” So he started sitting in on the sessions, beca
use he was an old mate really.’

  Preston’s keyboard skills injected life into new songs like ‘Get Back’, ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ and ‘Let It Be’ as well as sharpening their focus and discipline on other acoustic numbers such as ‘Two Of Us’ and Harrison’s ‘For You Blue’. He added rudimentary keyboard textures to a song then called ‘Bathroom Window’, later retitled ‘She Came In Through The Bathroom Window’. He said, ‘Everyone was pitching in with ideas. They just let me play whatever I wanted to play.’

  By the end of the week, Lennon was so enthused by Preston’s involvement that he floated the idea of him becoming a full-time Beatle. McCartney was quick to shoot the idea down with the remark that ‘It’s bad enough with four Beatles.’

  They now had five days left, more or less, to finally nail down usable tracks for the album while devising a spectacular end to the film. No one, though, could find a way through that quandary. Harrison remained steadfast in ruling out a live show. Besides, added Starr, they were in no shape to play live in front of an audience for a whole gig: a couple of songs, maybe, but an entire show would be hugely embarrassing.

  Most of the day was spent fine-tuning songs that actually made the grade. And, despite the maelstrom of the past few weeks, some of them were almost over line. Lost amid the bickering was the fact that there had been some moments when it all came together joyously. Just not in the one-take, no-overdubs ethos that had been the guiding principle of ‘Get Back’ from the outset.

  On Monday, 27 January, day sixteen of the album sessions, the band ran through some fourteen takes of ‘Get Back’, one of which included Lennon’s mock introduction about Sweet Loretta Fart, thinking she was a cleaner, but actually being a frying pan. And they remained on the same page during new takes of ‘Let It Be’, ‘The Long And Winding Road’, ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ and ‘I’ve Got a Feeling’, all of which crept closer to standard. Lennon, especially, was in good spirits after hearing that Yoko’s divorce from Cox had just been made official. ‘Free at last,’ he hollered, casually forgetting that it had cost him thousands of pounds in legal fees. And that night he and Yoko had a furtive appointment that, ultimately, would set in motion a domino effect on all their futures.

  *

  ‘Nervous as shit’ was how Lennon later described his frame of mind as he and Yoko walked into London’s upmarket Dorchester Hotel that evening. He felt strangely vulnerable and the reason was simple; he was heading for a secret rendezvous with a man who revelled in his self-styled image as a music industry shark, a guy whose long-avowed obsession ‘to get’ The Beatles made it sound like they were prey waiting to be devoured. And now Allen Klein, the fearsome manager of The Animals, The Kinks, Donovan and, most notably, the Rolling Stones, had the chance to bite down on his biggest victim yet – John Lennon, the de facto leader of The Beatles.

  Klein knew the band was perilously adrift after Lennon’s public admission that Apple’s financial woes had left them in serious danger of going bust. To Klein, this meant the biggest band in the world, one that had made – and squandered – untold millions, was ripe for the picking.

  In the story of The Beatles, Klein is cast as Satan incarnate, a character whose breath reeked of sulphur. On his desk in New York sat a plinth parodying the Twenty-third Psalm: ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, ’cause I’m the biggest bastard in the valley . . .’ Naturally, his reputation had preceded him, and Apple staff had been instructed to shield The Beatles from his increasingly aggressive phone calls. When he finally got through to Peter Brown, the closest thing the band had to a manager, his overtures were instantly rebuffed. Brown recalled how Epstein had shown Klein the door several years earlier for dismissing as ‘a crock of shit’ the deals that Epstein had brokered for his charges.

  Klein, now, was persistent. Sending a message through Stones intermediary Tony Calder he reached Derek Taylor, who, eager to get the aggressive American off his back, persuaded Lennon that he had nothing to lose by meeting him, especially when The Beatles needed someone to manage Apple.

  McCartney, Lennon knew, had already sounded out his prospective father-in-law Lee Eastman about taking on the job. Eastman’s first solution would be to delegate the task to his son John, who had already made a cursory examination of the band’s finances. He had also held an initial meeting earlier in the month with Epstein’s brother, Clive, over the possibility of The Beatles buying Nems, the Liverpool family firm that still banked a healthy twenty-five per cent management fee as part of the deal drawn up in 1967 before Brian’s death.

  Taylor, while acknowledging the part he had played in bringing Klein and Lennon together, always seemed to have retrospective regrets. He recalled: ‘Klein is essential in the Great Novel as the Demon King. Just as you think everything’s going to be all right, here he is. I helped to bring him to Apple, but I did give The Beatles certain solemn warnings.’

  Lennon had, in fact, met Klein briefly in December during filming for the Stones’ Rock And Roll Circus, but their conversation had been perfunctory. So much had happened in the seven weeks since. Lennon – and, especially, McCartney – knew that the Stones made more money than The Beatles despite selling fewer records – and there were five of them! So when Lennon arrived at the Dorchester with Yoko, he told himself to keep an open mind.

  To their surprise, they found an Ordinary Joe shorn of big-business artifice, dressed in casual clothes and projecting an air of humility. Lennon recalled: ‘He was sitting there all nervous. He was all alone, he didn’t have any of his helpers around, because he didn’t want to do anything like that. But he was very nervous, you could see it in his face. When I saw that I felt better.’ Klein then got to work, using flattery as his weapon. He knew exactly which Lennon buttons to press. He emphasised the uncanny ways in which his own rough childhood had parallels with Lennon’s.

  Klein never knew his mother, who died when he was young. Lennon’s mother Julia had died in a road traffic accident when he was seventeen. Klein’s father, a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant, worked in a butcher’s shop, and since he couldn’t afford to raise four children on his own, had placed the infant Allen in an orphanage, where he remained until he was at least nine (some sources say older). Eventually he was placed in the custody of an aunt (just like Lennon had been).

  And now? He owned a yacht and worked from a plush corner office on the forty-first floor of a West Side office building in the Big Apple. He could afford to gloat about his success because he had earned it. It came as a result of a ferocious work ethic, utter fearlessness and a brain that devoured audits like a calculator. He worked by the rules of Brill Building business: he consistently helped his clients – chiefly by forcing audits on unwilling record companies, which almost invariably turned out to be hiding a few beans themselves – while helping himself.

  Lennon was seduced.

  Klein pointed out that there were four Beatles. McCartney wasn’t anybody’s leader! Where did he get off, treating the others as if they were merely sidemen? It was just what Lennon wanted to hear. Lennon also believed Ono was fully his equal as an artist, and that she wasn’t being paid proper respect – not by the other Beatles, not by society.

  Klein had arranged for the hotel to serve Yoko the macrobiotic rice he knew she liked, and he lavished attention upon her throughout the dinner. He told Yoko he would find funding for her art exhibitions, and he would get her films distributed by the film studio, United Artists. Not only that, he guaranteed (preposterously) they would pay her a million-dollar advance.

  According to Lennon’s later recollections, Klein also underscored his deep understanding of The Beatles by telling him that he knew precisely which songs Lennon had written and quoted large chunks of his lyrics. Only three people know whether this is true and two of them are now dead. But it seems on the surface to smack of Lennon spin, even allowing for Klein’s lasting impression on the couple. ‘He knew every damn thing about us, the same as he knows everything abo
ut the Stones,’ Lennon claimed.

  Then, of course, came the question of Lennon’s own finances, and the real reason that had drawn him to the Dorchester. By quoting Lennon’s ‘Apple-is-going-bust’ comments back at him, Klein touched on John’s deepest fears – that he would end up on Skid Row. And he knew how to fix that in the same way he had once made Bobby Darin and Sam Cooke millions – by carrying out forensic examinations of the EMI and Apple books to get Lennon what he was rightly owed.

  The first thing he would do was sideline John Eastman’s idea that they should buy Nems for a cool million. Klein told John: ‘I’ll get ya Nems – and it won’t cost ya a penny. I’ll get it for nothing.’ Quoting his favourite mantra – ‘Fuck You Money’ – he assured Lennon that initially he wouldn’t charge him a penny. He just wanted permission to look into his affairs and see what he could do on his behalf.

  In his own account of the meeting, Klein said: ‘I didn’t propose anything, I don’t work that way. I just asked him “How can I help you?” That’s all, and after we broke the ice, it was a very personal sort of meeting. We were trying to get to know each other. He was scared to death about the money situation. How would you feel, sitting there damn near broke after having made millions and millions of pounds and about to end up with nothing except memories?’

  Lennon would later describe Klein as ‘the only businessman I’ve met who isn’t grey right through his eyes to his soul’. That night, he sent a memo to EMI chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood: ‘Please give Allen Klein any information he wants and full co-operation.’

  If McCartney was ever aware of Lennon’s meeting with Klein in advance, he has never let on. When all four Beatles gathered at Apple the next day, Lennon wasted little time in blurting out the news: Klein was the right man to lead The Beatles back from the brink. ‘I don’t give a bugger about anyone else. Allen Klein’s the man for me,’ he said.

  He later explained to Rolling Stone: ‘I had to present a case to them, and Allen had to talk to them himself. And of course, I promoted him in the fashion in which you will see me promoting or talking about something. I was enthusiastic about him and I was relieved because I had met a lot of people, including Lord Beeching, who was one of the top people in Britain and all that.