by Ken McNab
Grade, with his ever-present Havana cigar, was the type of old-school impresario The Beatles despised. So James was fearful of the reactions of Lennon and McCartney, but it was Harrison who got to him first, accusing him of an act of betrayal at a meeting in which he was backed by Neil Aspinall and a mildly inebriated Derek Taylor. At least Clive Epstein had the decency to offer them first refusal on Nems, said Harrison.
Asked why he had not consulted the songwriters before deciding, James said, ‘To telephone John and Paul would have been difficult. The call would have gone through a number of people and there was a need to keep it confidential.’ He tried to placate the guitarist by pointing out that it was not as serious as he was making out, only to get the response, in broad Scouse: ‘It’s fucking serious to John and Paul is what it is.’
Harrison’s intervention on behalf of Lennon and McCartney in absentia was puzzling. He had sold his small shareholding in the company months earlier, a token arrangement brokered by Brian Epstein when Northern was formed. Instead, he had set up his own publishing company, Harrisongs Ltd, and later formed another separate company, Singsong Ltd, in October 1968. (It would eventually be folded inside Harrisongs.) He had no personal ties to Northern.
So, while it might have been strange that he should speak for Lennon and McCartney, given the way they had treated him, Harrison was still a Beatle, still loyal.
James, for his part, refused to accept that he had done anything wrong. Who were they to saddle him with any guilt trip? The deed was done and there was nothing he nor Lennon and McCartney could do to stop it. Unless, of course, they were prepared to gain majority control of the company for themselves. That would mean buying enough shares to gain a fifty-one per cent majority. ‘You are getting some very bad advice,’ was James’ parting shot. Harrison left knowing that another business battlefront had just presented itself.
Klein was enjoying a holiday in Puerto Rico when he received two calls – one from Lennon and the other from McCartney – summoning him on the first flight back to London. Initially, McCartney was indecisive. Who should he turn to? Klein or Eastman? Klein, no matter how much he disliked him, was a brutal and intimidating negotiator with a proven track record. But the Eastmans, father and son, were experts in the byzantine world of copyright ownership.
Ultimately, it came down to the Lennon-McCartney alliance to save the one thing that would bind them together for ever, their own copyrights. That meant, reluctantly, giving Klein the green light to ride into battle against Grade.
Contacted by the Daily Express, Paul offered this lone comment: ‘You can safely assume that my shares are not for sale to ATV.’ But Lennon had no such misgivings about the fight that lay ahead: ‘They are my songs and I want to keep some of the end product . . . we are not going to sell and we advise all our friends to hang on to what they’ve got. Dick James? We don’t think he was very nice. You’d have thought the first thing he would have done would have been to consult us.’
The Amsterdam bed-in continued for another two days before the couple called it quits and went on a spontaneous tour of Europe. As the month drew to a close, they had one last stunt to perform, setting up a brief base camp at Vienna’s Hotel Sacher, where, yet again, an over-excited press corps arrived en masse. Ostensibly, the purpose of the visit was to promote Yoko’s film Rape, which was due to premiere on Austrian television that night. But the real purpose was also to inform the world of the couple’s new concept for total communication – Bagism.
Most of the journalists, just hoping to breathe the same air as a real-life Beatle, were dumbfounded by the couple’s zany sense of self-parody and gift for self-publicity. John and Yoko stayed hidden inside a white bag, with John whistling a snatch of Johann Strauss’s ‘The Blue Danube’. It was hokum on an epic scale.
Yoko introduced Bagism as the natural extension of the bed-in. Eventually, one reporter broke the stunned silence, asking, ‘Will you come out?’ Lennon uttered an emphatic ‘no’ and added, ‘This is a bag event – total communication.’ To a wider audience, it seemed as if he had lost grip of his sanity, but again they overlooked the humour involved.
As Lennon later said, ‘When we were in Amsterdam doing Bed Peace, halfway through the week we sort of realised a tag to put on what we’re doing, which makes it easier for us and you to recognise what we’re doing, by calling it Bagism. That means, if we have something to say or anybody has something to say, they can communicate from one room to another, and not confuse you with what colour your skin is, or how long your hair’s grown, or how many pimples you’ve got.’
Asked by one reporter how his recent actions had changed the world, he responded: ‘I couldn’t give you a concrete example, except for a few good cartoons that came out of it and a good few reactions from readers’ letters in England that I especially know about. Some old woman that said she’s had the best laugh of her life. If the least we can do is give somebody a laugh, we’re willing to be the world’s clowns, because we think it’s a bit serious at the moment and a bit intellectual. That’s the least we can do, because everybody is talking about peace but nobody does anything about it in a peaceful way. If you donate your holiday instead of just sleeping with your wife and giggling, you might do something about it.’
*
Like everyone else, Harrison and Starr had watched as the Lennons’ honeymoon circus continued to dominate the news. But if any of The Beatles were worried about John’s behaviour, they kept it to themselves. Starr, typically, had a wider perspective of the shift in public opinion towards the band. In an interview that month with music magazine Hit Parader, carried out during a break in filming on Cobham Common in Surrey, he said the cheeky, grinning moptops of Beatlemania were a thing of the past.
‘No, I don’t always understand [what the couple did], but then I am in a privileged position of being the person who is probably the closest to them and I can go and ask. I read the paper like anyone else and I think, “What’s this? What’s going on?” But then I can go and ask them what it’s all about. People have really tried to typecast us. They think we are still little moptops, but we’re not.’
With no group sessions in the diary, Harrison used the downtime to fine-tune a clutch of new songs, some of which had grown organically following his visit to Bob Dylan the previous autumn. The so-called Quiet Beatle was quietly confident that he was now finding his own voice. The demos laid down at the end of last month – ‘Something’, ‘Old Brown Shoe’ and ‘All Things Must Pass’ – had been added to a growing stockpile of strong compositions that were already beginning to form the outline of a possible solo album.
He said, ‘I felt they were good songs. I didn’t know if they were good Beatle songs but I liked them. I just wasn’t sure about having to go through all the usual just to get them on a Beatles record. It was always a stressful process for me.’
As it happened, Harrison was already well down the road to finishing his second, deliberately non-commercial solo album. In February he had become the first musician in Britain to own a Moog IIIP synthesiser, a new-age electronic instrument that, with its swirling keyboard textures and white noise effects, would soon revolutionise rock music and be brought on board by the likes of Yes, Pink Floyd and Genesis, as well as The Beatles.
Harrison had first encountered it the previous year during a trip to California, where he was given a demonstration of its abilities by Paul Beaver, a Hollywood sound-effects specialist, and his collaborator Bernie Krause.
Knocked out by the instrument’s seemingly limitless potential for creating new sounds and imitating others, he had immediately ordered one to be shipped to his home. Its arrival had been delayed for several months as Harrison haggled over a price – he reckoned he was Beatleproof when it came to actually paying for something, believing that his celebrity endorsement would entitle him to a substantial discount.
He was quickly captivated by his new plaything and spent hours programming it to reproduce the sounds he had heard in Cal
ifornia, Krause having supplied him with a multi-track tape of the recording from the tutorial in America. Throughout March, he laboured to create and hone an eighteen-minute aural soundscape called ‘Under The Mersey Wall’. In many ways, Harrison was dipping his toe into the unexplored waters of experimental sounds normally associated with Yoko.
When he wasn’t so engaged in the studio, he could often be found at Twickenham watching Ringo on the Magic Christian set, enjoying hanging out with Sellers and comic surrealists like Graham Chapman and John Cleese. Harrison had already developed an interest in the art of film-making and was often seen deep in conversation with the film’s Scottish director, Joe McGrath.
Both men shared a love of The Goons and McGrath told me: ‘Yes, George was a frequent visitor and it was always good to see him. I had produced several of The Beatles’ early videos so we knew each other. You could tell how close he and Ringo were. They had an almost telepathic understanding. He was very quiet and just stood on the sidelines while we were filming. I think he was just happy to blend into the background. Fame wasn’t his thing.’
Nevertheless, the month ended with another reminder of the high cost of celebrity for Harrison. Nineteen days on from the police raid, he and Pattie appeared at Esher and Walton Magistrates’ Court to plead guilty to possessing the cannabis they adamantly believed was planted in their house by police officers.
Despite his plea, there was no disguising his bitterness over the whole affair. They were each fined £250 and warned about the dire consequences of drug-taking. Only once did the Quiet One raise his voice – and that was to politely ask for the return of a key Crown exhibit, an ornamental peace pipe, which was a present from the Native American Church of Peyote Indians. Outside, justice having been done and with a criminal record now attached to his name, Harrison restricted his comments to: ‘I hope the police will now leave The Beatles alone.’ The Blue Meanies, though, were the last thing they would have to worry about.
© Christies/Getty Images
Signed by Lennon, Harrison and Starr, the letter that effectively outlawed Paul’s in-laws from The Beatles and widened further the rift with McCartney.
APRIL 1969
April was only two days old when Dick James arrived to face the music at McCartney’s house in Cavendish Avenue, a short bus journey from EMI Studios in Abbey Road. He had already been harangued by George Martin over his decision to sell out Lennon and McCartney. The Beatles’ gentlemanly producer recalled the angry exchange between the two of them in an interview with Ray Coleman.
‘This can’t be true! Martin had said.
‘Yes, it is,’ Dick replied. ‘I have sold. I’m tired of being threatened by The Beatles, and being got at. So I decided to sell.’
Martin: ‘Why didn’t you ask The Beatles first?’
James: ‘If I’d done that it would have been all over the place and then I could never have done the deal with Lew Grade.’
‘I told him he was a rat,’ Martin remembers. ‘I felt he’d betrayed everything we’d done together and I felt I was in a position where I could say that.’
Martin’s denunciation, however, was nothing compared to the sub-zero reception awaiting James at McCartney’s house. He went alone, armed only with an unwavering self-belief that he was doing the right thing. He might naturally have expected Charles Silver, his right-hand man and chief ally in Northern Songs, to provide some kind of solidarity. But of the reclusive Silver there was no sign.
In the countless books written about The Beatles, Charles Silver remains the missing piece in the puzzle. He has never been pictured or interviewed about his role in the greatest melodrama in showbiz history. Instead, he is a furtive figure, lost in the margins, unknown to even The Beatles.
McCartney noted: ‘We never met this Charles Silver guy, a character who was always in the background. He was “the money”, that was basically who he was, like the producer on a film. He and Dick James went in together, so Silver always got what was really our share. There were the two of them taking the lion’s share, but it was a little while before we found out.’
Inadvertently, George Martin had touched on one of the biggest oversights in The Beatles’ career. When the Northern Songs agreement was drafted, no one thought to include a clause giving Lennon and McCartney first refusal on the option to buy outright the company that was rightly theirs.
Unknown to them, Northern Songs had, in fact, been folded into the Dick James Music publishing stable as a subsidiary company. It was a dereliction of duty on Brian Epstein’s part and a calculated move by James that would ultimately cost Lennon and McCartney untold millions and see their songs bartered down through the decades ahead in a corporate game of pass the parcel. And each time the music stopped, someone else took ownership of the world’s most lucrative song publishing catalogue.
James, however, felt his conscience was clear, and all that was left was to endure the wrath of Lennon and McCartney that afternoon. By all accounts it was not a long conversation. The two musicians found their song publisher in an intransigent and unapologetic mood. No, he didn’t think to tell them he was selling his shares as he didn’t want to spook the market and see the value of the company’s stock plunge; no, he didn’t have any qualms about unloading his stake to Lew Grade, the bête noire of British entertainment; and, no, he didn’t see his decision as a personal betrayal of them. Neither Lennon nor McCartney ever talked about this meeting, but James, in rare interviews, did offer a small insight into their reactions.
‘Paul was annoyed, but John was inconsolable; he was hurt and I was very sorry.’ In another account, he declared: ‘Everything was very civilised. I explained why I had done what I had done, supported by the board. Paul sort of shrugged it off. John, who always placed great emphasis on respect and integrity for each other, was very cynical. I said: “Your financial gain will at least give you, regardless of what your earnings are from records, a substantial income.” Although they were established at that time as certainly great catalogue-sellers, no one could really visualise how they would continue to sell in ten, twelve, fifteen years’ time.
‘I tried to point out to John that his capital gain, which wasn’t like earnings from records, on which tax was astronomical because his royalties were subject to ordinary tax . . . the reward he would get from his shares was, in fact, a capital gain and that was at the lowest rate of tax you pay anywhere in the world.
‘I endeavoured to give John that point of view and I said, “At least that means you can put some money by for your children.” To which he retorted, quite cynically, “I have no desire to create another fucking aristocracy.” That’ll be the only four-letter word that you’ll get from me, but that is verbatim what he said.’
Apart from James and Silver, Northern’s board also included Clive Epstein and Geoffrey Ellis, both of whom held a small stake in the company. Minority shareholders they may have been, but both were entitled to feel part of the key decision-making process. Neither, though, was party to the discussions with Lew Grade, despite James’s later claims to the contrary.
Rather than it being a unanimous and collective decision taken by all of the company’s principals, it came down to a singular will. Like Allen Klein’s ABKCO, Northern Songs was a one-man band, run largely on similarly arbitrary lines by Dick James. As long as the share price held firm, everyone was happy. But when it started to wobble amid fears that the Lennon and McCartney train was coming off the rails, beads of sweat started to form on his brow. Fortunes easily made could just as easily vanish. So, as he walked out of McCartney’s house, having witnessed the hostile demeanour of his company’s two greatest assets, he was convinced more than ever that he had done the right thing.
It was Peter Brown who later said, ‘To John and Paul, Northern wasn’t just a collection of compositions; it was like a child, creative flesh and blood, and selling it to Lew Grade was like putting that child into an orphanage.
‘But Dick James had seen the writing on the wall; it
was in Allen Klein’s handwriting and James was determined to pull out. The value of Northern Songs depended on the willingness and ability of Lennon and McCartney to compose together. Already John and Paul had refused to sign an extension on their songwriting contract with Northern Songs and James had good reason to doubt the longevity of their relationship.’
Lennon made no mention of the confrontation, Northern Songs, Apple or The Beatles when he appeared on the Eamonn Andrews Show, a popular British TV news/discussion programme, the following evening. But the news about Grade’s takeover attempt renewed speculation over the health of The Beatles’ business interests and sparked a fresh wave of ‘Fab Four to Split’ headlines. In fact, The Beatles had not been seen in public together since the rooftop concert. By April, even their own sanctioned fan-friendly publication, The Beatles Monthly, was reduced to producing single shots of an individual Beatle looking vaguely interested.
Of course, they had not quite vanished: two weddings, one high-profile honeymoon, a dodgy drugs bust and now a Fleet Street feeding frenzy over Northern Songs had seen to that. But Apple press officer Derek Taylor recognised that the mask was slipping at a time when, more than ever, it needed to be held firmly in place. So he turned to an old photographer chum to help preserve the myth.
Taylor had befriended Bruce McBroom while both worked at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival in California. McBroom had also worked with Peter Sellers on a film called The Party. By one of those curious twists of fate, the young American was in London at this time working as a stills photographer on the Magic Christian set at Twickenham, where he had struck up an amiable working alliance with Ringo Starr. Taylor got in touch to ask how much he would charge to take pictures of the biggest rock group on the planet.
