And in the End

by Ken McNab

  Steve Miller was a young Texan singer-songwriter, a mainstay of the San Francisco scene that upended American culture in the late Sixties, a guitar blues virtuoso who had been in London for some time and had drifted into the outer margins of The Beatles’ social orbit. This had led to him sitting in at the Apple studio as the band recorded the single version of ‘Get Back’ and, on at least one occasion, jamming with them.

  On this night Miller was hoping to get some studio time at Olympic to continue laying down a track for his forthcoming third album, Brave New World. The link between McCartney and Miller was Glyn Johns, who was engineering Miller’s album while working on the ‘Get Back’ tapes.

  McCartney recalled: ‘Steve happened to be there recording, late at night, and he just breezed in. “Hey, what’s happening, man? Can I use the studio?” “Yeah!” I said. “Can I drum for you? I just had a fucking unholy argument with the guys there.” I explained it to him, took ten minutes to get it off my chest. So he and I stayed that night and did a track of his called “My Dark Hour”. I thrashed everything out on the drums. There’s a surfeit of aggressive drum fills, that’s all I can say about that. We stayed up until late. I played bass, guitar and drums and sang backing vocals. It’s actually a pretty good track . . . it was a very strange time in my life and I swear I got my first grey hairs that month. I saw them appearing. I looked in the mirror, I thought, I can see you. You’re all coming now. Welcome.’

  But Klein didn’t need McCartney’s signature on a piece of paper. Lennon’s endorsement carried the real weight in The Beatles, as his sheer, indomitable strength of will always had. ‘John was the leader because he shouted the most,’ said George years later when time’s passage had made reflections less acerbic.

  In an interview that month, Klein’s reciprocal loathing for McCartney surfaced when he was asked if Paul’s refusal to endorse him was a problem. ‘Well,’ sneered Klein in his Brooklyn tone, ‘I can understand him wanting to go with his family. It is a problem. But it’s his problem.’

  Even before the ink on his contract was dry, Klein had already begun stripping Apple to its core. The company, he reckoned, not without some truth, had become a hippie haven for every freeloader in town. Apple owned cars no one could remember buying, had a portfolio of addresses no one had ever visited – including a townhouse in Mayfair – and retained a charge account at such high-end stores as Harrods and Fortnum & Mason. On top of that, staff salaries had to be taken into account – and that included everyone from Derek Taylor in his generously stocked press office to the likes of Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans and all the mini-skirted girls perched behind a battery of secretarial desks and those who manned the telephones.

  Moreover, every Beatle had a gofer – and each one was on the clock. And every gofer had an assistant.

  Apple also ran a number of subsidiary companies, such as the newly-formed experimental Zapple label. And, of course, there were still those Beatle IOUs in the safe worth many thousands of pounds.

  To make matters worse, there was no fresh money flowing into the coffers. EMI had for weeks refused to unlock around £1.3m in royalties until Apple’s legal stand-off with Triumph Investment Trust over the purchase of Nems had been resolved.

  In Klein’s eyes, every penny was a hostage and every pound a prisoner as he set about his task. Sergeant Buzzkill was off the leash.

  The swiftness and brutality of Klein’s actions sent shivers through Apple. His assistant and nephew Ronnie Schneider, an equally brash American, acted like a Mafioso – an image he did nothing to contradict – as he helped carry out his uncle’s bidding. Among those caught in the first wave of the purge were Alastair Taylor, the company’s general manager, Ron Kass, the highly respected president of Apple Records, and Brian Lewis, who worked in contracts.

  Magic Alex discovered the spell had been broken when he turned up at his lab in Boston Place to find the doors shut and padlocks firmly in place as his so-called inventions were hauled away for scrap. By then he had run up debts of £53,000 – a sum nearly twenty times his annual salary. He kept his silence for forty years before pouring out his rage to The New York Times while insisting history had dealt him a bad hand over his part in the story.

  ‘I broke the locks and went in,’ he said. ‘I thought that there had been a burglary. None of my engineers were there. I therefore went straight to the Savile Row offices. When I walked in, the receptionist told me that Allan Klein had fired all the staff of all the Apple companies. She told me that I had been fired as well. I asked for John Lennon. He was not there, so I telephoned him in Weybridge. I said that all the equipment was missing and that I had been told that I had been fired. John Lennon replied: “Bullshit, no one can fire you. You are not an employee, you are a partner.”

  ‘Boston Place was ruined’, he continued. ‘They had removed all the equipment. I refused to have anything more to do with the venture. At John Lennon’s request, Allan Klein telephoned me. He told me that his job had been to clean out the whole of Apple Corporation. He said that the equipment that had been installed was now in the basement of Boston Place. I said that I wanted to have nothing more to do with it and I left Apple permanently.’

  Back at Apple, three secretaries were shown the door in one afternoon. Dee Meehan survived but watched the executions take place. ‘Klein just moved in and started firing people,’ she recalled. ‘He got rid of everybody he could possible clear out, either by taking their work away, so that there was nothing for them to do, or by making their jobs so uncomfortable they felt obliged to quit. He didn’t like people who were close to The Beatles. As soon as Ron Kass went, everybody was worried . . . Klein was really mean. He fired people when they were on location. Tea-girls were dismissed, then it was discovered that there was no tea.’

  Chris O’Dell was another who seemed to cling on by her fingertips but her intimacy with the whole meltdown helped her provide a measured assessment in the years that followed. ‘Apple was bipolar’, was her verdict. ‘It had a split personality. They were losing money and things were getting out of control. There is this part of it that was supposed to be very business-like, it was supposed to earn money. The idea wasn’t to turn millions and millions but it was supposed to support itself. The eccentric other side of it and the business side of it just clashed.’

  Others, such as talent scout Peter Asher, were quick to see the writing on the wall and began making their own plans rather than work under Klein, or at least walk before they were pushed.

  Alistair Taylor had been in from the start, having been standing at Brian Epstein’s shoulder when he first saw the unkempt and leather-clad wannabes playing Liverpool’s Cavern in November 1961. He had remained a loyal Epstein lieutenant before becoming Apple’s general manager following Brian’s death in July 1967. He famously appeared in a flyer for Apple as the one-man-band who now owned a Bentley.

  He was especially close to McCartney, for whom he was on call twenty-four hours a day as a personal Mr Fix-It. But when Klein pulled the trigger, Taylor quickly found himself out of favour. McCartney failed to return any of his calls. ‘It was a hell of a blow,’ said the mild-mannered Taylor, who never spoke to any of The Beatles again.

  Kass was embarrassingly bulleted after Klein concocted a false story to suggest the then fiancé of actress Joan Collins was creaming off the top. He left without a pay-off but was given the lease to the Mayfair town house no one could remember buying.

  Klein’s scattergun approach to cost-cutting was just as much about cementing his own powerbase. To that end, he trained his sights on The Beatles’ inner sanctum, which included Peter Brown, Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, but each remained ring-fenced from his grasp. He felt that Aspinall, especially, was a big threat, having wrongly pigeon-holed the former roadie as a shameless sponger. At one point he had tried to get Aspinall to sign a contract, even chasing him round a conference table before Lennon intervened, telling Klein: ‘Leave him alone. Look at the trouble I got into by signing pieces of paper
. Neil’s not stupid.’

  Despite his closeness to Lennon, Brown was rightly or wrongly considered to be a Klein lackey, an assertion not helped when he carried out some of the dismissals himself. Overnight, he went from director to doormat. In his own memoir, Brown defended his actions: ‘Some of the dirty work was left to me. I have been criticised for serving Klein in this task, but I unhappily agreed to do the job only because I hoped the news could be delivered with kindness and dignity instead of from Klein’s mouth.’

  They were indeed tempestuous times. Under normal circumstances, this would be familiar and comfortable terrain for Klein. Outwith personnel purges, he loved nothing more than taking on ‘the men in suits’ on behalf of clients he felt had been royally ripped off. And the strategy was simple – if they made more money, so did he. Greed and power, the oldest motivations known to man. Until now those battles had been waged on home turf, the courtrooms of his native America. British laws and British customs, however, provided a considerably different challenge, one that represented a steep learning curve.

  Klein’s power base at Apple was largely dependent on the support of Lennon. By May, he had Lennon’s unqualified backing over ‘sweeping out all the rubbish and the deadwood and stopped Apple from being a rest house for the world’s hippies’. Having slashed staff costs, his next priority was the royalties agreement with EMI.

  *

  EMI’s chairman, the genial Sir Joseph Lockwood, had, along with Brian Epstein and George Martin, ensured that The Beatles’ fame reached every part of the globe. He had always kept his door open for ‘the boys’ in recognition of the fact that the group had turned EMI and its American partner, Capitol, into the world’s most profitable record companies. Unrestricted access had been especially granted to Lennon and McCartney, and both men felt an informal and jovial affinity with Sir Joe, despite the generation gap.

  Only twice had they butted horns. Lockwood had insisted Gandhi’s image be removed from the Sgt. Pepper cover for fear of offending Hindus, and he had refused to distribute John and Yoko’s 1968 album, Two Virgins, on the simple grounds of good taste.

  Until his death, Epstein had been Lockwood’s go-to guy when it came to renewing the band’s EMI royalty contracts. The last one had been agreed in 1967 but the group had been so prolifically creative during this period that they had already fulfilled the terms of that deal by May 1969 – seven years earlier than required.

  Which was why Klein knew he held all the aces as he prepared to do battle with EMI. On 7 May, two days before McCartney’s bust-up with the other three at Olympic Studios, he and Lockwood sat round the boardroom table at EMI to discuss a new royalties agreement. Next to Klein, and looking slightly uncomfortable, were the four musicians and Yoko. (McCartney had argued for John Eastman to ride shotgun but had been shouted down.)

  Klein wasted no time in getting to the point. No increased royalty meant no more records. It was that simple. But if Klein expected Lockwood, a veteran of many bruising boardroom battles, to simply kowtow to his despotic behaviour, he was mistaken. Lockwood said he was happy to renegotiate the terms of the 1967 deal provided it benefited all parties. Puffing on his pipe, Klein guffawed and said, ‘You don’t understand. We get everything, you get nothing.’ Seconds later, the visitors were being summarily ejected from the premises. Only McCartney had the presence of mind to give Lockwood a sheepish backwards glance as if to say ‘Sorry, guv, it’s nothing to do with me.’

  Within half an hour, Klein, showing uncharacteristic contrition, was on the phone to apologise.

  There was, of course, an unspoken truth attached to the meeting; Klein and Lockwood knew they needed each other. Klein understood that within EMI Sir Joe’s word was law and that he alone could make or break any deal. Lockwood was equally aware that much of his company’s profits lay in the hands of the four musicians. A tense stand-off remained in place.

  Running parallel to the EMI discussions at this time was the equally fraught stalemate with Triumph over Nems. That drama was this month due to be played out in the High Court in London as Triumph sought a judicial ruling on EMI’s refusal to free up the £1.3m in royalties currently lying dormant in a Lloyds Bank escrow account. Having bought the company, Triumph was entitled to pocket an annual twenty-five per cent management fee – approximately £325,000 after expenses – for managing The Beatles, even though they didn’t fulfil that role. And they were entitled to keep on doing that until 1976. Clearly, someone had to blink.

  Days before the case was due to be heard in court, Triumph’s Leonard Richenberg heard a familiar New York accent on the end of the phone offering a plea bargain. Richenberg was prepared to mull it over but by the end of the day Klein had changed his mind, saying, ‘I’ll see ya in court.’

  Richenberg had by now grown weary at the prospect of a lengthy and costly courtroom battle, and eventually visited Apple to try and reach some kind of compromise without resort to QCs and judges. Triumph, he said, would surrender its entitlement to twenty-five per cent of the Beatle bounty in return for £750,000 and £300,000 of the royalties currently frozen by EMI. In addition, Triumph would receive £50,000 for Nems’ twenty-three per cent stake in The Beatles’ film company, Subafilms, as well as five per cent gross of the band’s royalties from 1972 to 1976. In return, Nems would surrender all its rights in all contracts affecting The Beatles.

  They received an option on the 4.5 per cent of Northern Songs’ shares owned by Nems, then valued at £335,000. Triumph also bought The Beatles’ ten per cent stake in Nems for 226,000 of its own shares, at the time valued at £420,000. When all the head-swirling sums had been calculated, both sides naturally proclaimed a victory of sorts. Even McCartney bought into the complicated outcome, which nevertheless would not be formally ratified for another two months.

  The Beatles no longer had any connection to Nems, thus severing a connection that had gone back to the earliest days of Beatlemania. The deal, however, had come at a sum far exceeding £1m – the precise figure John Eastman had laid out to Clive Epstein back in February to keep Nems in the Fab Four family. And he wasn’t slow off the mark in sending out a reminder of this to Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr.

  He wrote: ‘Before memories become too short, I want to remind everybody that we could have settled the Nems affairs for very little. Klein killed my deal by claiming all sorts of improper acts of Nems, which his investigation would disclose and promising to get you Nems for nothing. We all know that no improper acts were found by Klein if, in fact, Klein made an investigation at all.’

  Oddly enough, there was no mention of the letter he had sent to Clive Epstein in February questioning his late brother’s integrity, which brought Triumph on to the board in the first place.

  Shark though he was, Klein wisely refused to take the Eastman bait. He had bigger fish to land – Northern Songs. The struggle to retain the Lennon-McCartney catalogue was the third spoke in an ever-evolving corporate wheel – and the one that, perhaps, mattered most.

  Klein knew he desperately needed a major negotiating coup to restore confidence in his abilities and to ward off any nagging doubts that might surface with Lennon, Harrison and Starr.

  ATV had set a revised take-it-or-leave-it deadline of 11 May for its bid for majority control to be accepted. Both sides owned around thirty-five per cent each of the company’s stock, give or take a few points. But the main focus of any last-minute pitch was not to reel in a few wayward strays but to convince the consortium of shareholders who still held the crucial fifteen per cent balance of power to join them. It consisted of clients from three top London brokers, W.I. Carr & Spencer Thornton, Astaire & Co., and Howard & Wyndham, who, as owners of several West End theatres, carried more clout and were seen as natural allies of ATV. In business, however, money always held sway before any old pals’ act.

  The consortium remained unimpressed by ATV’s offer but were equally wary that a victory for The Beatles could see Klein, viewed by key City observers as a divisive figur
e, elevated to an influential place on a newly constituted Northern Songs board.

  In an effort to placate the consortium, Apple announced that David Platz, a respected music publisher and the man in charge of Essex Music, would run Northern Songs if The Beatles bid got over the line ahead of ATV. But it didn’t take the media long to discover that Platz had secret links to Klein and so wasn’t quite as impartial as Apple suggested. The consortium had their own ideas over who would run Northern Songs, with no place for either Klein or Grade at the top table. That scenario, mapped out during several meetings with Apple, would have seen The Beatles potentially still owning the company but, crucially, having no say in how it should be run.

  Backed into a corner, Lennon sensed that his grip on his copyright was slowly slipping away. Angry, frustrated and utterly fed up, he finally snapped. ‘I’m not going to be fucked around by men in suits sitting on their fat arses in the city,’ he famously declared after one meeting with consortium negotiators. It was an intervention, however, that helped to drive the consortium into the welcoming arms of ATV.

  Alerted to Lennon’s outburst and knowing how it would be received, Grade got in touch with Peter Donald, head of Howard & Wyndham, which was viewed as the most influential of the three consortium members. The two men agreed a deal for the entire bloc at, remarkably, a price lower than The Beatles’ offer. It was virtually game over for Lennon and McCartney.

  In his autobiography, Grade said: ‘I had meetings with Klein [in May] for hours on end each day and didn’t like the way it was going. I had a strange feeling about Klein because of all the delays so I called Donald and said, “I want to buy your fourteen per cent of Northern Songs, how much do you want for it?” We agreed a price and did the deal on the telephone.

  ‘We now had fifty-four per cent of the company and therefore controlled Northern Songs. Klein called me late that afternoon and said, “Well, I have to admit it, you beat me to the punch. We’re now ready to sell you the shares at the same price you paid Peter Donald.” That, my friends, is how we acquired The Beatles’ catalogue and got into the music business.’ Of course, it was much more byzantine than that.