And in the End

by Ken McNab

  Waiting for them in London was an old life, one in which a drug-enforced siege mentality would quickly re-establish its hold and see them return to a state of opulent misery. McCartney, Harrison and Starr were also nervous about how Lennon’s return would affect the relative harmony of the sessions. No one had to say it out loud but it was an obvious question: what was it going to be like in the studio again?

  The next day, Wednesday, 9 July, the answer was quickly forthcoming. An ambulance pulled up outside Abbey Road and out popped Lennon alongside a slightly unsteady Yoko, all in black and wearing a bandana to conceal the forehead scar caused by the road accident. What happened next, though, left everyone – front-office staff, engineers, session men, roadie Mal Evans, George Martin and the other three Beatles – open-mouthed with astonishment. The doors to Studio Two flew open to reveal four men in brown overcoats wheeling in a massive double bed from Harrods, the luxury Knightsbridge department store that furnished the couple with a money-is-no-object pipeline of caviar and fine foods. Lennon instructed the bed to be arranged and made up in a corner facing outwards towards all the sound booths. Yoko climbed in between the sheets but not before asking for a mic to be hung overhead so she could take her place as a part of a Beatles collective, offering up unwanted suggestions and criticisms. Even by Lennon standards, it was an extraordinary turn of events. McCartney declared: ‘What could we say? She was John’s bird.’ The awkward silence spoke volumes but everyone was thinking the same thing. None of the other Beatles dared protest.

  ‘The three of them were a little bit scared of him,’ recalled engineer Phil McDonald. ‘John was a powerful figure, especially with Yoko – a double strength.’ McCartney, though, set aside diplomacy and took his revenge in the only way he knew. ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, another unpopular curiosity from Twickenham, was just the type of song to get under Lennon’s skin. Bordering on vaudeville, it was a teeth-grating track about a psychotic murderer who pops off his victims by smashing their skulls with a silver hammer. The subject matter – and the song’s music-hall structure – was as far removed from, say, ‘I Am The Walrus’ or ‘Strawberry Fields’ as you could get. Lennon loathed ‘Maxwell’ and refused to have anything to do with it. Starr and Harrison felt the same way but had already been press-ganged into action as McCartney forced them to endure take after excruciating take in a bid to pummel the song into a Beatles single, which, insisted Lennon, ‘it never could be’.

  It was a familiar stand-off. Lennon knew he was deliberately baiting the band by turning the studio into another bed-in; McCartney, in turn, could always rely on the kind of ‘granny music’ so despised by Lennon to infuriate his erstwhile songwriting partner. More worrying was Lennon’s lack of new material. Nine weeks had passed since all four of them were last in the studio. Still under discussion was the idea, first mooted in April, to weave a long suite out of all the snatches of song fragments he and Lennon had tucked away. But they still needed standalone contributions from Lennon to at least give the impression that it wasn’t all smoke and mirrors, that whatever it was they were working towards was, in fact, a bona fide Beatles project.

  Over the next two weeks they maintained slow but steady progress in honing ‘Here Comes The Sun’, ‘Something’, and the universally hated ‘Maxwell’ while tackling McCartney’s ‘Oh! Darling’. That track was his homage to the Fifties rock ’n’ roll of his teenage years and he was determined to make it sound as if it had just been pulled off the peg from the era that had done so much to shape his musical adolescence. He recalled: ‘I came into the studios early every day for a week to sing it by myself because at first my voice was too clear. I wanted it to sound as though I’d been performing it on stage all week.’

  Lennon later said he would have been a better choice to sing it, but by then egotism had replaced co-operation. He declared: ‘I always thought I could have done it better – it was more my style than his. He wrote it, so what the hell, he’s going to sing it.’

  On 21 July, Lennon finally broke free from the creative ennui that had been holding him captive for weeks. He had long ago ditched Timothy Leary’s pitch for him to write a political campaign song called ‘Come Together, Join The Party’. But the idea of ‘Come Together’, with its double entendre, stimulated his sense of mischief. Playing it to the others for the first time, his excitement was palpable and suddenly all the bullshit went out the window. Visceral and crackling with energy, it was the best song he had produced since ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, even though the ‘gobbledygook’ lyrics were still unfinished. But McCartney, a veritable jukebox of rock ’n’ roll, quickly spotted an obvious problem. The tune was a virtual steal of Chuck Berry’s 1956 single ‘You Can’t Catch Me’, which also featured prominently in the 1958 movie Rock, Rock, Rock. And in case anyone was in any doubt about the provenance of the song, its lyrical reference to ‘old flat-top’ would be Exhibit A, m’lud, when the notoriously litigious Berry’s publishers took them to court seeking damages for plagiarism. Lennon sheepishly copped a plea as McCartney suggested slowing down the song with an almost voodoo-like feel and masking its origins with a ‘swampy’ bassline. The result showed The Beatles at their unified best. Lennon always reacted well to constructive criticism from his songwriting partner. As McCartney later put it: ‘John came into the studio one day with this song, he plays it for me, “Here come old flat top, He come groovin’ up slowly . . .” And I go: “What? We can’t do that! That [lyric] is Chuck Berry’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me!’. Anyway, it became “Come Together”. It shows just the influence.’

  Lennon never shied away from the obvious similarities, which would later see the original song’s publishers, Big Seven Corporation, now owned by American music mogul Morris Levy, sue for damages. In one of his last interviews, he admitted: ‘ “Come Together” is me – writing obscurely around an old Chuck Berry thing. I left the line in “Here comes old flat-top.” It is nothing like the Chuck Berry song, but they took me to court because I admitted the influence once years ago. I could have changed it to “Here comes old iron face”, but the song remains independent of Chuck Berry or anybody else on earth.’

  Over the next nine days, ‘Come Together’, showcasing again Starr’s innovative tom-tom fills, gradually took shape to become a Beatle tour de force and one of Lennon’s personal favourites. ‘It’s funky, it’s bluesy, and I’m singing it pretty well. I like the sound of the record,’ he said.

  McCartney was delighted to see his old partner, bolstered by a good track, at last bringing something to the party. He decided to cash in on John’s better mood by again trying to persuade him that one side of the new album should be a symphonically styled medley of short songs. Faced with a pincer movement – George Martin was as much a driving force as McCartney – Lennon reluctantly got on board. Over the next few days, they casually fused together ‘Mean Mr Mustard’, ‘Polythene Pam’ and ‘Sun King’, a song that unblushingly took as its jumping-off point Fleetwood Mac’s mellifluous instrumental, ‘Albatross’. ‘Sun King’, although beautifully melodic, consisted of one chorus containing only nine original words, making it lyrically the second shortest song in The Beatles canon next to ‘Wild Honey Pie’. The rest was more Lennon-esque nonsense sung in pseudo Spanish, exposing John again to the suspicion that he was lyrically bankrupt.

  The next day, 24 July, after a first pass at the song, McCartney spent an hour finessing a catchy new song called ‘Come And Get It’ without any help from his bandmates. He played every instrument himself before double-tracking his own vocal. It could have been another classic Beatle song but bizarrely would remain destined for another group altogether.

  Despite the occasional niggle, all four musicians were largely on the same page, driven perhaps by the unspoken notion that the sun really was setting on the band. If this was to be the borderline – no one said it was, but it felt like it might be – they needed a grand, sweeping and memorable exit. McCartney already envisioned the medley as an epic climax to side two bu
t it still needed a magical sign-off, something that would be remembered as a final Beatle bow to the world, something that summed up the whole of the parts.

  The answer lay in a song that, in its title alone, was perfect. Recorded during seven takes on 23 July, ‘The End’ was a high watermark for each Beatle’s individual musicianship and, in time, fulfilled McCartney’s hope for an unforgettable swansong.

  It began with a reluctant Starr being coaxed into performing his one and only drum solo, which in turn led into a ferocious 24-bar guitar duel between McCartney, Harrison and Lennon in that order. Unpretentious as he was, Starr never felt the urge to take the spotlight as a drummer. His job, he reckoned, was always to serve the song and not his own ego. But for ‘The End’, he was finally persuaded to show off the chops that proved his musicianship was on a par with that of any of his contemporaries.

  In the Beatles Anthology he declared: ‘I’ve always hated drum solos. That drum solo is still the only one I have ever done. I was opposed to it but George Martin convinced me.’ McCartney added: ‘Ringo would never do drum solos. He hated drummers who did lengthy drum solos. We all did. And when he joined The Beatles we said, “Ah, what about drum solos then?”, thinking he might say, “Yeah, I’ll have a five-hour one in the middle of your set,” and he said, “I hate ’em!” We said, “Great! We love you!” And so he would never do them.

  ‘But because of this medley I said, ‘Well, a token solo?’ and he really dug his heels in and didn’t want to do it. But after a little bit of gentle persuasion I said, “Yeah, just do that, it wouldn’t be Buddy Rich gone mad,” because I think that’s what he didn’t want to do.’

  Missing at this point, however, was a vital ingredient – the vocals – which would not be added for another three weeks. Among those who had a box seat at the instrument-only recording was Emerick, dovetailing his duties as the head of the new Apple studio with those of balance engineer on the new, still as yet untitled, album. And he watched in awe as the four musicians found themselves in perfect synch. In his memoir, he wrote: ‘For the hour or so it took them to play those solos, all the bad blood was forgotten. John, Paul and George looked like they had gone back in time, like they were kids again, playing together for the sheer enjoyment of it.’

  It was indeed a joyous, throwback moment and, as it turned out, one of the last times all four played with such unbridled joy on a specific track.

  By the last day of the month, they had broken the back of the medley, which was now almost ready to be sequenced. In the can also was ‘Octopus’s Garden’, the Starr-penned song, which relied heavily on unaccredited contributions from Harrison.

  In a marathon session on 30 July, McCartney adopted a de facto producer’s role to stitch the constituent parts of the medley into one seamless whole. Editing and crossfading began to weave together a rough uninterrupted mix of ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’, ‘Sun King’, ‘Mean Mr Mustard’, ‘Her Majesty’, ‘Polythene Pam’, ‘She Came In Through The Bathroom Window’, ‘Golden Slumbers’, ‘Carry That Weight’ – and ‘The End’, still minus vocals. The aim had been to suss out if the musical theory worked in practice and to give them the chance to iron out any kinks. Against all odds, they all liked it, even the reluctant Lennon who could be heard ad-libbing in broad Scouse: ‘Fab . . . that’s great . . . real good.’

  The only discordant note came from McCartney, who felt that ‘Her Majesty’ was out of synch with the rest of the medley. He instructed engineer John Kurlander to ‘throw it away’, a request that in Kurlander’s opinion ran counter to every EMI protocol he knew. He told me: ‘We were not allowed to just dispose of bits of tape. That could get you into all sorts of trouble. So when everyone was gone I just tacked ‘Her Majesty’ onto the end of the master tape. I never thought any more about it but I only did because I didn’t want to get into any trouble from George Martin or anybody else for that matter.’

  The July sessions, while ultimately fruitful, had been underpinned by a fragile and occasionally forced camaraderie. No one was pretending that it was now no more than a job of work. They rarely hung out together socially and if they did it would only be two at a time. But Sunday, 20 July – the day before Lennon re-entered the fray with ‘Come Together’ – saw all four, and their wives, break into their weekend for a private film screening at Apple.

  The movie of choice was not Dennis Hopper’s recently released, hippie-rite-of-passage film, Easy Rider, but a rough cut of Get Back, the warts-and-all photoplay from January that graphically trapped them on celluloid, caught in the crosshairs of their own conflicts. Michael Lindsay-Hogg had spent the last few months stitching together over two hundred hours of film into some kind of pared-down, watchable whole. His last music-based project had been The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus the previous December, but it had met with a withering response from a jealous Mick Jagger, who felt his own band had been upstaged by The Who. The upshot was the circus never came to town. (It lay unreleased for twenty years.) Now Lindsay-Hogg wondered if the same fate lay in store for Get Back, which, in its rough state, ran to just under three hours. It must have seemed like a Cecil B. De Mille epic, which in a way it was.

  Photographs of the screening tell their own story of inter-Beatle relations. Even though it’s a small room, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr are seated far apart. Accidental or deliberate, the informal seating spoke volumes. And the running time was too long to hold their attention, especially when the film was a harrowing depiction of a band – their band – self-destructing before their eyes. Watching it was painful for all of them and only brought an unspoken and uncomfortable truth horribly closer. Fearful of their reactions, Lindsay-Hogg was braced for the perfect storm of being berated by all four, but not one dissenting voice was raised as the credits rolled. Harrison left with his wife Pattie and his parents, Harry and Louise, to go back to Esher to watch Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong take his giant leap for mankind. Starr, naturally, headed to a club. Lindsay-Hogg joined the Lennons and the McCartneys for a ‘chummy’ dinner and went home with a feeling of job done. But if he thought his movie was on the brink of a four-signature sign-off, he was quickly disappointed. Early the next morning, he received a phone call from Peter Brown.

  Lindsay-Hogg recalled the conversation as follows: ‘Peter said, “There’s a lot of footage of John with Yoko in there, and I think it ought to come out.” And I said, “I think it’s really interesting.” And he said, “Let me put it another way, I’ve had three phone calls [from three Beatles] this morning saying it ought to come out.”

  ‘So there was much more in the original cut of John and Yoko relating. You saw that she and John – and I’m not saying she had anything to do with breaking up The Beatles – were like a separate camp in the group. And so we took that out.’

  Also out was anything that could harm ‘the Beatle brand’, a state of affairs that, ever since, has clouded any prospect of Lindsay-Hogg’s initial vision ever seeing the light of day. That meant shredding any material that could shine a light on the bust-up between Harrison and Lennon that saw George verbally quit.

  The director told Entertainment Weekly in 2003: ‘They were sort of falling apart at that time, and it was hard to get some of those moments into the movie because as well as being the stars, they were also the producers. They all had slightly different agendas. George didn’t like it because it represented a time in his life when he was unhappy. He was a very sensitive – almost too sensitive – sort of sardonic guy when he was pushed. It was a time when he very much was trying to get out from under the thumb of Lennon/McCartney – I mean the songwriting team. If there were twelve cuts on the album, they’d get ten, Ringo would be thrown one, and George would get one.

  ‘George was feeling his artistic oats, and he was writing some wonderful songs, and was looking for a chance to have more expression for himself. I was aware that they were beginning to get on each other’s nerves. If you notice, there’s a shot looking down on McCartney, and
the shot of George talking is on a long, slightly fuzzy lens. That’s because, knowing that this was coming, I didn’t want them to feel the cameras were intrusive. I put one camera up in the gantry shooting down, so they didn’t see it. I moved the other camera back to the end of the studio. So they didn’t really know the cameras were there, which gave them the opportunity to get it off their chest. But I knew I wanted to show the disagreement between these two musicians.’

  Of course Allen Klein had grand plans for the film. It had always been envisaged by The Beatles and Lindsay-Hogg as a TV film, but with so much footage having been shot, Klein spied dollar signs. Lots of them, in fact. The commercial potential of turning it into a major film to be shown in cinemas all over the world was self-evident. A low-budget film showing the band recording a new album would undoubtedly be a huge success – and he was in for twenty per cent of the proceeds under the terms of the deal he had cut with John, George and Ringo in May. The fact that it showed The Beatles in freefall didn’t matter. The fans would have to buy their tickets first. Money in the bank.

  He also had an opinion on Lindsay-Hogg’s rough cut. The film, he said, should be all about The Beatles and nothing but The Beatles. All material that showed those circling the outer margins of the band’s orbit – like those he had already identified as leeches – must be excised. That meant no Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans, George Martin, Glyn Johns, Terry Doran or Peter Brown. No Beatle wives, even. But there was so much footage of Lennon and Yoko joined at the hip that his request was beyond absurd.