by Ken McNab
The previous day, in between business meetings, he had broken his self-imposed media blackout to give an interview to journalist David Wigg for the BBC Radio One programme Scene and Heard, ostensibly to promote Abbey Road, the album that was now less than a week away from being in the shops.
In a wide-ranging conversation, McCartney wistfully discussed the changes that time had inevitably wrought on the band. He touched on his new role as a father, the business differences with Klein and the great unknown that represented the future.
He told Wigg: ‘I don’t like doing the business bit that much. But you can’t avoid it. See, the thing is, like, we were once a band, just a band. But then, because we were successful, you can’t help it being successful. Money comes in. You can’t help that, again. When money comes in, income tax is to be paid. So you can’t really help just turning into a businessman because someone says to you, “Where’s your income tax, mate?” You say, “Well, I better go on to someone,” you know. “I hope I’ve got a bit to pay you” and stuff. So you got to get all that together, you know. So it’s just force of circumstance. You can’t help it.’
Wigg asks: ‘Paul, what about the future of The Beatles? I happen to know that the organisers of the Isle of Wight pop festival are going to ask you and the rest of The Beatles if you will top the bill next year at the Isle of Wight. Now, what’s your reaction to a thing like that? Are you likely to go back on stage and perhaps do a show like that?’
Paul: ‘I don’t know, you know.’
Wigg: ‘Does it appeal?’
Paul: ‘I’ve never known. I didn’t know when we were playing the Cavern that we’d be on the Royal Variety Performance. And after that all the papers said, “Well, what’s left for them?” So then we went to America. They said, “What’s left for ’em?” then, you know. And we got into making better albums and stuff. I mean, I just don’t know what’s gonna happen. It’ll be all right, though.’
Heard on tape rather than read in black and white, it sounds more like he was trying to convince himself, his normal optimism buried beneath the shifting sands of uncertainty that continued to threaten The Beatles. Timing, he felt, was everything as he headed into Apple to sit down with Lennon, Starr and Klein. (Harrison swerved the meeting, having decided to head to Cheshire to visit his parents.) Inevitably, Yoko was in tow.
To begin with, the atmosphere was cordial but the mood of forced jollity was impossible to ignore, especially between Lennon and McCartney, who also had Linda and John Eastman in his corner. Peter Brown also fulfilled his diminishing role as a Beatle consigliere.
The first order of the day was to sign the paper that would bind The Beatles to EMI and Capitol for the next seven years in what both parties hoped would be a mutually beneficial partnership. Everyone recognised that it was an important moment, and one that should be properly recorded. Coincidentally visiting Apple that day was David Nutter, the photographer who had been corralled into taking John and Yoko’s wedding pictures on Gibraltar back in March. Soon, he found himself standing in front of John, Paul, Ringo, Yoko and Klein shooting off several frames as they hunched over a desk pretending to sign the paper. His contact sheet shows all five mugging for the camera. In a couple, McCartney is shown holding up a giant magnifying glass to the paperwork as if poring over the small print for any tell-tale signs of Klein crookedness.
Nutter told me: ‘I happened to be in the building and they said, would you take a picture? And I did. It was all very haphazard. I didn’t know what it was for. To be honest, I thought they were signing a napkin or something. But I got the feeling there was a very bad atmosphere in the room. You could tell it wasn’t a happy place to be.’
Job done and with a promise to deliver the prints later, Nutter was quietly ushered out of the room, unaware of the drama that was about to unfold. Conversation then shifted uncomfortably from the present to the future as McCartney made his pitch to Lennon for The Beatles to rekindle their lost magic by becoming a touring band again. In his book, Many Years From Now, he recalled the exchange as follows: ‘It got a little bit, “Well, why are we doing this? Are we sure the group is going to continue? Well, how’s it going to continue? What are we going to do? Massive big shows?”
‘Then I propounded the theory, “I think we should get back to our basics. I think we’ve got out of hand, we’ve overwhelmed ourselves and I think what we need to do is re-establish our musical identity and find out who we are again and so we should get back to little gigs.”’
Starr, no fan of touring, said nothing. Neither did Klein, though he could sense the tempest building inside Lennon as McCartney’s words hung in the air. When he could hold back no longer, his reaction left them all reeling. Lennon fixed McCartney with his most intense stare, a glare that brooked no argument.
As he recalled it: ‘Paul was saying to do something, and I kept saying, “No, no, no,” to everything he said. So it came to a point that I had to say something. So I said, “I think you’re daft. I wasn’t going to tell you until after we’d signed the Capitol deal but the group’s over, I’m leaving.”’
It was the moment when dry tinder exploded into flame. Lennon had been waiting for weeks, if not months, to let these words flow out. Now they poured forth in an adrenaline-fuelled torrent – and there was no way to stem the tide. Also nagging away at his psyche was the confirmation of twenty-four hours earlier that The Beatles had lost the battle with ATV for control of Northern Songs. And now it was all over, everything. For John Lennon, The Beatles were finished. And he meant it.
More than any other, this was the moment when the twentieth century’s greatest romance – a prosaic phrase memorably coined by Derek Taylor – turned to dust.
Visibly shaken, McCartney could feel the colour drain from his face: ‘We paled and our jaws slackened a bit,’ he later said. ‘I didn’t really know what to say. He had control of the situation. There’s not a lot you can say to “I’m leaving the group” from a key member. I remember him saying it was weird and exciting. It was like when he told Cynthia he wanted a divorce. He was quite buoyed up by it. It was later, as the reality set in, that it got quite upsetting.’
Klein, for his part, insisted he had never seen it coming. In the recollection he presented to London’s High Court months later, he said: ‘Everyone was in a very cheerful frame of mind and regarded this as a good deal and a great occasion in the life of The Beatles.’
The meeting broke up minutes later to the sound of doors slamming. Among those who heard the commotion was Evening Standard journalist Ray Connolly, who, despite being a friend of the band, nevertheless knew better than to pry too closely under the bonnet at that time. But he used it to pen a piece under the headline ‘The Day The Beatles Died’. (Expecting a Beatle backlash, Connolly instead found himself the recipient of a single white rose from a not-so-secret admirer – Lennon – a sign that his story was right on the mark.)
Mal Evans reputedly found Paul in tears. Lennon stormed red-faced into his own office inside Apple before heading out the door with Klein and Yoko to a nearby restaurant called the Peppermill. Yoko recalled him saying: ‘Now it’s only you and me.’ Behind them, Starr was left to come to terms with the fact that, suddenly, he had become an ex-Beatle. But he felt only relief over Lennon’s bombshell declaration. He said: ‘I just felt that John was being honest. We all knew it was coming.’
A sense of frustration and foreboding quickly fell over Klein, for whom the optics were disastrous. He had just witnessed his one moment of triumph ruthlessly snatched away, his Svengali-like hold over Lennon temporarily broken by his client’s sheer impulsiveness. Ever since Toronto, he had been trying to keep Lennon on a tight leash, imploring him not to do anything that would torpedo the deal with the band’s record companies and leave him looking like a fool. For once, though, his persuasive tongue failed him. If word got out that The Beatles were being scattered to the four winds, no amount of fast-talking would alter the reality. John Lennon was leaving The Beatles.
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The only card Klein had left to play was to appeal to Lennon’s loyalty to his bandmates – and his financial instincts – and beg him to keep silent until something could be worked out. They were all aware that if Lennon resorted to a scorched-earth policy, he could take them all down. Klein knew how this news would play out in the boardrooms of EMI, Capitol and the City. He had lost Nems, he had lost Northern Songs and now he had lost The Beatles, the biggest prize in showbiz. And it left him exposed to allegations of insider dealing. EMI and Capitol could easily claim that Klein had illegally coerced them into new deals while all the time knowing The Beatles had broken up – a move that would inevitably affect their stock market position and influence the bottom line. And, having had advance warning of Lennon’s intentions, he would not be able to use plausible deniability as an excuse. It had been a dreadful forty-eight hours.
Lennon later told Rolling Stone: ‘Allen was there, and he was saying, “Don’t tell.” He didn’t want me to tell Paul even. But I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t stop it, it came out. And Paul and Allen said they were glad that I wasn’t going to announce it, like I was going to make an event out of it. I don’t know whether Paul said, “Don’t tell anybody,” but he was damn pleased that I wasn’t. He said, “Oh, well, that means nothing really happened if you’re not going to say anything.” So that’s what happened.’
In later years Lennon, whose honesty veered close to masochism, seemed to harbour slight feelings of guilt over his eruption. He admitted: ‘When I finally had the guts to tell the other three that, quote, I wanted a divorce, unquote, they knew it was for real, unlike Ringo and George’s previous threats to leave. I must say I felt guilty for springing it on them at such short notice. After all, I had Yoko, they only had each other.’
The next day the Lennons headed to Harrison’s home in Surrey to explain the rationale behind his decision. According to George’s wife Pattie, Lennon was furious, venting over McCartney and Klein for the Northern Songs debacle. Years later, though, Harrison suffered a bout of Beatle amnesia, claiming he couldn’t remember when Lennon had handed in his resignation: ‘Everybody had tried to leave so it was nothing new,’ he said.
In the meantime, of course, EMI record manufacturing plants all over the world were being cranked up to deliver another new Beatles record into the world. Six days after Lennon privately declared The Beatles were dead, Abbey Road, the album that would become their unofficial eulogy, was released. The album flooded into UK shops on 26 September, though American fans would have to wait another five days for their turn.
Iain MacMillan’s show-stopping cover picture underscored the changes that time had wrought on the four individuals who had become world famous. Bestowing an accidental immortality on the Zebra crossing outside EMI Studios (soon they would be renamed Abbey Road Studios) it caught The Beatles seemingly stepping off the page, an image that would prove all too prescient.
To some critics, The Beatles were now considered passé, a broken-down institution. And initial reviews of Abbey Road by the rock press, including their most loyal placemen in the likes of NME, seemed to confirm the notion that musically the group was a spent force, content to live off former glories.
Some of the notices were savage, accusing The Beatles of music by numbers, shorn of the dazzling invention that had reinvented the genre and touched millions. Writing in the Guardian, Geoffrey Cannon lamented what he saw as Abbey Road’s staleness. It offered little, he complained, that was new.
‘Abbey Road contains talent comparable with any other Beatles album, but nevertheless is a slight matter,’ he wrote. ‘Perhaps to their own relief, The Beatles have lost the desire to touch us. You will enjoy Abbey Road. But it won’t move you.’
In America, advance copies exposed the band to some of the most coruscating expositions of their recording career. In The New York Times, Nik Cohn lavished praise on the medley ‘tour de force’ that dominated side two, but he leavened that opinion by saying he could barely listen to the ‘unmitigated disaster’ that was side one. And he wasn’t fooled by The Beatles’ attempt to disguise their Chuck Berry rip-off on ‘Come Together’, the album’s opener.
He wrote: ‘The six tracks on the first side and the opening two tracks on the flip are all write-offs: there’s a Ringo Starr nursery rhyme; a quick burst of sub-Brian Wilson; two songs by George Harrison, mediocrity incarnate; yet another slice of Paul McCartney Twenties nostalgia, and an endless slow blues. The badness ranges from mere gentle tedium to cringing embarrassment. The blues, for instance, is horribly out of tune, and Ringo’s ditty is purest Mickey Mouse. The only interesting failures are two numbers by John Lennon, “Come Together” and “Oh! Darling’’ [The latter song was actually sung by Paul].
‘“Come Together”,’ Cohn added, ‘is a slowed-down reworking of Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” and is intriguing only as a sign of just how low Lennon can sink these days. “You Can’t Catch Me” is a very great song, after all, and lumbering it with the kind of “Look Ma, I’m Jesus” lyrics that Lennon unloads here is not a crime that I’d like to have on my conscience.’
Rolling Stone handed the task of reviewing the album to a twenty-year-old staffer, Ed Ward, whose words turned out to be so poisonous that his editor, Jann Wenner, spiked them before giving the assignment to writer John Mendelsohn instead. Encouraged by his Beatle-obsessed boss to adopt a less acerbic approach, Mendelsohn performed the ultimate sycophantic about-turn, hailing Abbey Road as a masterpiece: ‘That The Beatles can unify seemingly countless musical fragments and lyrical doodlings into a uniformly wonderful suite, as they’ve done on side two, seems potent testimony that no, they’ve far from lost it, and no, they haven’t stopped trying. No, on the contrary, they’ve achieved here the closest thing yet to Beatles freeform, fusing more diverse intriguing musical and lyrical ideas into a piece that amounts to far more than the sum of those ideas.’
Closer to home, NME’s long-time Beatle loyalist, Chris Welch, played it safe by declaring: ‘It’s strange that we have now reached the point where nobody worries TOO much about what The Beatles are doing on record. There are no cries of “We demand a new Sgt. Pepper!” for example, or yells of “Whatever happened to their ‘Mr Moonlight’ period?” Now we can just sit back, relax and enjoy Beatle offerings and appreciate them on their own level.
‘Too much has passed under the bridge to start getting uptight, and the truth is, their latest LP is just a natural-born gas, entirely free of pretension, deep meanings or symbolism . . . while production is simple compared to past intricacies, it is still extremely sophisticated and inventive.’
Despite the album being pilloried by some critics, the verdict that really mattered would emerge from the court of public opinion. And first-week sales proved the band’s enduring appeal among a fan base that had largely been on the same journey as them. Lennon and McCartney were reluctantly wheeled out for limited promotional duties and both praised ‘Something’ as the best track on the album: it was a belated appreciation from the two chief Beatles for a song that both had initially derided as a lightweight piece of confectionery.
In a track-by-track interview with Australian DJ Tony McArthur, John happily hinted that he had managed to body-swerve the album’s weakest track, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’: ‘It’s a typical McCartney singalong or whatever you call them. I was ill after the [car] accident [in Scotland] but he really ground George and Ringo into recording it.’
He was still nursing a grievance over the gagging order imposed by Klein. On 28 September, he reconvened The Plastic Ono Band at Trident Studios to record a proper version of ‘Cold Turkey’ – the track rejected by McCartney and Harrison – with Starr sitting in for the unavailable Alan White, while Clapton and Voormann were again on board. Everyone in that room that night knew The Beatles were dead.
Meanwhile, death was about to haunt McCartney in the most macabre way possible. A spurious article had appeared in the 17 September edition of the Northern Star, the
newspaper of Illinois University, purportedly detailing the grisly demise of the Beatle. Poring over song lyrics and pictures of the band, a nineteen-year-old sophomore, Tim Harper, speculated that McCartney had been killed in a car crash in 1966. Outlandish as it seemed, Harper began to believe he had stumbled onto the biggest conspiracy of the decade. It swiftly took on a life of its own as his imagination soared on a flight of fancy. A spark that began as American campus kids shooting the breeze slowly caught fire and spread rapidly throughout the country’s Midwest. In truth, they were the embers of an old, long forgotten rumour.
But, with the US release of Abbey Road, the cinders smouldered gently back into life thanks to Iain MacMillan’s cover image. And there, in all its hidden symbolism, was, it seemed, irrefutable proof of a morbid tableau. Harrison was the gravedigger, Starr all in black dressed as the undertaker, Lennon, in contrasting white, was the clergyman. And the image of McCartney offered up the most compelling testimony of all. The left-handed bass player was holding a cigarette in his right hand and walking barefoot – a grisly sign of death in several European traditions. What other evidence did the world need? The flames began to catch as the wind took the story higher with every breathless retelling. The conclusion was unavoidable, wasn’t it? James Paul McCartney was literally a dead man walking.
© Bettmann/Getty Images
As the world’s youth reeled from claims that Paul McCartney was dead, Dr Oscar Tosi, assistant professor of audiology at Michigan State University, was called in to compare voice recordings to prove that McCartney was, in fact, still among the land of the living.
