by Ken McNab
OCTOBER 1969
The tectonic plates that had once bound The Beatles together had shifted following Lennon’s ‘divorce’ bombshell. In the weeks that followed, an awkward silence descended on the band. Cast adrift, McCartney and Starr were left clinging to their little piece of driftwood – a hope that this was just another typical Lennon outburst. McCartney said, ‘Nobody quite knew if it was one of John’s little flings and that maybe in a week’s time he would feel the pinch and say “I was only kidding, lads.”’
This time felt different, though, as if a Rubicon had been crossed. Being a Beatle now was, for Lennon, just a matter of legal semantics. Klein was coming to terms with a massive reversal of fortune. Every day he offered up a silent prayer that Lennon would stick to his vow of omertà and not give in to his instincts to tell the world The Beatles were finished.
Only Harrison was confident and savvy enough to glimpse the opportunities afforded by the sight of a new door opening as the old one creaked shut. Not least because nestling in his back pocket was a growing collection of songs that were tailor-made for a solo album. Huge advance UK orders ensured that Abbey Road, which was released in America on the first day of the month, quickly found its way to the top of the UK album charts, replacing Blind Faith’s self-titled debut. Brilliant in its ragged genius, it seemed to kill stone dead the long-standing speculation over the future of The Beatles. From the outside, it seemed as if they were still very much a fully functioning band.
Abbey Road had also revealed its own secret star; outwith the voodoo pulse of ‘Come Together’ and the primordial heavy rock of ‘I Want You’, distinct from McCartney gems such as ‘Golden Slumbers’ and ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’, the album shone a light on Harrison as a musician whose star was most clearly on the rise. ‘Here Comes The Sun’ and ‘Something’, arguably the standout tracks on Abbey Road, had placed him centre stage – the one place, of course, he hated to be. Klein had forcibly pushed for ‘Something’, with ‘Come Together’ on the flip-side, to be the lead single from the album to give Harrison a share of the lucrative royalties pie which had for so long been sliced up by Lennon and McCartney.
But he felt uncomfortable at accepting compliments for the two songs that arguably outshone Lennon and McCartney’s contributions. He bristled at suggestions he was ‘a late developer’, insisting that his ‘new’ songs were just as good as those he had done before. ‘Late, early, you know. What’s late and what’s early?’ he told the BBC’s David Wigg this month: ‘The last album we did [the White Album] had four songs of mine on it. I thought they were all right. So I thought these, “Something” and “Here Comes The Sun”, were OK . . . maybe a bit more commercial but as songs not much better than the songs on the last album.
‘But I’ve been writing for a couple of years now. And there’s been lots of songs I’ve written which I haven’t got round to recording. So, you know, in my own mind I don’t see what the fuss is, because I’ve heard these songs before and I wrote them quite a while back . . . I wasn’t Lennon or I wasn’t McCartney. I was me. And the only reason I started to write songs was because I thought, well, if they can write them, I can write them. Some of them are catchy songs like “Here Comes The Sun” and some of them aren’t, you know. But to me they’re just songs, things that are there that have to be got out.’
In the same interview, he hinted at relishing the chance to one day being able to shed his Beatle baggage, describing his celebrity persona as only a temporary part. He was already looking further down the road at a different kind of life. Tellingly, he declared: ‘I mean, even if it’s being a Beatle for the rest of my life, it’s still only a temporary thing. I got born seemingly to become Beatle George. But it doesn’t really matter who you are or what you are, because that’s only a temporary sort of tag for a limited sort of period of years.’
As it turned out, Harrison had also just discovered a new diversion. On 5 October, a comedy programme called Monty Python’s Flying Circus debuted on BBC television. The show contained a series of anarchic and surreal sketches put together by the Pythons – Eric Idle, Terry Jones, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman and Terry Gilliam. Harrison watched the pioneering first episode with Derek Taylor and got the humour right away. It would be the start of a lifelong love affair with the groundbreaking troupe.
Harrison said, ‘Derek and I were so thrilled by seeing this wacky show that we sent them a telegram saying “Love the show, keep on doing it.” I couldn’t understand how normal television could continue after that.’
At least two other Beatles, however, were unable to tune in. On the same night, Lennon was applying the finishing touches to ‘Cold Turkey’ at Abbey Road. Two nights earlier, with Starr on drums alongside Clapton and Voormann, he had taped the flipside, Yoko’s ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko’. The song, with its chainsaw-effect guitar and sparse, minimal feel, was a shout-out to Yoko’s estranged daughter during the Lennons’ prolonged battle to gain custody of the child from Tony Cox. All of which made the events of the next few days even harder to bear.
On 9 October, Lennon’s twenty-ninth birthday, Yoko was rushed to London’s King’s College Hospital amid growing fears that she was about to lose another baby. Lennon stayed by her side throughout, sleeping on the hospital floor rather than taking up an NHS bed. Four days later, Yoko miscarried again, leaving both of them traumatised and utterly bereft.
In the meantime, Apple continued to prep the UK and US releases of ‘Cold Turkey’, the first single he would release without the Lennon and McCartney imprimatur. ‘Give Peace A Chance’ carried McCartney’s name as co-composer as a quid pro quo for him being the only other Beatle to play on ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’. But anyone listening to ‘Cold Turkey’ for the first time knew it was unvarnished Lennon. Chartwise, he naturally wanted the song to do well even though he knew it was commercially a tough sell. As always, he was convinced that his art should mirror his life.
The sleeve, with a picture taken by David Nutter, carried the instruction ‘play loud’ in case anyone missed the message. Voormann had loved the song the first time he heard its composer run through it on the back of a Boeing jet flying across the Atlantic. But he knew then it was far from becoming the kind of record Lennon wanted. ‘I was very frustrated on the plane from London to Toronto because I knew we couldn’t do justice to the song with no real rehearsal,’ Voormann said. ‘I thought, “What a great song. We really have to rehearse this properly and make something of it.” But when we went onstage, we just played the chords. It was silly. It was just spur of the moment.’
Now, however, Lennon, Clapton, Voormann and Starr honed the arrangement over the course of twenty-six takes of the studio version. ‘We tried several things,’ Voormann explained. ‘And when I came up with that bass line that you hear on the record, and the guitar answered, that was it. Suddenly it was haunting. It somehow had this cold atmosphere.’
The song was slated for a late October release. Naturally, it would require some promotion and a little Fab Four fairy dust to help it on its way. That meant running the risk of Lennon being tempted to put a little wind in the song’s sails by confessing that he had left The Beatles. What better way to generate publicity by presenting the showbiz scoop of the decade? As it turned out, he played it pretty low-key. Interviews were restricted to a chosen few, those he could trust not to ask the penetrating and straightforward questions that would cause his mask to slip. Even then, for anyone reading between the lines, the clues were still there.
He told David Wigg: ‘Whatever happens to The Beatles, so-called, we’ll always be sort of friends, you know. So all I want for The Beatles is their individual happiness. And whether that’s in a collective form or not remains to be seen.’
Reviewers given an early pressing of the new single were stunned by the lyrics. It felt that once again Lennon was showing his chin to the showbiz establishment and inviting them to come and have a go. Inevitably, some radio stations immediately banned it, thus placing it alongside
other Lennon songs that ran counter to executive norms of the period: ‘A Day In The Life’, ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ and ‘I Am The Walrus’.
Indignant and fed up at being banned, Lennon again felt the media had badly misrepresented his thoughts. He repeated his initial insistence that ‘Cold Turkey’ was seriously misunderstood. ‘It’s neither anti-drugs nor anti-alcohol. It does not have any connection with drugs any more than it has with the experience you have with thirty-six hours of rolling in pain. That’s what miscarriage is, let’s face it; thirty-six hours rolling in pain.
‘I caught a chill in hospital while Yoko was having a miscarriage and I had what I would term “Cold Turkey” after it. That is, a fever of a hundred degrees. I was hot and cold for about two days . . . Everybody goes through a bit of agony some time in their lives. “Cold Turkey” is just an expression that I would have thought is suitable to explain the other side of life.’
Though few bought his explanation, Lennon carried on with a handful of media interviews while Apple insiders braced themselves for him to casually announce the Death of The Beatles. Instead, he found himself forced to deny not that The Beatles as a group were dead . . . only one of them.
*
The twelfth of October was a typically slowburn Sunday afternoon for Russ Gibb inside the DJ booth at Detroit radio station WKNRFM. Apart from being a very able broadcaster, Gibb was also a big noise in the Michigan city, home to the ‘Big Three’ motor manufacturers, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. As a concert promoter and founder of the city’s Grande Ballroom, he was music royalty. His stint on the city’s premier radio station also allowed him to tap directly into the city’s youth culture.
Even at the age of thirty-eight, – the kids gave him the soubriquet ‘uncle’ – he was considered a prime point of contact for up-and-coming bands and later credited with giving the likes of MC5, Ted Nugent and Iggy Pop their first leg-up on the rock ladder. He was also on first-name terms with Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger.
On this particular afternoon, the clock seemed to be ticking slower than normal. ‘It could be pretty boring for the jock,’ he said. ‘I liked to include phone calls from the audience and tried to find an issue to spark conversation.’ So Gibb opened up the phonelines, as he often did, to chat directly to his constituency to learn what was happening on the campus grapevines and in the dorms.
Among the first callers was a student who gave his name as Tom and posed what, on the surface, seemed an outlandish question. He asked Gibb: ‘So what do think about this story that Paul McCartney is dead?’ Experienced pro that he was, Gibb knew a wind-up when he heard one. Experience also told him that rock stars often patrolled the border between life and death in the foggy minds of students toked up at late-night parties. After all, hadn’t Bob Dylan been killed in a motorcycle accident in 1967 – yet strangely lived not to tell the tale?
‘I laughed,’ explained Gibb. ‘I said, “I heard every rock star is either dead, a dope-dealer, beats his children, beats his wife, or something.” Then the kid asked me if I ever played The Beatles’ “Revolution Number 9” from the White Album backwards? Then I played it backwards, Number 9, Number 9, where a very pronounced English accent says “Number 9, Number 9”, and it very clearly said, “Turn me on, dead man. Turn me on, dead man. Turn me on, dead man.”
‘I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. That floored me. It was very distinct. I put that on and within three to four minutes, the phone lines were jammed in my studio.’
Amazed by the reaction, the station’s managers suddenly glimpsed a ratings bonanza. The show was extended long into the night as other people called in with clues to support the bizarre theory. Gibb, while remaining open-minded, had a trump card to play. ‘I had been in London and I had spent some time with Eric Clapton who was a good friend, so I called Eric in London and I said, “Eric, have you heard there’s a rumour going on in the United States that Paul McCartney is dead?” And he said, “No, what are you talking about? What, Paul is dead?”
‘I said, “Yeah, they’ve got it in a record, and they’ve got it on so forth . . .” He said, “No, that’s not –” and then he said, “Wait a minute, you know, come to think of it, I haven’t seen Paul in about a month and a half.” And that did it. After he said that, all hell broke loose.’
The breadcrumb trail of clues led all the way back to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, in which fans thought they could detect Lennon in the fadeout intoning, with funereal precision, ‘I buried Paul’. The entire Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album was awash with clues. But the real giveaway, in the minds of the newest theorists, was hiding in plain sight in Iain MacMillan’s Abbey Road picture. For the Paul-is-dead believers, the sleeve of their latest album was a treasure trove of signs that proved beyond any measurable doubt that McCartney, the co-composer of some of the twentieth century’s most enduring pop songs, was dead – and the whole thing had been hushed up to an extraordinary degree.
Laid out in startling detail and kooky symbolism was MacMillan’s eerie mise-en-scene. Most observers seeking confirmation of McCartney’s demise convinced themselves they were indeed looking at a Fab Four funeral procession. And, crucially, the barefoot McCartney was the only Beatle out of step with the others, an accidental truism that captured better than anything the real behind-the-scenes carnage.
Elsewhere, there was the parked Volkswagen Beetle with its number plate of LMW28IF, another ‘clue’ that pointed to Paul’s age. (The fact that he was twenty-seven at the time was irrelevant.)
Flip the sleeve over and you find a huge crack running through the tiles spelling out ‘Beatles’. Joining all the dots, it pointed to the band being complicit in the decade’s biggest cover-up.
Listening to Gibb’s show was Fred LaBour, an arts reviewer for student newspaper, the Michigan Daily. LaBour used clues from the programme along with others he had invented himself – including the name of William Campbell, the alleged replacement for McCartney – as the basis for his own tangential take on the story. The Michigan Daily published it on 14 October, under the title ‘McCartney Dead: New Evidence Brought to Light’. Although clearly intended as a spoof, it had an impact far wider than the writer and his editor expected. Soon it was picked up by American wire services, which clattered it out on telex machines to a dumbstruck world. Hoax or fake news? It didn’t matter, though LaBour later admitted much of his story was the product of a febrile imagination.
He said, ‘I invented a lot of the clues. I just imagined this whole scenario and wrote it as sort of a quasi-news story with a lot of facts, and enough facts that were true to sort of keep pulling you along and enough facts that weren’t true that hopefully would let you know that this was a joke. This was a satire.’
In another interview he disclosed that he made up the William Campbell character: ‘It was originally going to be Glenn Campbell, with two Ns, and then I said, “That’s too close, nobody will buy that.” So I made it William Campbell.’
The Paul-is-dead story swiftly became the biggest and fastest circulating sensation since the 1963 assassination of JFK. The Apple switchboard came under siege from overwrought fans and news organisations. Huddled outside 3 Savile Row, the Apple Scruffs buttonholed Beatle insiders for any scrap of information that would either confirm or deny the story. Others hopped on the tube or took a 159 bus to Abbey Road studios or set up a vigil outside McCartney’s house on Cavendish Avenue.
‘What fascinated me most was how they got their information,’ said press officer Derek Taylor. ‘Often they knew more about where the boys were than we did. It was often a process of abstraction and deduction with them. Sherlock Scruffs they were.’
Naturally Taylor was handed the task of delivering a firm rebuttal, while cloaking the words with his stock-in-trade ambiguity. This had the desired effect of sounding like a denial without actually offering up any real evidence that McCartney was still with us. No, McCartney was unavailable for
comment. And, no, he wouldn’t be giving any interviews. An irritated Lennon called the story ‘garbage’ while Starr’s sole comment on the subject was: ‘I’m saying nothing because no one believes anything I say.’
Like all conspiracy theories, the claims simply didn’t stack up. But in the absence of irrefutable proof, the story refused to abate over the rest of the month. There was, though, method in Taylor’s vagueness. The immediate upshot of McCartney’s supposed demise was to propel sales of The Beatles’ back catalogue up alongside Abbey Road into the upper reaches of the charts. Within days, Abbey Road had shifted huge amounts of new units all over the world, proving once again that nothing makes an artist more commercially viable than death. Meanwhile, the subject of this latest drama was largely living under a self-imposed house arrest. Normally the man about town of the London showbiz circuit, McCartney was suffering the first pangs of what would become almost a nervous breakdown. He was always the group’s consummate PR man, who could schmooze the capital’s high society and mix effortlessly with the youthful radicals of the London underground.
He was equally comfortable among the theatre luvvies as he was helping to publish International Times, the counterculture publication.
With a new family to look after, Linda’s unquestioning love and a new album sitting at the top of the charts, it should have been the happiest time of his life. But Lennon’s shock revelation had created a paradigm shift, the moment when McCartney’s world came loose on its comfortable spindle. Ironically, especially given the circumstances, it felt like more like bereavement than a divorce. The Beatle bubble had finally burst, although he was still bound by contract to the band and controlled by Klein. He was estranged from his closest friend. And now he was the reluctant focus of the decade’s most absurd showbiz intrigue. It’s easy to understand his despair. Barry Miles told me: ‘Paul’s identity was wrapped up in being a Beatle and it was very hard for him to see himself separate from the band; it wasn’t just a job, it was who he was.’
