by Ken McNab
Dead or alive, McCartney was going through hell. As the Paulis-dead story continued to pick up speed, he ventured out only once, he and Linda joining Ringo and Maureen for a cabaret performance by former Apple ingénue Mary Hopkin at the Savoy Hotel. Even that appearance refused to kill the rumours. Eventually, McCartney chose an escape route he thought would finally render him invisible from scrutiny. It may even have been Linda’s idea.
On 22 October, fed up and emotionally spent, he bundled Linda, six-year-old Heather, baby Mary and their sheepdog Martha into the back of a Land Rover, making sure they had enough provisions for the journey, and set off on the arduous six hundred miles from London to High Farm, the broken-down homestead he had bought in 1966 on the Kintyre peninsula on Scotland’s rugged Argyll coast.
It was, at that time, at least a ten-hour drive, which included navigating some pretty bleak terrain once they hit the high road north past Glasgow. But he hoped that the sheer remoteness of Kintyre, with its windswept beaches and open fields, would provide the sanctuary he desperately needed. Also, by putting so many miles between them while still remaining in Britain, McCartney was also symbolically properly cutting ties with Apple, the company in which he had invested so many hopes and dreams.
He later reflected: ‘We decided the only thing to do was to boycott Apple, just get out of there. The meetings were just such a headache so we just came to Scotland. We took the kids, we took the dog, took everything we had, put a guitar on the top and took a potty for the baby and that was it.’
Ironically, another music superstar had just offered him a different kind of escape. The day before he left London, a telegram from Jimi Hendrix had landed at Apple inviting him to take part in a session alongside Miles Davis and jazz drummer Tony Williams. Hendrix, a fully paid-up member of the McCartney fan club, always regarded him as a bass guitar pioneer. Now he hoped to recruit a Beatle for an album that would fuse together rock with jazz, an innovative idea for the time.
The note said: ‘We are recording and [sic] LP together this weekend in New York. How about coming in to play bass? Peace, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Tony Williams.’ Of course, the likelihood is McCartney never saw it so the intriguing possibilities offered up by Hendrix remain open to conjecture. But it’s feasible to imagine that the invite might have appealed. After all, he had watched largely from the sidelines as Lennon and Harrison took their first steps into another world with a variety of experimental solo work. Lennon especially had made it clear that the alternative universe provided by The Plastic Ono Band offered up a whole world of possibilities.
McCartney had worked with Badfinger and occasionally sat in on sessions for the likes of Jackie Lomax, James Taylor and Steve Miller. In general, though, resentment over Apple and Klein in particular and life in general was building to an uncharacteristic crescendo. He later admitted to natural feelings of pent-up anger during this period as he did a bunk with his family.
‘I was going through a hard period,’ he acknowledged in Many Years From Now. ‘I exhibited all the classic symptoms of the unemployed, the redundant man. First, you don’t shave, and it’s not to grow a groovy beard, it’s because you cannot be fucking bothered. Anger, deep anger, set in, with everything, with yourself number one, and with everything in the world number two.’
McCartney left London in a hurry, telling only a few select people at Apple of his plans, notably Taylor and Brown. He didn’t utter a word to any of his bandmates or, specifically, Klein. All he wanted was a little solitude to save his sanity away from the media’s constant gaze. But privacy for a Beatle, even a ‘dead’ one, was a hard-to-find commodity. In general, the press were unaware of his whereabouts, which only added more machinations over his mortality. And for those who did know, newspaper expenses didn’t extend to covering the cost of an onerous hike to Campbeltown, the closest town to McCartney’s rural retreat.
There is, however, always one who is willing to make the effort, especially when the biggest story of the year is on the schedules. Aware that the BBC was on his trail, Paul reluctantly agreed to a one-off interview. Scruffily dressed and looking every inch the welly-booted farmer, he tried to put his current life in context against the tidal wave of newsprint claiming he was dead. The explanation was simple; since getting married and becoming a father he had just decided to adopt a lower public profile rather than do ‘an interview every week’.
He was, he assured everyone, still very much alive, declaring: ‘If the conclusion you reach is that I’m dead, then you’re wrong, because I’m alive and living in Scotland.’ Linda said their holiday was being ruined by the press speculation, adding pointedly that ‘everybody knows he’s alive’. The story, however, wasn’t going away anytime soon.
There may have been another reason behind McCartney’s decision to skip his Apple bail on 22 October. A few days before, Klein had convinced all four Beatles – and Lennon and McCartney in particular – that it was finally time to hoist the white flag in their long-running and bitter battle over Northern Songs. Covert attempts by Klein to reach a last-minute deal with ATV and Grade had failed. All that remained was to agree a settlement for The Beatles’ thirty-five per cent stake in the company that owned the publishing rights to the Lennon and McCartney songbook. For both of them it felt like a dagger to the heart. The question was: what to do next? Keep the shareholding and become songbirds locked inside Grade’s golden menagerie or take the shilling?
On the table from Grade, under instruction from the City Takeover Panel, was an offer of 200p a share – the same price ATV had paid for the decisive block of shares held by Howard & Wyndham which had swung control of the company in Grade’s favour. That would have given the two Beatles a cash windfall of something like £3.5m in ATV loan stock – a far cry from the eye-watering £9m Klein had rejected months earlier for the entire holding.
The Great American Hustler had been outdone by a sixty-three-year-old, cigar-chomping, old-school British boardroom bruiser, a truth even Klein acknowledged. He said, ‘We made a lot of money, but it wasn’t the best we could have done.’
It was almost the final act in a soap opera that had gripped the City for months. Indeed, it had become an allegory for the breakdown in relations between Lennon and McCartney and the various factions in their corners. But it had made Klein, previously a twisting target, much easier to hit for McCartney and the Eastmans. Loyalty to Klein was one thing, but even Lennon could see vast chunks of their fortune sailing down the river. And it awoke the deep-rooted fear he had of becoming a lifelong prisoner of the taxman.
During one interview in October, he declared: ‘When all the Associated Television dealing was going on with Northern Songs, one day I was a millionaire and the next day I was broke. I can still afford to live well. Nobody has taken my home off me and I’ve still got a car and all the cigarettes I need, so I must be all right.
‘I’m always worried about the taxes because they are such a big thing and I don’t want to end up like Mickey Rooney, having to work just to pay the taxes off. I don’t want to end up doing TV ads to keep myself going. I wouldn’t be ashamed of doing it but I wouldn’t want to write crummy commercial songs that I don’t like because I’ve got to earn a bit of bread.’
Harrison, largely a bystander during the negotiations over Northern Songs, was equally vexed at the prospect of ending up broke. Days before Klein admitted all options over Lennon and McCartney’s shareholding had finally been exhausted, he spelt out his own fiscal unease to David Wigg: ‘It’s very ironic in a way because we’ve all got, maybe, a big house and a car and an office, but to actually get the money that you’ve earned is virtually impossible. It’s like illegal to keep the money you earn.
‘“You never give me your money, you only give me your funny paper.” You know, that’s what we get. Bits of paper saying how much is earned. But you never actually get it in . . . uhh . . . It’s the same thing [with] showbiz . . . and all they think of is, “Oh, all that money you’ve got and you’ve got
a big house and car,” and all that sort of thing. But the problems that come along with that are incredible. And I can tell you, everything material that we have, every hundred pounds we’ve earned, we’ve got a hundred pounds’ worth of problems to balance it.’
Setting his spiritual beliefs aside, Harrison clearly had his mind on the material world. If this was to be the end, he was already seeking out a new beginning. He continued to earn his musical stripes by producing sessions for Apple stablemate Doris Troy while jamming with former Blind Faith bassist Ric Grech and Denny Laine, who years later would be taking flight as a mainstay of Wings, McCartney’s post-Beatles group. Loosely mapped out in Harrison’s mind was a road to a future without The Fabs, as he drily called them. Lennon had already signposted his intentions with ‘Cold Turkey’. Now, in October’s final days, a third Beatle was about to declare his hand.
Starr had spent the previous three weeks, by his own account, sitting morosely in his garden, and staring into the great black hole that now seemed to be his future. He said: ‘I wondered, what shall I do with my life now that it’s over.’ Not even a brief holiday in Los Angeles with Maureen had lifted the blues. The solution, as it always did, turned out to be better than the puzzle. Salvation and opportunity lay in music so on 27 October he ventured back into Abbey Road’s Studio Two to record the first track for what would become, figuratively and literally, a sentimental journey set to music.
Like his three bandmates, his early musical education had been a composite of vaudeville, country music, the Big Band sound of Duke Ellington and the first shoots of rock ’n’ roll. Starr absorbed them all like a sponge from an early age, especially during family parties. Still, it was a surprise to many when he opted to record a whole album of pre-rock ’n’ roll standards for his first solo project. In doing so, he would be the first pop star to cherry-pick his way through the Great American Songbook. In fact, his choice of songs was payback to the devoted mother and stepfather who had nursed him through the childhood illnesses that had wrecked his education but formed his happy-go-lucky personality.
He said: ‘It came from my stepdad. He taught me all about the big bands – Billy Daniels, Billy Eckstine . . . all the Billys we used to laugh about. He was a really good singer. At parties in Liverpool everybody has to sing. He did one incredible thing that I have also passed on to my children. When I was playing the music I was playing he would never say, “Oh, that crap!” He’d always say, “Oh, that’s fine but have you heard this?” And it would be Sarah Vaughan or Ella Fitzgerald or whoever, but he did it in such an incredible way. I did it because of Harry. He loved Glenn Miller, just all the big band stuff and great singers. I was brought up with all those songs. They were my first musical influences.’
Starr was now quite prepared to step out on to the highwire without a Beatle safety net, but he still needed a familiar face to hold his hand. He asked George Martin to man the production board and explained his idea to record separate tracks featuring arrangers such as Count Basie and Quincy Jones. Martin, a veteran of such music, immediately bought into the idea.
The first session laid down was a cover of Cole Porter’s 1932 song, ‘Night And Day’, exactly the kind of singalong that was a staple during boisterous Starkey family parties. Martin, delighted to be able to step outside his customary circle, pulled out all the stops and hired a seventeen-piece orchestra featuring saxophone, trumpet, trombone, bass guitar, piano and drums to give Starr the kind of big band sound he was striving for. ‘Night And Day’ became the first track for the album, which, initially, was to be called Ringo Stardust before it morphed naturally into Sentimental Journey. ‘It got me off my horse and back into recording,’ said Starr, as firm plans were made to record more tracks in November.
The month ended with a break in Beatle tradition. There was a long-standing convention that the group never released singles that had already appeared on albums. But Klein, one eye forever on the bottom line, tore up that arrangement with the release of ‘Something’ and ‘Come Together’ (this time the broadcasting censors remained oblivious to Lennon’s smutty wordplay) as a double A-side UK 45 on Friday, 31 October. Klein said, ‘I suggested strongly that this single be released from the Abbey Road album. I thought that it was important for George to show himself. I thought “Something” was the best song on the album.’ Lennon also insisted he had pushed for Harrison to be given top billing for once.
Commercially, the decision was a no-brainer. The radio-friendly single would give Abbey Road its second significant sales spike inside the space of a month and maintain the album’s trajectory, a path that eventually would see it sell 4m copies in two months. It also ensured that by the end of the month the illusion of harmony remained, albeit one held in place by nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
© Keystone Pictures USA/Alamy
Heartbroken over Yoko’s miscarriage in October, a month later the Lennons headed for the Greek island of Spetses to help her recuperate and to escape the turmoil of their lives in London.
NOVEMBER 1969
It began as a single voice, just one man singing while gently strumming his acoustic guitar. Before long, however, it had grown into an incredible choir of some half a million people, all of them united under one protest banner and each of them chanting the simple nine-word refrain that crystallised all their thoughts. Young and old, black and white, it was an extraordinary display of solidarity.
Pete Seeger’s impromptu rendition of ‘Give Peace A Chance’ at the Vietnam Moratorium Day march in Washington on 15 November inadvertently brought Lennon’s anti-war campaign right into the heart of the American capital and straight to Richard Nixon’s front door. ‘Are you listening, Nixon?’ taunted Seeger, the acclaimed American folk singer, who was sharing a platform with fellow activists Arlo Guthrie, the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, and four different touring casts of the musical, Hair. In front of them, a sea of faces stretched as far as the eye could see along both sides of the Mall across from the White House, the largest anti-war demonstration in American history.
It was held forty-eight hours after 40,000 protesters had walked silently down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House in the so-called March of Death bearing placards carrying either the name of a dead US soldier or the name of a Vietnamese village bombed out of existence.
The song had reached a creditable Number Fourteen in the American single charts after it was released on 7 July but it was already fading into memory, despite the napalm-laden payloads carried by F-4 jets and the increasing numbers of American servicemen being brought home in body bags. This, though, was the day that the anti-war campaign finally found the anthem it was seeking, a song that would replace ‘We Shall Overcome’ and bring the peace movement into proper alignment with the counterculture. Seeger later admitted, astonishingly, that he had never heard Lennon’s original recording, a strange admission for someone so closely linked to anti-war activism. But, as he stood on that stage, he suddenly felt himself being directed by some inner force to perform it before the biggest live congregation he had ever faced, not to mention a TV audience of millions.
‘I’d only heard the song myself a few days before,’ Seeger recalled, ‘and I confess when I first heard it I didn’t think much of it. I thought, “That’s kind of a nothing of a song, it doesn’t go any place.” I heard a young woman sing it at a peace rally. I never heard Lennon’s record. I didn’t know if the people there had ever heard it before. But I decided to try singing it over and over again, until they did know it. Well, we started singing, and after a minute or so I realised it was still growing. Peter, Paul and Mary jumped up onstage and started joining in. I realised it was getting better and better. The people started swaying their bodies and banners and flags in time, several hundred thousand people, parents with their small children on their shoulders. It was a tremendously moving thing.’
In the eyes of most Americans, Lennon and Yoko Ono were dismissed as what would today be termed snowflakes, their activism naïve
and self-serving. But in 1969, in that one instant, their credibility suddenly benefited from the power of Seeger’s spontaneous and passionate performance that caught the mood of millions. From then on, ‘Give Peace A Chance’ would serve as the centrepiece for sing-ins at shopping centres planned throughout America and join the list of carols to be sung in nationwide Christmas Eve demonstrations. It became the song of the people.
Behind the twitching curtains of the Oval Office, Nixon remained implacably defiant. He delivered his own two-fingered salute to the protesters by watching a game of American football on TV in an attempt to turn a deaf ear to the chorus of disapproval on his own front lawn. The probability is he never heard the people singing ‘Give Peace A Chance’. But when he was later briefed by White House aides on the events at the Mall, he put a call into J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI and asked him to update the file that was already opened on John Winston (Ono) Lennon. The fact that Lennon was then five thousand miles away and had no direct involvement in the protests didn’t matter a damn.
Blissfully unaware of the events in Washington, Lennon and Yoko had just started a ten-day holiday in Greece to help her recover from the trauma of her latest miscarriage. But Lennon was an inveterate news addict and wasn’t slow in getting up to speed over an occurrence that easily crossed international datelines. He watched transfixed as images of the march in Washington flashed up on the TV screen in his Athens hotel. Surprise quickly morphed into pride for a man who, by his own admission, was rarely impressed by anything. The next day he told a local newspaper reporter: ‘It was one of the biggest moments of my life.’
He later expanded on his feelings to Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner. ‘I wanted to write something that would take over “We Shall Overcome”. I thought, “Why doesn’t somebody write one for the people now? That’s what my job is, our job.”’
