And in the End

by Ken McNab

  Indeed, apart from the odd joint, Lennon had straightened himself out for the first time in months, having temporarily purged his system of the heroin that partly contributed to his wild mood swings. Canada was then in the grip of a furious public debate over legalising the non-medical use of cannabis. A commission, spearheaded by a judge called Gerald Le Dain, was already fully engaged with opponents and supporters of the contentious legislation. Lennon, since he was in town, was invited to offer his input.

  On 22 December he and Yoko had a confidential session in Montreal with members of the commission arguing the case for Canada to prove its progressive credentials by leading the way in decriminalising pot. Secrecy was essential because even members of the commission feared Lennon being busted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, possibly acting on orders from the FBI to get their man and hang him high. Watching from a distance, spooks from the RCMP security service already had Lennon under surveillance following his announcement of a peace festival near Toronto, a fact that was kept secret from the government.

  He was braced for a grilling from the country’s anti-drug establishment. Instead, he found himself face-to-face with legislators genuinely anxious to hear both sides of the story. Straight off the bat, Lennon said, ‘I must say, this commission that you’ve set up . . . I don’t know what’s going on in the rest of the world, you know, in reality, towards drugs, but this seems to be the only one that is trying to find out what it’s about with any kind of sanity.’

  The nuts and bolts of the testimony remained buried in government archives for years until patient excavation work undertaken by John Whelan of the Ottawa Beatles website allowed observers to reach their own verdict. In it, Lennon declared he was in favour of governments monitoring a kind of marijuana open market to control the prices and denounced all-too-familiar claims that smoking pot would automatically take kids down the road to narcotic perdition. ‘If the governments were as clever about preventing people getting arms for revolution as they are about keeping speed and H [heroin] off the market, and cocaine, then there would be no problem. Because if you can’t get it, the drugs go in and out of popularity, and the popularity of the drug goes with how much you can get. There’s a cocaine phase if cocaine’s loose. If there’s a big lot on the market, it lasts for a year or two then they clamp down on cocaine, but something is replaced, you get something else instead, so there’s always some hard drug available. You can always get it, but it goes in fashion, people change from one drug to another as they get it . . . but when you say marijuana leads to H, it’s like saying beer leads to alcoholism.’

  Almost overnight on this trip, Lennon had acquired an unlikely statesman-like aura, shedding the widespread bafflement caused by the bed-ins to become a serious speaker on serious topics. It seemed that Lennon was a rock star who wanted to be a politician.

  Conversely, Pierre Trudeau was a politician who wanted to be a rock star. When the two men met two days before Christmas, ostensibly to discuss the peace campaign, it was a gift to both of them, a mutually beneficial photo opportunity. The influential leader of the counterculture and the uber-cool head of state. Trudeau was twenty-one years older than Lennon but spoke the lingo of the Sixties like a baby boomer. The meeting was scheduled to last only a few minutes but went on for just under an hour, a sign of the friendship that had been quickly struck.

  Broadly speaking, they agreed to keep the finer points of their discussion between themselves before emerging to a battery of flashbulbs and shouted questions from reporters. Lennon told the assembled hacks, with only a dash of hyperbole: ‘We spent about fifty minutes together, which was longer than he had spent with any head of state. If all politicians were like Mr Trudeau there would be world peace.’

  He rowed back on the big talk and cut to the chase when he later enlarged on the meeting during his 1970 interview with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner. ‘He was interested in us because he thought we might represent some sort of youth faction. I think he was very nervous, he was more nervous than we were. We just wanted to see what they did, how they worked.’

  Among the press pack was the Evening Standard’s Ray Connolly, one of Lennon’s most trusted media intimates, who had arrived in Toronto a few days earlier to cover the story of the Beatle and the prime minister. Arriving at Hawkins’ farm, he was greeted by a Lennon high on adrenaline, his hair dripping wet from having just stepped out of a shower. He was visibly desperate to get something off his chest. Connolly had seen this impulsive look in Lennon’s eyes before but even he was unprepared for the bombshell that followed.

  He told me: ‘He insisted I follow him and Yoko up to the secrecy of their bedroom. And then he just said, ‘‘I’ve left The Beatles,” and carried on drying his hair with a towel. I was speechless. At the time, The Beatles absolutely dominated the world of popular culture. Abbey Road was still at Number One in the charts everywhere. Why would anyone in his right mind decide to destroy the most popular entertainment ensemble the world had ever known? It didn’t make sense. But I wasn’t only astonished. I was devastated, too, because I was as big a Beatles fan as anyone.

  ‘There was, of course, something else. As a journalist, I knew that the break-up of The Beatles would be the biggest story I would ever get in my life. John, however, had something more to say. “Don’t tell anybody yet,” he said. “I’ll let you know when you can put it out. Allen Klein doesn’t want me to make it public until after Let It Be comes out next year.”

  ‘He put me in a terrible position,’ Connolly continued. ‘He knew I could be trusted but, when I look back on it now, especially with what happened a few months later, I can’t help wondering if he wasn’t setting me up. I think he expected me to put the story before our friendship, which I would not have done. It was the biggest story of my career – and I never told a living soul. So it was also the biggest mistake of my career.’

  Four months later, Connolly would have good cause to choke on his integrity.

  *

  A few days before Christmas, while Lennon was courting Canadian politicians and burrowing further under the skin of Richard Nixon, Paul McCartney returned from the grave. With Linda, Heather and baby Mary in tow, he slipped quietly back into his London home under the cover of late December darkness. No one at Apple knew of his return. Similarly caught napping were the Apple Scruffs who had long abandoned their posts outside Cavendish Avenue. Around six weeks had elapsed since he had finally decided to turn his back on the only adult existence he had ever really known. There had been intermittent phone conversations with Ringo and George, but only radio silence from Lennon. His erstwhile songwriting partner seemed happy to talk to anyone except the one person who sought his attention most. As far as Lennon was concerned, McCartney right now was a non-person.

  It was a grim time for Paul and for Linda, a woman who suddenly found herself with a new baby and a new husband whose mental health was showing every sign of buckling. Try as he might, he couldn’t shut out all the dissonant voices in his head . . . John . . . George . . . Ringo . . . Allen Klein . . . Lew Grade . . . Peter Brown . . . Derek Taylor . . . Glyn Johns . . . John Eastman. Each one drowning out the other and weighing heavily on his nervous system. Emotionally uptight, McCartney wasn’t the type to pour his worries out to others.

  Barry Miles could have provided a sympathetic ear but knew only too well that Linda had usurped a lot of Paul’s old circle. He told me: ‘When Linda moved in she did the usual thing that all new girlfriends do when confronted by a prince and his courtiers – she replaced them all. I didn’t even meet her until years later. All the old friends, including Peter Asher, Alistair Taylor, John Dunbar etc., were all suddenly on the elbow list.’

  But it was Linda, not for the last time, who provided the balm of recovery. Fed up with Paul’s self-pity, yet standing solidly by her man in the battle of The Beatles, she slowly convinced him to put the cork back in the whisky bottle he was reaching for all too easily these days. Step by step, she applied the bandages t
o his ravaged ego, pointing out – in a mirror image of what Yoko had done with John – the songs he had written, many of them with little or no input from Lennon. He hadn’t suddenly stopped being a musician. And a brilliant one at that. Now, despite being wracked by the insecurity of being unemployed and still bewildered by the turn of events, McCartney faced having to pick up the threads of an old life. And that meant finding recovery in the one thing that had always been his anchor against the storms of life: music.

  Lennon and Harrison had already released a number of deliberately non-commercial records but they still counted as solo material. And Starr was raiding his parents’ songbook in a bid to prove that he, too, could stand tall. It was only natural that McCartney would allow his thoughts to stray into similar territory.

  ‘I knew I had to get my act together,’ he later said. ‘I couldn’t just let John control the situation and dump us as if we were jilted girlfriends.’

  As always, a guitar had stood in the corner of the farmhouse in Scotland. All he had to do was pick it up and let his fingers find the right chords, let his mind settle on a possible melody and let his well-honed instincts do the rest. Within a few days, he had the basic structures worked out for a number of new songs, ‘The Lovely Linda’, ‘That Would Be Something’ and the instrumental ‘Valentine Day’ among them. By the time he arrived back in London, several others were fomenting inside his head. He already had a couple of works in progress, such as ‘Every Night’ and ‘Teddy Boy’, a tune that had failed to make the Beatle grade. He said, ‘We never got round to doing it well so I just thought, “Well, I’ll do it on my own album.”’

  Hot to trot – a phrase he often employed when inspiration struck – he now carried on recording at home using just ‘one mic and nerve’ to lay down more tracks. Playing every instrument himself, the recordings were deliberately low-fi and rudimentary, done without a mixing track or VU meters. More important, though, they were his guilty secret.

  ‘We decided we didn’t want to tell anyone what we were doing,’ he said. ‘That way it gets to be like home at the studio. No one knows about it and there is no one in the studio or dropping by.’ It felt, he later attested, like a continuation of his Scottish layover, where the only distractions came from the happy sound of children or his wife making food. ‘I loved making music and I found that I didn’t want to stop . . . I found that I was enjoying working alone as much as I had enjoyed the early days of The Beatles.’

  Nostalgic for his cloudless past, McCartney, nevertheless, couldn’t fully shut out the darkness that still invaded the present. The power struggle with Klein over Apple and the future of The Beatles still haunted him at night. He remained firmly stuck on the horns of a dilemma. On one hand, his loathing for Klein had only worsened during his time in Scotland; on the other, he was exposed to accusations of sanctimony because he benefited hugely – as they all did – from the benchmark-setting royalties deal the American had struck with EMI and Capitol.

  Midway through December it was quietly announced that ATV had officially acquired a ninety-six per cent shareholding in Northern Songs. It had been a bitter and costly saga, the fallout from which would continue to ripple down through future decades. For Klein, it was the biggest humiliation of his career. In the space of nine months, he had lost Nems and now was powerless to prevent those faceless and avaricious stockholders, chewing on fat Cuban cigars, reaping the megabuck benefits of the Lennon and McCartney songbook. Crucially, though, he retained Lennon’s backing, a strategically important bulwark in the fast-impending last stand with the Eastmans.

  As the year ended, Lennon simply rebuffed any notion that Klein’s feet should be held to the fire over fortunes won and lost. Proof lay in his decision to gift Klein his famous white Rolls-Royce, a sign of his personal gratitude for the royalties increase. In an interview with the NME, taped in early December before he left for Canada, he again praised his manager for ruthlessly freeing Apple of the financial noose that was slowly choking the life out of The Beatles.

  ‘Paul and I have differences of opinion on how things should be run,’ he declared. ‘But instead of it being a private argument about how an LP should be done, or a certain track, it’s now a larger argument about the organisation of Apple itself. Whether we both want the same thing from Apple in the end is a matter of opinion. But how to achieve it – that’s where we digress. Mainly we disagree on the Klein bit. But, you know, I don’t really want to discuss Paul without him here. It’s just that as far as I can see, Paul was always waiting for this guy to just appear and save us from the mess we were in. And we were in a mess, and only my saying it in the press that time enabled Klein to hear about it and come over.

  ‘I’m a quarter of this building, and it became a question of whether I should pull my money out if I could – which I probably can’t. I did say I wanted out at one time. It was just that all my income was going into Apple and being wasted by the joy riding people who were here. I just wanted it to stop. It’s no use pretending we can be here all the time when that kind of thing is going on. We needed a businessman. No Beatle can spend his days here checking the accountants.’

  He also offered an archetypal Lennon olive branch for the future, couched in non-binding double-speak, while sticking largely to the party line. ‘The Beatles split up? It just depends how much we all want to record together. I don’t know if I want to record together again. I go off and on it. I really do. The problem is that in the old days, when we needed an album, Paul and I got together and produced enough songs for it. Nowadays there’s three of us writing prolifically and trying to fit it all onto one album. Or we have to think of a double album every time, which takes six months. That’s the hang-up we have.

  ‘It’s not a personal “The Beatles are fighting” thing, so much as an actual physical problem. What do you do? I don’t want to spend six months making an album I have two tracks on. And neither do Paul or George probably. That’s the problem. If we can overcome that, maybe it’ll sort itself out.’

  Lennon, though, was already embracing life as an ex-Beatle, the appellation that would cling to them all for the rest of their lives. He and Yoko returned to Britain from Canada early on Christmas Eve and swiftly made their way to Rochester Cathedral in Kent. There, they joined Dick Gregory (a member of the backing chorus for ‘Give Peace A Chance’ in Montreal in June) in a giant fast and sit-in to highlight world poverty and protest again at American bombing in Vietnam.

  But the minute that word spread of the Beatle on their doorstep, hundreds of fans descended on the church grounds, leaving the couple with no choice but to abandon their plans and head home to Ascot.

  Jacky Bevan was one of those fans. She recalled: ‘I was overcome and had to leave almost immediately or pass out. They went to the Cathedral and a friend of mine was in there and managed to give them a gift, but they were mobbed and didn’t stay long.’

  Traditionally a time of goodwill to all men, there was scant evidence of that within the Fab Four. The band that had once told us that love is all you need now mainly communicated together through their various proxies.

  One reminder of happier times was the traditional Beatles Christmas record, a flexi-disc freebie mailed out to fan club members as a thank-you for another year of unquestioning devotion. Produced by DJ Kenny Everett, all the segments were taped individually, each of them shorn of the collective and Pythonesque esprit de corps that had defined the previous six discs.

  By 29 December, the Lennons had looked out their passports again, flying to the small city of Aalborg in Denmark. This time another kind of peace mission was on the agenda: Lennon was seeking to build bridges with Tony Cox, Yoko’s second husband, in the hope that he would grant them more access to her daughter Kyoko, then six years old.

  Back home, his three bandmates and their wives mingled awkwardly with the other guests at a traditional Hogmanay party hosted by Ringo and Maureen in their newly bought luxury home in London’s affluent Highgate. Mostly, they stuck t
o pleasantries. Circling each other on neutral ground, no one mentioned the War. Or the K word. The nearest they came was a notional plan for the three of them to meet up in the next few days to record a new version of Harrison’s ‘I Me Mine’ for Let It Be, a thinly veiled allegory on the band’s decline into torpid selfishness throughout the battle-weary months of 1969.

  Six miles away, the chimes of Big Ben rang out across London, a funeral bell tolling the end of the Swinging Sixties and the end of The Beatles. A requiem for a sunburst decade that dismantled the old order and, for a time at least, ushered in an era of optimism for a better world. The Sixties provided a small window when a significant chunk of humanity briefly realised its moral potential and flirted with a collective belief that the love you make really is equal to the love you make. But not even The Beatles could fully live up to the unattainable idealism of McCartney’s cosmic couplet.

  It took Lennon to eventually spell out the harsh reality. Calling 1970 Year One, he issued his own New Year message as the era he had done so much to define retreated into memory. ‘We believe that the last decade was the end of the old machine crumbling to pieces. And we think we can get it together with your help. We have great hopes for the new year.’

  The Beatles were over, but John, Paul, George and Ringo would go on, separate but bound for ever, shining on until tomorrow and making the world continue to smile with the songs they sang. And, as so often happened, the last word lies with John Lennon . . .

  ‘I met Paul, said, “Do you wanna join me band?”, you know, and then George joined and then Ringo joined. We were just a band that made it very, very big, That’s all.’