Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  Among many other unfinished projects, “Magic Alex” Mardas had been sent off to build a seventy-two-track console, which was either unusable or unworkable (EMI blocked Mardas at every turn). EMI itself was just making the leap from eight-track to sixteen-track; seventy-two sounded fantastical. So George Martin installed a portable eight-track machine in Apple’s basement for on-the-fly recording so that filming could continue. A couple of days later, the Disc and Music Echo ran Lennon’s quote from a Ray Coleman interview that steered Apple’s ship straight into its iceberg: “Apple is losing money every week. . . . If it carries on like this, all of us will be broke in the next six months.”5 Naturally, Apple’s bankers and tax lawyers frowned on this kind of talk, even if Lennon had a reputation for overstatement. Shareholders were unaccustomed to rock-star loose cannons of Lennon’s stripe, and McCartney could not enforce discretion. Lennon openly repeated his financial dread every time a reporter brought it up. This rant caught the eye of a notorious industry fixer named Allen Klein in New York. Imagine the other Beatles’ frustration: defiantly mute in rehearsals, Lennon could not resist yapping to the press daily, as if determined to sabotage their joint venture.

  Luckily, changing the rehearsal space, and the appearance of an old Hamburg friend, reversed the band’s lethargy. One of the beguiling twists to the late Beatle story arc is how George Harrison’s songwriting star rises just as Lennon and McCartney’s collaboration declines. Harrison had been friendly with Billy Preston ever since they met in October 1962, when they shared a bill as openers for Little Richard’s act at the New Tower Ballroom in New Brighton, Wallasey. Preston played keyboards for Little Richard’s band, and the show came around to Liverpool’s Empire Theatre later that same month. Both bands also appeared together in Hamburg during the Beatles’ fifth and last visit to the Star-Club, at the end of 1962. Preston had bounced around during the sixties, playing for Sam Cooke (notably on 1963’s urbane yet soulful Night Beat) and the house band on ABC-TV’s Shindig! His latest gig had him touring with Ray Charles, passing through the Royal Albert Hall early in 1969. Harrison caught the show after a Let It Be session, greeted Preston backstage and invited him to sit in with the Beatles.6

  Harrison’s visit to Dylan’s Woodstock sessions and his invitation to Eric Clapton to solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” convinced him that an outsider could revive stalled sessions. Dylan and the Band treated Harrison as an equal, while in his own band, Lennon and McCartney persistently patronized his material, even as it began to peak. (Lennon, in fact, sat out most of Harrison’s Beatle recordings from here on out.) Taking in an ally could only ease Harrison’s reentry into the contentious Beatle orbit. Along with lobbying for Ringo Starr to replace Pete Best, bringing Preston into the Get Back project stands as a defining move for Harrison: he single-handedly rescued Let It Be, and pushed his material throughout 1969, until Abbey Road featured his best work yet.

  When they greeted Preston at Apple on the afternoon of January 22, the group’s emotional tone changed drastically: Preston’s keyboard figures gave the Beatles new lines to listen and react to; he also freed them up to focus on arrangements. With an old friend in their midst, tensions eased, and work progressed more smoothly. Harrison’s resignation had slammed the door on desultory group workouts; now, with less than ten days on the clock, work lurched forward.7

  On January 25 these five did takes of “Let it Be,” Harrison’s “For You Blue” and “Isn’t It a Pity?” and their discussions about how to bring it all to a close led to a rough notion of a concert on the roof. With spirits flagging, and sessions dominated by endless oldies jams (some of them sprightly, and underrated), they sought the simplest solution. On the 27th, they rehearsed “Oh! Darling,” then let it drop as they assembled a track list for the live show: the following day, parts for “Get Back” and “Don’t Let Me Down” took more shape, with Lennon taking lead guitar on the former and McCartney figuring out a contrapuntal bass line on the latter. On the 29th, instead of running through the set list, they lapsed into oldies again: “Besame Mucho,” the first number they had played for George Martin back in 1962; an early stab at Lennon’s “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”; then Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” and a slow burn on “Mailman Bring Me No More Blues,” the Holly favorite released on Anthology 3, with a bleak Lennon vocal that made for an oddball cousin to “Please Mr. Postman.”

  On the afternoon of January 30, the four Beatles climbed up to the roof of 3 Savile Row to see how Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall had set up their equipment. Director Lindsay-Hogg stationed four cameras on the roof, another at Apple’s reception desk, and one more roaming around the street to catch listener reactions. In the basement, engineer Glyn Johns manned a mixing board from audio feeds winding down four flights of stairs. The unlikely setting sparked a burst of inspiration: ambivalent and wary, the Beatles were about to cancel when Lennon simply pitched forward, saying, “Fuck it, let’s play.” The situation proved too tempting: to act out a cinematic pun on that old Drifters’ song by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, “Up on the Roof.” This set, their last live performance together, has the piquant double quality of a band rediscovering itself while bidding a fond farewell.

  The whole charade has a larkish tone, scaled down from the New Year’s hopes of a Royal Albert Hall or Roundabout finale, and nobody seemed to anticipate the cold: January breezes, somehow symbolic, whipped off the surrounding buildings with only the music to warm the band’s fingers. McCartney wore a formal black jacket and white shirt; Lennon put on Yoko’s fur coat; Ringo had a cheesy red plastic mac; and Harrison stood off to stage right with green sneakers beneath his furry overcoat. To the left and behind McCartney, Billy Preston, in a leather jacket, crouched over a Fender Rhodes electric piano.

  As they started their first take of “Get Back,” the conservative tailoring district of Central London peered upward at the noise wafting from above. Slowly, and then very quickly, the band began to surf wave after redemptive wave of ensemble fellowship, as if warming up against the cold air strengthened their resolve against an entire month’s tiresome indecision. Ringo’s inimitable shuffle, tidy yet propulsive, made “Get Back” both roomy and concise, tickling the band’s ensemble in ways that brought mystery and surprise to every cadence. Lennon plays a tart lead lick behind McCartney’s vocals, and turns in lower vocal harmonies by the second refrain. (Between takes, Lennon hits the mike with deejay patter: “We’ve had a request from Martin and Luther . . .”) They struggle at first, the balance is off, but by the second take they’re hitting kicks with verve, the song puts on some flesh, and McCartney spurs the momentum with some jubilant screams on top, gunning for home. When Ringo interrupts the second fake ending for a coda, he trips things up with a stumbling yet perfectly controlled tom-tom roll, spilling the song into a victory lap for McCartney to scat over.

  If they had any doubts about how their unproduced sound might fare against Dylan and the Band, this rooftop set quickly gave back far more than what Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras had caught so far. “I’ve Got a Feeling” opens humbly: a ringing guitar lick that hits a deceptively simple stride with a Lennon-McCartney duet during the verse; it drops into a gentle rolling groove. The climax comes as McCartney starts wailing, as if he can shout down the song’s paradoxes: “All I’ve been looking for is somebody who looked like you!” And then a wiry guitar line uncoils with a nudge from Ringo, and the groove settles back into the familiar opening cadence. The song glides on a riddle, another side-by-side Lennon-McCartney patchwork that inverts the typical “We Can Work It Out” and “A Day in the Life” format: McCartney burrows down into raw feeling in the verse and tail, and then Lennon pans back for an innocent bystander counter-section (“Everybody had a hard year . . .”). These distinctive fragments circle each other like cats, counterparts snugly joined. The understated irony nearly overwhelms the performance: it’s a tapestry of Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting themes and formulas describing their dissolution. After a final verse wh
ere Lennon’s out-of-body slant descants McCartney’s uplift, the band coils the song back up into one last dangling question mark.

  There’s a scene in the film during a break when McCartney talks to Lindsay-Hogg about writing “One After 909,” which he and Lennon never finished—the words were too corny, he remembers. But they light into the song on the roof like a forgotten truce, a long-withheld hope fulfilled, and it catches gusts of feeling from their earliest heights. The band has a full gait now, they can do anything, so they hold back and dig into this slight adolescent novelty, a teenage breakthrough, to project something more layered than simple nostalgia. Now the song converts simplicity into valediction, a token of triumphs whooshing past, and in their adulthood, it sounds like the best ambitions have all come true: between themselves, their audience, and their songwriting muse. Lennon and McCartney plant their vocal harmonies like banners rippling in the breeze: if you didn’t know any better, they might be brothers, spiritual twins pitching headfirst into gale winds. “Move over once [pause], move over twice [pause] . . . Come on baby don’t be cold as ice!” The music unfurls around their voices like too-familiar jokes reaping peals of laughter. This “One After 909” take transfers virtually uncorrected from rooftop to disc, and toots along atop Ringo’s lively yet laid-back verve. (On its tail, Lennon starts singing “Danny Boy,” as if it belongs to the same canon.)

  McCartney harmonizes on top of Lennon on “I Dig a Pony” for yet another vocal color that masks his supple control. Ringo misses the first count-off for a false start, but then the groove hits a steady gait, lean yet muscular, and the track resembles “Hey Bulldog” or “I Feel Fine,” another sturdy guitar workout based on the same arpeggios that drove “Day Tripper” and “Birthday.” Lennon garners this familiar setup with sly sincerity: the closing cadence (“All I want is you/Everything has got to be just like you want it to”) so closely resembles a devotional outcry that it buoys the surrounding verbal flotsam.

  After a second take of “I’ve Got a Feeling,” featuring even more harmonies from Lennon, and more risky Harrison guitar work atop his verse, some defining questions hover over the music: How could such wan rehearsals yield such onstage magic? How did this much confident simplicity spring from three weeks of desultory deadlock? Following Lennon’s “Don’t Let Me Down,” the expectations game suddenly veers into relaxed, bluesy ambition: the band renews itself with every phrase; they lean into breaks without knowing where they’ll land, and they land with such assurance and comfort that every downbeat redoubles release and forward motion. When Lennon flubs his “Don’t Let Me Down” lyric on the second verse, inserting gobbledygook, their laughter warms the sound anew.

  In “Don’t Let Me Down,” irony toyed with intimate conundrum: here was Lennon, the putative tough, who had done his best to piss off both audience and band by posing naked and positioning his new lover in the band’s crosshairs, singing about how brash and desperate love made him feel, earning back no small measure of respect and self-assurance from his band as he does. This number, a paean to Yoko and never-ending romance as pop staple, swells into a farewell pledge to Lennon’s band, with overtones of all they’ve been through, and winds up glimpsing Lennon’s solo insecurities. As he did in “If I Fell,” Lennon pledges devotion to his new partner by reiterating how risky love feels and the high cost of emotional commitments.

  As if concurring in Lennon’s conceit, McCartney shadows with an exquisite upper harmony for the refrains and writes a beguiling lower melodic bass guitar lead beneath the bridge (“I’m in love for the first time”). Descending in steps, this McCartney descant traces the song’s emotional puzzle from below, a new strand of competitive counterpoint. The second take features a fearsome Lennon lead vocal: even though he flubs the lyric, the band shakes loose a steady-rolling vibe from its unprepossessing frame. Like the baroque piano that interrupts “In My Life,” the instrumentation becomes a waking symbol of the song’s lyrical puzzle: true love as quiet panic.

  A lark turns into a modest set for the ages, an argument about how middle-aged paunches can rock just as steadily as anybody, thank you, and Lennon pulls off sincerity, running off with a Japanese-American home-wrecker, even muttonchops, without seeming anything less than a Beatle. During the second and closing “Get Back,” the cops push past Mal Evans behind Ringo and Lennon and Harrison’s guitar amps fail. This causes momentary confusion, and then, as Evans convinces the bobbies this will be the last song, the band gallops the number home, with McCartney ad-libbing over the coda (“You been playing on the roof again . . . and that’s no good!”).

  “I always feel let down about the police,” Ringo said later. “Someone in the neighbourhood called the police, and when they came up I was playing away and I thought, ‘Oh great! I hope they drag me off.’ I wanted the cops to drag me off—‘Get off those drums!’—because we were being filmed and it would have looked really great, kicking the cymbals and everything. Well, they didn’t, of course, they just came bumbling in: ‘You’ve got to turn that sound down.’ It could have been fabulous.”8

  When they finish, Lennon steps forward to say good-bye, apologizing for the abruptness and unfinished edges with feigned modesty: “I’d like to say thanks on behalf of the group. For ourselves, I hope we passed the audition.” On that roof, for about forty minutes, they made the troubled Apple offices beneath their feet seem incidental. It was exhilarating, for both the band and its listeners, but ephemeral.

  On his way into Apple the next day, McCartney posted a card to Ringo that read simply: “You are the greatest drummer in the world. Really.”9 Lindsay-Hogg posed them in front of his cameras for formal sequences of quieter material they couldn’t do on the roof: somber takes of “The Long and Winding Road,” “Let It Be,” and “Two of Us,” with McCartney in a dark suit, lit with a spotlight, singing lead. All these numbers now sounded like weak metaphors for everything these sessions had wrought, a love affair creeping toward some unknowable yet inevitable finale. Lennon played sloppy bass and contributed sympathetic backup vocals to McCartney’s gospel move, and eventual title song, “Let It Be.” The material had its strengths, but this last session felt like a wake, as if returning to their offices had given them all an emotional hangover.

  When this session was finished, nobody could bear to listen to the tapes, let alone prepare them for mixing and release. The combination of material and overhang from the previous day’s surge gave this footage a mournful feel. They wrapped the shoot, called it something besides success, and put it on the shelf until they could figure out what to do with it. Let It Be’s dour mood—and ironic-uplift finale—makes a lot more sense in retrospect. “Behind the scenes, everything was falling apart”: if only the Beatles had copyrighted that phrase for the future VH1 series Behind the Music. As with so many other rock clichés, this one started with the Beatles reluctantly circling one another, avoiding the inevitable clash.

  Three days before the rooftop concert, Allen Klein had flown in from New York to meet with John and Yoko at the Dorchester Hotel to make his pitch, and he had done his homework. The fact that other sharks hadn’t connived their way to such a meeting sooner measures the bluster of Lennon’s stormy evasions. Lennon had met Klein backstage at the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus shoot the previous December, but only informally. Something savvy and manipulative in Klein told him that if he could get Lennon to identify with him, he could win him over. With fourteen years in the business, Klein dropped names like Sam Cooke, Chubby Checker, and Mick Jagger, presenting himself as a tough New Jersey street kid, as if he knew Lennon would be comparing him to Epstein the retailer.

  Klein’s Hungarian father had been a butcher, and he made sure to mention how his parents had split in his childhood, and his auntie raised him, just like John. Lennon admired Klein’s candor, the curses that spiced his vernacular, and his compact, pit-bull demeanor; to Lennon’s mind, perhaps, Klein resembled a New Jersey Scouser. Where suits like Dick James patronized the Beatles (“Do
you have anything else that goes ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah’?”),10 Klein made sure to recite Lennon lyrics to him from memory. Klein knew rock ’n’ roll history, and had already invested emotionally in Lennon’s work in a way James never had.

  Klein’s specialty, learned as a label accountant in the late fifties, leveraged a keen understanding of how record companies systematically cook their books. He proved himself in the early 1960s by approaching Bobby Darin with a plan to win him back royalties. Once his negotiations allowed him access, he audited Darin’s account and sent him a check for $100,000. Klein used this gambit repeatedly. Sam Cooke hired Klein as his business manager in 1963 to negotiate a favorable deal as he launched his own record label, SAR Records. Klein won Cooke an unprecedented package deal from RCA, which included gate receipts, back royalties, and a hefty percentage of records sold in an era when even managers typically left such particulars unattended.

  Because British law lagged on copyright issues compared with America, Andrew Loog Oldham sought out Klein in 1965 to consult on better contracts for the Rolling Stones. Oldham had been winging it, and Klein took their business game up a notch; Lennon would have heard about this on the grapevine and in club chatter with Jagger. In 1967, Klein bought out Cameo Records, which included lucrative catalogs by the Animals, Herman’s Hermits, Bobby Rydell, ? and the Mysterians (“96 Tears”), and the Twist’s Chubby Checker. This track record convinced Lennon that Klein could turn Apple around.

  In meeting with Klein, Lennon answered an emerging McCartney threat. McCartney had recently taken up with photographer Linda Eastman and met with her father’s legal firm in New York. In addition to falling in love, he began to see solutions to many of Apple’s business tangles through the extensive experience of Eastman and Sons, who had pioneered intellectual copyright and entertainment law. Clearly, McCartney angled to hook up the Beatles’ business interests with his new relations. Lennon’s head was clouded both by grief and smack, but he knew how McCartney’s melodic lilt could conceal bald aggression, and historians tend to let his foresight on this matter go uncredited. With many variables yet to crumble, Lennon acted impulsively to counter McCartney’s tack, in what he perceived as his own self-interest.