Man on the Run

by Tom Doyle

  The critical episode in what Lennon called the ‘slow death’ of The Beatles had come at a meeting at Apple on 20 September 1969. Three of the band members, minus George Harrison (whose mother had just been diagnosed with cancer), had convened at the office to ink their names on a new deal with Capitol Records, their label in the US and most other international territories. The deal had been hammered out by Allen Klein, a hate figure to Paul, who represented the others, while McCartney had divisively chosen to be looked after by his new in-laws, father-and-son lawyer team Lee and John Eastman. A touch gallingly for Paul, the contract Klein had brokered carved out an impressive 25 per cent royalty cut for The Beatles, the highest of any recording artists in the world.

  On the day, in the preamble to signing the deal, a self-consciously babbling Paul had attempted to rah-rah-rah his downbeat colleagues into trying to recapture their fire. He suggested they could perhaps do this by way of a tour of small clubs where the band – who had last performed for a paying audience more than three years before – could turn up unannounced or billed under a pseudonym (he proposed Rikki and The Redstreaks). He argued that this might prop up their sagging confidence in their live abilities and help them get back in touch with who they were.

  ‘I think you’re daft,’ a scowling Lennon abruptly informed McCartney, before announcing, ‘I’m leaving the group. I want a divorce.’

  Following this jaw-dropping declaration, the three signed the contract (which would in any case ensure that they earned far more from their future record sales, whether or not they stuck together) ‘in a bit of a daze’, according to Paul. All involved would look back on this as being the moment when the illness that had been affecting The Beatles finally became terminal.

  As he would later attest when the press and fans cast him as the pantomime baddie in the drama of the Beatles’ separation, Paul was actually the only member who up until that point hadn’t previously walked out on the band. Ringo, feeling like an outsider and, worse, a musician of dwindling talent, had announced during the sessions for The White Album in summer 1968, that he was quitting. On his return from a cooling-off-period holiday in Sardinia, he walked into Abbey Road to find the studio festooned with flowers to celebrate his return.

  George, meanwhile, had stormed out of the rehearsals for Let It Be in the cold environs of Twickenham Film Studios during the Beatles’ winter of discontent in January 1969. Harrison, who would later gripe that McCartney had treated him with a ‘superior attitude’ for some years, had bitterly argued with Paul over the guitar part for ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, as seen in the final cut of the painfully candid documentary. On the day he walked, however, he had been battling with Lennon over a matter long since forgotten, though serious enough to enrage both sufficiently that they ended up trading blows.

  After Harrison’s departure, The Beatles spent the rest of the day rehearsing without him. That afternoon, with a significance that can’t have escaped anyone, Yoko Ono took over George’s position and began wailing into his microphone. The others reacted – Lennon with enthusiasm, McCartney and Starr in frustration – by erupting into an accompanying barrage of feedback and thunderous drumming.

  George, of course, returned to the band a week later, though the schism between him and Paul was now even wider, if papered over for the purposes of band morale.

  In the aftermath of the ultimate Beatles split, of course, the wives would take the blame. But it was Allen Klein, rather than Yoko Ono or Linda McCartney, who broke up The Beatles.

  Klein walked into the Beatles’ world like something from a bad cartoon, a squat, cigar-sucking caricature of a Jewish showbiz manager. The New Yorker divided and conquered John, Paul, George and Ringo when they were lost and insecure and lacking in impetus and direction. He was also a master of casual intimidation; in one meeting in the Apple boardroom, he smirked at Lennon while nonchalantly brandishing a hammer.

  He had served his apprenticeship as an accountant at an entertainments firm before moving into management, initially handling 1950s crooner Bobby Darin. But Klein’s special skills soon became apparent: meticulously auditing accounts and sniffing out discrepancies, and, later, prising enormous advances from record companies. He had pulled off something of a coup by securing $1 million for American soul singer Sam Cooke. More significantly, however, in 1965, The Rolling Stones had appointed Klein as their business manager and he’d renegotiated their contract with Decca, resulting in a record-breaking $1.25 million advance that wouldn’t have escaped the attention of The Beatles.

  It was Lennon who first became captivated by Klein, before convincing Starr and Harrison that this mouthy character could plug the holes in their business affairs. McCartney was not so sure. He’d already put forward Lee Eastman as a possible candidate for, if not exactly Beatles manager, then at least some form of financial controller for Apple. ‘But they said, “Nah, nah, he’d be just too biased for you and against us,”’ Paul says. ‘Which I could see.’

  Significantly, Eastman had informed McCartney about the shady flipside of Klein’s reputation in America. At the point when Klein first approached The Beatles, he had just been investigated for both insider trading (he was in fact cleared, though he immediately changed his company name from Cameo-Parkway to ABKCO) and tax evasion.

  Then Paul received a letter from Mick Jagger, pointedly warning him, through his own bitter experience – the New Yorker having managed to con the Stones into signing over their hits up to that point to his company – about getting involved with Klein. Paul, feeling that at last he had someone to add weight to his serious misgivings about the manager, invited Jagger to Apple to meet the others and explain his feelings about Klein. McCartney remembers the Stones’ singer backing down when faced with all four Beatles: ‘He said, “Well, he’s alright if you like that kind of thing.” He didn’t say, “He’s a robber.”’

  The bad feelings festering among The Beatles came to a head one night when George, John and Ringo turned up at Olympic Studios during the Abbey Road sessions with Klein in tow. The three informed Paul that he would have to sign the ABKCO management agreement right there and then, as Klein had to report to his board. McCartney refused to put pen to paper, pointing out that it was Friday night anyway and, since Klein was ‘a law unto himself’, the board theory didn’t wash. The others then told McCartney that Klein was asking for twenty per cent of their future earnings. Paul, enraged, insisted that Klein would take fifteen, since The Beatles were, with no little understatement, ‘a big act’. The three accused him of stalling and walked out of the studio.

  On 8 May 1969, John, Ringo and George signed the ABKCO agreement. Only three days before, The Beatles had begun recording Paul’s melancholic and resigned ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’, a barely disguised attack on Klein. McCartney remembers that Lennon, perhaps typically, appreciated the twisted humour of the lyrical gesture.

  But now, no one could even laugh about where The Beatles had ended up. ‘It was,’ Paul says, ‘just fucking awful.’

  McCartney greeted the dawning of the 1970s back in London in his St John’s Wood townhouse at 7 Cavendish Avenue, within walking distance of Abbey Road. Here, Linda and Heather, still relative newcomers to England, attempted to fit back into London life.

  For Linda it was a frequently claustrophobic experience, thanks to the often bitter and vicious attentions of the feral girl fans who stalked her every time she stepped outside the house, tried to trip her up, or, if she was in a car without Paul, hammered on its roof and lobbed abuse at her. They scrawled messages on the walls outside: ‘Fuck Linda’. They broke into the house and stole her photographs. They posted her cruel letters and parcels containing human turds.

  For Heather, naturally reticent and in possession of an incongruous American accent, life at Robinsfield, the local private primary school in which the McCartneys had enrolled her, was equally as tough. She found it hard to make friends and often appeared sad and isolated, a situation only made worse by her elongated b
reaks from school as she travelled with her mum and soon-to-be adoptive dad, in an arrangement that was only to become looser as the decade progressed.

  At the time, the McCartneys professed a wholly laidback attitude towards their child’s education. ‘I leave Heather to herself pretty much,’ said Linda. ‘I’m not interested in breathing over her shoulder.’

  ‘I’m not fussy about education,’ said Paul. ‘Linda’s not very well educated. I know a lot of people who aren’t and they’re still really great people. So I don’t place very heavy emphasis on it.’

  For Paul, returning to the capital from Scotland made him quickly realise that the destructive animosity that had set in to The Beatles was, if anything, beginning to intensify.

  Business woes aside, there was still the matter of the unreleased tapes of the troubled Twickenham sessions (which had been transplanted to Apple Studios in Savile Row upon Harrison’s return to the group). Throughout 1969 and into early 1970, two intensive attempts were made by producer Glyn Johns to boil down the hours of unvarnished, often sloppy takes – inspired by the bare-bones live jams of The Band – into an album that deserved to be released under the Beatles’ name.

  Test acetates had been found lacking in one way or another, although a mocked-up sleeve had been designed for the planned album, to be named Get Back. It featured The Beatles assuming the same positions and poses they’d adopted on the balcony of EMI’s Manchester Square offices for their Please Please Me debut album six years earlier, the four now decidedly hirsute, with Lennon the most dramatically changed of all.

  Back in Beatles headspace, Paul sat in a room at Cavendish Avenue and, with fresh ears, reviewed the results of the second version of the Get Back LP. To his mind, the music was stark, unadorned, frighteningly bare, but ultimately thrilling.

  Klein, meanwhile, bluntly deemed it ‘a crock of shit’ and conspired with Lennon to bring in Phil Spector, who had just overseen the rousing production of ‘Instant Karma!’, to rework the tapes. Unknown to McCartney, Spector booked studio time in March and began slathering strings and brass, fairytale harp and aaahing choir onto ‘The Long And Winding Road’, making it sound hopelessly corny, like a BBC orchestra backing Engelbert Humperdinck.

  At this stage, however, Paul remained unaware of this development, his thoughts somewhere else entirely. Secluded in his music room at Cavendish Avenue, McCartney began recording his first solo album, without the knowledge of the others. He wheeled a cooker-sized four-track machine from Abbey Road into his home and, free of the emotional and artistic complications of the Beatles’ most recent sessions, began to play, in the childlike sense of the word.

  ‘It was very liberating,’ he says. ‘But very necessary at that time, ’cause otherwise, I wouldn’t have anywhere to go to get away from the turmoil.’ In these solo sessions, it became clear to Paul that treating his music as therapy was yielding positive results: ‘It’s a bit like after an operation, where you want to rest but you’ve got to push it.’

  He was able to record entirely alone, and even without a recording engineer, thanks to a device built by an Abbey Road technician which allowed him to plug directly into the back of the tape machine. He muffled boomy tom-toms with towels or simply moved the cymbals further away from the microphone if they sounded too loud and splashy on the recording. ‘It was brilliant, actually,’ he says of this unfussy approach. ‘You’re talking pure sound.’

  When it became clear to him that he would have to step outside his house to finish the recordings, Linda booked time for him at Morgan Studios in Willesden, north-west London, under the name Billy Martin, making explicit the necessity for secrecy.

  Inside Morgan, the troubles of the outside world seemed to evaporate, as noted by the facility’s house engineer, Robin Black. ‘You would never have guessed that he had any problems at all, quite frankly,’ he says. It was ‘like a holiday’, according to Paul. He and Linda would even turn up with a packed lunch: ‘We’d take some sandwiches and a bottle of grape juice and put the baby on the floor.’

  The sense of fun and games spilled over from Cavendish Avenue and into the Morgan sessions. One day, inspired by a TV documentary he’d watched the previous evening about the Kreen-Akrore tribe of the Brazilian Amazon region, Paul fashioned a slightly daft ethno-rock instrumental of the same name. Feeling that something was lacking from the track, he disappeared for an hour and returned from Harrods with a longbow and arrow set, which he fired at a target to add percussive effects to the recording. ‘I had microphones the whole way across the studio,’ says Black, ‘to try and capture the sound of the release of an arrow and the swish and the thud as it hit the target.’

  Home-made and hand-made, the resulting album, McCartney, was less the grand launch of his solo career, more an insight into Paul’s creative practices, being a precursor to the lo-fi recordings that would be in vogue decades later. But without the critical input of the other Beatles or George Martin, McCartney’s creativity ran rampant, and to many the record seemed too random and sketchy, especially coming off the back of the polished Abbey Road. In many ways, the freedom and playfulness resulted in Paul’s quality control slipping. For every track with the sophistication of the dreamlike and nostalgic ‘Junk’ or the gold-standard McCartney ballad ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, there was the cloyingly simple snippet ‘The Lovely Linda’ or the throwaway one-man jam of ‘Oo You’.

  But before the listening public even had the opportunity to make up their minds about Paul’s first solo effort, it was to provoke an almighty ruckus.

  Ringo Starr stood on the doorstep of McCartney’s house at Cavendish Avenue, unaware that he was about to precipitate the end of The Beatles. His tricky diplomatic mission, which he had chosen to accept in his role as the chirpy drummer, was to convince his increasingly estranged bandmate that there was an unacceptable clash of release dates between the long-delayed Get Back – now renamed Let It Be – and Paul’s freshly minted eponymous solo album, which was due to be issued only a week before.

  With him, he had a letter, dated 31 March 1970, handwritten by John Lennon and co-signed by George Harrison. It read: ‘Dear Paul, We thought a lot about The Beatles and yours [sic] LPs – and decided it’s stupid for Apple to put out two big albums within 7 days of each other. So we sent a letter to EMI telling them to hold your release date ’til June 4th (there’s a big Apple-Capitol convention in Hawaii then). We thought you’d come round when you realised that The Beatles album was coming out on April 24th. We’re sorry it turned out like this – it’s nothing personal. Love, John and George.’

  Paul – his patience already strained, his temper on a hair-trigger – invited his friend inside and very quickly absorbed this information. Then he erupted.

  ‘I told him to eff off,’ Paul says. ‘Everyone, to my mind, was completely treating me like dirt. It was kind of like, “We’re the big guys, we’re the grown-ups.” And I said, “No way, man. Get out.”’

  Ringo swiftly departed with the sound of Paul’s fury ringing in his ears. McCartney refused to budge and his solo album was released on 17 April 1970, forcing Let It Be back another two weeks to 8 May.

  It was the moment when Paul McCartney finally gave up on The Beatles, the point where he mentally quit the group. Interview-phobic as he was at the time, when it came to promoting McCartney, Paul sidestepped face-to-face encounters by inserting a press release-cum-self-interview with the review copies of the album.

  In the mock questionnaire, however, he sounded sulky, revealing more of his unhappy state of mind than perhaps even the most probing interviewer might have been able to. Was it true that Allen Klein and ABKCO weren’t to be involved in the manufacturing or distribution of the new album? Not if Paul could help it. Was he planning any new records with The Beatles? No. Due to ‘personal differences, business differences, musical differences’. Did he see himself writing songs together with John in the future? No. What were his plans now? ‘My only plan is to grow up,’ he wrote.

  Not t
hat anyone could tell from the tone of the pseudo-interview, which was stroppy and childish. Later, McCartney said it made him shudder to look back at it.

  The news exploded across the front pages of the world’s newspapers. The Daily Mirror in Britain, on the morning of 10 April 1970, was the first to break the news of the band’s split, with the unfussy words: ‘Paul Quits The Beatles’. In the days that followed, a wave of outrage began to build, with fans and reporters alike stunned that McCartney would dare to walk out on their beloved Fabs. Lost in the roar was the fact that at no point in the ‘interview’ had McCartney actually stated that he was walking out on the band.

  Overwhelmed by the reaction, Paul thought, ‘Christ, what have I done?’, as he vainly attempted to back-pedal. Forced to break his year-long British press silence, he asked Derek Taylor to arrange an interview with a trusted journalist, Ray Connolly of London’s Evening Standard. The pair met for lunch, along with Linda, at a packed seafood restaurant in Soho. It was apparent that Paul was desperate to set the record straight.

  ‘It was all a misunderstanding,’ he protested. ‘I never intended the statement to mean “Paul McCartney quits Beatles”. I didn’t leave The Beatles. The Beatles have left The Beatles, but no one wants to be the one to say the party’s over.’ He went on to spend much of the remainder of the interview venting and moaning: about Klein, about the previous flounce-offs by Ringo and George, about how John had demanded a divorce from The Beatles, about how this ‘trial separation’ wasn’t working.

  If Paul was trying to redirect the finger of blame towards John, then it suited Lennon fine, since he was fuming that Paul had broken the news. John had in fact told Ray Connolly the previous December that he had left the band, but asked the writer not to print the story, since Klein didn’t want the news to leak until after the release of Let It Be.