by Tom Doyle
Now, of course, Lennon was furious that McCartney had beaten him to it. Ray Connolly would later wonder whether Lennon had attempted to set him up with the Beatles Split exclusive, figuring the journalist wouldn’t be able to resist printing it and that John could shruggingly walk away from the band, blaming the writer for letting the cat out of the bag.
McCartney, meanwhile, now viewed Klein with out-and-out contempt. On 14 April 1970 he wrote him a flinty letter, addressing what he saw as the vandalising of ‘The Long And Winding Road’, informing him that ‘in future no one will be allowed to add to or subtract from a recording of one of my songs without my permission’, though only going as far as to insist that the orchestration be toned down. Menacingly, though, he ended it with a threat: ‘Don’t ever do it again.’
But Klein was no pushover. For the US release of McCartney, he further incensed Paul by taking out ads in Rolling Stone provocatively proclaiming that the album was being released by Apple, ‘an ABKCO-managed company’. The battle, it seemed, was on.
In the fall-out, the McCartneys once again ran away to Scotland. But Klein continued to haunt Paul. He would appear in his dreams as a demented dentist, chasing after him with a hypodermic needle, determined to, as he imagined, ‘put me out’. McCartney confessed his fears to those close to him and they laughed. ‘No,’ Paul insisted, ‘it’s really fucking scary.’
For the first time in his life, he noticed grey in his hair. He gritted his teeth and read the music-press reports of how he had apparently stitched up the other Beatles and about how, vain and reclusive, he was ‘sitting up in Scotland, looking into his mirror, admiring his own image’.
It drove him back to the bottle. One evening, in front of his wife, Lee Eastman and another unnamed guest, Paul began swigging whisky and jabbering, mumbling repeated phrases to himself: ‘Fuckers . . . fucked me up . . . fucking carve-up.’
Eventually Linda led him to bed. Again, it was down to her to straighten out her husband’s head. ‘If I’d been doing that on my own,’ Paul says, ‘I’m not sure I’d have got out of it.’
Come summer, Lennon and McCartney entered into an odd correspondence, in an attempt to untangle the legal binding of The Beatles. First, Paul sent a twelve-page document to his bandmate, listing his many dissatisfactions. The gist was: ‘I want to leave.’ John artily responded with a photograph of himself, upon which he’d drawn a speech bubble containing the words ‘How and why?’ Paul wrote back saying he wanted the band’s partnership to be officially dissolved because there was no partnership left. John sent him a curt postcard: ‘Get well soon. Get the other signatures and I will think about it.’
The words ‘I will think about it’ unsettled Paul. For the first time, he considered the sickening notion that he might have to resort to legal action. It was something that had already occurred to Lee Eastman, the 60-year-old legal veteran, music publisher and expert in copyright law. Eastman senior had a reputation as a strong-headed negotiator himself and had already lost his composure in meetings with Klein. In June, he wrote an official letter to his adversary seeking the dissolution of the Beatles’ partnership. Klein didn’t reply. Eastman could read the signs that this had all the makings of a dirty fight.
For their part, the other Beatles had their reasons for being distrustful of McCartney and the Eastmans, particularly given the superior, almost Kennedy-like air of the latter. During the carving-up of the Beatles’ business affairs between the two New Yorker factions, Lee Eastman had furtively advised Paul to buy up extra shares in the band’s publishing company, Northern Songs, in an effort to strengthen his bargaining power. Upon his discovery of this, Lennon flew at Eastman, attempting to thump him.
Amid all of this viciousness and spite, a touch ludicrously, US promoter Sid Bernstein chose this moment to publicly offer The Beatles $1 million to perform at a music festival in Holland in August 1970. If at that time it seemed to McCartney that a reunion had never been less likely, in fact it wasn’t quite as ridiculous a concept as it appeared.
Suddenly concerned that he had inadvertently slit the throat of his golden goose, in October Klein was behind a sneaky attempt to bring the band back together, when he tried to trick McCartney into returning to the fold. He instructed John to call Paul and say, ‘We’re recording next Friday, are you coming?’ Dutifully, John did just that, having been advised by Klein that any signs of détente might limit Paul’s powers in being able to legally extricate himself from the group.
Paul simply didn’t show up. The three others then proceeded to work on a song called ‘Early 1970’, sung by Ringo and set to become the B-side to his subsequent single, ‘It Don’t Come Easy’. The loping, light-hearted number addressed each of the other Beatles in the first three verses, before mocking Ringo’s own musical limitations in the final stanza. In the opening lines, concerning Paul, Starr noted that his estranged friend not only lived on a farm but, in addition, apparently had ‘plenty of charm’.
If it was any kind of serious attempt at reconciliation, it was too little, too late. That same month, the McCartneys travelled to New York to ‘get away from everything’, not knowing that both Harrison and Lennon were coincidentally to be in the city at the same time.
While there, John arranged a meeting with Paul. McCartney cancelled, and Lennon later claimed that he hadn’t planned to turn up anyway. Paul and George did meet, however, though their conversation quickly turned argumentative. McCartney stressed that he wanted off Apple. ‘You’ll stay on the fucking label,’ Harrison hissed, before reflexively adding, ‘Hare Krishna’.
And so McCartney’s mind was set, even if, torn and procrastinating, he let the situation drift on for another couple of months before making his final move.
That December, back in Argyll, on a bright, cold day, McCartney stood high on a hill overlooking Skeroblin Loch, at the end of a long walk and deep conversation with Lee Eastman, in which, Paul says, ‘we’d been searching our souls’. There was no other way, he concluded.
Surveying this peaceful scene, he decided that it was time to sue his bandmates, to legally kill The Beatles.
Taking the other Beatles to court must have been a huge, difficult decision for you to make.
It was just something I knew I had to do. I could not let Allen Klein get away with it. I just knew that very clearly. And unfortunately, nobody else did. You’ve got to imagine yourself in my position then. Being, in my mind, the only person without the blindfold on.
2
Across the Water
Three days into the new year of 1971, the SS France pulled out of Southampton harbour, en route to New York, with the McCartneys aboard. Unusually for Paul, visibly reflecting his desire to be distanced from the ‘straights’ he was forced to share the luxury ocean liner with for six days, he spent much of the voyage sporting dark glasses.
This starry behaviour disgruntled one female passenger in particular, who was affronted by the singer walking one evening into the dining-room without first removing his shades. She duly accosted him, saying, ‘Take your sunglasses off. Elizabeth Taylor is on this boat and she doesn’t wear them.’
In response, Paul accurately pointed out, ‘Well, I’m not Elizabeth Taylor.’
McCartney was intent on putting some miles between himself and the legal ructions beginning to rumble back in London. Effectively, this trip to the States would find him, for a limited period, in self-imposed exile.
On the final day of 1970, he had filed to dissolve The Beatles & Company, listing his three estranged friends as defendants. There were still almost seven years left to run in the ten-year partnership agreement that the four had signed together in April 1967. In the light of the recent aggravations, however, McCartney couldn’t bear the prospect of every financial or creative move he made having to be filtered through the clogged Beatles bureaucracy.
At the same time, he also sought a receiver for Apple to be appointed until the dispute was settled and asked that Klein be charged with the mismanagement
of Apple funds, since he claimed not to have had accurate accounts from the New Yorker for either Apple or the band’s partnership. Access to the band’s recent income, totalling nearly four million pounds, was accordingly frozen.
From here on in, no one could get their hands on any of the money earned in the name of The Beatles.
To Paul’s way of thinking, Klein had ripped off The Rolling Stones, and The Beatles were next. ‘I was the lone voice,’ he says. ‘It was really painful, but I knew I had to take a stand.’
Compounding the agony, John and Paul’s feud was intensifying and, worse, going public. Lennon fired the first shot in the press war, lambasting McCartney in his lengthy, Beatles-demolishing Rolling Stone interview, published in two parts early in 1971.
It caught John in a coarse, purgative mood. Far from being adorable mop-tops, The Beatles, he said, were ‘the biggest bastards on earth’. He even took a dig at the mild, inoffensive George Martin, dismissing the producer’s crucial role in the band’s development. But, of course, he spewed most of his bitter rage in the direction of McCartney.
Paul had elected himself bandleader after Brian Epstein’s death, he said, but in the end McCartney had only led The Beatles round and round in circles. Eventually, Lennon began to think of his role in the band merely as a day job. Paul would only toss him a guitar solo on Beatles records when he was feeling ‘kindly’ or guilty that he’d commandeered the A-side. The other Beatles had grown sick of being merely sidesmen for McCartney. Given Paul’s casually domineering nature, there was a ring of truth to all of this.
But then Lennon twisted the knife: the McCartney LP was ‘rubbish’. The Let It Be film had been ‘set up by Paul, for Paul’. McCartney had fallen for the Eastmans’ ‘bullshit’ because he was hopelessly entranced by this ‘east coast suit . . . with Picassos on the wall’. They were cut from the same cloth, anyway, Paul being ‘all form and no substance’. Now, Lennon seethed, McCartney would only talk to the others through lawyers because his attitude was ‘I’m going to drag my feet and try and fuck you’.
Lennon’s rant blindsided McCartney and, privately, it began to further deplete his already pitifully low self-esteem. Paul sat down and pored over every sentence, thinking, maybe Lennon was right, maybe he was this horrendous, vain, pig-headed, self-serving bastard. He voiced these thoughts aloud: ‘He’s captured me so well,’ he said. ‘I’m a turd.’
Again, Linda tried to talk her husband out of his black fug, saying, ‘Now you know that’s not true.’ But Paul was wary of being drawn into a public battle with the merciless, acidic Lennon. Deeper than the worry of merely losing face, he feared being humiliated: ‘He’d do me in.’
In New York, Paul kept his head down, scruffy-bearded and dressed-down in combat jacket and jeans to look ‘like any junkie on the street’. One night, he and Linda rolled up to the Harlem Apollo to check out the talent night. Typically late, Linda had to sweet-talk the doorman to let them in. At the tail-end of an era violently stirred by the Black Panthers, they were the only two white faces in the theatre, blithely assuming that they would be safe in the crowd.
Still, elsewhere, paranoia was in the air. As a father, Paul worried about the kids being photographed by fans or, unthinkably, kidnapped, and tried to maintain as low a profile for his family as for himself. At the same time, there remained an oddness to his behaviour. One New Yorker Beatles fan, Libby Fields, claimed to have discovered a rumpled-looking McCartney very early one morning, spaced and jaded, in his army fatigues jacket, sitting on a bench in Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park. Shocked by his demeanour but thrilled to have this surprise one-to-one with even an apparently down-and-out Beatle, she asked him if he could wait five minutes until she ran home to grab her camera.
‘Why not?’ said Paul. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
A week into January, drummer Denny Seiwell, booked for a nameless demo session, turned up at an address in an unsettlingly heavy area in Manhattan, on 43rd Street between 9th and 10th. Immediately, he felt something was not right: the building looked burned out and appeared to have no electricity.
Through the opened door of the lobby he saw a guy sitting at a desk. Seiwell tentatively asked, ‘Is there something going on?’ The doorman nodded and gestured: ‘Yep, down there.’ Seiwell felt uneasy but made his way downstairs. There, in the damp, seedy basement, to his relief and surprise, he found Paul and Linda, sitting beside a battered old hired drum kit.
‘They said, “Do you mind playing for us?”’ says Seiwell. ‘And I just went into Ringo on the tom-toms.’ His playing aside, the drummer scored extra points for not being thrown by the idea of performing for a Beatle. ‘I was young, and I don’t mean to sound egotistical, but I knew I had something good. I felt like I deserved to be in there.’
Two days beforehand, New York session guitarist David Spinozza had found himself auditioning for Paul in a filthy loft on 45th Street. Linda, now acting as day-to-day organiser for Paul, had called the guitarist, introducing herself as Mrs McCartney, before vaguely asking him if he would like to meet her husband. The much-in-demand Spinozza copped something of an attitude straight away, playing hard to get and forcing the cagey Linda finally to name Paul. ‘Like I’m supposed to know Paul McCartney was calling my house,’ he huffed.
Post-audition, the guitarist got the gig and was asked if he was available to work five days a week for the next six weeks. He said he wasn’t, but that he could manage two days a week. And so began the loose, three-handed recording sessions, featuring McCartney, Seiwell and Spinozza, for what would become Ram.
While the album was to be credited to Paul and Linda McCartney, Spinozza claimed – their increasingly accomplished and characteristic harmonies aside – that the latter’s input was minimal. The sessions at Phil Ramone’s A&R Studios on West 48th Street were markedly clean and efficient: McCartney and the two session men working regular hours, with no imbibing of alcohol or dope, usually knocking off late in the afternoon. Emphasising the McCartneys’ growing attitude that they were a travelling musical family, Linda and the kids were always present, even on the rare occasions that the session dragged on and on until four in the morning.
During the making of Ram, Seiwell and McCartney grew closer. ‘I’d never seen that kind of talent before,’ says the drummer. In this setting, far from London and the battling Beatles, working with musicians paid to follow his every musical instruction closely, Paul was at last free to let his creativity flourish in a band setting without argument or interference. For the time being, this arrangement was highly productive, McCartney directing the musicians through song after song, great take after great take. To Seiwell’s ears, one stand-out number, ‘Another Day’, the mundane daily routine of a female office worker set against a dreamy, hooky acoustic-guitar-strummed backing, sounded like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ transported to inner-city New York.
But while the sessions were creatively successful, Seiwell remembers that the money deals with the musicians were done, in a pre-echo of the troubles to come, purely ‘on a hippie handshake’.
Sorely disrupting the creative flow, on the other side of the Atlantic there was the tangled mess of the Beatles’ legal affairs still to unravel. On 19 February 1971, a Friday, Paul stepped back into the eye of the storm, gently shoving through the crush of reporters outside the High Court in London for the first day of the case to settle the dispute in the partnership. Even if it was weighed down with negativity, there was still the thrill of a Beatle-styled happening in the air.
John Eastman had insisted that Paul appear in court every day wearing a suit and tie. McCartney initially protested, until he was reminded exactly what was at risk. If Allen Klein and the other Beatles retained control of the band’s interests, then McCartney would effectively wind up bound to Apple or, cripplingly, ABKCO.
Paul turned up for the first day in court in the dark grey Tommy Nutter-designed suit he’d worn on the cover of Abbey Road, matched with an open-necked shirt, in a minor show of defiance. Conform
ing to the point of wearing a tie, he told his brother-in-law, would feel like ‘humiliation’. Though his hair was trimmed, his bushy beard remained, signifying his recent rough times and desire to shield himself psychically.
In tow was Linda and Paul’s counsel, David Hirst QC. The McCartneys entered the court and settled into the second row facing the judge’s bench, with Hirst directly behind and, two rows further back, Klein, in trademark brown turtleneck sweater, along with his legal team. Paul shot a blank stare at the New Yorker and then turned away.
In a prelude to the proceedings, there was a moment of lightness to lift the tension. The court attendant whispered to Paul that he expected the imminent arrival of John and Yoko, since it was unlikely they would be able to resist turning up. Paul bet him two shillings that they wouldn’t show, and won. None of the other Beatles would make an appearance during the twelve-day period in which the case lumbered on.
Facing Mr Justice Stamp, Hirst set about dismantling Klein’s professional character – a task made far easier by his opening announcement that the manager had been convicted of ten tax offences by a New York jury only three weeks before. ‘It has obviously not enhanced Mr McCartney’s confidence in Mr Klein,’ Hirst pointed out dryly. He further argued that Klein couldn’t be trusted to look after the partnership and its assets, and accused him of already overpaying himself in commission.
McCartney sat before the judge, using body language as a weapon, shaking his head sadly every time an erroneous statement was read out by Klein’s defence. Then, having made this first-day appearance, he disappeared to New York once again.
On day two, Klein’s counsel, Morris Finer QC, declared that Klein had effectively saved The Beatles from bankruptcy and that the current partnership could be advantageous to McCartney since, under the arrangement, all four Beatles shared in the profits of one another’s solo records. Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord’, he pointed out, had earned nearly £1 million, close to twice what Paul’s solo releases in 1970 had brought into Apple. ‘No one is getting at Mr McCartney on this,’ he stressed.
