by Tom Doyle
On the third day, the affidavits from the other Beatles were read out. Lennon’s was long and, in places, persuasive. He didn’t agree with Paul that The Beatles had begun to drift apart after their touring days ended in 1966. In fact, he claimed, they had argued more on the road, and since then had got on better and were regular visitors to each other’s homes. The Beatles were, however, he admitted, largely clueless about business, which is why Apple had become a hopeless mess.
Klein, Lennon reckoned, was ‘certainly forceful to an extreme, but he does get results’. John said he had brought in Klein to clear out the ‘hustlers’ and ‘spongers’ responsible for the haemorrhaging of Apple funds. Further, he claimed that he had initially only wanted Klein to be his personal manager and that he hadn’t tried to force him on the other Beatles. He concluded by declaring that Paul was acting ‘selfishly and unreasonably’.
Harrison was clearly keen to air his grievances too. The major rift within the band had between himself and Paul. Since George had walked out of the Twickenham Let It Be sessions, however, Paul had treated him more as a ‘musical equal’. This, he reasoned, showed that an intra-Beatles argument could be beneficially resolved. He had been stunned by Paul’s legal letter seeking to dissolve the partnership: ‘I still cannot understand why Paul acted as he did.’
Ringo’s statement at first flattered Paul, calling him ‘the greatest bass guitar player in the world’, but went on to say that McCartney was also ‘determined . . . he goes on and on to see if he can get his own way.’ This, the drummer argued, had led to musical disagreements, even if these often proved to be the grit that produced the pearls. In December, he said, Paul had apparently agreed to sit down for an air-clearing meeting with the other Beatles in January, and so the writ had shocked the drummer too.
‘Something serious, about which I have no knowledge, must have happened after Paul’s meeting with George at the end of December,’ he reasoned, apparently entirely aware of the damage the guitarist had done by angrily telling McCartney he would make him stay on the label. Starr ended on a positive note, however, in hoping that ‘all four of us together could even yet work out everything satisfactorily’.
On day four, Klein launched his defence in an affidavit read out to the court, pointing out that he had vastly improved the Beatles’ financial affairs. In 1969 their earnings had doubled; in 1970 they had increased fivefold. He then griped that: ‘Mr McCartney has made attacks on my commercial integrity’.
One of Paul’s chief grievances was that Klein had sold the rights to the Let It Be film to United Artists without his approval. Klein argued that the sale had ‘made an absolute fortune for all four Beatles’. In this way, he was virtually holding up his hands and admitting he was a music-business hustler, while pointing out that all four Beatles were better off as a result. This was, of course, undeniable: Paul had profited from the deals Klein had made. ‘McCartney has accepted the benefits,’ the manager stated, ‘which I have negotiated in that capacity.’
A week into the proceedings, 26 February, Paul returned to the court, entering the witness-box. He rejected Lennon’s earlier claim in his statement that the band ‘always thought of ourselves as Beatles, whether we recorded singly or in twos or threes’. He quoted, almost as evidence, the fact that in the mantra-like ‘God’, from the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album, released two months earlier, his former bandmate had listed all the things he no longer believed in, the final one being, simply, ‘Beatles’.
He then tried to undermine Lennon and Klein’s relationship. In a phone conversation Klein had apparently told Paul that John was only angry with him because ‘you came off better than he did in Let It Be’. In the witness-box, McCartney stirred the situation further, saying Klein had also warned him that Yoko was ‘trouble . . . she’s the one with ambition’. Openly and brazenly playing an intra-Beatles mind game, in a court of law, he disingenuously said that he’d wondered what John might make of this.
The main problem, as he saw it, was that when The Beatles signed the 1967 agreement, none of them had really considered the wording. Spotlighting his apparently guileless attitude to business, Paul said he always thought that he could just walk away from the deal at any point. In response to his colleagues’ bewilderment when it came to his current legal action, he stated that his reasoning behind it was simple: The Beatles had broken up. In his mind, there could be no partnership if there was no band.
When summing up, David Hirst for McCartney said there were four major factors to their argument that the 1967 contract was unworkable: its assets were in jeopardy, one partner was being excluded, there existed a ‘lack of good faith towards a partner by other partners’, and the likelihood was that a dissolution was inevitable.
Morris Finer, for Klein and the other Beatles, rather poetically accused Paul of living ‘in a world where everyone is either a seraphim or angel, ape or viper’. Moreover, he asked the judge not to grant a receivership order, since this would trigger the band’s business organisation descending further into ‘chaos’.
McCartney’s defence team, having sifted through a three-foot-high pile of Beatles- and Klein-related documents, finally showed their hand. Hirst produced a cheque from Capitol to Klein for £852,000. The manager had of course increased the Beatles’ US royalty rate from 17.5 per cent to 25 per cent, contractually entitling him to a fifth of the 7.5 per cent rise. But this was commission for a fifth of the band’s entire cut. Paul argued that Klein had invoiced for at least £500,000 more than he should have done. ‘We couldn’t send him to jail for that,’ he later said, ‘but at least we could get a judgment.’
On the ropes, Klein’s team cited a letter from the other three Beatles, dated January 1970, that seemed to rubber-stamp this new commission agreement. McCartney’s team rightly argued that his former bandmates weren’t allowed to alter management terms without his permission. Mr Justice Stamp instantly backed them, denouncing Klein’s protestations as ‘the prattling of a second-class salesman’.
After all the debate and deliberation, on 12 March 1971 Justice Stamp granted McCartney’s request for a receiver to oversee the band’s interests ‘pending a permanent fix’.
James Spooner, a City-based chartered accountant, was appointed to oversee the Beatles’ business affairs. Later, as he dug deeper into the paperwork, he discovered a different partnership agreement that appeared to have Paul’s signature on it. He concluded that it was a forgery, which was a distinct possibility, given that through years of signing countless records, The Beatles had successfully learned to copy each other’s signatures. ‘It was a very crooked piece of paper,’ Spooner noted.
Whatever the truth behind this strange postscript to the whole chaotic affair, McCartney had unequivocally won the first crucial round in the Beatles’ legal battle, even if he now found himself hated by the press, the fans and the other band members.
‘There was a lot of hostility going around,’ he says now. ‘But I had to do that to not let Allen Klein own The Beatles. If I hadn’t done it, everything we’d ever done would’ve just gone down the drain. A few years later, they all recognised that.’
That was to be some way into the future, however. On the day, after the verdict was announced, according to the eyewitness accounts of the constant scrum of fans outside Paul’s house, John, Ringo and George turned up at Cavendish Avenue in Lennon’s white Rolls-Royce.
Lennon emerged from the car with two bricks, scaled the wall and, reverting to the furious teenage Teddy boy who used to wreck phone boxes in Liverpool, smashed McCartney’s windows.
Meanwhile, Paul was three thousand miles away, back in New York. Three days after the end of the court case, with the recording of Ram completed, he flew to the west coast with Linda and the girls to oversee its mixing in Los Angeles. For the duration of their stay the family rented a Santa Monica beachside house, owned by the Getty family. Their routine quickly began to resemble a working holiday: leisurely laps in the pool while listening to Linda’s
reggae records, lengthy dinners in hip restaurants on Ocean Park Boulevard.
In his final act of Beatle duty, Paul attended the Grammys with Linda, padding up to the podium to pick up the award for Best Original Score for Let It Be from, a touch surreally, famously bandy-legged Western screen legend John Wayne. As the McCartneys left, a reporter asked him if he was planning to do any recording while in LA. Paul, in a line that sounded prefabricated, said, ‘I have a knife and fork and I’m here to cut a record.’
The New York leg of the album having been cleanly and successfully marshalled, the LA sessions were fuelled by dope. Paul would usually arrive mid-afternoon, spark up a joint and then tinker around endlessly. This mood of stoned whimsy extended to the album’s artwork, featuring a black-and-white shot of McCartney manfully handling the horns of a Blackface sheep on the Scottish farm, framed by crude felt-tip scribbling in orange, blue, green and red. The inner art was similarly childlike, incorporating photos of Paul and Linda and random horses into a purposely rough-cut collage with slightly bizarre found elements: grass from the garden, a few strands of human hair.
Upon the release of Ram in May 1971, keen artwork-scanners soon found in it what they assumed to be an oblique jibe: a nature photography library shot of two beetles copulating. This was interpreted in various ways: fucking Beatles, fuck The Beatles, fucked by The Beatles. Paul insists that its inclusion was purely accidental. ‘It was just a funny shot,’ he protests. ‘A photograph of two beetles shagging. I mean, that had to get on the cover. Then afterwards, you go, “Oh, but they were beetles.” To me they were just a couple of little ladybirds or something. I swear to God I didn’t think about that. The thing is, whatever you do gets interpreted. And I don’t see half of it coming.’
Less considered still was a strange promo disc put out to press and radio to publicise the album, entitled Brung To Ewe and featuring a sound collage of sheep noises, nonsensical snatches of Paul-and-Linda dialogue and in-jokes over snippets of the album’s songs. Recurring throughout was a gospel number, ‘Now Hear This Song Of Mine’, that hadn’t even made it onto the record. Those in the music industry who heard it were slightly baffled: rather than summoning the spirit of Beatleish playfulness, it sounded like a lot of stoned rambling.
Nevertheless, although not viewed as such at the time in many quarters, given the Olympian expectations of the solo Beatles, Ram was something of a marvel. Really the true successor to Abbey Road, in its baroque detail and flights of imagination, it was variously funny, daft, touching and knowing. It was also deliberately eventful in its structure, featuring songs within songs and unexpected dips and turns.
‘I tried to avoid any Beatles clichés and just went to different places,’ says Paul. ‘So the songs became a little more episodic or something. I took on that kind of idea a bit more than I would’ve with The Beatles. I suppose I was just letting myself be free. So if I wanted to do “Monkberry Moon Delight” with “a piano up my nose”, then I figured, that’ll be OK.’
Unlikely US number 1 ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’ spotlighted the new McCartney method: its trippy sentimentality giving way to rain and vocally impersonated ringing telephone effects before restlessly tempo-shifting upwards through its lengthy coda. Elsewhere, Beach Boys references abounded, not least in the ornate arrangement of ‘Ram On’ and the multi-voiced teenage swoon of ‘The Back Seat Of My Car’.
Artwork aside, Ram also seemed to be carefully mined with lyrical digs at Lennon and the other Beatles. McCartney insists that the apparent pot-shots in ‘3 Legs’, particularly the parts where he laments being betrayed by a former friend, were misinterpreted: ‘That was just kind of a joke blues song in my mind.’
‘Too Many People’, though, was directed squarely at the ‘preaching practices’ of John and Yoko. ‘I felt that was true of what was going on,’ says McCartney. ‘“Do this, do that, do this, do that.”’ If there was dark anger at the heart of Ram, however, it was deeply hidden. Even the song’s opening words, ‘piss off’, were veiled by a weak pun.
‘It’s actually “piece of cake”,’ Paul says, ‘which was thinly disguised as “piss off, cake”. And, hey, come on, how mild is that? It’s not exactly a tirade.’ The withering put-downs of ‘Dear Boy’, meanwhile, were penned not with any of The Beatles in mind, but for Linda’s first husband, Mel See. In it, the singer derided See for not recognising the wonders of the now Mrs McCartney, who Paul further admitted in the lyric, had emotionally revived him when he was low.
If relatively slick compared to its scrappier predecessor, Ram only made number 2 in the US, where McCartney had reached number 1, though it topped the album chart in the UK. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic, however, were unkind, verging on brutal. Rolling Stone’s review was particularly vitriolic, loftily claiming, ‘Ram represents the nadir in the decomposition of 1960s rock thus far . . . so incredibly inconsequential and monumentally irrelevant.’ Melody Maker, meanwhile, struck a nerve: ‘It must be hell living up to a name . . . you expect too much from a man like McCartney.’
Asked about Ram, Lennon admitted that he liked the beginning and end of ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’, but griped that the rest of it ‘just tripped off all the time’. Ringo, quizzed about the record elsewhere, came across as bitter and hurt when it came to Paul. ‘I don’t think there’s one tune on Ram,’ he said. ‘I just feel he’s wasted his time. He seems to be going strange. It’s like he’s not admitting he can write great tunes.’ The fact that, in May, Paul and Ringo had hung out together at Mick Jagger’s wedding to Bianca in St Tropez – the first time they’d socialised since the Beatles split – seemed to have no bearing on the drummer’s negative feelings.
For McCartney himself, Ram was an entirely successful endeavour, both creatively and commercially, if not critically. In the end it served its purpose, in driving on his post-Beatles career, as – he pointed out – suggested by its determined, dual-meaning title: ‘It meant . . . ram forward, press on, be positive.’
If McCartney’s ongoing process of creative therapy now found him with his head happily back up in the musical clouds, where it had been in the best times with The Beatles, it wasn’t long before various realities began to drag him back earthwards once again.
In April 1971 came the word that Klein and the other Beatles weren’t going to appeal against the court’s judgment and had decided to grant McCartney his freedom from the partnership. But, with most of his money still tied up in Apple, Paul was suddenly faced with financial embarrassment. On the last day of March, the newly formed McCartney Productions Ltd submitted its first annual accounts for the period 1970 to 1971: £3,017 incoming, £5,417 outgoing, resulting in a deficit of £2,400.
Day to day, the McCartneys were actually living on the money that Linda had earned as a photographer in New York before meeting Paul. As a kept husband, McCartney used to joke to his wife that at least one of them was keeping them afloat.
But in December 1970, before announcing that he was to sue the other Beatles, Paul had tried to make a business manoeuvre that, depending on your perspective, was either prescient or crafty. He had asked for there to be a further definition of the terms of his contract with Northern Songs – the company formed by Brian Epstein, The Beatles and music publisher Dick James in 1963, which owned the rights to all of the group’s songs and which James had sold in 1969 to media magnate Lew Grade’s ATV, without first consulting The Beatles. McCartney was arguing that the deal shouldn’t cover any material that he wrote with anyone other than John Lennon.
Now, with Ram, he was claiming that seven of its fourteen tracks were straight 50–50 co-writes with Linda, despite the fact that she wasn’t a recognised songwriter. Grade, perhaps understandably, thought he was being stitched up and that Paul was underhandedly trying to claw back some of his songwriting royalties to McCartney Productions.
This, of course, was reasonable, but tough to prove. Only those in the room when the songs were being written, Paul and Linda, knew exactly who was
responsible for what. ‘If my wife is actually saying, “Change that”, or “I like that better than that”, then I’m using her as a collaborator,’ Paul reasoned. In the event, an entirely unconvinced Grade slapped the McCartneys with a lawsuit for an arbitrarily round one million dollars, in a dispute to be settled, in a wholly unorthodox fashion, a little further down the line.
As the spring of 1971 turned to summer, the strangeness that came with Paul’s extraordinary fame began to creep back into the McCartneys’ lives. In June, an odd-looking parcel addressed simply to ‘Paul McCartney’ was delivered to the BBC’s Bush House in London’s Aldwych. Suspecting it to be a letter bomb, the staff there immediately called in the police. Once carefully opened, the package was revealed to be a gift of wineglasses and crockery from a fan, ahead of Paul’s upcoming twenty-ninth birthday, along with a letter that said ‘I love you’ in Spanish.
Other, more determined devotees would sometimes make the long pilgrimage to Argyll, since it was no secret now that the McCartneys spent much of their time near Campbeltown. Their neighbours would sometimes be shocked to find a frazzled-looking hippie peering through their windows, thinking they had found where Paul lived. Once the McLean family, who lived nearby, found five longhairs hiding in their shed, claiming they had merely wanted to practise yoga in the vicinity of the supposed McCartney aura.
More worryingly, a young girl, a Mormon from Utah, had taken to camping on the edge of some woods just beyond the boundary of High Park, meaning she could get close to Paul without trespassing on his land. The McCartneys often saw her, partially hidden by the trees, watching them through binoculars. One day in summer 1971, Paul apparently snapped and, according to the girl, came out of the house, drove towards her in his Land Rover and angrily emerged, shouting and swearing.
