Once There Was a Way

by Bryce Zabel

  Mercifully, a grand creaking roar caused everyone to flee the studio. The twelve-by-sixteen-foot hole that appeared sent wood, plaster, desks, chairs, tables, and Apple’s green carpet from the office above to the basement below. A water pipe was broken during the descent, making everything that much worse.

  When the damage was assessed later, it was obvious that the destruction had crushed the Abbey Road equipment on loan, several of the Beatles’ prime guitars, and a piano. Also destroyed was any lingering image Apple had previously maintained of functioning as a legitimate business. The collapse served as a metaphor for the company’s own implosion.

  Given the fact that the last year ended with Hells Angels roaming the halls and was quickly followed by the Beatles being fired off a picture by Stanley Kubrick, the disintegration of Apple was not a good sign. The London papers gave it brutal front page treatment, with the Daily Mirror proclaiming, “Apple Rotten to the Corp!”

  There was, briefly, the feeling that since Twickenham and Savile Row had turned out so badly, it would be best to just give up entirely. Support for carrying on came from an unlikely source: George Harrison.

  “I don’t want to do this any more than the rest of you,” he said, “but we’ve got the material, so let’s just go finish it up.”

  With that, the Beatles returned to EMI’s Abbey Road, Studio Two, the third location they had recorded so far on their return-to-roots album, Get Back. This final location was familiar and comfortable, the place where most of the recorded output of the Beatles was laid down over the years.

  The bandmates were well aware that despite the overwhelming commercial success of A Doll’s House, fans and critics alike were beginning to notice that the Beatles were now playing as each other’s session men more than as fellow band members. John Lennon, perhaps urged on by Yoko, was speaking more and more openly about his tenuous new relationship with Paul McCartney.

  “It’s no secret Paul wants to run the show, is it?” Lennon had asked a reporter for London’s Melody Maker magazine. “The whole ‘leader-of-the-band’ trip. Ask him. He’ll tell you.”

  “John is the only leader of Beatles there can be,” chimed in Yoko. “And there can be no Beatles without John.”

  McCartney fumed when he read such talk printed in the music trades. Especially irritating was the fact that Yoko, even now, could not seem to bring herself to call the group by its proper name with the definite article—the Beatles, not just Beatles. McCartney also felt Lennon knew better than anyone on the planet what the truth was: Paul first stepped in because he was more organized and a harder worker, then because John was tripping out on acid, regularly. Then came Yoko, and then “JohnandYoko” started doing everything together, including heroin, something they began shortly after Yoko suffered her first miscarriage in November of 1968.

  Even as the rehearsals for the new album continued, there was a palpable sense of anxiety over what to do about Apple. In an effort to shore up Apple’s artist roster, John, Yoko, Ringo, and Maureen caught a performance of emerging artist Elton John at a small London venue where they could slip in and out without too much fuss. Elton was preparing to record his first album, Empty Sky, and was trying out material. Years before, the talented songwriter had worked in the office of early Beatles music publisher Dick James when the Beatles sent in their demos, creating a musical relationship between the artists of which most people were unaware.

  Afterwards, the two Beatles and their wives visited the new artist backstage. John was effusive about Elton’s performance. “You’ve fucking got it,” he declared.

  Suddenly, John Lennon’s resistance to playing the material from Get Back before a live audience dissolved. He had seen with his own eyes how Elton John had commanded concertgoers, and he knew the Beatles could do the same. A plan was hatched to use the influence of the Beatles to book Elton John into the Roundhouse.

  On April 7, then, Elton John performed five songs and took an unexpected break. “We’re going to take a few minutes to rearrange the stage, if you don’t mind,” he told the audience. “But I promise the wait will be worth it.”

  When the lights came back on thirty minutes later, the lucky audience found themselves watching history as the Beatles played their first fully live concert performance since 1966. The performance at the Roundhouse turned out to be both a surprise and a success, meant to cap the documentary that had started so sourly with the confrontation with Stanley Kubrick. The Get Back—Live at the Roundhouse album is culled from both the work sessions and the April 7 performance.

  The film documentary includes one powerful and unexpected moment. One young man, a house painter named David Morehouse, had angrily left the venue that night when Elton John left the stage. The next day, when he heard that he had missed out on seeing the Beatles, Morehouse went to the Hornsey Lane Bridge that connects the Highgate and Crouch End areas of London and prepared to jump.

  As a crowd gathered, the breaking news coverage emphasized Morehouse’s despondency over missing the Beatles, which attracted the attention of Linda Eastman. Soon she and Paul were in their car being waved through the police line. The documentary crew had been alerted and were filming at a respectful distance when Paul got out of the car and walked up to Morehouse, who was standing precariously on the edge of the bridge.

  “The Beatles have been having a rough go of it, ourselves,” he told the stunned house painter, who nearly passed out and fell off the bridge. “We need all the fans we can get these days.”

  Less than ten minutes after McCartney had gotten out of the car, he and David Morehouse walked up to the documentary crew together and told them all about their little chat.

  “Don’t everybody start going to the bridges now,” McCartney said with his best poker face, straight to camera. “We’re all quite busy, you know, and there’d be no guarantee that you’d get a Beatle.”

  Derek Taylor was on the scene by this point and shoved one of his local reporters forward to ask the question, “When will your Get Back album come out?” Paul took the opportunity to act high-minded while simultaneously promoting for the Beatles.

  [Paul] “This isn’t the moment to be talking about such things. But it’s not just an album anyway, it’s a concert, an album and a film, all three of them as live as live can be. Call up Apple if you want to talk about it, but right now, let’s give this man a chance to get home.”

  With that, McCartney signed an autograph on the arm of Morehouse’s girlfriend, Anne Thompson. He waved at reporters and then he got back in the car with Linda and they motored off through the crowd.

  Under New Management

  The lack of a new manager for Apple had risen to a high priority for all parties involved. Everyone finally began to search in earnest for someone who could take control of Apple and fix it. There was even talk of finding a “simple bank manager and a simple solicitor” under the guise that it was only accounting discipline that needed to be imposed—but the dream of simplicity never materialized. Everyone knew that whomever they chose needed to have both experience and guts.

  Lists were compiled and meetings scheduled. Individual Beatles were involved in some of the outreach, but so were Neil Aspinall and Peter Brown.

  During this period, candidates included Lord Poole, chairman of Lazard’s Bank; Lord Goodman, lawyer to the prime minister; Cecil King, newspaper baron; and Ronan O’Rahilly, the visionary founder of the first pirate radio station, Radio Caroline. The Beatles, Aspinall, and Brown also discussed Tony Defries, the manager of David Bowie; Albert Grossman, the manager of Bob Dylan; and Peter Grant, the manager of Led Zeppelin. And the name of Lord Richard Beeching kept coming up. He was the man who was widely credited with saving Great Britain’s railroad system. He had done it by being ruthlessly efficient about expenditures and notably non-sentimental about failing lines that cost more than they brought in. He was not always liked, but he was respected.

  McCartney met him first. Beeching was not particularly interested in taking over t
he management of the stumbling Apple Corps. Still, he felt the Beatles were a matter of national pride, not unlike the country’s trains, and if he could help save them, he felt the country would be better for it. At the same time, he also knew that a desperate private company like Apple would likely pay a savior a significant sum.

  Paul suggested that John take a meeting with Beeching. Lennon, to put it charitably, did not have as much respect for Beeching as his partner did. “He looks like a Dickens character and smells like it, too,” was his post-meeting analysis.

  Paul, desperate to find someone sooner than later, suggested the names of the buttoned-down entertainment attorney Lee Eastman, nearly 60, and his son John Eastman for the job of saving the group’s finances. The Eastmans had the distinction of being Linda’s family and Paul’s soon-to-be father-in-law and brother-in-law. Paul saw this familial connection as a way to avoid being fleeced by outsiders who didn’t care about the Beatles personally.

  John, George, and Ringo were highly skeptical of Paul’s plea to bring in his in-laws, saying that such an arrangement would hardly guarantee neutrality and fairness among the band’s individual members.

  While others considered and vetted and mused, John Lennon acted. On January 30, 1969, John and Yoko met with Allen Klein, the manager of the Rolling Stones, a tough-talking New Yorker who won their immediate affection. He knew what songs John had written for the Beatles, and he could recite the lyrics from memory.

  The next day, John and Yoko announced to Apple, and thus to the other Beatles, that they would now be represented by Klein. The others could do what they wanted to do, but John would introduce them to Klein, and they could make their own decision.

  Soon the Beatles split into camps, or, more accurately, one camp and one individual. John convinced both George and Ringo to side with him to bring in Klein, arguing that he knew the music business inside out and, based on what Mick Jagger had said, was enough of a right bastard to bring royalties into line with their true worth.

  The vote was about to go three-to-one when Lennon was reminded by Starkey that the Beatles refused to invoke plain “majority rule” on him when it came to “Revolution 9.” They had backed away then, preferring to keep the unanimous decision policy intact within the band. The question now was, on a matter of this importance, could they do any less?

  There was no hope that Lennon or McCartney would change positions and switch over to supporting the other man’s nominee. If they were going to stick with unanimous decision making, they would need to find a mutually agreeable candidate. This seemed impossible.

  The group decided that the management search would continue but, in the interim, John, George, and Ringo would go with Allen Klein, and Paul would stick with Lee and John Eastman. No one, not even Klein or the Eastmans, considered this to be a long-term solution.

  Significant Others

  While John Lennon believed that he was the leader and Paul McCartney the follower, that belief had more to do with emotion than fact. One of the starkest examples concerns the wedding of McCartney to Linda Eastman, followed just a single week later by the wedding of Lennon to Yoko Ono. Both weddings came immediately on the heels of Paul leaving his longtime girlfriend Jane Asher and John leaving his wife Cynthia, each man shedding a long, meaningful relationship for something new and exciting.

  On March 12, 1969, Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman. He’d been increasingly taken with the confident New York photographer, to the point where they had become inseparable. Their bond could scarcely be considered less than the one John Lennon shared with Yoko Ono, though paulandlinda had not had the same impact as johnandyoko, with its intercultural overtones.

  The event invoked classic Beatlemania: girls waited outside, cried at Paul’s new unavailability, and mobbed the newlyweds when they emerged from the civil ceremony.

  The marriages of Paul McCartney and John Lennon had transcended the realm of typical celebrity buzz to become an iconic watershed event. Under the guise of “showing up” for each other, John and Yoko staged the ultimate performance art when they crashed the civil ceremony marriage of Paul to Linda. John and Yoko insisted it was a spur-of-the-moment decision:

  [John] “Paul and me weren’t talking, you know? The whole Hobbit madness made it shit for all of us. When I heard he was getting married, I wasn’t going to go. The last thing I wanted to do was pretend things were all lovely when they weren’t.”

  [Yoko] “Paul and Linda didn’t invite us. We knew that she was always intimidated by me. But then Paul was always intimidated by John.”

  [John] “It just hit me, about an hour before. We were in London, and we’d just got these white outfits back from the cleaners, and we just put them on. Looked like we belonged on the cake. So we just drove on over.”

  The arrival of the Lennons surprised the soon-to-be McCartneys, who were already inside the building where the ceremony would take place. Paul and Linda heard the not-unfamiliar screams of the fans outside and went to the window to wave to them. The fans, however, were too distracted to see them because of the arrival of John and Yoko in a psychedelic painted Mercedes-Benz.

  “What is he doing?” asked Linda.

  Paul, whose first instinct was anger upon seeing that his partner had upstaged him at his own wedding, had to smile. John Lennon was being outrageous by simply showing up. Clever boy he is, thought McCartney.

  Paul would get the chance to return the favor just one week later, when John married Yoko—only Paul had to come back from his own honeymoon and fly to the island Gibraltar near Spain in order to do so. It had all been quietly arranged by their overwhelmed manager, Peter Brown. “Linda informed me that I’d be getting her and Paul to the Lennon wedding or she’d cut my balls off,” he said. “It had to be a secret, too, because they’d never told her they were coming to hers.”

  Lennon would never officially admit to being inspired by McCartney’s own nuptials, but it would be a very long shot indeed if that were not the case, given the time proximity. In truth, McCartney’s wedding had fired up his own competitive spirit. Like brothers fighting to get recognized, John determined to marry Yoko as soon as possible. It came together in less than a week.

  [John] “We both got very emotional about the actual marriage ceremony. We’re both quite cynical, hard people, but very soft as well. Everyone’s a bit both ways. And it was very romantic. Or it was, until he turned up.”

  Lennon was hardly in a charitable mood when his newly married business partner showed up at his wedding with his own new bride. “Now Paul, why have you two gone and done such a thing?” When it came to him as the recipient of a visit, John had no appetite for the concept of showing up.

  Shortly after the wedding, John and Yoko flew off to Paris and began a new run of social activism after their Gibraltar elopement that included the now classic “Bed-In” for Peace masterstroke. It was a two-for-one deal for John: he got to upstage McCartney’s nuptials and turn “Peace” into a product that he could use his celebrity to help market.

  When eccentric cartoonist Al Capp attacked John for the “filth” of the Two Virgins album and even took a shot at Yoko, it was McCartney who came to their defense from his almost-working farm in Scotland. “This guy is slagging off Yoko—and that’s one thing you don’t do,” reminded Paul who, by some accounts, had done the same. “You don’t slag off someone’s woman—that’s tribal time, isn’t it?”

  George and Ringo missed both weddings. Since the respective marrying parties had issued no invitations to either and since the wisdom of Ed McMahon had not been directed at them, showing up was impossible. George professed to be relieved of the obligation.

  [George] “I’d put my heart into the Lord soundtrack, and when it fell apart, it felt like my work was being rejected, and me along with it. I just went back home and started gardening. I planted and chanted for days at a time. I didn’t want to see them any more than they probably wanted to see me, if you want to know the truth.”

  Ringo was
another matter. He liked being a Beatle and, since he was not in competition with either John or Paul for creative control of the group, he could afford to like them personally as well.

  [Ringo] “It’s cool now that it went down the way it did, I suppose. They each got married the same week. No one told me. But they went to each other’s wedding. Oh, well, I thought, what should I expect? Nobody hires a wedding drummer.”

  In the aftermath of the weddings, John and Paul actually converged on Abbey Studios (without George or Ringo) to record a single about their wedding experiences. The A-side was Lennon’s “The Ballad of John and Yoko” and the B-side was McCartney’s “Two of Us,” which he claimed was about his relationship with Linda. There was give-and-take musically between the two men, and a bit of fun, according to the men themselves.

  The leaders of the Beatles now each had someone more important in their lives than their professional partners.

  • • •

  In late June, the Everest sessions were set to begin in earnest at Abbey Road Studios. It was a curious time—each of the four musicians now believed that this could easily be the last album they would ever make together as a group.

  Maybe that’s why the squabbling of A Doll’s House and Get Back was replaced by a sense of purpose on Everest. They were simply devoted to the idea of making one last great album and going out in style.

  All four men brought in material but, for the moment, they also all agreed to work on as many of their other bandmates’ songs as possible.

  When Yoko Ono began showing up to every one of the sessions, Paul decided that Linda should do the same. The two women were developing a relationship known these days as “frenemies.”

  In the same way that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had been a concept album with the band posing as another band, a new concept informed and organized Everest. One side would be the great music that the public had come to expect from the Beatles. The other would be a collection of song fragments fused into a “suite” that was one single musical experience, an idea that Paul thought was keen and John thought was weird. Harrison watched as an observer: