by Bryce Zabel
Both Harrison and Starkey were in London and informed Apple that they would play on the songs, or not—they were fine with either option. Both men were concerned that songs featuring contributions from Yoko and Linda could hardly be considered pure Beatles songs.
In the end, that may have been the single’s saving grace. The songs felt timely and not entirely appropriate for the next Beatles album, which was due to be recorded in Los Angeles in the spring. By putting the songs out on a single, and only as a single, Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starkey made it clear that the tracks were not technically a part of the Beatles canon. It was the same thinking that went into last year’s Christmas single.
Lennon went to work to merge “The Luck of the Irish” into a single song that built into “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” McCartney refined his “Give Ireland Back to the Irish.” Both Harrison and Starkey came into the Savile Row studios to add their contributions. Lennon and McCartney had written a single together, but neither man had performed on the other’s individual song.
While the song was being mixed, Derek Taylor spun out this release:
[Derek Taylor] “The Beatles are citizens of England who have feelings like all citizens. John and Paul each independently felt it was time that people questioned what we were doing in Ireland. George and Ringo agree. So they have come together to raise these questions and to see if music might bring some peace to this troubled land. Plus, they like the songs, too.”
With the songs completed and the press release ready to be triggered, both Paul and John received a call from Sir Joseph Lockwood, the chairman of EMI. He wanted them to know that EMI simply could not release this single because it was too inflammatory. Both of the Beatles told him essentially the same thing: they felt strongly about it, and it must be released.
“It will be banned, you know,” said Lockwood.
The chairman was right. It turned out that it was banned by the BBC. This fate, however, was not entirely new to the Beatles, who had seen “I Am the Walrus,” “Come Together,” “A Day in the Life,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Hi, Hi, Hi,” and “The Ballad of John and Yoko” previously banned.
The single did reach number one on the charts in Ireland and Spain, but did not receive a U.S. release. Record executives there felt that Americans had enough troubles of their own with Vietnam, and, beyond that, the Ireland conflict was far too difficult for them to understand.
• • •
To counteract this evolving image of the Beatles as drug-taking undesirables and political fringe elements, Allen Klein brought a bold plan to Lord Beeching that would allow Apple to re-package these angry, edgy young men as the Moptops one last time.
[Klein] “I thought, ‘Who doesn’t love a Greatest Hits album?’ The Beatles had so many hits over the years that they could have the Greatest Hits album of all Greatest Hits albums. In fact, I thought, they could have two of them. And each one could be a double album.”
Klein had a vision, and he pursued it with dogged determination. That vision had been triggered by the appearance of a bootleg version of Beatles hits, which was illegally taking profits from an unexploited public demand. If anyone should be taking profit, he reasoned, it ought to be Apple.
Klein briefed Beeching (whom he considered woefully ignorant of Beatles history) about album lengths. A Doll’s House had been a two-record album, and rather than turning off fans by its price, it turned into a giant bestseller. The Concert for Bangladesh had done it again with three records and great sales of its own. Klein now proposed that the Beatles release two Greatest Hits albums, each with two LPs inside, for a total of four records.
He began to package a “Red” album and a “Blue” album, the former covering the early years of the band, and the latter covering the years leading up to the Grand Bargain. They would be The Beatles/Red (1963–1966) and The Beatles/Blue (1967–1969).
The packaging was stunning. For the group’s 1963 debut LP, Please Please Me, photographer Angus McBean took a distinctive color photograph of the group looking down over the stairwell inside EMI House, the company’s London headquarters in Manchester Square.
In 1969, the Beatles asked McBean to re-create this shot. The contrast between the clean-cut young men framed in red on the first LP, and then the bearded, mustached hippies they had morphed into in the second LP, was striking.
Klein’s first take on what came to be known as the “Double-Doubles” was to curate a representative chronological collection of Beatles hits and successes to cover the four sides, maintaining the image of the cohesive group.
As it turned out, however, Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison all complained and asked that the sides be divided in a way that allowed them to feature the songs that were predominantly theirs on a side dedicated to them alone. Starkey was the only voice to the contrary, feeling that he would not be able to fill two full sides with songs that related only to his work.
While many fans still could not tell a Lennon from a McCartney song in the The Beatles Red album, that was not the case for The Beatles Blue.
When the “Double-Double” albums were released, their very organization seemed to tell fans about the new Beatles. They still recorded as a group, but they were clearly four separate musicians. The albums gave each man his solo due, and every one of them could feel properly recognized for their own individual talents. Another compromise had lent itself to a positive spin.
While the Red and Blue albums kept the Beatles in the eyes of the world musically, they did nothing to actually move the band toward recording new material. That decision was still being postponed.
• • •
Hollywood continued to push the Beatles before the public eye whether they were really in the mood for it or not. In early 1972, before the Nixon Administration had told the INS to bar them at the door of America, they had come to the U.S. to shoot a new film, The Hot Rock, and to attend a round of awards shows in support of their last film, The Lord of the Rings.
To mention The Hot Rock today brings out the knives in debate among Beatles fans, as some see it as comedy just slightly beyond the complication factor of Help!, while others see it as a complete sellout. In 1971, when the papers were signed and the film greenlit for production, however, it was simply an acknowledgment by Hollywood that, coming from the success of The Lord of the Rings, the Beatles had earned the right to have big movie offers brought to them.
The mood in the Apple offices on Savile Row reflected resentment at the hammerlock UA had on the Beatles’ earlier films. On the deal for The Lord of the Rings, UA had stuck with terms that had been agreed to back in the early days when the Beatles were not considered to be film stars. The film division wanted to continue those terms, even after this latest film became a critical and commercial hit.
With the Beatles free to make movies with anyone they chose, 20th Century Fox had come calling with The Hot Rock, the kind of ensemble project that seemed perfectly suited to the Beatles as they were coming from a hit and needed to get product to market quickly and efficiently.
As a caper-comedy, The Hot Rock had originally been developed to star Robert Redford and George Segal. Peter Yates was attached to direct from a screenplay by William Goldman, based on Donald E. Westlake’s novel of the same name. The film would introduce Westlake’s long-running John Dortmunder character. The story concerned a team of four men who steal a massive diamond from a museum and then have to break into prison to rescue the one team member who got caught and swallowed the diamond during the heist.
The studio asked screenwriter Goldman, who was coming off the success of his own original Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, to revise his draft to accommodate the casting of the Beatles and their own quirky screen personas. In his classic book Adventures in the Screen Trade, he remembers his first reaction.
[William Goldman] “I nearly walked off the project. I’d been hired to write the first draft because of my relationship with (Robert) Redford, now he’s off the picture and J
ohn Fucking Lennon is playing a part that he had no business playing. Totally trying to punch above his weight class. The problem was I fucking loved John Fucking Lennon, so I shut up and re-wrote the script.”
Goldman set out to revise his own script to play to the strengths of the Beatles. He even managed to create a credible reality where four British criminals could operate effectively in New York City. It was ironic to the extreme that in his new draft, John Lennon played a naturalized American citizen originally from the United Kingdom.
In the opening scene, Lennon’s character, jewel thief Dortmunder, is released from the State Prison into the hands of his safecracker brother-in-law, Andy Kelp, played by Paul McCartney. Harrison got the part of the driver who handled the getaway car, which fit in with his own extracurricular interests in auto racing, and Ringo was the bomb maker who ends up needing to be broken out of prison, which caused Ringo to name himself “McGuffin.”
Shot over thirty-seven days in February and March in New York City and its environs, screenwriter Goldman had been on the set for much of the production. In his book, he vividly remembers watching Yates direct the scene with Lennon’s Dortmunder being released from prison to McCartney’s Kelp. One of the actual prison guards, taking it all in, observed to Goldman about McCartney: “My wife said to me today that she would get down on her hands and knees and crawl through glass just for the chance to fuck him one time. One time.”
Everyone associated with the film at this time knew that it was not going to win the awards The Lord of the Rings had but that the magic of the Beatles still might propel it to commercial success.
• • •
Although the production of the Stanley Kubrick version of The Lord of the Rings was now in the rearview mirror, its impact was still being felt during Hollywood’s awards season in the first months of 1972. The film itself was nominated for Best Picture by the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes, and all the major guilds. Kubrick was nominated as a director across the board.
The acting was another matter. In the end, the group-think of Hollywood seemed to settle on Paul McCartney and Richard Starkey as the breakout stars.
George was considered an interesting but one-note wizard in his portrayal of Gandalf. Similarly, John was thought to be slightly over-the-top in his characterization of Gollum.
Paul and Ringo, however, seemed to touch a nerve as the likable duo of Frodo and Sam. Both were nominated by the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes, Paul in the Lead Actor categories and Ringo in the Supporting Actor categories. Both men won the Golden Globe for their work. Whether he did so out of jealousy is debatable, but John referred to the award as the “Golden Knob Job.”
The 44th Academy Awards were presented April 10, 1972, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. The ceremonies were presided over by Helen Hayes, Alan King, Sammy Davis Jr., and Jack Lemmon. For the first time in the history of the Awards, the nominees were shown on screen while being announced, an advance many observers attributed to the program’s producers capitalizing on the chance to broadcast actual living, breathing Beatles in their seats.
It became something of a joke when, in category after category, the presenters were forced to pronounce the full official name of the film—Stanley Kubrick Presents J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Starring The Beatles.
On Oscar night, the movie had nominations (and wins) in mostly all the technical categories and included nominations that were part of the official television broadcast, like Best Picture, Director, Cinematographer, Writer, Soundtrack, Song, Lead Actor, and Supporting Actor.
Early on, it became clear that the night was a battle between The French Connection and The Lord of the Rings. Kubrick himself won two Oscars, for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director.
The actor known as Richard Starkey won Best Supporting Actor in a category that included Ben Johnson, Jeff Bridges, and Roy Scheider. Paul McCartney, however, had to applaud politely for Gene Hackman, who took the Best Actor award. Even so, critics and audiences alike believed that McCartney had delivered his best performance ever on film and that appearing with Ringo by his side made him seem even more relatable.
As always, the evening came down to the battle for Best Picture. In 1972, the films nominated included The French Connection, Fiddler on the Roof, The Last Picture Show, and Nicholas and Alexandra. Jack Nicholson was the category presenter:
[Jack Nicholson] “And the Oscar for Best Picture goes to…well, wouldn’t you know it…Stanley Kubrick Presents…aw, what the hell, it goes to The Lord of the Rings.”
Kubrick had made it known that only producers should go on stage if the film won in the Best Picture category. That meant that Paul McCartney, Richard Starkey, George Harrison, and George Martin (John Lennon did not attend) were supposed to stay in their seats and politely smile. Both the telecast producers and the audience, however, had other ideas and practically propelled the three attending Beatles toward the stage.
In his speech, however, Stanley Kubrick never mentioned the Beatles, nor were they allowed to speak for themselves. On the way off the stage, Ringo approached the still hot mic and uttered the words that would become his trademark: “Peace and Love.”
Fear and Loathing in America
As far as fans were concerned, John Lennon and Yoko Ono came to America because Lennon felt that the United States, and New York City, in particular, was the center of the universe for Planet Earth. After his years in the United Kingdom, he was ready to take up residence where the action was.
There was another reason, one that got less press coverage because he spoke about it less frequently, both to protect his wife’s privacy and because it did nothing to increase his mythological status in the counter-culture. Lennon had come to America with his wife to look for Yoko’s daughter, Kyoko. Ono’s previous husband Tony Cox had gone into hiding with the girl, even though Yoko had been granted shared custody.
By now, Lennon’s limited three-month stay granted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service had been regularly revoked and subsequently appealed. By 1972, he and Yoko were in a constant struggle to stay in the United States, and it was not going well. The Nixon Administration’s perception that they were a threat made their daily lives unbearable. And they still had not found Kyoko in all this time.
As a result of the constant harassment from the INS and the FBI, John and Yoko had actively inserted themselves into radical left American politics. They marched in support of Native American rights, met with the Black Panthers, wrote columns for leftist magazines, and attended anti-Vietnam protests. They were by no means trying to maintain a low profile.
As a consequence, the Nixon Administration had moved far beyond simply paying attention to the comings and goings of the Lennons. They worried that Lennon might motivate young people to vote against Nixon’s re-election and that he’d have particular influence over the millions of voters, mainly Americans aged from eighteen to twenty, the ones who would vote for the first time in 1972.
The Nixon team was correct to worry. Lennon, having flirted openly and heavily with radical politics, saw 1972 as one last chance for the system to save itself. That meant that Richard Nixon had to be sent packing from the White House. Senator George McGovern from South Dakota was the first Democratic challenger who had come forward, but Lennon thought he was too nice, too unknown, too untested, and would be battered badly by the Nixon machine. He began looking more and more at Senator Edward Kennedy as the only politician who might get into the presidential race and take on Nixon.
Lennon’s lawyer was also instrumental in his tilt toward the political center. He felt that it would be better for his client to be preaching democracy to eighteen-year-olds than revolution to the world. He encouraged Lennon to do whatever he thought was appropriate to show an interest in the mainstream American political process.
There was one thing John Lennon had learned in his time in America: when he telephoned someone, they usually took the call.
On Janua
ry 17, Lennon called the Washington, D.C. office of Senator Kennedy and asked to speak to the senator directly. The staffer who answered thought it was a joke, and it was not until Lennon sang a bar from “Help!” that he was asked to hold the line. After a minute, he got his wish.
“This is Senator Kennedy.”
Lennon introduced himself and said he wanted to talk about how Kennedy should enter the race and defeat Richard Nixon. Kennedy thanked him for his support but stated that Senator McGovern had an organization that was already built and he would be starting from scratch. “As you’ll remember, my brother, Bobby, entered late in 1968, and many people thought he was an opportunist for taking on Senator McCarthy so late in the game.”
“There’s a big difference, Senator,” explained Lennon. “This time the Kennedy in the race will have me on his side.”
It was a cordial conversation but one that didn’t change Kennedy’s mind. He had his own stumbling blocks, namely the Chappaquiddick scandal from 1969 when he drove a car into a river and a young girl drowned. This was compounded by his own reputation as the lightest weight in the Kennedy brand. Having the endorsement of a drug-taking radical was not going to make his chances any better.
“Let me know if you change your mind,” said Lennon as he hung up the receiver and turned to Yoko, who was eager to hear how the conversation had gone.
“He’s thinking about it.”
The irony was that Lennon was correct. Kennedy was under enormous pressure from the party to challenge Senator George McGovern before the primary voting started. Most of that pressure came from the politicos in the Democratic party who felt that Nixon could be beaten, but not by a back-bench peacenik senator from South Nowhere. They needed a big gun to take out Nixon. They needed a Kennedy.
Years after the 1972 election, Kennedy reflected on the Lennon call. “All my children and my nieces and nephews and all my staffers made me tell that story over and over and over. They were pretty sure that I was nothing special, but the thought of possibly meeting the Beatles made them push me as hard as they could to get in the race.”
