John Lennon: The Life (78 page)

Despite vastly pleasanter surroundings and a clearer objective in view, tension soon began seeping back. Playing whole tracks in one go, without editing or overdubbing, was something the Beatles had not done since Martin had wrung their first album out of them in a single day back in 1963. “And course it became terribly tedious because they couldn’t give me what I wanted—a perfect performance,” Martin remembers. “I’d say ‘Okay, seventeen…John that was a lovely vocal, but Paul had a bit of a glitch on the bass.’…On the 61st take, John would say ‘How was that one, George?’ I’d say ‘John, I honestly don’t know.’ ‘No fookin’ good then, are you?’ he’d say. That was the general atmosphere.”

Since Yoko had taken up station next to John, and Eric Clapton had played lead guitar for George on the
White Album
, no one any longer regarded the Beatles as an inviolably self-sufficient foursome. On the
Get Back
sessions, they acquired their first black American auxiliary in keyboards player Billy Preston, whom they had first met when he appeared at the Hamburg Star-Club with Little Richard. Preston fitted effortlessly into the music, while his happy-go-lucky personality did much to improve the problematical vibes. When not working on tracks for the album, they used up hours of tape and film in talking and jamming every kind of irrelevant number—fifties rock-’n’-roll classics, old Beatles tracks, current chart hits by other people, show tunes, comic songs, even nursery rhymes, around a hundred titles in all. “They didn’t care what I filmed because they were the producers and could cut anything they didn’t like,” Lindsay-Hogg remembers. “It all began to feel like Sartre’s play
No Exit
…characters trapped together in a room, uncertain why they were there and not knowing how to get out. There didn’t seem to be any way of stopping it.”

The only possible ending was for the Beatles to give the live performance they had originally intended, albeit at some venue nearer at hand than Tunisia or Egypt. Ringo suggested going back to their old Liverpool home, the Cavern club, but none of the others fancied such a sentimental journey. Weary of the whole subject, John was heard to mutter, “I’m warming to the idea of doing it in an asylum.”
The least bad option seemed to be the Roundhouse, a converted tram shed in Chalk Farm, which had become the London counterculture’s favorite auditorium. Then Lindsay-Hogg came up with an idea that combined maximum visual drama with minimum inconvenience. “One day when we were all having roast lamb in the Apple boardroom, I said why didn’t they do the show here, from their own roof? As we were in midwinter, it would have to be quite early in the day, before the light started to fail. I told them they should aim to make so much noise that George Martin would hear it over in St. John’s Wood.”

The roof of 3 Savile Row included a good-size flat portion accessible via the main stairs (as more than one casual visitor had demonstrated by stealing portions of valuable lead insulation and making off with it unchallenged). A quick inspection confirmed that it could easily accommodate a makeshift wooden stage and the requisite camera and sound-recording equipment. Besides shooting from chimney level, Lindsay-Hogg planned to hire a helicopter for aerial views like those of Shea Stadium in 1965. “I went to Paul and asked if it was OK. He answered, ‘That’s a yes’ with his thumb turned down and ‘That’s a no’ with his thumb turned up. Then I looked at John, who just nodded. I took that to be the say-so that mattered.”

The performance was scheduled to take place on the afternoon of Thursday, January 30. The day was unrelievedly dull and cold, with a biting wind and a suspicion of fog that ruled out the helicopter sequence. On Apple’s roof, the stage was prepared, the cameras were in position and about thirty spectators, friends or employees, had taken up vantage points on the surrounding walls and parapets; five stories below, the streets were crowded with unsuspecting passers-by. “About 10 minutes before we were due to start, all the Beatles were in a little room at the top of the stairs and it still wasn’t certain that they’d go ahead,” Lindsay-Hogg remembers. “George didn’t want to and Ringo started saying he didn’t really see the point. Then John said ‘Oh fuck—let’s do it.’”

H
is interview with
Disc and Music Echo
had appeared twelve days earlier and had spun and echoed around the world.
BEATLE BITES APPLE, FINDS WORM
, said
Variety
in the spirit of its
famous 1929 headline,
WALL STREET LAYS AN EGG
. Far from trying to tone down the vision of chaos and imminent insolvency he had shared with Ray Coleman, John repeated it to the other reporters who instantly besieged him, adding more and better particulars all the time. The choicest were given to
Rolling Stone
, the “serious” music paper that had recently begun publication from San Francisco. Apple had become such a drain on his personal resources, he told
Rolling Stone
, that he was “down to my last £50,000.” Though £50,000 was an enormous sum in 1969, and the estimate patently unrealistic (what about the constant top-up from songwriting royalties?), the notion of a cash-strapped Beatle caused universal amazement and consternation.

Paul, that tireless PR man, tried to downplay the story, fearful of the damage it would do to Apple’s credibility as a company, never mind the morale of 3 Savile Row’s many decent, conscientious employees. Bumping into Ray Coleman there, he berated the scoop getter for not having realized it was “just John shooting his mouth off” with customary disregard for consequences. On the contrary, the revelation had been timed for the moment when Paul’s chosen new broom, Lee and John Eastman, were poised to sweep into Apple. It could be read as an open invitation to rival candidates to step forward, if not a coded message to the one who actually did.

On January 28 John and Yoko kept a secret rendezvous at the Dorchester Hotel with the Rolling Stones’ manager, Allen Klein. A thirty-seven-year-old accountant from New Jersey, Klein had made a specialty of British pop acts with bankability in America, also controlling the Dave Clark Five, the Animals, Herman’s Hermits, and Donovan. In the transatlantic music world, he was renowned for the ferocity with which he negotiated recording contracts for his artistes, securing them large advances against royalties (something never yet done for the Beatles) and pursuing his commercial adversaries through the courts. Klein himself had no quarrel with his reputation as—in one British newspaper’s words—“the toughest wheeler-dealer in the pop jungle.” On his desk he kept a plaque, half-quoting Psalm 23: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil for I am the biggest motherfucker in the valley.”

Short and pudgy, with greased-back hair, somewhat like the forties
comedy star Lou Costello, he seemed the very last person with whom John could ever strike up a rapport. “But Allen was very clever,” Yoko says. “He knew all the lyrics of John’s songs. He just kept on quoting lyrics. He’d memorised them all. And that got John.”

Klein’s proposition, expressed in blunt, colorful New Jersey-ese, was simple. He would go into Apple, stem the hemorrhage of waste, and, by reorganizing the Beatles’ contracts in his usual style, make all four wealthier than they’d ever dreamed—wealthy enough, as he put it, to say, “F.Y.M., Fuck You, Money.” After the Eastmans’ Park Avenue preciousness, he seemed to John like the honest, unpretentious whiff of a downtown kosher deli. Nor was he one of the hated “men in suits,” being addicted to turtleneck sweaters (despite being severely challenged in the neck department) and cardigans with leather facings. The vibe grew still better when it emerged that his parents had separated when he was very young and that, just like John, he had spent much of his childhood in the care of an aunt. At the end of a couple of hours, John had made up his mind, and there and then dashed off a note to EMI’s chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood: “Dear Sir Joe—from now on, Allen Klein handles all my stuff.”

His Apple codirectors were not informed of his decision until a board meeting on the day after the rooftop concert. Paul was hopeful this might have reawakened the others’ appetite for playing together, and suggested they might follow it up with some further appearances at selected small venues on the ground. John bluntly told him to forget any such ideas, then went on to capsize the new-broom strategy the others regarded as virtually a done deal. “I don’t give a bugger what anyone else wants,” he said. “I’m having Allen Klein for me.”

John would not back down, and Paul could not. He was irrevocably committed not only to the Eastman law practice but the Eastman family, through his involvement with Lee Eastman’s daughter, Linda. Ironically, a year or two before, he had been strongly in favor of hiring Allen Klein to light a fire under EMI Records on the Beatles’ behalf. Now, after a hostile briefing on Klein from all three Eastmans, he would sooner have put himself in the hands of Jack the Ripper. With John resigned and forbearing no longer and Paul angry
that the Beatles’ traditional democratic spirit was being ignored—and atypically passionate and outspoken—this first-ever real quarrel between them was to prove fatal.

Despite John’s belligerently unilateralist tone, he knew that having one management for himself and another for the rest of the Beatles would be unworkable. The crucial question was how George and Ringo would take to Allen Klein. In the event, both were equally captivated by Klein’s down-to-earth manner and “Fuck You, Money” pledge, withdrawing their support from the Eastmans and aligning themselves behind John.

For now, an uneasy compromise was agreed to. John Eastman and Klein both moved into 3 Savile Row, ostensibly handling separate aspects of Apple business but in evident daggers-drawn competition. While their respective champions beavered away, John and Paul maintained an appearance of amity, though new tensions were bubbling under the surface. John clearly did not care overmuch for Linda, whom he regarded as little more than a spy for a hostile power. Paul thought that most unfair, considering the friendliness he felt he had shown to Yoko. Linda and Yoko found little in common, despite both being New Yorkers and divorcées with small daughters of similar ages. In contrast with John and Yoko’s low-key comings and goings, Paul liked to make an entrance with Linda, usually carrying her little girl, Heather, on his shoulders. “Here comes the Royal Family,” John would mutter as the stir of their arrival floated upstairs.

Klein played a clever game, always scrupulously giving Yoko the same respect and attention he did to John and putting their work together on the same level as the Beatles’. Though a veteran of a thousand bloody boardroom scraps, he refused let John Eastman rile him. The first meeting he had with Lee Eastman and the three in-the-bag Beatles, at Claridges Hotel, broke down when Eastman senior began shouting at him. The outburst had, in fact, been skillfully provoked by Klein to make Eastman look like a hysteric and himself like a stolid underdog. George, Ringo, and especially John sided with the underdog.

Klein also quickly found an arena in which to employ his fabled deal-making techniques and put the Eastmans’ noses out of joint.
Despite the establishment of Apple, the Beatles’ earnings continued to be paid into NEMS, the management company Brian Epstein had built around them—and in which he had given them a 10 percent stake. Late in 1968, faced by punitive taxes on Brian’s estate, his brother, Clive, and mother, Queenie, had no choice but to sell NEMS. John Eastman had put together a plan for the Beatles to acquire the company, helped by a £1 million loan from EMI. The Epstein family felt a moral obligation to consider no other offer, and the deal seemed a foregone conclusion.

With Klein and his reputation added to the mix, however, Clive and Queenie Epstein took fright and on February 17 sold out to a firm of London merchant bankers. There followed a protracted battle in the High Court over whether the Beatles’ earnings in future should be channeled through NEMS’s new owners or paid directly into Apple. Klein managed to sideline John Eastman and conclude a settlement that, if it did not win NEMS for the Beatles, at least broke its hold over them. The new owners would buy out their 10 percent share and cease receiving their income, and levying commission, in exchange for a lump sum to be paid from future EMI royalties.

The brickbats thrown at Klein by the British press during the NEMS affair only hardened John’s support and loyalty. Friends in the music business who begged him to think again all received equally short shrift. Even that least altruistic of pop stars, Mick Jagger, phoned one day and offered to brief him on the Rolling Stones’ growing disillusionment with their manager. But when Jagger arrived in Apple’s boardroom to see John, he found Klein also sitting around the table. Never one for confrontation, Mick departed without unburdening himself.

Having tried various forms of facial hair since
Sgt. Pepper
and India, John now grew a long, bushy beard, weirdly similar to his joke disguise in
Help!
Its effect was to transform a face that never looked serious into one that looked nothing else. Framed by shoulder-length hair, it gave him a permanently tragic and aggrieved expression, like the stylized Christs in religious imagery of his boyhood—though he had only to open his densely whiskered mouth for the same old John to be instantly resurrected.

With Yoko he was discovering a new kind of live performance, arousing reactions very different from the joyous, uncritical Beatlemaniac screams that so used to disgust him. The two had made their debut together at the Alchemical Wedding, a Christmas party for London’s avant-garde art community at the Royal Albert Hall on December 18. They appeared onstage together hidden inside a large white sack, making no sound but writhing energetically. This was Yoko’s concept of “Bagism,” inspired by the dictum of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s cult novel
The Little Prince
: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. The essential is invisible to the eye.”