John Lennon: The Life (80 page)

Thus, the song that represented John’s first break for freedom ended up being credited to Lennon and McCartney and released in the United Kingdom as an extra springtime Beatles single on May 30, while “Get Back” was still number one. Thus, thanks to pairing with an indifferent George Harrison song, “Old Brown Shoe,” the truant had his first A-side with the band in two years, and a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. And thus it seemed that in his escapades with beds and bags, the other three stood as solidly behind him as ever.

L
ennon and McCartney’s truce over “The Ballad of John and Yoko” ended well before the single came out. Early in May,
John went to Paul, backed by George and Ringo, and asked for his signature alongside theirs on the management contract Allen Klein had drawn up. Paul conceded defeat but, reluctant to let Klein reel them in with such apparent ease, suggested trying to reduce his commission from the 20 percent he was asking. The deputation said there was no time for further argument, as Klein had to fly back to New York that same day and present a fully ratified contract to his “board.” Paul saw this as just a ruse to pressure them: Klein was a virtual one-man band in his company, ABKCO Industries, and, anyway, they were just coming up to a weekend, so nothing needed be done until the following Monday. There was a heated argument, which ended with Paul saying “Fuck off” and the other three walking out.

The following week, discussions reopened on a calmer note. Paul accepted the majority decision to hire Klein, with the proviso that his 20 percent would not extend to the Beatles’ earnings from Capitol Records in America. When he negotiated a new royalty rate with Capitol, later that year, he would receive 20 percent only on the increase. Even now, Paul did not actually sign the management agreement. Nor did he acknowledge that Klein had any personal sway over him as an individual and—emphatically not—as a musician. For such advice and guidance as he sought in these areas, he continued to turn to his new father-in-law and brother-in-law, Lee and John Eastman, and, increasingly, to his wife, Linda.

The immediate effect was to make him lose all interest in the organization he above all had wanted to bring into existence and had worked so hard, on so many fronts, to maintain. His pride hurt more than his smiley face ever let on, he retreated with Linda and little Heather behind the walls of his London house or to his Scottish farm near the Mull of Kintyre.

With all opposition now removed, Klein went through Apple like a Rottweiler through a basket of newborn puppies, slashing costs, axing idealistic or unproductive projects like the Apple school, the Apple Foundation for the Arts, Apple Films, and Apple Electronics, firing all staff members he deemed nonessential, creating an atmosphere of terror and insecurity that was normal to American business
but still almost unknown in Britain. That many marked for termination considered themselves personal friends of John or George, as much as large-salaried and expense-accounted employees, made no difference. Apple Records’ top man, Ron Kass, was instantly let go, even though his division represented the company’s one undoubted commercial success. The head of A&R, Peter Asher, resigned out of loyalty to Kass, taking with him a soon-to-be monster moneymaker, James Taylor. Concerned that, here and elsewhere, Klein seemed to be throwing out the baby with the bathwater, Neil Aspinall protested to John, but even he received short shrift. Back came a telegram that seemed to take little account of Neil’s longtime loyalty and selflessness. “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” it said.

Klein’s powers turned out to have some limits. Derek Taylor, the Apple press officer, was too much beloved of John—never mind the press—for Klein to try to unseat him or seriously curb the daily carnival that went on in his office. And Aspinall soon found that his years of loyalty were not as undervalued as he had thought. “One day in the boardroom, Klein tried to make me sign a contract while John and Yoko were sitting at the table,” he would remember, “I’d never had any kind of written contract with the Beatles, and I wasn’t going to start now. I got up and started dodging round the table and Klein chased me, waving this piece of paper. When he got to John and Yoko, John put out a hand and stopped him. ‘Look at all the trouble I got into, signing bits of paper.’ John said. ‘He’s not stupid. Leave Neil alone!’”

Ron Kass’s departure had left vacant an elegant, high-ceilinged office on the ground floor, looking into Savile Row. This now became a self-contained headquarters for John and Yoko where the pair would develop their own film and musical projects and continue the momentum of their recent European travels. They formed a company named Bag Productions, hired their own art adviser, a critic and exhibition organizer named Anthony Fawcett, and announced open house.

After the bed-in, every pacifist organization in the world was avid for John’s suggestions on how to publicize their message with similar effect. Among those who requested his input was the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), whose mass rallies and marches on nuclear bases had made headlines in the late fifties, but had since greatly declined in newsworthiness. John suggested a promotional strategy that certainly would have won it more attention: “You’ve got women in your movement. Sell sex for peace.” He received countless invitations to address conferences and seminars, but declined them all because formal speechmaking had never been his bag, and also on the perfectly sincere grounds that “I’m a shy guy under all this madness.”

Apple’s staff were expected to work for Bag Productions also, carrying out assignments that sometimes made Beatle whims seem almost routine. Picking up the theme of their Coventry Cathedral exhibit, John and Yoko decided to present every major world leader with two acorns to bury as a symbol of peace. Since this was springtime and oak trees do not yield their crop until autumn, a nationwide search for secondhand acorns had to be made. Leading philosophers and thinkers, among them the nonogenarian Bertrand Russell, had to be contacted and asked for support. “Think of it as a pop song,” John said. “You’ve got to have a great catchphrase and the catchphrase is ‘Acorns for peace.’”

He was aware of the jokes and cruel nicknames that Yoko inspired around Apple and, on his angrier days, believed the whole house to be colluding to undermine their projects. On May 9, they released a second album of sonic experimentation,
Unfinished Music No. 3—Life with the Lions
. This nod to John’s childhood radio favorite,
Life with the Lyons
, was the only lighthearted touch. The contents included a recording of his gig with Yoko at Cambridge in February, and the brief heartbeat of the baby they had lost four months earlier. The front cover showed Yoko in bed at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, with John next to her on the floor where he had slept. The back-cover image was a press photograph of them being mobbed outside Marylebone Magistrates Court after John’s drug conviction.

Life with the Lions
did not come out on Apple but on Zapple, a subsidiary label dedicated to poetry-and prose-reading, run by the Indica Gallery’s Barry Miles and miraculously still unmauled by Klein. It clearly was never going to get much radio play beyond John
Peel’s esoteric
Night Ride
program on the BBC. Nonetheless, John was furious with Apple’s promotion department for not doing more to plug it.

He might have merged his name with Yoko’s, mingling letter
o
’s like red corpuscles, but in the public’s mind it was still indivisibly joined to that of his former creative other half. The Lennon-McCartney song catalog was the richest storehouse of universally adored music ever created. Northern Songs, the public company that controlled it, ranked with Shell Oil, Ford Motors, and the other most enduring chart-toppers on the London Stock Exchange. Behind that simple, rain-on-cobblestones name were 129 Lennon-McCartney song copyrights, many now ranked as classics alongside the best of Cole Porter or Irving Berlin.

Northern was still run by Dick James, the small-beer publisher who had set it up around John and Paul after a single hearing of “Please Please Me” in 1962. So long as Lennon gave an appearance of being as house-trained as McCartney, the future of Northern Songs was rosy. But once John’s individuality asserted itself and a threat to that golden stream of hits was perceived, the share price began to wobble alarmingly. In March 1969, Dick James’s nerves could stand no more and, without any advance warning, he sold his 23 percent stake for £1 million to the television mogul Lew Grade, whose ATV corporation already owned 12 percent. With 35 percent now under their belt, Grade and ATV had announced a £9.5 million bid for the rest of the company.

The news had come when John was in bed in Amsterdam and Paul enjoying a more conventional honeymoon in America. Despite their disagreement on other issues, they were united in fury against James for having sold them down the river without even the courtesy of a warning. The managerial duel between John Eastman and Allen Klein at this point was still far from resolved, but once again Klein took the initiative, putting forward a strategy for Apple to snatch Northern Songs from Lew Grade’s open jaws. At present, John and Paul each owned 15 percent of the company, and another token 1.6 percent was held jointly by George and Ringo. Klein’s plan was to offer £2 million for the 20 percent that would secure them a
hair’s-breadth majority stake. The money was to come from a firm of merchant bankers on collateral including John’s entire holding in Northern, 650,000 shares. While these arrangements were going forward, it emerged that, on Eastman’s advice, Paul had quietly increased his own holding to 750,000 shares, which would form no part of the collateral. John was vociferously upset by what he saw as Paul’s underhanded behavior and selfishness.

By mid-May, it seemed as if they were going to win. Apple had found enough allies to secure that vital extra 20 percent, most crucially a City consortium that currently held 14 percent. A delicate deal was in place, stipulating among other things that Klein would have no part in the new Northern’s management structure and that John and Paul would extend their creative involvement beyond the present expiration date of 1973. Then, at a crucial meeting with the consortium’s representatives, John lost his temper and announced he was “sick of being fucked around by men in suits, sitting on their fat arses in the City.” The offended suits instantly switched allegiance to ATV, Lew Grade gained control of Northern Songs, and Lennon-McCartney’s catalog became a pass-the-parcel prize that would be handed down the decades, increasing stupendously in value each time it was unwrapped.

B
etween May 26 and June 2, John and Yoko staged a second bed-in. They originally planned to do it in America on a mission that would also include visiting the country’s new Republican president, Richard Nixon, and presenting him with two acorns to bury for peace. The rest of that painstakingly gathered crop had been put into little boxes, labeled with the names of other world leaders, such as China’s Mao Tse-tung and the Soviet Union’s Leonid Brezhnev, who were likewise to be invited to forget warfare and oppression, choose a plot of earth, unwrap their acorns, pick up a spade, and get digging. John wanted to take the boxes to the United Nations building in New York where the emissaries of every leader, except China’s, could be found “in a pile.” Those that could not be handed over personally at the UN would be mailed.

The original plan was for him and Yoko to cross the Atlantic on
the Cunard company’s brand-new
Queen Elizabeth II
liner, with Ringo and Maureen Starr, Derek and Joan Taylor, Peter Sellers, and the writer Terry Southern as fellow voyagers. En route to Southampton to board the
QE2
, John was called on his car telephone and told that, because of his drug conviction, he had been refused an American visa. As Joan Taylor remembers, he shrugged philosophically and told Derek and her to go on without him, little guessing how much more of this was to come.

Even then, he suspected the reason was not his—very mild—drug offense so much as his widely quoted criticism of the Vietnam War and, still more pertinently, the fact that he’d written a song entitled “Revolution.” At the time, other British pop stars with drug convictions were being granted American visas with little or no problem, most recently the folksinger Donovan. “The States are afraid we’re going to go over there and rouse the kids up, which we don’t intend to do at all,” he insisted. “We intend to calm it down, you know. I think the States needs us, and we can help.”

Barred from mainland America, the peace missionaries decided to “do a Cuba” and beam in their message from the nearby Bahamas—which, being a British territory, presented no passport difficulties. They traveled to Freeport on Grand Bahama Island but were repulsed by the heat and the unpleasantness of the hotel offered to them, so decided on Canada instead. Not only was it next door to America, but its British heritage would, hopefully, make it a more tolerant and relaxed host. In the event, Canada refused John’s visa application on the same grounds as had the United States, but there at least he would be allowed entry and several days grace to lodge an appeal. He and Yoko flew to Toronto, accompanied by Kyoko and Derek Taylor, then made their way to their chosen venue, the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal.

An early opportunity arose for John to prove he had not come to North America to “rouse the kids up.” At the University of California, Berkeley, students were in open revolt and heavily armed police had been sent onto the campus to restore order. A radio link was arranged between some of the protest’s leaders and the giver of that blanket promise, “You can count me in.” But instead he delivered a
passionate appeal to them not to resort to violence and to maintain self-control, whatever the police provocation. “Sing Hare Krishna or something, but don’t move around if it aggravates the pigs. Don’t get hassled by the cops and don’t play their games.”