Shout! (70 page)

The chief deterrent, as Paul himself acknowledged, was simple stage fright. It had been more than two years since the Beatles last faced an audience together. In that time, only John had given anything like a live performance, in the
Rock ’n’ Roll Circus
film. He had also appeared at the Alchemical Wedding, a Christmas rally of Britain’s hippies, mystics, and dropouts, though that merely meant sitting with Yoko inside a plastic bag on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall.

Paul kept up the pressure, reminding them of stage fright successfully overcome in the past. Hadn’t it been the same when they suddenly took a step up from Liverpool and Hamburg clubs to the grandeur of Leicester’s de Monfort hall? And when they had made the quantum leap from the London Palladium to Shea Stadium? John and Ringo seemed persuadable but not George. Nothing, he said, could make him go back to the witless screaming and frantic running of the Beatlemania years. Paul agreed that going back on tour in the old way would be unendurable. They would play only a few, carefully selected live dates; perhaps only a single one. “But we’ve got to keep that contact somehow. And it’s what we do best.”

In the end, they agreed on a compromise. Rather than giving a live performance, they would make an album that was like a live performance—an album shorn of all studio artifice, reliant only on their abilities as singers and musicians, simple and powerful and honest enough to reach back over the years to their original, punching power in the Cavern Club. To underline the point, they went to George Martin—now a freelance producer, soon to launch his own independent AIR studios—and asked, or rather begged, him to work for them again. It was their obvious sincerity rather than any fee that persuaded Martin to put his new career on hold and try to re-create the spontaneity and honesty of the
Please Please Me
album. “They said they wanted to go right back to basics,” Martin says. “They wouldn’t use any overdubbing. They’d do the songs just as they happened.”

The simple resolve of four musicians, however, was now subject to the complexities of Apple Corps, and its still unused subsidiaries, Apple Films and Apple Publishing. It was decided that the making of the album must be made into a film, and that film and record sessions should be described in an illustrated book to accompany each album. The climax of the film would be the live performance Paul wanted, at a location still to be decided.

The arrival of a film crew, led by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, gave additional scope to Paul’s ideas. At one point, with Lindsay-Hogg’s encouragement, he proposed giving the concert in a Tunisian amphitheater; at another, he suggested making the whole album live in Los Angeles. George vetoed both suggestions as “very expensive and insane.” Another of Paul’s schemes was to record at sea, onboard an ocean liner. George objected that the acoustics would be impossible and that, anyway, they’d need two liners rather than one. As the argument flew back and forth, John was heard to mutter, “I’m warming to the idea of doing it in an asylum.”

The project’s working title—symbolic of their desire to rediscover their roots—was
Get Back
. At John’s suggestion, they even posed for a photograph looking down from the same balcony as on the cover of their first chirpy, working-class LP.

Rehearsals began on January 2, 1969, at one end of a cavernous soundstage at Twickenham film studios. Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s camera crew were already in position to film Mal Evans, the perennial roadie, carrying in amplifiers and cymbal stands, and Paul testing the
grand piano, still in his hobo-ish tweed coat, a half-eaten apple before him on the polished lid.

The cameras ran on as Paul, each morning, strove to make the other Beatles forget their dismal surroundings, the unaccustomed daylight playing, and the constant, numb-fingered cold. His resemblance to a schoolmaster grew, even as the class grew more plainly recalcitrant. “Okay—right. Er—Okay, let’s try to move on.” He went and sat with George, as with a backward and also stubborn pupil, tracing with his arm the sequence he wanted George to play. “You see, it’s got to come down like that. There shouldn’t be any recognizable jumps. It helps if you sing it. Like this—”

Resentment was not yet in the open. Paul worked conscientiously to provide a falsetto counterpoint to John’s “Across the Universe.” John played chords as instructed to a pretty little Paul tune that would one day become “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” They even, spasmodically, enjoyed themselves. John got up, and Yoko did not follow him: Paul and he sang “Two of Us,” burlesquing like teenage Quarry Men. When George played over “I Me Mine,” a new song in turgid waltz time, Paul and Ringo tackled it gamely. John and Yoko, two white-clad figures in gym shoes, waltzed to it together across the cable-strewn floor.

As well as the new material, they continually ran through old songs from Liverpool and Hamburg: the Chuck Berry and Elvis and Little Richard songs they had always played to warm up before performing or recording. They even resurrected a Quarry Men song, “The One After 909,” written by John and Paul on truant afternoons in Jim McCartney’s sitting-room with the Chinese pagoda wallpaper and the
Liverpool Echos
piled under the dresser. “We always hated the words to that one,” Paul said. “‘Move over once, move over twice. Hey, baby, don’t be cold as ice…’ They’re great, really, aren’t they?”

Whatever glow these memories awoke soon died again in the cold and general discomfort. Nor did playing the old songs seem to bring the new songs any nearer to satisfying Paul. “We’ve been going round and round for an hour,” he complained wearily at one point. “I think it’s a question of either we do it or we go home.”

As Paul talked to George, a row started. “I always hear myself—annoying you,” Paul said. “Look, I’m not trying to
get
you. I’m just saying ‘Look, lads—the band. Shall we do it like this?’”

“Look, I’ll play whatever you want me to play,” George cut in. His
voice silting with resentment, he continued: “Or I won’t play at all. Whatever it is that’ll please you, I’ll do it.”

At lunchtime on January 10, George said he had had enough. He was tired of being “got at” by Paul. He was quitting the Beatles, he said. He got into his car and drove home to Esher.

It was a temporary flare-up, and recognized as such. George knew, and the others did, that he could never resign with an album half-finished. And, sure enough, when a business meeting took place at Ringo’s a few days later, George turned up as usual. Work on the album resumed after Paul promised not to get at George or try to teach him the guitar. And, they all agreed, they had had enough of Twickenham studios. They decided to move straight into their own studio—the one that Magic Alex had been designing and assembling in the basement of the Apple house.

George Martin had already visited the basement but found the studio unready, lacking a console. It could be made fit for recording only by silencing the air conditioner, which thumped and wheezed in the corner, and by bringing in heavy consignments of rented sound equipment. This done, the Beatles and their film crew tried again. Billy Preston, a gifted American performer who was George’s protégé, joined the sessions as organist. What with the film crew, and this or that friend and acolyte, there was scarcely room in the basement to move. Yoko sat by John, as always, reading or embroidering. When Paul arrived—managing to make an entrance even through that narrow basement door-way—he brought Linda’s little daughter, Heather, riding on his shoulders.

The album that would finally be released as
Let It Be
in fact contained only the tiniest fraction of what the Beatles recorded in that crowded basement during January 1969. More than a hundred songs, by every artist they had ever admired or copied, and also from every epoch of their own career, piled up on spools destined never to be released, or even listened to, again. It was as if, to rediscover themselves as musicians, they were putting themselves through the kind of endurance test that Hamburg used to be, seeking to renew themselves with music that stretched back to their collective birth. They even recorded “Maggie May,” the Liverpool sailors’ shanty that John sang at the Woolton fete that day in 1957 when Paul McCartney cycled across from Allerton to meet him.

It was after they stopped jamming and returned to today’s material that the breakdown always came. Determined to be “honest,” to forsake all artifice, they still wanted from George Martin what he had always given them: a flawless final product. “We’d do sixty different takes of something,” Martin says. “On the sixty-first take, John would say, ‘How was that one, George?’ I’d say, ‘John—I honestly don’t know.’ ‘You’re no fookin’ good then are you,’ he’d say. That was the general atmosphere.”

Ironically, the best and happiest song on the finished album was one that grew out of random studio ad-libbing. Paul gave it the shorthand name “Loretta”: Only later did it receive the album’s original title of “Get Back.” Several versions of Paul’s vocal were taped, including one that sarcastically made “Get Back” a warning to Asian immigrants in the tones of the racist lobby inspired by Enoch Powell. Another featured John as lead singer, giving the song a bitter drive and bite that even Paul’s best version lacked. Halfway through the John version, both he and Paul suddenly tailed off into silence: It was Ringo, redeeming himself at last in George Martin’s eyes, whose quick-witted drum solo forced them back again on target.

The film crew, with twenty-eight hours of footage, finally packed up and left. The Beatles themselves did so a few days later, leaving behind an aural rag-bag that not even Paul could face hearing, let alone editing down to fourteen songs. John was all for putting out the album as it stood: a confession of their own internal chaos. “It’ll tell people, ‘This is us with our trousers off, so will you please end the game now?’”

For the benefit of the film crew, they had already given their much debated live performance—not in Tunisia or L.A. or on an oceangoing liner, but on one arbitrarily chosen afternoon on the roof of the Apple house. In keeping with the atmosphere of reticence and self-deprecation, no one knew about the event but their own employees and a few close friends. They little realized they were creating yet another scene to be replayed, and many times imitated, in decades to come, as passersby stopped to stare up in amazement at the electric din erupting in the sky; as traffic between the custom tailors’ shops ground to a halt; as policemen appeared, at last, from nearby Savile Row station; as the law decided it must put a stop to it, and a thickset sergeant crossed the road to knock sternly at Apple’s white front door.

• • •

It was, in fact, a British music paper,
Disc
, that had first broken the story now blazoned all over American
Rolling Stone
: “John Lennon Says Beatles In Cash Crisis.”
Disc’s
editor Ray Coleman, a longtime Beatles follower and friend, later received an angry dressing-down from Paul on the stairs at Apple for having run the original piece. “This is only a small company and you’re trying to wreck it,” Paul shouted. “You know John shoots his mouth off and doesn’t mean it.” Coleman had been close to the Beatles long enough to recognize what was off or on the record.

So it proved when the world’s press poured over the Apple threshold, asking for further and better particulars. John confirmed what he had told Ray Coleman—that Apple was losing some twenty thousand pounds a week to its myriad hangers-on, and that he personally calculated he was “down to my last £50,000.” George, as a rule the closest one in money matters, was equally willing to talk. “We’ve been giving away too much to the wrong people—like the deaf and the blind,” George said. “This place has become a haven for drop-outs. The trouble is, some of our best friends are drop-outs.”

The story that the Beatles were going broke somewhat abated the Apple orgy. It also placed the honest, and rather underpaid, regular staff members under the same stigma as predatory Hell’s Angels and larcenous visitors. Paul, in a thoughtful PR gesture, sent round a morale-boosting letter to all Apple artists and employees: “In case you’re worried about anything at Apple, please feel free to write me a letter, telling me about the problem. There’s no need to be formal. Just say it. Incidentally, things are going well, so thanks—love, Paul.”

The news that Allen Klein, the Rolling Stones’ manager, was in London and wanted to see the Beatles with a view to helping them, did not at first seem vastly portentous. When Klein’s first call reached Apple, they were still immured at Twickenham studios, refusing to see anyone. It was simply another message from the hundreds left hanging in the psychedelic twilight of Derek Taylor’s press office. “Allen Klein! What the fuck does he want, man?” “How the fuck should I know?”

That Klein’s message should have reached John Lennon was surprising enough. What was still more surprising was John’s instant agreement to meet him, as requested, at Klein’s suite in the Dorchester Hotel. John went without telling the other Beatles, accompanied only by Yoko, and, as he later admitted, petrified with nerves.

Klein played the scene perfectly, meeting John and Yoko alone in his
room, wearing a sweater and sneakers, the nearest to their hippie threads that he could muster. Having expected a one-dimensional businessman, John found a fan of more than usual devotion, for Klein knew by heart every Beatles song dating back to the very start of their career. He showed an instinctive grasp of the Beatles’ peculiar problems, and had clear and forceful proposals for remedying them. He impressed John with his straightforward manner and the blunt New York wit that put him spiritually not far from a Liverpudlian. The fact that he, too, had lost his mother in early childhood and been boarded out with an aunt cemented the bond between them.

By the end of that first meeting John had made up his mind. There and then he wrote a note to EMI’s chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood: “Dear Sir Joe—from now on, Allen Klein handles all my stuff.”

Sir Joseph read the note with a bewilderment shared by others to whom John announced his adoption of Allen Klein. For so far as their closest associates knew, the Beatles had already decided on the man who would rescue them and Apple Corps from chaos.