The Beatles (157 page)

As far as Paul knew, even as he began this novel adventure, the other three Beatles had already moved on to other projects that expressed their newfound independence. Ringo segued from his brief self-doubt right into making an album of standards—“
songs Ringo likes
and his parents love,” according to an Apple press release—called
Sentimental Journey
with the assistance of George Martin, while George produced records on Apple for Billy Preston and Doris Troy. In his spare time, George even played a few dates as part of Delaney and Bonnie’s funk band, shuffling onstage anonymously and without fanfare, which rekindled his enthusiasm for performing. There were no expectations other than playing music that really rocked—and, better yet, no screaming, ducking, police escorts, helicopters, and running for one’s life. The experience proved so satisfying that it led George to admit: “
I’d like to do it with the Beatles
, but not on the old scale, that’s the only drag.” His preference, he said, would be to model it loosely on “Delaney and Bonnie, with… a few more singers and a few trumpets, saxes, organ, and all that.”

John was another story altogether. By late fall his and Yoko’s life together had become a traveling carnival of put-ons and misbehavior, rhetoric, and activism. No opportunity to grab headlines, no matter how inane or scandalous, went unexplored. After Yoko suffered yet another miscarriage that nearly took her life, the couple went on a tear of public misadventure that stretched out into the following year. To set the scene, they staged a four-hour retrospective of their self-produced films at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Under cover of darkness, a “
frequently perplexed audience
” watched unending footage from
Two Virgins, John and Yoko’s
Honeymoon, Rape,
and
Self-Portrait,
the latter of which featured John “smiling beatifically while bird, traffic, and airline noises are heard on the soundtrack.” A week later they announced plans to help fund and launch the
Peace,
a 570-ton Dutch freighter converted into a pirate radio station that was to anchor outside the territorial waters of Israel and Egypt, from where it would broadcast news, political commentary, and music. And following that, they released
The Wedding Album,
a lavishly decorated box set of mementos from their marriage ceremony along with an LP that contained one whole side of John and Yoko screaming each other’s name.

It didn’t stop there. Despite John’s concerns that the Beatles were going broke, he
gave away Dor Inis
, an island off County Mayo in Ireland that he bought as an investment in 1966, offering it free to a group of “dropouts and nonconformists” called the London Street Commune. He and Yoko “donated” tens of thousands of pounds to the Black House, the London headquarters of the militant black power movement, via
his drug dealer Michael X
.

Then, in perhaps the most unexpected and bizarre twist, John sent his chauffeur, Les Anthony, to Buckingham Palace to return his Order of the British Empire to the Queen, accompanied by a flippant note typed on Bag Productions stationery that read: “I am returning the M.B.E. in protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts.” British citizens were outraged by his gesture, which they considered a public relations gimmick at the most, and at the very least, disrespectful. A diabolical-looking picture of John and Yoko, smugly holding an identical letter sent to Prime Minister Wilson that appeared in every major newspaper the next day, only boosted public scorn. John told a BBC correspondent that he’d been “
mulling it over
for a few years.” In an eerily delivered rejoinder, he muttered: “Really shouldn’t have taken it. Felt I had sold out. I must get rid of it. I kept saying, ‘I must get rid of it.’ So I did. Wanted to get rid of it by 1970 anyway.” He said he had been waiting for “an event to tie up with it,” and while he sided with neither Nigeria nor Biafra, he was “beginning to be ashamed of being British.”

By saying that, John had finally crossed the line. Even George Harrison admitted the public now viewed John as “
a lunatic or something
.” If he wasn’t off his rocker, as many suspected, he had lost their unconditional respect. The
Daily Mirror
went so far as to name John “
Clown of the Year
” for 1969.

In January 1970 John recorded a new Plastic Ono Band single, “Instant Karma,” with Phil Spector overseeing the production. An all-out rocker with a great hook and sharp percussive accents playing against John’s raw, agitated vocal, Spector layered it with his trademark “wall of sound” to give the track a heavy, haunting swell, then “
mixed [it] instantly
,” practically on the spot, so as not to lose the incredible energy. It was a powerful piece of music-making straight out of John’s Cavern and Kaiserkeller handbag, which to his ears sounded “
fantastic… like there were fifty people
playing.” It was honest, thrashing, concussive rock ’n roll. In fact, it was exactly the sound he’d described to George Martin when they set out to record
Let It Be.

Perhaps there was still hope for that as well. John’s enthusiasm over the single led Allen Klein to hire Spector to remix the tapes of
Let It Be.
“None of us could face remixing them,” John recalled. They’d been moldering in the can, untouched, for almost a year. Letting Spector have a pass at them, “
to tidy up some of the tracks
,” so to speak, might salvage the abandoned session. George and Ringo voiced no objection, and since Paul hadn’t signed the management agreement, they saw no reason to seek his approval. In fact, Paul knew nothing about it until a remixed test pressing of “The Long and Winding Road,” which Allen Klein chose as the first single, arrived at his house along with a note from Klein explaining that the changes were necessary. “I couldn’t believe it,” Paul told Ray Connolly in an interview published shortly thereafter in the
Evening Standard.
It was the same acoustic track he’d written and sung on, but “with harps, horns, an orchestra, and women’s choir added.” Someone had come in and tampered with his music—the first time
that
had ever happened.

Paul was offended by it and enraged, not only by the remix but that it had been done behind his back.
He threatened to sue Klein
until John Eastman advised him that it was pointless. To make matters worse, Paul was informed in a handwritten memo from John and George that his solo album, which had been given an April 17 release date, would have to be pushed back to June 4 to make room for
Let It Be
and its accompanying documentary film, which United Artists was releasing the following month. “
It’s stupid for Apple
to put out two big albums within 7 days of each other,” they wrote him, “so we sent a letter to EMI telling them to hold your release date…. It’s nothing personal.”

Nothing personal!

That did it, that was the last straw, according to Paul. “
From my point of view
, I was getting done in,” he recalled. “All the decisions were now
three against one.” Instead of complying, however, instead of following the idea of “majority rules,” he dug in his heels. He would not agree, insisting that Apple hold to the original plan.

The other Beatles tried to ameliorate the situation in a series of frantic phone calls, but it was hopeless. “I had an understanding,” Paul insisted, refusing to budge off the mark.
He even called Joe Lockwood
at EMI to complain that he was being sabotaged. On every side, it seemed, they had reached an impasse. Klein convinced the others that Paul’s solo album would confuse the public and dilute the impact of
Let It Be,
and perhaps he was right. Either way, they weren’t about to let that happen. Finally, as the release date loomed, Paul offered an alternative way out of the mess. He called George, in his capacity as an officer of the company, and said, “
I want to get off the label
.” Replied George: “You’ll stay on the fucking label. Hare Krishna.” And he hung up.

Still, it didn’t end there. With the release date now only weeks away, the others decided they had to confront Paul directly in an effort to change his mind. One of them was recruited to go ring his doorbell and reach a compromise. “
Unfortunately, it was Ringo
,” Paul recalled. The gentlest of the Beatles, the only one who never uttered a bad word about his bandmates, who genuinely loved the others and wanted only their love in return, Ringo appeared at Cavendish Avenue with a letter from the group. “
We want you to put your release date
back, it’s for the good of the group,” he told Paul, who went blind with rage. Paul finally snapped and in an interview a week later said, “
I called him everything under the sun
.” He gave poor Ringo a royal tongue-lashing, backing him helplessly against a wall and shaking a finger in his face as all the bitterness and frustration came hurling out. Paul has said in subsequent interviews that it almost came to blows—“
it was near enough
,” he admitted—but just before things reached that point, he came to his senses and simply threw Ringo out.

An alternative offer, although generous, put Paul in an untenable position: in order to release his solo album first, the Beatles insisted he sign the management contract. He flat-out refused. Finally, Ringo threw up his hands in surrender. George Harrison, perhaps out of frustration, also relented. He persuaded the others to let Paul have his way. But overall, George stuck to his belief that Paul “was just trying to grab a bit of the momentum,” much as he’d always done. He was just being Paul, an egomaniac, out for himself.

By the end of April 1970, everyone knew it was all over. The only unresolved issue was: Who would spill the beans? Who would go public first? John, more than anyone, had already distanced himself from the Beatles, and he’d told friends that he’d left the group for good. As far as he cared, “
there was no common goal
anymore,” nothing to keep him tied to the past. But for whatever reason, he chose not to announce it to the press.

Paul, however, couldn’t resist. Peter Brown was pressing Paul to do some selective interviews for the launch of his new solo album, to no avail. Paul was bitter, despondent. He wasn’t in any mood to put a good face on the Beatles’ breakup and he didn’t want to face the press with anything but his best. He couldn’t bear to answer the same nagging question: Are you happy? Even hearing it, he admitted, “
almost made me cry
.” In lieu of interviews, Brown suggested an old Brian Epstein tactic: a homemade questionnaire. He’d pose a series of mundane questions that Paul could answer, with some forethought and at his leisure.

Of course, Paul went him one better: they would include it along with the album’s liner notes, as an insert, perhaps, in copies that were sent out for review. Little did Brown suspect what Paul was really up to.

The
Daily Mirror
headline shot around the world:
PAUL LEAVES THE BEATLES.
Newspapers everywhere quickly picked up the story. “
Beatle Paul McCartney confirmed today
that he has broken with the Beatles—but ‘did not know’ if it was temporary or permanent.’… He said he was not in
contact with manager Alan [sic] Klein ‘and he does not represent me in any way.’ ” The rest of the article used everything Paul provided in his “questions and answers” survey to defend the breakup.

What did John have to say about this? Connolly rang him for comment about three the next afternoon, when he finally awoke, and filled him in on the events. “
He was cross
about it,” Connolly remembers. He had no idea Paul was going public and was furious that he had been scooped. “Oh, Christ,” John swore, “he gets all the credit for it!”

For an instant, Paul’s announcement brought everything to a standstill. A lucid stillness filled the void. The music fell silent. All the tension melted away, the demands of unimaginable superstardom ceased. For the moment, the world as they knew it stopped spinning, seemed perfectly at peace. As the Beatles, they had been to the toppermost of the poppermost. They had encountered the crowds, heard the screams, felt the love.
Saw the light.
In a brief and shining interval, they had lived a dream that no Liverpool lad could imagine—a magical, fabulous dream, like out of a fairy tale. An unforgettable dream. “
It was wonderful and it’s over
,” John affirmed to all those waiting for a sign. “And so, dear friends, you’ll just have to carry on. The Dream Is Over.”