Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!, page 18
George Harrison in 1969. © MIRRORPIX
Eventually John agreed to “give it a couple of months” so that they could work out some kind of strategy and to keep an open mind about the group. Music might help them patch things up. So they began work on another album, with a film crew shooting footage of the recording sessions for a future television documentary. But by the second week of rehearsals, tensions were at an all-time high. Ringo and George were bored; John wasn’t into it. Only Paul was charged up at the sessions, choosing the songs, directing the cameraman, working to fire up the other Beatles’ enthusiasm. Now it was George’s turn to let anger show, and during a tense session at which Paul badgered him about how to play a simple guitar solo, George finally snapped. What am I doing here? he wondered. He packed up his guitar, banging the case shut with sharp, angry blows. “That’s it. I’m out of here.” And he stomped out.
George did not return at all that day or the next. John suggested replacing him with Eric Clapton, but it was pointless for them to continue without him. Finally, he agreed to return, but only if the others would work on the new album in a studio they were building at Apple. With George Martin’s help, they got the place into working condition and began to jam like mad. “The facilities at Apple were great,” Ringo recalled. “It was so comfortable and it was ours, like home.”
The Beatles’
#1 US Hit Singles
1.“Love Me Do”
2.“From Me to You”
3.“She Loves You”
4.“I Want to Hold Your Hand”
5.“Can’t Buy Me Love”
6.“A Hard Day’s Night”
7.“I Feel Fine”
8.“Eight Days a Week”
9.“Ticket to Ride”
10.“Help!”
11.“Yesterday”
12.“Day Tripper”
13.“We Can Work It Out”
14.“Paperback Writer”
15.“Yellow Submarine”
16.“Eleanor Rigby”
17.“Penny Lane”
18.“All You Need Is Love”
19.“Hello Goodbye”
20.“Lady Madonna”
21.“Hey Jude”
22.“Get Back”
23.“The Ballad of John and Yoko”
24.“Something”
25.“Come Together”
26.“Let It Be”
27.“The Long and Winding Road”
The Beatles immediately banged out “Get Back” and “The Two of Us.” There seemed to be a renewed sense of teamwork in the friendlier setting. But as the week wore on, tempers collided anew. More than ever, according to George, Yoko was putting out “negative vibes.” She acted resentful toward the other Beatles. She found the band to be “very childish.” And John withdrew behind her, becoming increasingly nervous and apprehensive. The Beatles’ sound was something he “didn’t believe in” anymore. John quickly changed the atmosphere in the studio. Once again, the Beatles started banging heads. “They started picking on each other,” according to John. “It was a very tense period,” Paul recalled.
By the end of January 1969, working together on the project had become completely unmanageable. During a lunch at Apple, everyone sat around debating how and where to finish the film. In the course of the conversation, Ringo mentioned that there was a wonderful open roof above their offices that they intended to turn into a garden. “Oh, that’s fantastic,” John remembered saying. Everyone immediately went upstairs to have a look.
The final concert on the rooftop of Apple Records, as the Beatles, with Billy Preston, perform together—joyously—for the last time, January 30, 1969. © MIRRORPIX
The roof, as it turned out, held the answer to their problems. The unanimous opinion: What a great idea it would be to play on the roof—play to the whole of the West End of London. The Beatles could give a concert from the comfort of their own building. Just head upstairs, plug in the instruments, and let ’er rip. Brilliant! “Nobody had ever done that,” George recalled, “so it would be interesting to see what happened when we started playing up there.”
The whole thing was to be very spontaneous, a secret. Not even the Apple staff was given advance warning. The next morning, a cold, cloud-streaked day, a crew set up the Beatles’ equipment while the film crew staked out territory along the outer walls of Apple. Not since the live broadcast for “All You Need Is Love” had the Beatles felt as excited or more like a band.
Just before noon, the haze burned off, the clouds rolled back, and the sun broke through. Before the first song, a breathless version of “Get Back,” had even ended, the music had attracted a small lunch-time crowd of onlookers. Word began to circulate that the Beatles, who hadn’t entertained in England for more than three years, were playing in public. All around, neighbors rushed into the street or raced to their own roofs to see what all the racket was about.
Eventually, the police showed up and requested that the volume be lowered. The police were friendly but insistent: “Honestly, the music has got to go down, or there’s going to be some arrests,” they said. But it was too late. The Beatles had already managed to play just enough material to cover a full performance.
“I’d like to say thanks on behalf of the group and ourselves,” John said, mugging into the camera, “and I hope we passed the audition.”
• • • • •
Though the Beatles had dodged questions about the bubble bursting ever since they first landed in America, they couldn’t help but feel the pressure mounting toward the inevitable, ugly bang. By March 1969, John, Paul, George, and Ringo knew the end was near. Months of bickering had steadily dispirited them. To ease the tension, they each became involved in personal projects: John and Yoko finished production of an avant-garde film for TV; Paul worked with a singer named Mary Hopkin, for whom he produced a song called “Those Were the Days”; Ringo accepted a role in a movie called The Magic Christian; and George recorded a solo album, Electronic Sounds, at his home. They still existed as the Beatles, but they were unable to summon either the means to resolve their differences or the courage to go their separate ways.
Paul and Linda on the day of their marriage, London, March 1969. © CUMMINGS ARCHIVES/REDFERNS
No one was prepared when rumors of Paul’s marriage to Linda Eastman began circulating around London. Paul and Linda had been seeing a lot of each other, first in New York, where Linda lived, and later in London, where she had come to seal their relationship. John, Ringo, and George might have been surprised by the sudden announcement, but none of them was shocked that he hadn’t been invited to attend. “We’re not even on speaking terms,” George said. Marrying off the “last bachelor among the Beatles” was big news, and even a cold, driving rainstorm couldn’t keep the fans from staging a crazy mob scene. The wedding, on March 12, 1969, resembled a page torn from the Beatlemania scrapbook.
Beatles US Albums
July 22, 1963, Introducing the Beatles, Vee-Jay Records
January 20, 1964, Meet the Beatles, Capitol Records
April 10, 1964, The Beatles Second Album, Capitol Records
June 26, 1964, A Hard Day’s Night, United Artists Records
July 20, 1964, Something New, Capitol Records
November 23, 1964, The Beatles Story, Capitol Records
December 15, 1964, Beatles ’65, Capitol Records
March 22, 1965, The Early Beatles, Capitol Records
June 14, 1965, Beatles VI, Capitol Records
August 13, 1965, Help!, Capitol Records
December 6, 1965, Rubber Soul, Capitol Records
June 20, 1966, Yesterday…And Today, Capitol Records
August 8, 1966, Revolver, Capitol Records
June 2, 1967, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Capitol Records
November 27, 1967, Magical Mystery Tour, Capitol Records
November 25, 1968, The Beatles (White Album), Apple Records
January 13, 1969, Yellow Submarine, Apple Records
October 1, 1969, Abbey Road, Apple Records
May 18, 1970, Let It Be, Apple Records
Right about the same time, there was a mass firing at the Apple offices. The Beatles had decided to cut back on their expenses, and they dismissed almost everyone, even people who had been with them since the beginning, in 1962. The Apple Boutique was shut down, as were their electronics, film, and publishing divisions. There was also an ongoing battle among them about who would handle their business affairs now that Brian Epstein was dead. Paul wanted his new father-in-law, Lee Eastman, a well-regarded music lawyer, to fill the post, while John, George, and Ringo were in favor of a tough-talking business manager named Allen Klein. Neither side was willing to give an inch to the other. “We had great arguments with Paul,” Ringo remembered.
Meanwhile, John and Yoko launched one crazy project after another, such as a press conference in Vienna at which they lay inside a large white sack, singing and humming, to promote a process they called “total communication.” They also staged bed-ins—weekends where they stayed in a hotel bed while being interviewed—to promote world peace (although most people assumed it was to promote Yoko Ono). For another project, Acorns for Peace, they sent envelopes containing two acorns to the head of state of every country in the world so they could plant trees instead of making bombs. John was having so much fun stirring up trouble and manipulating the press with Yoko that nothing, not even the Beatles’ money and legal hassles, was important enough to distract him.
Somehow, Paul persuaded the others to return to Abbey Road, for old time’s sake, to work on a new studio album. Paul phoned George Martin to inquire whether he’d be available, or even willing, to make another Beatles album. Considering the way the group was arguing, Martin assumed he’d worked his last with the boys. “Only if you let me produce it the way we used to,” he told Paul. John also had to agree, he insisted, but Paul assured him their decision was unanimous.
John was actually psyched to record. He was brimming with material, real edgy stuff. He confessed to a reporter that songwriting was “something that gets in your blood” and forced him to put aside old conflicts. “I’ve got things going around in my head right now, and as soon as I leave here I’m going round to Paul’s place and we’ll sit down and start [to] work.”
Throughout May and into July they blazed through most of the album’s basic tracks. They began with George’s masterpiece, “Something,” which he’d written for his wife, Pattie. It was an intensely stirring romantic ballad that would challenge “Yesterday” and “Michelle” as one of the most recognizable songs the Beatles ever produced. John and Paul had always thought that George wasn’t in their league when it came to writing songs, but that opinion changed with “Something.” George had also written “Here Comes the Sun,” which held its own against the Lennon and McCartney songs on the album.
The work went well in the studio, but Yoko became an intruder again, this time with an even stranger twist. She was pregnant and under strict orders from her doctor to remain in bed. So she had a department store deliver a double bed to the studio and instructed an electrician there to suspend a microphone above her head so she could furnish her comments to the band while they recorded “Come Together.”
Lennon in bed with Yoko Ono at the Hilton Hotel, Amsterdam, peace protest, March 1969. © MIRRORPIX
The sessions eventually dwindled into chaos. “People would be walking out, banging instruments down, not turning up on time and keeping the others waiting three or four hours, then blaming each other for not having rehearsed or not having played their bit right,” recalled an engineer on the session. Even so, the music remained sharp and daring. The band worked intently through the summer of 1969. At the beginning of August, they decided, almost on the spur of the moment, to shoot a photograph for the album cover. After much debate, they agreed to “just go outside, take the photo there, call the album Abbey Road, and be done with it.” And sometime after ten o’clock in the morning, they marched onto the street to shoot the now-famous cover photo: John in a white suit and tennis shoes at the head of the pack; Ringo in black tails just behind him; Paul, wearing navy blue and an open-necked shirt, trailing in third place; and George in a blue-jean outfit, bringing up the rear. John, impatient as ever, urged the others forward. “Come on, hurry up now, keep in step,” he muttered. At the last minute, Paul kicked off his sandals and rejoined the procession barefoot. It was done in six quick shots, but it became perhaps the most famous album cover photograph ever taken.
• • • • •
By late August, with the album almost finished, John again expressed his wish to leave the Beatles. He’d already formed another band with Eric Clapton so that they could play rock ’n roll at a concert in Canada. Finally, at a meeting in October with the other Beatles, John told them he was getting a divorce. “What do you mean?” asked Paul, to which John responded, “I mean the group is over. I’m leaving.”
The others didn’t really believe him. “Everybody had tried to leave” the band at one time or another, according to George, “so it was nothing new.” But John believed “they knew it was for real.” Moments afterward, John burst into another room downstairs at Apple and shouted, “That’s it—it’s all over!”
And in a way, as Ringo noted, it felt like “a relief.” He “knew it was a good decision.” The constant sniping and fighting among “the lads,” as he called the Beatles, had disturbed Ringo’s gentle soul. Still, it was difficult for Ringo, who worried about what he was going to do with the rest of his life. George, on the other hand, had no regrets. “I wanted out myself,” he recalled. “I could see a much better time ahead being by myself, away from the band. It had ceased to be fun, and it was time to get out of it.”
As for Paul, his entire world, “since I’d been seventeen,” he acknowledged, had been wrapped up in the group. He had so much invested in it, emotionally and personally. He loved the music they made, loved the recognition and the fans. Privately, he held out hope that John would come around. But in the weeks that followed, Paul lapsed into a depression. Some days he really missed the band, the guys and their horseplay, but there were also times he despised them. “Anger, deep, deep, anger set in,” he recalled. He felt cheated. “And justifiably so because I was being screwed by my mates.”
The other Beatles had betrayed him, Paul concluded, abandoned the dream they had shared. There was nothing he could do to restore their enthusiasm. The others seemed determined to go their own ways. For a few weeks they avoided one another. Any business was left to the accountants and lawyers. But Paul found it impossible to separate himself from the Beatles. He tried everything to distract himself from the overwhelming loss, but nothing seemed to capture his interest. He couldn’t even get himself out of bed in the morning. He felt inadequate, empty, convinced that “I’d outlived my usefulness.” The Beatles had given his life meaning. He spent hours, days, weeks, trying to make sense of the breakup, lashing out at anyone who attempted to draw him out of his funk. Instead of writing music, he spent hours outside “just planting trees” or helping Linda renovate an old farmhouse they’d bought in Scotland.
>Paul Is Dead!
On Friday, October 10, 1969, a Detroit disc jockey named Russ Gibb went on the air at WKNR-FM and astonished his listeners with the news that Paul McCartney was dead. In fact, he had been dead for several years, Gibb insisted. How did he know this? Gibb had reached this incredible conclusion after reading a college student’s essay claiming that clues were presented on the Abbey Road cover.
On the cover, Gibb argued, Ringo was dressed in an undertaker’s outfi t, while Paul walked behind him barefoot, in the manner of a corpse prepared for burial in Italy. In fact, the picture itself resembled a funeral procession. The license plate of the Volkswagen in the picture was another tip-off: it read 28 IF, suggesting that Paul would have been twenty-eight if he had lived. There was more. On the back cover photo of Magical Mystery Tour, Paul wore a black carnation, while John, George, and Ringo wore red ones. Meanwhile, Paul was dressed in black, the other Beatles in white.
Gibb’s announcement touched off rumors that swept across the globe. Every radio station jumped on the story, sending hundreds of thousands of fans scrambling to scour their Beatles records for clues. If “Strawberry Fields Forever” was played at 45 rpm instead of 33 1/3, some listeners claimed, John sang the words “I buried Paul.” Paul is dead became a slogan as familiar as almost any tune on Abbey Road. Everyone was convinced, except for Paul, who was very much alive and considered it “a bloody nuisance.” Tracked down by reporters at his home in Scotland, he insisted, “For the record, Paul is not dead.”
It never occurred to Paul just how much he missed John. More than anyone else, John had been his friend for ten years, to say nothing of his collaborator, his sidekick, his shadow. Not only had they played music together, they’d hung out together, dreamed together, became famous together, grown up together. Paul continued to hold out hope that their separation was temporary, but as the weeks, then months ticked away, Paul realized it was finished. He was angry at the Beatles—but even angrier at John. Without John, Paul finally admitted, the Beatles were indeed a thing of the past. That did not mean their music wouldn’t live on, but the band as they knew it was done.
The Beatles, 1967. © MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/REDFERNS
Then, one day just after Christmas in 1969, Paul emerged from his funk. He had a four-track recorder installed in his house and, in an attempt to get it together, began doing the only thing he knew how to do: making a new record. Only this time, he was making it by himself.
The other three Beatles had already moved on to other projects that expressed their new independence. Ringo was making an album of standards with the assistance of George Martin, while George was producing records on Apple for other artists. John was another story altogether. By late fall, his and Yoko’s life together had become a traveling carnival of put-ons and misbehavior. They made some avant-garde films, staged peace festivals, and released The Wedding Album, a box of mementos from their marriage ceremony along with a record that contained one whole side of John and Yoko screaming each other’s names.
