"He wouldn't talk"
Biographer Hunter Davies recollects spending a day of silence with John Lennon.
"The first memory that always comes back is swimming in John's pool at his house in Weybridge. I'd gone to spend the day with him, but when I arrived, it turned out he had decided it was a day for not talking. I walked round his garden with him, not talking. Cynthia made lunch and we ate it, not talking. I sat with John in his cramped little den, under a sticker saying "Safe as Milk" while he watched children's television, not talking.
Then we had a swim, round and round in his pool, not talking, but while we were swimming, we suddenly heard the noise of a police siren floating up the hill from Weybridge itself. It was giving that familiar two-note wail - Ah, ahh, ah ahh, ah, ahh. John started playing with the two notes - humming them, while not actually talking.
Then he went inside, went to his piano, till he had turned the two notes into a song, or at least half a song. John was very good at half songs, quickly growing bored, often needing Paul to coax the other half out of him. A lot of their joint working sessions were like competitions - to show the other what they could do, or make the other do better."
Paul’s handwritten lyrics of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” for Hunter Davies (but with a twist)
The Beatles Lyrics by Hunter Davies, pg. 59
“And please say to me, you’ll let me hold your thing”
Paul did say in The Lyrics that he likes to have sexual references in his love songs.
“But eroticism was very much a driving force behind everything I did. It’s a very strong thing. And, you know, that was what lay behind a lot of these love songs. ‘I wanna hold your hand’, open brackets, [and probably do a lot more!]” - Paul McCartney, The Lyrics , pg. 244.
Paul also says that this song was not about Jane (who he was living with at the time of writing this song)
“‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ is not about Jane, but it was certainly written when I was with her. To tell you the truth, I think we were writing to a general audience. I may have been drawing on my experience with a person I was in love with at the time-and sometimes it was very specific-but mostly we were writing to the world”- Paul McCartney, The Lyrics , pg. 244. (The “we” is him and John writing this song together).
Not sure why Paul wrote this joke for Hunter Davies if he knew it was going into a Davies’s book about The Beatles lyrics. Maybe Paul had a bone to pick with Davies, lol.
Now I’m wondering if Paul always had this joke in mind when writing this song. (I have a feeling he did). Well we can definitely tell this song was not written for Jane because she doesn’t have a “thing”.
i'm curious what you mean that brian became less of a conformist?
Throughout 1967, Brian broke many of his own rules and became a more carefree, outspoken person, very in-line with the sentiments endorsed by the Summer of Love. You could argue that this is a conformity of its own, but in my personal opinion, he took it farther than most hippies of the era, especially considering how much he had to lose.
He started dressing in the styles of the era, finally shedding his immaculate business suits for brightly-colored floral shirts. He also did away with his famous curls and for a time combed his hair down into something of a moptop, the result of which made him appear shockingly young whenever he visited the Beatles in-studio with their mustaches.
He also promoted recreational drug use and admitted to having used such substances as LSD himself. Granted, this seems the most involuntary change, as initially his confession was meant to detract from the drama of Paul McCartney's drug use, but for a man who'd previously kept his image squeaky clean, admitting that he'd used these drugs at a time when they were illegal was a huge step for him.
He and the Beatles also leant their names to some sort of petition which was pro-recreational drug use, probably with the intent of lessening Mick Jagger's possible sentencing (sorry this is so vague, I literally read about this yesterday but can't find it in the book to get the specifics).
The rule that Brian specifically broke which shocked me was the no-talking-about-politics. For years the boys had been chafing under this rule, wanting to discuss things such as segregation and Vietnam, and they did manage to do so in their own special way, just with heavy limitations on what they could say. I'll admit that, while overwhelming, this rule wasn't useless; look at the bigger than Jesus controversy to see what happens when the boys spoke about politics off the cuff. But by 1967, all their political ideas had matured, and so had Brian's.
One of the most significant was his view of Israel. As someone from an orthodox Jewish family, undoubtedly he felt pressured to support Israel (sixty years later, I'm from a purely cultural Jewish family and even then the pressure is immense), and in the late-50s he even intended to give all his clothes to the country of Israel in his will. More recently, in 1964 he planned to have his new-signing The Cyrkle play in Israel. As he revealed in what might be his final interview, with Melody Maker, his opinions on Israel had changed drastically, undoubtedly in response to the third Arab-Israeli War.
I believe you were asked to help the Israeli cause in the recent Middle East crisis and refused. Why?
I refused to help because I’m as sorry for a wounded Arab as I am for a wounded Israeli. People fundamentally are all the same and I can’t discriminate between Israelis and Arabs.
Did your refusal to help upset your Jewish friends?
I think Bernard Delfont and Cyril Shane who were among many who particularly asked me to help, were somewhat surprised at my negative reaction! But I can’t help it. I feel that people should have no greater concern for the suffering of one race than they have for any other. I believe in and want to help, as far as I can, to understand mankind whatever colour, creed, religion or nationality. And I think this sort of philosophy, however broad and general it sounds, is the only basic one the leaders of the world can work from to attain world peace.
As Brian has said, even his private refusal to help Israel had gotten him into hot water with his Jewish friends. Imagine the backlash he would've received for broadcasting this on a grand scale, and in Britain, no less, the very architect of the country of Israel! And yet he didn't seem to care anymore. He was placing authenticity over reputation for the first time in his life.
This is especially evident when he compares the criminalization of marijuana to something particularly close to home:
There is a parallel with homosexuality when that was a cardinal sin. Isn’t it silly that we have had to wait all this time for the reforming legislation to go through?
Do you, then, support the provisions of the new bill which legalises homosexual acts between consenting adults in private?
Of course! In fact, the majority of people do, I’m certain. You hear of very few prosecutions for homosexual offences these days.
Mind you, he brought this up entirely on his own. The interviewer literally has to steer him back to questions on drugs. For a man who would previously take legal action against anyone who claimed he was queer, this is beyond unprecedented.
The largest leap, in my opinion, was only revealed posthumously by Hunter Davies, author of the 1968 authorized Beatles biography, and was prevented only by his family:
As [Brian] was now dead, the Epstein family demanded to see the manuscript. Legally, his mother had inherited his estate. I was therefore technically beholden to Mrs Queenie Epstein, an old lady who knew nothing about the pop world, and, even worse, nothing about Brian's secret life, for the final clearance on the book.
You can imagine what she thought about any suggestions that Brian might be homosexual. She denied it. As far as she was concerned, it wasn't true. I needed her signed agreement...
Clive Epstein, Brian's brother, was helpful, though of course he wanted to keep his mother happy. As her beloved son had died only recently, it was thought unseemly to go into all the sordid details of his last couple of years... In the end I was persuaded to steer completely clear of his sex life, but I thought I did manage to make it fairly clear at the end of Chapter 15, where I said he had only one girlfriend in his life—and then continued to talk about his unhappy love affairs. I also described him as a 'gay bachelor'. The word was not in such common use in England in those days, but it was enough to let many people know the truth.
Did it matter, Brian's homosexuality? I did regret having to disguise it, as he himself had given me permission to mention it and it has been publicly stated since. With most people, their sex life is not relevant, either way, to their work, although... with Brian I think it did matter and it was a vital clue to his personality, to his death, and also to the birth of his interest in the Beatles.
So, there you have it. Brian was planning to be completely open regarding his queerness by 1968. I'd say that's pretty non-conformist, even by Summer of Love standards.
And here is the bittersweet final paragraph. Don’t read it if you don’t want to.
I would like to discover other beautiful, bittersweet loves like this one. But I guess all love is bittersweet, because even if it lasts a lifetime, life still ends.
And I don’t mean that in a nihilistic way.
But Paul’s words, and the author’s conclusion, is indeed true for all of us. We can never fully know another person. I think that, above all else, is what makes love so difficult.
I was writing about how Paul started writing with John, and how that story has been told. Once you’ve noticed that Paul wrote songs first, you can’t unsee it. And you can’t help spotting which writers just haven’t noticed, and who is actively going LOOK OVER THERE A SQUIRREL when they have to mention Paul bringing songwriting into the group. (I’m curious to see how the new Ian Leslie book handles this; the first review I’ve seen says the partnership “began in earnest in 1962”, which suggests Leslie has at least looked beyond the usual “they met at Woolton Fete and almost immediately started writing together” take.) Anyway, here’s a LOOK OVER THERE A SQUIRREL compilation, because some of these are outrageous
During the 1960s, the official band narrative presents JohnandPaul as a unit, keeping their contributions carefully balanced. Here’s Hunter Davies, the jumping-off point for most later accounts:
[Paul] played a couple of tunes to John he had written himself. Since he’d started playing the guitar, he had tried to make up a few of his own little tunes. The first tune he played to John that evening was called ‘I Lost My Little Girl’.
Not to be outdone, John immediately started making up his own tunes. He had been elaborating and adapting other people's words and tunes to his own devices for some time, but he hadn't written down proper tunes till Paul appeared with his. Not that Paul's tunes meant much, nor John's. They were very simple and derivative. It was only them coming together, each egging the other on, which suddenly inspired them to write songs for themselves to play.
After the breakup, rock journalism tended to take John’s side, and downplay Paul. Here’s Philip Norman in Shout! (1981), doing a virtuoso hatchet job:
Paul McCartney had always used his guitar to help him make up tunes. His main objective in the Quarry Men, however, was to oust Eric Griffiths from the role of lead guitarist. One night at the Broadway Conservative Club, he prevailed on the others to let him take the solo in a number. He fluffed it and, later, in an attempt to redeem himself, played over to John a song he had written, called I Lost My Little Girl. John, though he had always tinkered with lyrics, had never thought of writing entire songs before. Egged on by Paul - and by Buddy Holly - he felt there could be no harm in trying. Soon he and Paul were each writing songs furiously, as if it were a race.
Did you think, dear reader, that writing your own songs might be a significant artistic breakthrough? No, no, it’s just a backup weapon in Paul’s Machiavellian plot against poor Eric. This is his “main objective”, and he’s manipulated the others into letting him grab a solo. Norman has, by the way, already admitted that the Quarrymen all recognised that Paul was a stronger musician than the rest of the group. Is it reasonable for the best guitarist to want to play a solo? Clearly not.
For maximum whiplash, compare Norman telling the same story 27 years later, in John Lennon: The Life (2008).
The idea of writing original songs to perform, rather than merely recycling other people’s, was firmly rooted in Paul’s mind well before he met John. He had begun trying it virtually from the moment he acquired a guitar, combining melodic gifts inherited from his father with a talent for mimicking and pastiching the American-accented hits of the moment. His first completed song, “I Lost My Little Girl,” had been written in 1956, partly as a diversion from the trauma of his mother’s death, partly as an expression of it. Around the time he joined the Quarrymen, he had something like a dozen other compositions under his belt, mostly picked out on the family upright piano, including a first draft of what would eventually become “When I’m Sixty-four” (which he thought “might come in handy for a musical comedy or something”).
For a fifteen-year-old Liverpool schoolboy - indeed for any ordinary mortal - this was breathtaking presumptuousness. In Britain’s first rock’n’roll era, as for a century before it, songwriting was considered an art verging on the magical. It could be practiced only in London (naturally) by a tiny coterie of music-business insiders, middle-aged men with names like Paddy or Bunny, who alone understood the sacred alchemy of rhyming arms with charms and moon with June.
Just imagine if Norman had published that second version in 1981. Shout! was one of the most influential Beatles books, shaping the narrative for decades to come. Even Norman now admits its extreme bias, but you can still see its lingering influence. (Also, what a natural-born hater Norman is. When he puts his Paul-bashing on hold, he makes up some fictional songwriters to despise instead.)
Next up we have Mark Lewisohn, who doesn’t write Paul as the Evil Grand Vizier, but keeps shuffling the pack to put John front and centre whenever a breakthrough happens. His prologue to Tune In is a snapshot of John and Paul writing together at the very beginning of their partnership:
Towards the end of 1957, John wrote Hello Little Girl and Paul came up with I Lost My Little Girl; the similarity in their titles was apparently coincidental but both were steeped in [Buddy Holly and] the Crickets’ sound…Buddy Holly was the springboard to John and Paul’s songwriting. As John later said: “Practically every Buddy Holly song was three chords, so why not write your own.” Stated so matter-of-factly, it could seem that writing songs was an obvious next move, but it wasn’t. Teenagers all over Britain liked Buddy Holly and rock and roll, but of that great number only a fraction picked up a guitar and tried playing it, and fewer still, in fact hardly anyone, used it as the inspiration to write songs themselves. John and Paul didn’t know anyone else who did it, no one from school or college, no relative or friend… and yet somehow, by nothing more than fate or fluke, they’d found each other, discovered they both wrote songs, and decided to try it together.
When Lewisohn disagrees with the accepted narrative, he’s usually very keen to show you all his evidence for why everyone else is wrong. Here he suggests John wrote Hello Little Girl first, without discussion. Then he quotes John on getting the idea to write songs, before discussing what an important innovation that was. Right at the end, he says they both wrote independently - but John is in prime position throughout.
As you read on, he acknowledges Paul’s pre-Quarrymen songs, framing them as juvenilia (“exceptional for a first attempt by a boy on the cusp of 14”). Giving I Lost My Little Girl a later date than everyone else, Lewisohn notes that when Paul performed it on MTV Unplugged, his “vocal includes a Holly hiccup, pinpointing its creation to post-September 1957”. (Because the way Paul sings something in 1991 must be exactly how he sang it from the beginning.) Lewisohn also ignores the many interviews in which John says he started writing after seeing Paul’s example.
Obviously, these distraction tactics sell Paul short. But I think they harm John, too. If you’re interested in him as an artist, don’t you want to know how he developed? What he learned, how he used those influences to shape his own voice? How he and Paul worked, together and apart? How they saw their partnership, how that fed into their competitiveness, ambitions, or insecurities? Mary Sue Blorbo Leader John is no good to me. And, more than 60 years on, memories have faded and sources have died; we’ve lost so many chances to look at how they really worked. John and Paul both deserve better.
SG: Then, what happened? You finally got to meet with John and Yoko, and there was an all-night session at the Dorchester hotel. And something happened in that all-night session at the Dorchester that totally won their allegiance to you.
AK: John said, listen, the Beatles are represented by the Eastmans,
will you represent me and Yoko?
SG: The Beatles’ legal affairs were represented by the Eastmans?
AK: You see, you have to read that piece of paper.
SG: The piece of paper the Eastmans had with the boys?
AK: Oh yes. All signed.
SG: All of them signed it?
AK: Yes. And Apple. It never used the word management, but it didn’t have to. If you represent all the negotiations throughout the world of Apple and the Beatles, you have it. The import of that particular piece of document was that everything would have to flow through them.
(Allen Klein, 1980, interview with Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, All You Need Is Love, 2024)
John comes into the office and says, ‘Don’t care about the others, don’t give a shit … but I’m having Klein, he can have all of my stuff and get it sorted out.’
(Derek Taylor, As Time Goes By, 1973)
AK: …We were just trying to get to know one another… Lennon and Yoko, I would rather not say what won them over for me. I would think that a principal thing was the fact that they really wanted someone for themselves. Apart from the Beatles. That’s really what it was. John is a very practical human being and the conflict was there, and it was his band and he was losing control, and he didn’t want to. He wanted to be protected. It was as simple as that. That first evening that I met with John, he said, “Do you want to represent us?” I said yeah.
(Allen Klein, 1980, interview with Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, All You Need Is Love, 2024)
When the four of us entered into our partnership agreement in 1967, we did not consider the exact wording or give any thought to the agreement's legal implications. We had thought that if one of us wanted to leave the group he would only have to say so. On the way in which the four of us had sorted out our differences in the past, I deny that it had been on a three-to-one basis. If one disagreed, we discussed the problem until we reached agreement or let the matter drop. I know of no decision taken on a three-to-one basis. I deny that the Eastmans and I obstructed Mr. Allen Klein in the preparation of accounts. Nor had the Eastmans been contenders for the job of manager for the group. I wanted them as managers but when the rest of the group disagreed, had not pressed the matter. Mr. Lennon had challenged my statement that Mr. Klein had sowed discord within the group, but I recall a telephone conversation in which Mr. Klein had told me, "You know why John is angry with you? It is because you came off better than he did on Let It Be.' Mr. Klein also said to me, 'The real trouble is Yoko. She is the one with ambition.' I often wonder what John would have said if he heard the remark.
(From Paul McCartney’s affidavit, Feb 26 1971, The Beatles Diary. Volume 2. After The Break Up. 1970-2001. Keith Badman)
I was very upset when they said I was just trying to bring in Lee Eastman, because he’s my in-law. As if I’d just bring in a member of the family, for no reason. They’d known me twenty years, yet they thought that. I couldn’t believe it. John said, ‘Magical Mystery Tour was just a big ego trip for Paul.’ God. It was for their sake, to keep us together, keep us going, give us something new to do…
(Paul McCartney, Private Call with Hunter Davies, May 1981)
Klein keeps saying that I don’t like him because I want Eastman to manage the Beatles,’ he said. ‘Well, this is how it really happened. I thought, and still think, that Linda’s father would have been good for us all. And I decided I wanted him. But all the others wanted Klein. Well, all right, they can have Klein, but I don’t see that I have to agree with them.
‘I don’t think I need a manager in the old sense that Brian Epstein was our manager. All I want are paid advisers, who will do what I want them to do. And that’s what I’ve got. If the others want Klein, well, that’s up to them, but I’ve never signed a contract with him. He doesn’t represent me. I’m sure Eastman is better for me.
(Paul McCartney, interview, Evening Standard, April 21-22, 1970)
In fact, there was one classic little meeting when we were recording Abbey Road. It was a Friday evening session, and I was sitting there, and I’d heard a rumor from Neil or someone that there was something funny going around. So we got to the session, and Klein came in. To me, he was like a sort of demon that would always haunt my dreams. He got to me. Really, it was like I’d been dreaming of him as a dentist. He came round to the session, and he said, “I gotta have this thing signed, I gotta get you guys on a contract,” and then so I said, “Wait a minute, c’mon, it’s Friday night, what’s the hurry? Give us the thing over the weekend, and we’ll let ya know Monday?” Fair enough?
And everyone said, “Uh-huh, there he goes.”
...
John said, “Oh, fucking hell, here you go, stalling again.”
I said, “I’m not stalling, I want it checked out. It’s a big movement, going with a new manager, you know, and maybe we don’t want to go with this guy. What’s the hurry? Why can’t he wait?”
(Paul McCartney, 1980 - All You Need Is Love: The End of the Beatles by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, 2024)
‘Security is the only thing I want. Money to do nothing with, money to have in case you wanted to do something.’
(Paul McCartney (1964) in Love Me Do! The Beatles’ Progress by Michael Braun, 1964/1995)
They said, “Oh no, typical of you, all that stalling and what. Got to do it now.”
I said, “Well, I’m not going to. I demand at least the weekend. I’ll look at it, and on Monday. This is supposed to be a recording session, after all.”
I dug me heels in, and they said, right, well, we’re going to vote it.
I said, “No, you’ll never get Ringo to.”
I looked at Ringo, and he kind of gave me this sick look like, Yeah, I’m going with them.Then I said, “Well, this is like bloody Julius Caesar, and I’m being stabbed in the back!”
It’s the first time you realize in our whole relationship that whenever we voted, we never actually had come to that point before—three were going to vote one down. That was the first time, and they all signed it, they didn’t need my signature.
(Paul McCartney, 1980 - All You Need Is Love: The End of the Beatles by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, 2024)
Steve Miller happened to be there recording, late at night, and he just breezed in. ‘Hey, what’s happening, man? Can I use the studio?’ ‘Yeah!’ I said. ‘Can I drum for you? I just had a fucking unholy argument with the guys there.’ I explained it to him, took ten minutes to get it off my chest. So I did a track, he and I stayed that night and did a track of his called My Dark Hour. I thrashed everything out on the drums. There’s a surfeit of aggressive drum fills, that’s all I can say about that. We stayed up until late. I played bass, guitar and drums and sang backing vocals. It’s actually a pretty good track. It was a very strange time in my life and I swear I got my first grey hairs that month. I saw them appearing. I looked in the mirror, I thought, I can see you. You’re all coming now. Welcome.
(Paul McCartney in Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, 1997)
The nature of The Beatles’ management deal with Allen Klein remains a source of annoyance to McCartney:
“I kept saying, ‘Don’t give Allen Klein 20 per cent, give him 15, we’re a big act!’ And everyone’s going, ‘No, no, he wants 20 per cent’. I say, ‘Of course he does, he wants 30, really, but give him 15. It’s like buying a car. You don’t give the guy what he asks for.’ But it was impossible in the end, because it became three to one and I was like the idiot in the corner – trying, I thought, to save the situation.”
“And to Klein it looked like I was trying to screw the situation. He used to call me the Reluctant Virgin. I said ‘Fuck off, I don’t want to fucking marry you, that’s all.’ He’s going, ‘Oh, you know, he may, maybe he will, will he, won’t he, that’s a definite maybe.’
(Paul McCartney, Dec 2003, interview with Paul Du Noyer for The Word)
Q: He was once quoted in New York magazine as saying he was going to roast your ass.
А: Yeah, well, he never did, you know, and that’s cool. He wouldn’t get near my ass to roast it, anyway. Punk.
(Paul McCartney, Jan 1974, interview with Paul Gambaccini for Rolling Stone)
[Allen] Klein came to London with the sole objective of closing the deal, and having had an unsuccessful meeting with Paul in the morning, he left for Heathrow to return home to New York. Paul and I were working together in Olympic that afternoon, and there was a noticeable sense of relief when he heard that Klein had left for the airport. However, Klein had second thoughts about leaving and decided to have one more attempt at changing Paul’s mind face-to-face. Unannounced, Klein walked into the studio, and very quickly it became apparent that as voices were raised a private conversation was taking place. I turned off all the mics in the room and left them to it. The control room of a studio is isolated from the recording room where the musicians play, but even all that acoustic treatment was not enough to prevent me hearing Paul McCartney defend himself against Allen Klein’s attempt at bullying him into submission. It was extremely unpleasant to witness.
(Glyn Johns, Sound Man: A Life Recording Hits with the Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, Eric Clapton, the Faces…, 2014)
I never much liked authority. I didn't like school teachers or critics telling me what I could do. Or myself telling me. I'm alive - do it!
(Paul McCartney, March 2001, interview with Nicci Gerrard for the Observer)
And the thing is, of course, you know that when you’ve got a daddy, it is nice. If you’re a little bit sort of worried as to what to do next, and your daddy says, [claps hands] “What are you worried about? Hey John, what do you want, son? You want a house? [claps hands] You got it.”
(Paul McCartney, November 11th, 1971, interview with Chris Charlesworth for Melody Maker)
They talk Klein’s script. John Lennon once said to Allen Klein, “So what do I do now, Allen?” You know, I mean, these are all – I’d say there are certain little things, you know, and… brought together in one big thing, it does look a bit sort of heavily that way. It’s not [inaudible]. But it’s all true, you know. It’s not… John did say that. And it indicates something that he’s just turned to Allen and said, “Well, what do I do now?” And that’s the kind of role that Klein is playing for them all now.
(Paul McCartney, November 11th, 1971, interview with Chris Charlesworth for Melody Maker)
The build-up is the thing — All these things continuously happening making me feel like I’m a junior with the record company, like Klein is the boss and I’m nothing. Well, I’m a senior. I figure my opinion is as good as anyone’s, especially when it’s my thing. And it’s emotional. You feel like you don’t have any freedom. I figured I’d have to stand up for myself eventually or get pushed under.
(Paul McCartney, 1970, interview with Richard Merryman for Life Magazine, published in April 16 1971)
When the Beatles were falling apart in 1969, he suffered from depression – staying in bed, forgoing shaving, drinking too much, taking consolation in little beyond his marriage to Linda Eastman.
(Paul McCartney, Nov 2013, interview with Jonah Weiner for Rolling Stones)
PAUL: As far as I was concerned, yeah, I would have liked the Beatles never to have broken up. I wanted to get us back on the road doing small places, then move up to our previous form and then go and play. Just make music, and whatever else there was would be secondary. But it was John who didn’t want to. He had told Allen Klein the new manager he and Yoko had picked late one night that he didn’t want to continue.
…
PAUL: And he said, “I wasn’t going to tell you until after I signed the Capitol thing, but I’m leaving the group.” And that was really it. The cat amongst the pigeons.
…
PAUL: We weren’t going to say anything about it for months, for business reasons. But the really hurtful thing to me was that John was really not going to tell us. I think he was heavily under the influence of Allen Klein. And Klein, so I heard, had said to John – the first time anyone had said it – “What does Yoko want?” So since Yoko liked Klein because he was for giving Yoko anything she wanted, he was the man for John. That’s my theory on how it happened.
(Paul and Linda McCartney, interview for Playboy, December 1984)
For the first time in my life, I was on the scrap heap, in my own eyes. An unemployed worker might have said, “Hey, you still have the money. That’s not as bad as we have it.” But to me, it didn’t have anything to do with money. It was just the feeling, the terrible disappointment of not being of any use to anyone anymore. It was a barreling, empty feeling that just rolled across my soul, and it was… I’d never experienced it before. Drugs had shown me little bits here and there – they had rolled across the carpet once or twice, but I had been able to get them out of my mind. In this case, the end of the Beatles, I really was done in for the first time in my life. Until then, I really was a kind of cocky sod. It was the first time I’d had a major blow to my confidence. When my mother died, I don’t think my confidence suffered. It had been a terrible blow, but I didn’t feel it was my fault.
(Paul and Linda McCartney, interview for Playboy, December 1984)
“At a certain point I asked myself, ‘Are you going to sit around doing nothing, or are you going to make some music again?’ So I’d be at home sitting around, doing something on guitar, and Linda would say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you could do that!’ Then I’d be drumming – ‘I didn’t know you could do that!’ So I got back into it just to impress Linda, really. I wanted to prove my usefulness again.”
(Paul McCartney, Nov 2013, interview with Jonah Weiner for Rolling Stones)
"The thing about Paul," George says, "is that apart from the personal problem of it all, he's having a wonderful time. He's going riding and he's got horses and he's got a farm in Scotland and he's happier with his family. And I can dig that."
(George Harrison, 1970, interview with Al Aronowitz)
Paul was already thinking about recording again. Never happy unless he was making music andwiththe Beatles not functioning, probably extinct, Paul began recording tracks for a solo album…
Paul had been given a release date by Neil Aspinall [April 10, 1970 at first and April 17 later when Paul agreed to one week delay for help sales of Ringo Starr’s album “Sentimental Journey“, scheduled to be released on March 27] and he built the project around meeting the various deadlines that entailed: handing in a final mix tape, designing and proofing the cover art, approving test pressings and so on. Working with the artist Gordon House and the designer Roger Huggett, whom he still uses, Paul and Linda put the entire thing together at home.
Paul: "I was feeling quite comfortable, the more I went on like this. I could actually do something again. Then I rang up Apple one day and said, "Still okay for the release date?" and they said, "No, we're changing it. You got put back now. We're going to release Let It Be first.""
(Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now by Barry Miles)
GEORGE: "But it's more of a personal thing, you know. That's down to the management situation, you know, with Apple. Because Paul, really - It was his idea to do Apple, and once it started going Paul was very active in there. And then it got really chaotic and we had to do something about it. When we started doing something about it, obviously Paul didn't have as much say in the matter, and then he decided… you know, because he wanted Lee Eastman his in-laws to run it and we didn't. Then that's the only reason, you know. That's the whole basis. But that's only a personal problem that he'll have to get over because that's… The reality is that he's out-voted and we're a partnership. We've got these companies which we all own 25 percent of each, and if there's a decision to be made then, like in any other business or group you have a vote, you know. And he was out-voted 3 to 1 and if he doesn't like it, it's really a pity…"
(George Harrison, May 1th 1970, interview with Howard Smith at WABC-FM radio in New York City)
Paul: They eventually sent Ringo round to my house at Cavendish with a message: "We want you to put your release date back, it's for the good of the group" and all of this sort of shit, and he was giving me the party line, they just made him come round, so I did something I'd never done before, or since: I told him to get out. I had to do something like that in order to assert myself because I was just sinking. Linda was very helpful, she was saying, "Look, you don't have to take this crap, you're a grown man, you have every bit as much right …" I was getting pummelled about the head, in my mind anyway.
(Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now by Barry Miles)
YORKE: Do you dislike writing a song and not being able to record it immediately?
JOHN: I can’t stand it. I can’t stand having songs lying around for years. It just annoys me, and I think it annoys all of us.
(John Lennon, December 23rd, 1969, interview with Ritchie Yorke)
Dear Paul, we thought a lot about yours and the Beatles LPs – and decided it’s stupid for Apple to put out two big albums within 7 days of each other (also there’s Ringo’s and Hey Jude) – so we sent a letter to EMI telling them to hold your release date til June 4th (there’s a big Apple-Capitol convention in Hawaii then). We thought you’d come round when you realized that the Beatles album was coming out on April 24th. We’re sorry it turned out like this – it’s nothing personal*. Love John & George. Hare Krishna. A Mantra a Day Keeps MAYA Away.
(The letter from John and George to Paul, March 31th, 1970)
*in 1968 Two Virgins was released ten days prior to the White Album, btw
As a director of Apple, he had had to sign a letter that he wrote with John ordering Paul not to release his McCartney album on a day that would conflict with the release of the next Beatles record, Let It Be. When the letter was finished, Ringo had volunteered to deliver it because he didn't want Paul to suffer the indignity of having it handed to him by some impersonal messenger. At Paul's house, he gave the letter to Paul and said, "I agree with it."
(George Harrison, 1970, interview with Al Aronowitz)
I doubt he meant to do anything, I think they sent him round just as a sort of scapegoat, and he didn’t realize what he was telling me, really.
(Paul McCartney, 1980, interview with Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, All You Need Is Love, 2024)
“I went to see Paul. To my dismay, he went completely out of control, shouting at me, prodding his fingers towards my face, saying: 'I’ll finish you now’ and 'You’ll pay.’ He told me to put my coat on and get out. I did so.”
(Ringo, during 1971 Beatles court proceedings)
Ringo Starr said in his statement: “Paul is the greatest bass guitarist in the world.” But he added that he thought Paul had behaved like a spoiled child.
(Daily Mirror, February 24, 1971 - about the third day of the Court Case for the dissolution of The Beatles’ contractual partnership)
Then he had to stand there while both Paul and his wife, Linda, screamed at him. When Ringo returned from delivering the letter, he was so drained his face was white.
(George Harrison, 1970, interview with Al Aronowitz)
[John Lennon and George Harrison] didn’t send me round. They, as directors of the company, wrote a letter to him, and I didn’t think it was fair that some office lad should take something like that around. I was talking to the office, and they were telling me what was going on, and I said, ‘Send it up, I’ll take it round’. I couldn’t fear him then. But he got angry, because we were asking him to hold his album back and the album was very important to him. He shouted and pointed at me. He told me to get out of his house. He was crazy; he went crazy. He was out of control, prodding his finger towards my face. He told me to put my coat on and get out. I couldn’t believe it was happening. I had just brought the letter. I said, ‘I agree with everything that’s in the letter’, because we tried to work it like a company, not as individuals. I put my album [Sentimental Journey] out two weeks before [released 27 March 1970, in compliance with the original schedule], which makes me seem like such a good guy, but it wasn’t really, because I needed to put it out before Paul’s album, else it would have slayed me!
(Ringo Starr, 1971, from “The Beatles: Off the Record” by Keith Badman)
‘Strictly speaking we all have to ask each other’s permission before any of us does anything without the other three. My own record nearly didn’t come out because Klein and some of the others thought it would be too near to the date of the next Beatles album. I had to get George, who’s a director of Apple, to authorise its release for me. ‘Give us our freedom which we so richly deserve.
(Paul McCartney, April 21-22, 1970, Interview for the Evening Standard)
On the radio, they're playing Paul's album now. George may be the youngest of the Beatles but his attitude toward Paul is the same as a big brother trying to wait out a kid's tantrum because the kid can't get the candy he wants. He talks about the last time Paul spoke to him on the phone.
"He came on like Attila the Hun," George says. "I had to hold the receiver away from my ear."
It was as if the whole world was waiting for Paul's album and George was standing in its way.
"I don't want to say anything bad about Paul," George laughs, "but I can be egged on."
(George Harrison, 1970, interview with Al Aronowitz)
From my point of view, I was getting done in. All the decisions were now three against one. And that’s not the easiest position if you’re the one: anything I wanted to do they could just say, ‘No.’ And it was just to be awkward, I thought.
…
I got so fed up with all this I said, ‘OK, I want to get off the label.’ Apple Records was a lovely dream, but I thought, ‘Now this is really trashy and I want to get off.’ I remember George on the phone saying to me, ‘You’ll stay on this fucking label! Hare Krishna!’ and he hung up – and I went, ‘Oh, dear me. This is really getting hairy.’
(Paul McCartney, The Beatles Anthology, 2000)
PAUL: I didn't want to do a press conference to launch the album because whenever I'd meet a journalist, they always floored me with one question: they'd say, "Are you happy?"' and it almost made me cry. I just could not say, "Yes. I'm happy," and lie through my teeth, so I stopped doing interviews.
Peter Brown, who was at Apple at that time, said, "What are you going to do about publicity?"'
I said, "I don't really want to do any."
He said, "It's a new album. You'll kill it. Nobody'll even know it's out at all. You should do something."
I said "Well, how do you suggest we do it?"'
He said, "Maybe a questionnaire?"'
I said, "Okay, look, you write some questions that you think the press wants to know. Send 'em over to me and I'll fill it out but I can't face a press conference."
So the questionnaire came, and Peter Brown realised that the big question was the Beatles so he put in a couple of loaded questions and rather that just say, "I don't want to answer these," I thought, Fuck it. If that's what he wants to know, I'll tell him. I felt I'd never be able to start a new life until I'd told people.
(Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now by Barry Miles)
It is 1970. Paul still doesn’t like Klein but John digs him more than ever and George digs him more than that and Ringo doesn’t mind him. Paul? He is so uptight about Klein he only leaves the Beatles, that’s all. Klein and me meet the press and TV and all that; together we sit on a sofa and talk about Paul. Mr Klein, why doesn’t Paul like you? Mr Taylor, why doesn’t Paul like Mr Klein? I don’t know, don’t ask me, man, don’t ask me.
Paul releases his album and Klein releases the Beatles’ album and they both make a million and Klein has had Phil Spector remix Paul’s song ‘The Long and Winding Road’, adding a women’s choir and some violins etc. Paul thinks this is the shittiest thing anyone has ever done to him and that is saying something, but Klein laughs up his silk sleeve and releases ‘Long and Winding Road’ as a single anyway and still with Phil’s new arrangement.
Up there in Scotland, Paul McCartney, one of the four owners of Apple, the company formed to give total freedom, artistic control, to struggling performers and writers, wonders what went wrong, when even he can’t control his own work.
(Derek Taylor, As Time Goes By, 1973)
Q: "The album was not known about until it was nearly completed. Was this deliberate?"
A: "Yes, because normally an album is old before it even comes out. (A side) Witness 'Get Back.'"
…
Q: "Is it true that neither Allen Klein nor ABKCO have been nor will be in any way involved with the production, manufacturing, distribution or promotion of this new album?"
A: "Not if I can help it."
Q: "Did you miss the other Beatles and George Martin? Was there a moment when you thought, 'I wish Ringo were here for this break?'"
A: "No."
(Paul McCartney, April 9th 1970, press release 'McCartney')
Derek Taylor, the Beatles' press officer, is with us, talking about how unexpected Paul's attack had been.
"He was only supposed to write out information explaining how he made the album,? Derek says. "Instead, he hands us this interview in which he asks himself questions, such as would he miss Ringo? It was entirely gratuitous. Nobody asked him that question. He asked that question of himself."
(George Harrison, 1970, interview with Al Aronowitz)
We’re beginning now to only call each other when we have bad news. The other day Ringo came around to see me with a letter from the others, and I called him everything under the sun. But it’s all business. I don’t want to fall out with Ringo. I like Ringo. I think he’s great. We’re all talking about peace and love, but really we’re not feeling peaceful at all. ‘There’s no one who’s to blame. We were fools to get ourselves into this situation in the first place. But it’s not a comfortable situation for me to work in as an artist.’
(Paul McCartney, April 21-22, 1970, Interview for the Evening Standard)
We all started on a bus and small clubs and things like that, but Paul is that type of person. Paul wanted to do it all over again, and he did. And he went through hell. He went through hell. I mean, now he’s not talking to me and that’s too bad, but he started again from the bottom to do the Paul McCartney show. I don’t wanna do it anymore. I did it once.
(Ringo Sarr, 1980, interview with Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, All You Need Is Love, 2024)
Was there nothing to be done, no consolation at all? No. None. John was dead. Gone. No more jokes, no more cards, letters, songs, insults, misunderstandings, apologies. In his fading shadow we now saw widows and fatherless sons. What must it be like to be them, in that glare of ghouls and lovers alike? Dreadful. Ringo was on his way, Julian too, to the Dakota; George and Paul were staying in England, all now themselves vulnerable. Trust of a stranger’s handshake ended that day, for all time. John Sheppard, Neil and I went out to a smartish pizza restaurant - we had to eat something - and then split up, Neil going back to Apple, Sheppard to Granada and I to George’s office at HandMade Films, where the telephones were ringing with the clamour for statements. I telephoned George, who was as may be imagined: shocked, dreadfully upset and very angry. He said he didn’t want to give a statement at such a time, but Denis O’Brien had said there ought to be one. I knew there should be but I didn’t want to push anything. This wasn't like old times; this was a bad new time. After an hour or so I telephoned George again and this time we worked out a short statement based on his real response to the tragedy; never mind whether it was ‘cosmic’ or not, he wanted to express his anger. So did I.
The press agencies, wire services and news-desks were unfriendly, sour and functional, already tired by the event even though their prose would be the deepest-dyed purple since the Death of Nelson - for this was so appalling an event that even the meanest Beatle-hater knew what the public expected of him. Southey said of Nelson’s passing: ‘His death was felt in England as something more than a public calamity; men started at the intelligence turned pale, as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend.’ The only difference here was one of scale. The feeling for John spread far beyond our shores; it was felt as keenly in the Americas and in the Orient and across Europe and in the Southern Hemisphere as in Liverpool or London. After phoning through the statement, I crossed London by taxi in profound silence and caught the train home to Suffolk. In the train I wrote a few lines for the Liverpool Daily Post and then Joan met me at the station and drove me home to tea and sympathy in equal measure.
I telephoned my copy through in time for the Welsh edition of the Daily Post. While the ‘copytaker’ ran me through the piece, checking punctuation, I allowed myself a smile as I recalled past tensions, when I had believed my future reputation to be at stake with every story phoned through. Back to the beginnings, all the time, back to where we once belonged. For the remainder of the evening I watched television, in a trance, saw the Granada special; a dismal affair, with Johnny Hamp (Head of Light Entertainment) trying to make the very good case that there had been four Beatles, always equal, and yet quite aptly identifying the concept of John as leader, hardman. Hunter Davies appeared on film, making a kind of sense but not enough. His position was that John had needed The Beatles to ‘make it’ himself, whereas Paul could have done it alone. Hunter seemed very chirpy, as if that were the way John would have wanted it. Maybe so. Anthony Fawcett was there, looking like a man who had seen ghosts and making a lot of good points in mid-Atlantic dialect; he had, after all, been there when the madness was upon the House of Bag, The Ant, The Incredible Shrinking Man, he did know and understand them and above all, he loved them. Richard Williams, a journalist, was also on the panel. I was glad to be at home - safe with Joan.
