And in the End: The Last Days of The Beatles by Ken McNab is a nice summary of the band's breakup. Last week we looked at I’ll Push You, which was an inspirational book about a journey two men made across Spain’s Camino de Santiago trail. This week’s selection is about a band that dominated the music scene for many years, The Beatles, who in their own way inspired millions of people all over the world.
The book documents the unraveling of the band in 1969. I, like most fans, knew that the group was having problems then, but I had no idea how rapidly and irreparably things were falling apart for the lads from Liverpool.
Perhaps the major point of the book is that The Beatles were as bad at business as they were good at producing great music. The opening chapter, January 1969, reveals that the band was broke. That surprised me. They had a lot of money coming in, but they spent it faster than they accumulated it.
Recording the White Album, which was released in November of 1968, really strained the relationships. By then, creative differences were fracturing the band, and it took a lot of give and take to get the record out.
The lads were going in different directions. John, the most out-there member of the group, wanted to produce cutting-edge music. Paul was more pop-oriented and mainstream. While Lennon and McCartney had co-written most of The Beatles songs, by now they were doing their own things. Paul loved Let It Be; John loathed it. George had been writing songs for years but was ignored by his two creative bandmates and resented it. Ringo was just happy to be with the boys.
In 1967 Apple Corps was set up to run the group’s business activities and provide resources to upcoming artists like James Taylor. Despite the fact that the White Album (1968) sold millions of copies, by early 1969, Apple Corps was almost bankrupt. Brian Epstein, their manager, had kept track of money, but he died in late 1967 of a drug overdose, and no one replaced him on the business side.
Apple Corps had lots of “employees” who did interesting things. One guy, Stocky from Massachusetts, was paid to sit on a filing cabinet and draw pictures of genitals. John hired a guy who invented an electronic pulsating apple that did nothing. In 18 months since Apple Corps’ founding, they had blown through the equivalent of 30,000,000 pounds, which is more in dollars. They had only earned about one-third of that amount. Each of the boys had routinely overdrawn his personal accounts by one to two million pounds. They owned property all over London but there was no centralized record of their holdings. John and Paul began to worry that they’d end up like Mickey Rooney, who was broke at the end of his career.
The group needed a fixer and they finally settled on Allen Klein, an American with a checkered reputation. He managed other groups, including the Rolling Stones, but he was known as a sleaze who got things done. John had made overtures to Klein without telling McCartney, which became a stress point. Paul wanted Linda Eastman’s (his fiancé) family, businessmen from New York City, to bail out the Beatles. He lost since George and Ringo went with what John wanted. The deciding factor was Yoko; she insisted on Klein.
Yoko Ono was another problem and comes across as very controlling. She thought she was the Fifth Beatle, and John did not discourage her. She was more of a fifth wheel – useless and potentially harmful. On the rare occasions in 1969 when the band did go into the recording studio, she would sometimes spontaneously join in “singing” (polite observers called it shrieking), which did not sit well with the performers.
While the band members were no strangers to drugs, for most of their careers they managed to not let substances affect their lives. Marijuana was their drug of choice, although they dabbled with LSD, cocaine, and various uppers and downers, not that Bob in the Basement knows anything about that stuff. By 1969, John was a full-blown heroin addict, with Yoko his wing woman.
January 30, 1969, was the last time the band performed. They gave a concert on the roof at Apple Corps headquarters on Savile Row. Organist Billy Preston joined them and added real zest to the performance. While it was a thrash to get the boys to play together, it worked. And, although they didn’t realize it then, it was a good way to go out.
The Beatles were almost bankrupt for two basic reasons: 1) They spent too much money, often on silly things; 2) They didn’t make enough money.
The main source of income was their contract with EMI/Capitol Records, which gave them a very low return. John and Paul had an interest in Northern Songs, which owned the songs the two had written, but the deal was very bad for them in terms of what they actually received in royalties.
Allen Klein eventually negotiated a much better deal with EMI but ended up losing Northern Songs in a bad buyout. The problem was that by the time the new contract with EMI was signed in the fall of 1969, the Beatles were done as a group. They would not produce too many new songs.
Yoko would do gigs also featuring other acts and bring John along. She screeched and shrieked while he fumbled away on his Epiphone guitar. She made sure that she dominated the event, which always irritated the concert promoters and the audience.
McCartney married Linda Eastman in March and Lennon married Yoko the same month. Paul and John didn’t invite any Beatles to their weddings. That says a lot.
John did his famous bed-in with Yoko in May of 1969 at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. He wanted to go to NYC, but, due to a previous drug conviction, he couldn’t get into the USA. They spent a week in bed, being fawned upon by the press and hangers-on. At the end of said bed set, they recorded Give Peace a Chance, with lots of celebrities, including Petulia Clark, Tom Smothers, and Timothy Leary, joining them in singing.
Given the zooish nature of the session, the sound mix was terrible, but a talented local producer got new singers in the studio to spiff it up, and it ended up fine. The song launched John into his new career as a peace activist. This got Richard Nixon’s attention, and he instructed the FBI to set up a file on Lennon, which was interesting because Lennon was an English citizen.
George was fed up with the group, especially with Paul, who had done some sketchy back-door business things and had come to dominate the group. Harrison headed off to Sardinia with his wife, Pattie, to try to get away from the group and patch up his marriage, which was in trouble due to George’s wandering eye and straying other things. Paul and Linda went to Corfu in the Mediterranean, where people left him alone. John and Yoko, along with Julian, John’s son from his first marriage, headed up to Scotland to visit relatives he had ignored for years. Yoko took over cooking which, since she and John were on a weird macrobiotic diet, did not sit well with the family or their stomachs. John thought of the trip as “the fookin’ holiday from hell.” Meanwhile Ringo had finished making a movie with Peter Sellers and was at home waiting to see what would happen.
By the end of June, 1969, the boys had been away from each other for months. They were now sort of willing to see if things could work out. That set the stage for Abbey Road.
George was a closet Hare Krishna who liked their peaceful philosophy but was not down with the “no alcohol, drugs, or illicit sex” thing. Before recording Abbey Road, he brought the Krishnas into the studio to record their mantra. His engineer thought it was pretty weird to have all these people in robes chanting while he tried to get the recording levels right, but it worked.
In July the boys headed to the studio to record. John, always the imp, finally showed up with Yoko in a bed they brought into the sound stage. They got to work on the songs, starting with Here Comes the Sun, which George had written years before. Finally, he was getting noticed.
John had been in a creative funk (The heroin perhaps?). He wrote Come Together, one of his best, which they recorded. As one of the sound crew noted, it was like old times. The Beatles were back to being The Beatles. They were like little kids enjoying themselves immensely. There was still a lot of tension when they weren’t working, and Yoko was Yoko-ing, but things went well.
On my birthday, August 21, they finished recording, a nice tribute to me. It was the last time they would play as The Beatles. That was one month short of seven years recording together, with their first session in September of 1962.
George, John and Ringo did go to the Isle of Wright for a Bob Dylan concert in late August. There was some hope that the three Beatles would perform, but they just watched Dylan. That’s as close as they came to a reunion.
By the end of the summer, they still hadn’t come up with a name. Ringo suggested Abbey Road, and he also suggested the idea for the picture. Paul came up with the set design. He roughed out a drawing of the way the group would walk across the street. The photo shoot took 20 minutes, with a friendly Bobby (no relation to me) holding up traffic.
FYI: Around the same time as the shoot, the Manson Family killed Sharon Tate and others in Los Angeles.
By August, John was addicted again, as was Yoko, who was pregnant and would miscarry later. His mansion looked like a high-class drug den. He brought in a personal assistant who was also addicted and who could get good stuff.
Years later, John would accuse people of being racist towards Yoko. That might be right, but she was very intrusive and demanding and had no boundaries at all. She would be very irritating to most people, regardless of her ethnicity.
In September, John and Yoko were being creative again, this time with a movie, Smile, a fifteen-minute exposition of John’s you-know-what becoming aroused. It did not resonate with critics or the public.
Speaking of weird, at the same time, George and Bob Dylan, who were friends, did a film, recording their conversation in the back of a limousine. Their oeuvre, Eat This Document, alas, was not an artistic success. One perceptive critic said, “The camera captured the incoherent ramblings of two impossibly stoned rock stars riding around London.”
The last interesting event of the month was a one-day rock festival in Toronto that was falling apart. Despite having put together a lineup of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, The Doors, and Jerry Lee Lewis, ticket sales lagged. The promoters were desperate so they called up John Lennon in London and somehow got through. Lennon agreed to show up if he and Yoko would be featured. A deal was struck.
Lennon needed to put together a band so he reached out to Eric Clapton who joined the group. They pulled in a couple of other musicians and rehearsed their songs on the plane winging its way west to Canada from Britain. They were ready.
The only discordant note was Yoko, who began the performance by writhing onstage in a large white plastic bag, and then made things worse by coming out, as it were, to screech to the audience at the beginning of the show. After that, the new Plastic Ono band was very good, giving the folks some kick-ass rock and roll, so most people forgot about how bad Yoko had been.
Back in London, Allen Klein was finishing his negotiations with EMI Records about getting a better deal for The Beatles. At about the same time he got that done, John announced that he was leaving the group. This was no surprise, but the timing could not have been worse, Abbey Road, one of their most successful albums which ended up selling 27 million copies, had just been released. The new deal set them up nicely for the future, based on what they cranked out musically. The only problem was that the band was through. There would be few future songs sung by The Beatles.
At about the same time, Paul and John lost their rights to Northern Songs, where all of their tunes resided. They would get paid something, but not nearly as much as the songs were worth, even then. Their catalog’s value increased immensely over the next 50 years, which made the deal even worse in retrospect.
John leaves the band. John and Paul lose their music. It wasn't a good time. The silver lining was that John agreed not to announce publicly that he was leaving. Paul revealed the break up in April of 1970, right before their last album, Let It Be, was released.
After John’s announcement, Paul ended up crying. John left in a huff to have dinner with Yoko. Ringo and George were not surprised. It was like a marriage falling apart. It was inevitable, given the different directions the band members were going. John – iconoclastic avant garde performer; Paul – an organized, buttoned-down pop record producer; George -– a frustrated artist who wanted to go his own way; and Ringo – the most stable one – who had carved out somewhat of a film career. He was the least surprised of all at what happened. He was probably the most grounded member of the group.
This is about the time when we heard that Paul was dead, a silly story with long legs that I will not go into here. He wasn’t dead but The Beatles were. Ironically, news of his demise propelled sales of the Beatles’ albums.
In November of 1969, there was a massive mobilization of anti-Vietnam War protesters around the country, headlined in Washington, DC. Pete Seeger sang Lennon’s new song, Give Peace a Chance,and it captured the crowd as Peter, Paul and Mary and Arlo Guthrie joined in. John was in Greece vacationing with Yoko. He was delighted at the fact that his song had become the anthem of the anti-war movement.
December wasn’t a very merry month. Despite the fact that John was on his way out, Abbey Road topped the charts. John was increasingly seen as a powerful voice for the peace movement. He was also planning a music festival in Canada.
George got on a bus and joined a tour by Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett and Eric Clapton. He was a sideman, playing in the back of the stage. George had become sick of touring with The Beatles. He, like John, thought that the audience's expectations were too high for what the group could do live. With his new group, he enjoyed touring – they didn’t have the hang ups and tensions of The Beatles – and he picked up some new guitar stylings from Delaney.
Ringo was excited about the release of his new movie, The Magic Christian. Alas, he was more excited than the critics and movie goers. It bombed, but Ringo got better reviews than Peter Sellers.
John returned to Canada to spread peace and push for a July, 1970, music festival in Toronto. He also hung out at a friend's farm and managed to rack up an $8,000 phone bill. (For the kiddies on the email list, back then you were charged extra for long-distance calls, and they were very expensive. Given his personality, John was probably calling Pluto.) He had gotten off heroin and was now enjoying other, less dangerous substances.
Paul was really upset about the demise of his band and was in a dark mental place. His wife, Linda, reminded him that he was still a great songwriter and musician and that he had a lot of life and performing ahead of him. It worked, and he started writing songs. They went to their farmhouse in Scotland where he set up a recording studio and recorded the new material and some old tunes that never quite made it with The Beatles.
There was one more album, Let It Be, in May of 1970, which was a huge seller but was poorly reviewed. The four Beatles never were in the recording studio at the same time for that one, which included material that hadn’t made it into previous albums. It wasn’t their best, but the very fact that it was released at all is impressive. I loved it.
Bob’s Take
I really enjoyed this. It wasn’t too long, and, while it was detailed, it was never overwhelming, at 300 pages of pretty big print.
This was kind of a sad book. My friends growing up loved the Beatles. I remember seeing them on the Ed Sullivan Show; it was amazing. The next day at school, that’s all anyone was talking about.
While most people had a pretty good idea that things weren’t going well with the group in 1969, I had no idea things were so bad. Each member of the band was truly miserable for long stretches of the year. Different people observed that John and Paul were likely going through nervous breakdowns during that time.
They really had financial problems which is hard to fathom given their success. The fear of being poor motivated a lot of their behavior in 1969. John and Paul wanted to get control of Northern Songs, which would give them a hefty lifelong income. George and Ringo wanted to go off in different individual career directions to ensure that they were financially secure.
Artistically, they were sort of stuck, but they did rally to come up with Abbey Road, which was initially panned by many critics but ended up being a huge commercial success. It wasn’t as edgy or as complete as the White Album and it wasn’t the tour de force of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but it was solid and interesting. Now it is considered a classic.
As many of us thought, Ringo comes across as the most normal Beatle. He was probably the least talented initially, but his drum work on Abbey Road was considered extraordinary. He appeared in movies and still performs concerts.
Tidbits
-- The Beatles were four musicians that turned out to be the biggest band in the history of the planet, but John put things in perspective: “I met Paul, said, ‘Do you wanna join me band?’, you know, and then George joined and then Ringo joined. We were just a band that made it very, very big. That’s all.”
-- Author Ken McNab has some great closing thoughts which seem very naive in our world but made sense in yesterday’s world: “The Sixties provided a small window when a significant chunk of humanity briefly realized its moral potential and flirted with a collective belief that ‘the love you take really is the love you make.’ But not even The Beatles could fully live up to the unattainable idealism of McCartney’s Cosmic couplet.”
-- Barry Miles, Paul’s close friend and the founder of International Times, an underground London newspaper, put The Beatles in an interesting perspective: “They spanned the decade. They began in black and white and ended in colour. Like European architecture, they went from simplicity and raw energy, Romanesque, through a mature middle period, gothic, then a Mannerist phase, baroque, and ended with a return to basics, stripped-down early Georgian in Abbey Road. The Beatles were always a four-way relationship, like a love affair. They were the Sixties band.”
