Fire and Rain (11 page)

On January 25, Lennon and Ono finally returned to London; the next day, Ringo Starr left. By then, Starr had two comfortable homes: a house with a garden in Highgate, a hilly London suburb, and a centuries-old Tudor mansion in Elstead in county Surrey that he'd purchased in 1968 from his friend, actor Peter Sellers. With its oak-beamed rooms, wandering packs of ducks and geese, and separate movie theater, Brookfield House, as the Elstead home was called, was a welcome retreat from the pressure of Beatlemania.

Still, Starr had to leave, even for a bit. As unappealing as the thought of inquisitive reporters was—he dreaded the inevitable questions about how the Beatles were getting along—he had a movie to promote and a career of his own to map out. With Maureen, his low-key wife of nearly five years, and Apple administrative director Peter Brown, he boarded a plane for Los Angeles.

The oldest Beatle and the last to join, Starr had been a drowsy-eyed but amiable child growing up in Liverpool. To everyone around him, he still was. He'd been the first to say he was leaving: After a tense 1968 recording session, he stayed home and didn't return for several days (when he was welcomed back with a drum kit enshrined in roses). They knew he would come back: More than the others, Starr was always happy with his job, so why change anything? According to one former Apple employee, Richard DiLello, Starr's presence was especially welcome the day Lauren Bacall called and said she wanted to swing by with her daughter to meet a Beatle. Starr, the only Beatle available on short notice, charmed them so much that Bacall felt as if they were
all
in the offices. Starr's interest in the business of the Beatles, while never as intense as McCartney's, rose in the new decade: Now it was he, not McCartney, who was the most visible at 3 Savile Row and most passionate about the idea of the Beatles. As the four pulled away from each other, Starr steered closer to home base.

The previous October, Starr had launched a project of his own, an album of standards from the pre-rock era—purposefully cornball but guileless songs like “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” and “Stardust,” with big-band arrangements courtesy of Quincy Jones and McCartney. “The idea of Ringo doing his own album made us all think, ‘Oh,
really
?'” remembered Paul Watts, an EMI marketing executive at the time. Plenty of others, including Starr himself, didn't see the project as more than a way to pass the time and record long-ago pop songs his mother would enjoy hearing him sing. Over the course of four months, with the Beatles on an extended hiatus of some sort, Starr worked on the album at his leisure.

Since he'd been such a natural, unaffected screen presence in
A Hard Day's Night
and
Help!
a career in acting became another way to pass the time between Beatle projects. He'd already played a Mexican gardener in 1968's
Candy
, a warped sex comedy based on a novel coauthored by
Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, and he'd just wrapped up a larger, costarring role in
The Magic Christian,
also based on a Southern novel, in which he was cast as the adopted son of a rich cynic (played by Sellers) who bribes unsuspecting people to do outrageous things for cash. The film had already opened in the U.K. to mixed reviews, but a U.S. premiere was set for the middle of February.

Arriving in Los Angeles for the film's opening, Starr made nice at a press conference. With his usual nonchalance, he deflected most of the Beatle questions, only saying the group would most likely be recording together soon. Hardly anyone seemed to care about the movie; most of the non-Beatle questions had to do with working with his busty costar Raquel Welch.

Starr couldn't have been happier to leave the next day for Las Vegas to see Elvis Presley. The previous summer, Presley had returned to live performance with a string of triumphant and inordinately profitable shows at the International Hotel. Coming on the heels of his 1968 comeback TV special, the Vegas shows marked the concert debut of a different Elvis. His voice revealing new layers of emotional depth and velvety richness, he was still undeniably sexual, a prowling cougar onstage. But he was singing far more contemporary pop tunes, he was surrounded by a choir and orchestra, and he was wearing a newly designed one-piece jumpsuit that made his karate stage moves easier to pull off. Before long, Presley would be taking a nearly identical version of the show on the road.

After being sneaked in through the kitchen entrance at the International, Starr, Maureen, and Brown were escorted to their table. Halfway through the show, Presley introduced the visiting Beatle from the stage and Starr, good-natured as always, took a bow. Afterward, he and Brown were hustled backstage for a quick meeting with Presley. Despite the presence of more beefy security types than he'd ever seen, Brown was pleasantly surprised by how chatty, courteous, and charming Presley was.
Six years before, the Beatles had visited Presley at his Bel Air home, a meeting notorious for Presley's indifference to their presence. Now, as the new decade arrived, Presley and Starr were on equal ground: two well-compensated, beloved pop aristocrats, each searching for something new in their lives and work.

Two weeks after John Brower left Denmark, Lennon's assistant Anthony Fawcett tracked him down at a hotel in Los Angeles, where Brower was being interviewed about his grandiose festival by a writer from the Los Angeles
Free Press
. Still scrambling to turn his idea into reality, Brower had changed the name of his festival company to Karma Productions. Now, here was Fawcett on the line, telling him Lennon had written and recorded a new song, “Instant Karma,” and offering to play it for him over the phone.

On January 26, just before the call, American gossip columnist Earl Wilson had written a syndicated column, “Beatles May Not Record Together,” in which he noted there was “increasing conviction among their intimates that they may never record again as a whole.” The following day, Lennon unintentionally backed up Wilson's story. Having just returned from his Scandinavian trek, he'd woken up with a lyric in his head, written a rudimentary melody on a piano, and then, with the help of Apple employees Mal Evans and Bill Oakes, rounded up a quick cast of musicians (including Harrison and White, substituting for the nowdeparted Starr) to help him put it to tape. To oversee the session, Lennon suggested Phil Spector.

In rock and roll circles, the diminutive but intense Spector was a controversial and mythical figure. After a flush of early success, he'd retreated into seclusion. Starting with a cameo as a drug dealer in
Easy Rider
the year before, he'd emerged from semiretirement. He was
strong-willed and strident, yet he and Lennon shared a caustic sense of humor right from the start: The two men joked about starting and finishing the song in a day. As Spector scurried around the studio hooking up tape machines and setting up microphones, the band began rehearsing the tune. “John played the song and we all started playing and it sounded good and was very swinging and came together fast,” recalled Voormann, a German artist and musician who'd met the Beatles in Hamburg and was playing bass at the session. Evans corralled a bunch of locals from a nearby pub to join in on the background vocals in the chorus. By 4 A.M. it was done—recorded, mixed, and ready to roll off a vinyl assembly line. Again, Lennon was elated: The Beatles would never have bashed out a song so fast. “There was a simplicity in the way he did it that I don't think he would have been able to get across with the Beatles,” recalled Voormann. “He felt much freer than before.”

In the L.A. hotel room, Brower and the
Free Press'
John Carpenter picked up separate phone lines and prepared to hear the results. “Instant Karma” roared out; even over a Transatlantic connection, Brower could hear its massive, reverberating piano chords and White's loud, pushy shuffle beat, which put a massive exclamation mark at the end of each line in the chorus. But those lyrics . . . “Who on earth do you think you are—a superstar? Well, right you are!” taunted Lennon with a rasp that stung like scalding water.

When it was over, Carpenter looked at Brower and brought up the use of the word “karma” in the song. “Isn't that the name of your company?” he asked. “I don't know if that's a song for your festival. It doesn't sound very positive.”

Brower had to admit that, yes, it
was
the name of his production company, and no, he didn't know what to make of its message. Similarly, plenty of Beatle fans scratched their heads when copies of “Instant Karma” arrived in stores ten days later: The sleeve credited the song to “John Ono Lennon.” Although Lennon had had his middle name officially
changed from Winston to Ono when he wed Ono the previous March, “Instant Karma” marked the first time he used the name on a record. Even in the world of John Lennon, it was hard to imagine a more puzzling month than the one just ended.

Both everyone and no one knew where Paul McCartney was. Certainly, the other Beatles and Apple employees knew he'd spent a good deal of the winter holidays at his bare-boned farmhouse outside Campbeltown in the remote southwest of Scotland. He'd purchased it several years before, during his relationship with Peter Asher's sister Jane. In the fall of 1969, when a new degree of tension enveloped the Beatles, McCartney had retreated to the house with Linda, her seven-year-old daughter Heather from her previous marriage, and her and McCartney's new baby Mary. Aside from a
Life
magazine photographer and journalist who tracked him down that fall, looking to prove he was actually alive during the “Paul Is Dead” uproar, McCartney was guaranteed isolation.

None of the Beatles ever made the trip to the house, and in February, Lennon gave an interview—one of many at the time, sometimes to promote his peace causes, sometimes to simply keep his name in the papers—saying he and McCartney hadn't spoken in two months and only communicated by postcard. Even Peter Brown, Apple's dapper and unflappable administrative director and one of the few in close touch with McCartney, didn't bother making the trek to the farm, knowing he'd have to hike from a main road to reach it. McCartney told everyone the house didn't have a phone, even though it did; Brown, who'd more or less taken over the duties of handling the Beatles after Brian Epstein's death in 1967, would often receive calls at Apple from Scotland.

With McCartney's exact whereabouts up in the air and communication among the Beatles fractured, Klaus Voormann was particularly
stunned to receive a call one winter afternoon from McCartney himself. Would Voormann be up for a visit to McCartney's home in London?

In Hamburg a decade before, Voormann, then a young Berlin-born artist with male-model cheekbones, chanced upon the Beatles when they were blasting out sweaty rock and roll at the Kaiserkeller Club during their residence there. With his friends Astrid Kirchherr and Jürgen Vollmer, Voormann became an immediate Beatle follower and friend. When he moved to London a few years later, he remained close with Lennon, Harrison, and Starr; it was Lennon who suggested Voormann illustrate the cover for
Revolver
, and Voormann at various times crashed at Harrison's and Starr's homes.

No sooner had Voormann said yes to McCartney's invitation than the Beatle himself pulled up to Voormann's apartment on Heath Street. McCartney was driving a Mini, one of Europe's fashionably small cars, complete with dark-tinted windows. In the car on the way to McCartney's home in St. John's Wood, Voormann noticed the collar of his friend's blue shirt: scruffy and worn down, not quite the sartorial garb everyone associated with McCartney. Like others, Voormann had heard McCartney's fashion sense had taken a funkier, more downscale turn with his new wife.

In less than ten minutes, they arrived at 7 Cavendish Avenue, a cozy three-story home behind a black security gate that McCartney had purchased five years earlier. Voormann stepped inside and came upon keyboards, drums, and guitars: a veritable one-man band scattered about the living room. Voormann picked up a guitar and the two men jammed a bit together. Then, to Voormann's added wonder, McCartney cued up a tape machine and played him a few songs he'd been creating on his own.