Fire and Rain (20 page)

From the start, Peter Brown—who cultivated the air of a refined British gentleman from his neatly trimmed beard to his tasteful suits—had a visceral dislike for the far less suave Klein. Brown was also offended by Klein's assertions that Apple was in poor financial shape and saw them as Klein's calculated way of winning over the band. Within months, he and Klein were barely on speaking terms. Brown's job description remained the same, but Klein's accountant began badgering him with questions. “I wasn't happy at all, but I didn't want it to appear that Klein had pushed me out,” Brown recalled. He stayed on, but when Brown and Neil Aspinall weren't reelected to the board of shareholders that year, probably thanks to Klein, Brown knew his Apple days were numbered.

As another one of his early projects, Klein also lit a fire under
Get Back,
the movie of their recording sessions they'd filmed over a year before. After
A Hard Day's Night
,
Help!
, and
Yellow Submarine
, the Beatles owed United Artists one more feature, so Klein made a revamped deal for a release and a soundtrack album, both now called
Let It Be
. Although engineer Glyn John had taken a first crack at making sense of the tapes and even sequenced a finished album, Klein ultimately went with Phil Spector.

Spector seemed an odd choice to oversee this particular project. His Wall of Sound was now out of vogue (as proven by the chart flop of what he saw as his masterpiece, Ike and Tina Turner's “River Deep—Mountain High” in 1966), and it also seemed the antithesis of the very idea of the consciously under-produced
Get Back
sessions. Still, he and Klein were natural cohorts: both sons of European immigrants, both rooted in the New York area (Spector was born in the Bronx, where Klein later worked). ABKCO also had a “financial participation” in hits Spector had cowritten, like “Be My Baby” and “You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'.” When the two would meet up in recording studios, they'd unintentionally
look and sound like a Noo Yawk comedy duo; Lennon and Klaus Voormann would be beside themselves with laughter.

When asked why he'd hired Spector to work with the Beatles, Klein was typically blunt. “Wouldn't you want the number-one director to direct the number-one actor?” he told the
New York Post
. Klein was so confident in the unfinished
Let It Be
album that he ordered EMI to press up three million copies.

By spring, Klein had far stickier Beatle matters to sort out. McCartney's own album was no longer a secret, especially when he made it known he wanted it out fast, on April 17. Klein knew releasing it at the same time as a new Beatles album (and Starr's now completed
Sentimental Journey
record) could potentially dilute the sales of each. In his particular way, Klein went about solving the problem. After discussions with Harrison, Lennon, and Starr, he sent a letter on March 20 to Ken East, the managing director of EMI Music, which distributed Apple, asking to delay the release of McCartney's album. The only person he didn't bother to inform about his decision was McCartney.

EMI had little choice in the matter. The power of the Beatles was such that the corporation had an arm's-length relationship with Apple, which supplied EMI with release dates, finished artwork, and tapes. Other than employees of the studio on Abbey Road, hardly anyone at the company saw or worked alongside a Beatle. The imminent release of something called
Let It Be
embodied the lack of interaction between the two companies. When EMI marketing director Paul Watts heard about it, he was confused: What
was
it, exactly? And had it been recorded before or after
Abbey Road
?

The beginning of the end started on March 23. At one studio, Spector began sorting through the pile of tapes from the Twickenham and
Apple group sessions; on the same day, he also managed to stretch out “I Me Mine,” the song McCartney, Harrison, and Starr had cut in January, by thirty seconds by repeating the chorus. The same day, “Billy Martin” logged his final day at EMI Studios. And also on March 23, Klein met with East to repeat his demands to postpone McCartney's album, and East agreed. In a sign of how badly communication had broken down inside the band—and how much resentment had built up toward McCartney after he'd insisted on having the Eastmans represent them—eight days went by after Klein and East's meeting before anyone reached out to McCartney.

Finally, on March 31, Lennon and Harrison sent their own letter to East, saying “it would not be in the best interests of the company” for McCartney's album to be released April 17. The same day, they dashed off another piece of correspondence, this one to McCartney himself. “To: You, From: Us,” it began, followed by: “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 seven days of each other. So we sent a letter to EMI telling them to hold your release date till June 4th (there's a big Apple-Capitol convention in Hawaii then). We thought you'd come around 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.” It was signed “Love, John and George.” Extending a particularly thorny olive branch, Harrison added his own postscript: “Hail Krishna. A mantra a day keeps ‘Maya' away. I hope my friend gets joy from that.”

As it turned out, McCartney did take it personally. That day, Starr drove to McCartney's home on Cavendish Avenue to hand-deliver the letter. McCartney greeted his bandmate coldly, then read the letter in his parlor as Starr stood by. As McCartney later affirmed in a court affidavit, “I got really angry when Ringo told me that Klein had told him my record was not ready.” That was an understatement. Appalled by the way Klein and his fellow Beatles had conspired behind his back—even
though they only wanted to hold back his record for two months, not kill it altogether—McCartney exploded in a way Starr had rarely seen. “I'll finish you now!” he yelled. “You'll pay!” Starr had barely taken his coat off when McCartney told him to put it back on and leave.

Simultaneously, John Eastman, who had taken over handling McCartney's day-to-day dealings from his father, heard about the plans to postpone the record during a meeting with executives at Capitol Records in Los Angeles. Furious himself, Eastman calmed a nerve-wracked McCartney, telling him the record would come out one way or another; in fact, Eastman was already thinking about contacting Clive Davis to see if Columbia would take it. When McCartney mentioned this possibility to Harrison, Harrison shot back, “You'll stay on the fucking label. Hare Krishna.” (As a Beatle associate of the time noted, Harrison, when angry, had a distinct way of making “Hare Krishna” sound like “fuck you.”) In the end, McCartney got his wish: When Starr checked in with Harrison and Lennon after his confrontation with McCartney, he argued they should grant McCartney his wish and release his album on his schedule, and they did.

Shortly after,
Rolling Stone
editor Jann Wenner flew to London to interview McCartney about the impending album. McCartney asserted Klein wasn't managing him, talked about the good time he had making a record on his own, and downplayed any rifts with Lennon. Instead of talking about specific songs, he told Wenner that those details and more would be included in a special announcement accompanying the record. “I just filled it out like an essay, like a school thing,” he said. When pressed by Wenner to divulge its contents, McCartney demurred. “It's much nicer as a surprise,” he said.

The week of April 6 began inauspiciously enough in the land of the
Beatles. In America, “Let It Be,” the elegiac ballad McCartney had written for his mother—a song with the instantly timeless feel of a church hymn composed centuries before—easily floated up to number 1. On Tuesday, April 7, John and Lee Eastman announced that their client Paul McCartney had formed his own production company, sporting the not terribly original name of McCartney Productions. Its first two projects would be an animated film based on
Rupert the Bear
, a children's cartoon celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, and the release of an album of his own,
McCartney
. That day, a meeting was scheduled at Apple Corps for April 10, at which the four Beatles would finally face each other—after months apart—to discuss plans for the release of
Let It Be
, which would be in theaters in a little over a month.

That Tuesday, DiLello was in the Press Office at Apple when Derek Taylor casually handed him a typed, four-page letter on Apple stationery. “What's this?” DiLello wondered.

The document in DiLello's hand was an “interview” with McCartney, albeit in description only. McCartney enjoyed being the jovial salesman for the band more than any of the other Beatles, but the thought of having to answer questions about the state of the Beatles appealed to him as much as seeing the frontal nudity on the cover of Lennon and Ono's
Two Virgins
. Taylor and Brown suggested McCartney write up his own question-and-answer session and supplied him with typically banal questions: “Why did you decide to make a solo album?” “Did you enjoy working as a solo?” “Were you pleased with
Abbey Road
?” As Brown watched, McCartney wrote out the answers in the living room of his St. John's Wood home, after which they were quietly typed up for distribution with the first one hundred British promotional copies of
McCartney
.

On the morning of Wednesday, April 8, Ray Connolly, a young music columnist and reporter at the
Evening Standard
, was at his desk when he received a call from Taylor. Taylor said he was about to messenger over a statement from McCartney, but asked that Connolly and the paper
hold off publishing it until Friday, April 10. When the envelope arrived, Connolly flipped through it. The bulk of it was innocuous enough. In it, McCartney talked up his record and commented elliptically on where the Beatles stood as people and creative partners. McCartney said the band was split over “personal differences, business differences, musical differences,” but added, “Temporary or permanent? I don't know.”

The document hardly knocked Connolly out of his desk chair. Along with a group of other writers, he'd been granted much access to the Beatles over the previous few years, conducting interviews with them and spending considerable time at Apple headquarters. He'd witnessed his share of bickering and had been in the Press Office when Lennon had bolted from the meeting in Brown's office the previous September. Connolly had flown to Toronto to cover Lennon's appearance at the Rock & Roll Revival concert. Arriving at the house of rockabilly icon Ronnie Hawkins, who was lending his home to the Lennons, Connolly heard Lennon shout out his name and ask him to an upstairs bathroom. Still washing his long hair in a sink, Lennon had breathlessly told Connolly he was leaving the Beatles. Stunned by the news, Connolly realized he had the pop scoop of the decade, but Lennon told him not to write about it just yet; he'd tell him the appropriate time to break the story.

At his desk, Connolly flashed back to that and other tumultuous moments. Thinking McCartney's statement was simply of a piece with the band's increasingly public grousing, he filed it away until publication three days later. Besides, it was hard to imagine a world without the Beatles.

The next morning, Thursday, April 9, Connolly received a call at home from his editors: The
Daily Mirror
was announcing the Beatles were over. Where was
his
story?
Daily Mirror
writer Don Short, a longtime friend of the band, had received the same packet but, unlike Connolly, saw McCartney's statement as inflammatory. Short particularly focused on one back-and-forth: To the question “Do you foresee a time when Lennon-McCartney become an active songwriting partnership
again?” McCartney tersely wrote out, “No.” McCartney never came out and said the band was over or that he was leaving, but Short felt otherwise. “Paul is quitting the Beatles,” he wrote. Disregarding Taylor's request, his editors ran Short's piece a day early. Taylor had no comment, while Mavis Smith, who worked in the Press Office with Taylor and DiLello, denied any breakup.