The Beatles Boxed Set (9 page)

            Paul
said as much to the
Sunday Times
, revealing that the band was about to
call it quits. He said, “We Beatles are ready to go our own ways. I’m no longer
one of the four moptops.” He then pointed to the mustache growing over his
lips. He added that it was “part of breaking up the Beatles. I no longer
believe in the image.”

            Even
the other Beatles made clear their plans for their own pursuits. Among them, it
was George who was by far the most successful and had gone to India to study
sitar and Eastern religion. Ringo chose to stay at home with his wife and
children while John involved himself in a new Richard Lester film,
How I Won
the War
, but would soon discover that acting was even more boring than
touring with a rock band.

            And
when it was time for them to record their
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band
, Paul had taken on a leadership role. But this time, it was obvious
that something changed in Paul. He and John would treat George, who also had
songs he wanted to contribute to their albums but was turned down, as a
second-class Beatle. And Paul further alienated the youngest Beatle by taking
the guitar solo in the album’s title track, and even playing lead on John’s
Good
Morning, Good Morning
.

            Paul
also aggravated John by doing endless retakes on his own lead vocals, and then
kept the engineers occupied for hours while he worked on his bass part for
Love
Rita
, playing for such long hours that his fingers bled.

            And
if he didn’t think twice about asking others to wait, Paul was offended when
George Martin asked him to wait a few days before working out a string
arrangement to Paul’s
She’s Leaving Home.
Martin was busy producing a
new record for Cilla Black. Paul said, “I thought, ‘Fucking hell! … He ought to
put himself out.’”

            Paul
then approached another arranger and gave him the job, much to Martin’s dismay.

Let It Be
was the band’s final album release

            Strain
between the Beatles surfaced when they were recording
Let It Be
, the
band’s final album release. George Martin revealed that the project was “not
all a happy recording experience. It was a time when relations between the
Beatles were at their lowest.” John thought the sessions were “hell … the most
miserable … on Earth” while George thought it was “the low of all-time.”

            New
tension developed between the Beatles when they argued about who will be their
financial adviser be. John, George and Ringo favored Allen Klein, who had
managed The Rolling Stones; Paul voted for John Eastman, brother of Linda
Eastman, whom Paul married in March. As they couldn’t agree with their
decisions, Klein and Eastman were both appointed. But then, further conflict
followed, leading to lost financial opportunities. Finally, Klein was appointed
as the sole manager of the band in May.

            When
the band was recording for their album
Abbey Road
, John didn’t agree
with George Martin’s proposed format of a “continuously moving piece of music”
and wanted his and Paul’s songs to occupy separate sides of the album. Paul
finally came up with a compromise: the first side would contain the
individually composed songs and the second would consist largely of a medley.

            The
Beatles were together in the same studio for the last time on August 20, 1969,
to complete and mix their single,
I Want You (She’s So Heavy).
John
finally announced his departure from the band on September 20 during one of
their meetings. He told them, “The group is over! I’m leaving!”

            Paul
was surprised, and Klein urged John not to tell the public about his decision. Klein
had just finished negotiating with Capitol and didn’t want the company
executives to discover that there’d be no more original records until after the
paperwork for the Beatles’ elevated royalty rates were signed. So they kept it
hushed up, with Paul still hoping for the best. He recalled, “Nobody quite knew
if it was just another one of John’s little flings. I think John did kind of
leave the door open. He’d said, ‘I’m pretty much leaving the group, but…’”

            But
John had no intention of coming back. And now that his songwriting partner was
out of the band, Paul packed his bags and took his wife and their children to
the farm he kept outside Campbeltown in the hills near the water on the Mull of
Kintyre. There was nothing there to do, certainly no fans to wave to. But what
Paul intended was to vanish from the civilized world.

            Paul
was saddened by the disbandment of the Beatles. He had difficulty facing the
reality that the stress resulting from the band’s split turned him to drinking
that got out of control. The problem got so bad that writing songs was a
struggle.

Paul and his wife and kids escaped to his
farm near the Mull of Kintyre after the Beatles’ breakup

            Although
he intended to stay at his farm to escape the stress caused by the split-up,
the ‘business hassles’ followed him and drove him to a drinking stupor to block
them out. Paul recalled, “So I think I was just trying to escape in my own
mind. I had the freedom to have just a drink whenever I fancied it. I’d go into
the studio, maybe have another drink and so on. I over did it, basically, I got
to a point where Linda had to say ‘look, you should cool it.’”

            One
of the songs that Paul wrote while in his farm was
The Long and Winding Road
,
which talks about the disintegration of the Beatles and was recorded as they
drifted apart.

            Paul
publicly announced his departure from the band on April 10, 1970, one week
before his first, self-titled album was released. He also filed suit for the
band’s dissolution on December 31, 1970. This was followed by legal disputes,
as Paul’s representation, the Eastmans, fought Allen Klein over royalties and
creative control of musical projects.

            The
Beatles formally dissolved on January 9, 1975, but lawsuits against their
record company EMI, Allen Klein, and each other dragged until 1989. When the
Beatles were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, Paul didn’t
show up, saying that unresolved “business differences” would make him “feel
like a complete hypocrite waving and smiling with them at a fake reunion.”

            And
so this marked the breakup of the Beatles, once the most popular and
influential musical group in history and a legend in their own right for the
music they created together. Each of the Beatles went on their separate ways,
making their own albums and chasing other interests and focusing on family
life. Though the Beatles disbanded, their music stayed on and would become a
permanent fixture in the history of music and entertainment.

            For
Paul, this signaled a new chapter in his life. He still loved music, and knew
that it was something he’d be doing even after leaving the Beatles.

While
still with the Beatles, Paul had proven his artistic talents in singing and
songwriting. And even now that he was on his own, he was in no mood to stop his
musical career. This was just the beginning of his solo career.

            But
while Paul was poised for success, he was dogged by rumors that had been
circling for a few years but became intense after he retreated to his farm to
‘escape’ his problems concerning the Beatles’ breakup.

Paul
wasn’t the only Beatle who had been the subject of death rumors, but the rumors
surrounding him were the most intense. NEMS spokesman Tony Barrow’s memoir
mentioned an incident in the fall of 1966 when more than a dozen reports asked
him if Paul was still alive. Barrow called the Cavendish house where Paul was
staying and Paul came to the phone, sounding very much alive.

Rumors had it that Paul died in a car
accident and a look-alike replaced him in the band

            The
ghoulish mania swept across the media in 1969. It began as a rumor that slowly
spun out of control. A college journalist at the University of Michigan named
Fred LaBour was in the newsroom when somebody called him and told him that Paul
was dead. LaBour thought it was weird, especially after the caller mentioned
the incantation at the end of
Strawberry Fields Forever
that sounded
like
I buried Paul
.

The
caller also brought to attention the fact that Paul was the only Beatle who
wore a black carnation on
Magical Mystery Tour
. And why was his back
turned to the camera on the back cover of
Sgt. Pepper
?

            LaBour
took note of these things. It was ridiculous, but it was also very interesting.
Then an idea hit him. “I talked it over with a friend of mine and said, ‘I’m
just gonna kill him. I’m gonna make the whole thing up.’”

            And
that was exactly what LaBour did, collecting the clues the caller gave him
along with some of the observations he made.

            LaBour’s
article in the
Michigan Daily
displayed the headline: “McCartney Dead:
New Evidence Brought to Light.” As you can expect, some of the new evidence
that LaBour discussed in his article was nonsense. The open hand held above
Paul’s head on the cover of
Sgt. Pepper’s
being a Mafia sign of death was
just one product of LaBour’s imagination. He also made up the equivalent of the
word
walrus
as Greek for “corpse” (as in the band’s song,
I Am the
Walrus
). Truth to tell, the Greeks didn’t have that word.

            LaBour
also didn’t fail to bring to attention the fact that Paul was barefoot on the
cover of
Abbey Road
, and claimed that dead men wear no shoes. He thought
“it sounded good.” He also mentioned the single-file march across the
Abbey
Road
, which resembled a funeral march. John, in white, appeared like Christ
while Ringo, wearing black, was a preacher and George, in denim, was the
gravedigger.

            In
addition, LaBour described a fatal car accident in the fall of 1966 and the
top-secret campaign to replace Paul with a Scottish look-alike by the name of
William Campbell.

            LaBour’s
article contained such very interesting information that it caught the
attention of a disc jockey named Russ Gibb who played the story on his WKNR-FM
radio show and threw in some of his own interpretation. He even promised more,
just to keep his listeners coming back.