Paul McCartney (52 page)

There was inevitably the odd lapse. Some of the material had already featured in the Get Back sessions, so carried a legacy of boredom and impatience born of vainly striving for perfection in a single take. Paul’s ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, in particular, had been tried so many times under its composer’s relentless cosh that John refused to work on it any further.

Nor did ‘going back to the way they used to do it’ mean excluding Yoko. On the contrary, the Abbey Road sessions included a bed-in right there on the studio floor. Before reporting for work, John had taken Yoko on a car-trip through the Scottish Highlands–his attachment to which long predated Paul’s–accompanied by his son Julian and her daughter Kyoko. A chronically bad driver, he had landed their hire-car in a ditch, badly gashing his face and injuring Yoko’s back to the extent that walking and even sitting were still painful for her. Rather than be without her in the studio, he had a double bed delivered from Harrods department store. There she lay, propped up by pillows, with a microphone rigged above her head to allow her to comment on the proceedings at will. Amazingly, the ceasefire still held.

For once, none of Paul’s contributions had ‘hit single’ tattooed on it. ‘Oh, Darling’ was a pastiche of overwrought soul singers like Jackie (‘Reet Petite’) Wilson; an early example of the 1950s nostalgia soon to flavour most British pop. ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, recorded sans John, began in familiarly cute, homey McCartney style with a character named Joan studying ‘pataphysical science’–the term he’d picked up in his days of hanging out with underground intellectuals at the Indica bookshop. Inside the pretty wrappings, a serial-killer medical student, Maxwell Edison, mutely stalked and bludgeoned his inoffensive victims with a cheery ‘Bang-Bang!’ to ‘[make] sure [they were] dead’. Giving him a silver hammer was meant to dilute the sick humour (just as putting ‘Silver’ in front of ‘Beatles’ had once seemed to bestow more glamour). But even for the charts of 1969, whimsical mass-murder was way too strong.

So the double A-side single taken from the album was John’s ‘Come Together’–a blatant double entendre which no longer held any risk–coupled with George’s ‘Something’. Yet, far from creating further tension, ‘Come Together’ revived the old unselfish creative interplay of Lennon and McCartney at their best. In John’s original version, Paul noticed the opening line slightly resembled Chuck Berry’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’. To forestall any charge of plagiarism, he suggested giving it a different arrangement that he envisioned as ‘swampy’. Hence its somnambulistic, bass-heavy beat, suggestive of tropical night, croaking frogs and sex under mosquito-nets.

There, alas, creative interplay hit the buffers. Although ‘Come Together’ seemed made for a live Lennon–McCartney harmony, John opted for vocal overdubs, done solely by him. Paul would later remember hoping the two of them would share a microphone again, but being ‘too embarrassed to ask’. It was, perhaps, the saddest measure of the gulf now separating them.

Side two of the album had the strongest air of innovation rather than valediction. For some time past, George Martin had been urging John and Paul to take their music to a higher level by writing in symphonies and movements rather than just the three-or four-minute flurries of a pop track. Now, as an extended finale to Abbey Road, he suggested they each root out fragments of unfinished or unrecorded songs from their bottom drawers, to be arranged into a classical-style suite. ‘Paul went for the idea at once,’ Martin remembers. ‘John grumbled a lot at first, but then he started coming in and saying, “’Ere, I’ve found another bit for the medley.”’

John’s ‘bits’ were very obvious leftovers with Sgt. Pepper-y titles, ribald lyrics and lapses into Scouse dialect, like poltergeists of his pre-Yoko self. Paul’s, by contrast, formed a complex mosaic revealing more of his private feelings and emotions than his music ever had before. Indeed, all the reassurance the album had built up so carefully was undermined in its final few minutes, thanks to the Beatles’ one-time consummate PR man.

‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ was an unmistakable reference to Allen Klein’s promises of fabulous wealth, which so far had produced only ‘funny paper’ like the management contract Paul alone had held out against signing. Outvoted and marginalised, his ‘one sweet dream’ was for himself and Linda to be ‘out of here… step on the gas and wipe that tear away’.

‘She Came In Through the Bathroom Window’ recalled his chaotic bachelor existence, just before Linda, when one eager groupie actually had entered Cavendish by that route. ‘Golden Slumbers’ derived from a setting of ‘Cradle Song’, by the Elizabethan pamphleteer Thomas Dekker, which Paul’s nine-year-old stepsister, Ruth, happened to have been learning on the piano. A passionate lullaby, from a soon-to-be father, turned into an anthemic chorus that was an uncannily accurate glimpse into his own future: ‘Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight… a long time!’

Here, at least, he had the last word–or, rather, two. In ‘The End’, the others really were just ‘sidemen for Paul’ as he pronounced their collective epitaph: ‘The love you take/ is equal to the love you make’. Then, when the album seemed over, as if to make up for all that grousing, came ‘Her Majesty’, a fragment of his old cheeky charm apparently calling Britain’s sovereign ‘a pretty nice girl’. He’d actually decided to cut it, but the studio engineers didn’t dare.

It was to promote Abbey Road that the Beatles had done their last-ever photo-shoot together, a melancholy occasion at John and Yoko’s new country mansion, Tittenhurst Park, on 22 August. They wore virtually the same clothes as on the album cover–save that John sported a wide-brimmed black hat like a Quaker elder–and seemed as awkward and withdrawn as four strangers.

It was hard to equate those cold, indifferent men with the boys who’d survived the Liverpool Cavern, Hamburg, Beatlemania and even crazier post-Beatlemania together, sustained by laughter, passion, optimism and, above all, a friendship that seemed indestructible. The love they’d made had been infinitely greater than any they could take–and this was the heaviest price of all.

Paul never did sign Allen Klein’s management agreement: John, George and Ringo’s majority vote had been sufficient to swing the appointment. His contractual obligations to the Beatles’ partnership and Apple meant he was now stuck with a manager he’d never wanted and could not stand.

Klein, for his part, assumed the lofty air of a man on a mission far more important than petty personality-clashes. ‘[Paul] was obligated into Apple for a considerable number of years,’ he told a TV interviewer in the stilted legal-ese he employed in public, ‘so his disassociating from me has really no effect.’ Privately, his ironclad self-belief persuaded him Paul would come over to him in the end.

Paul’s own skills as a politician, for once, had failed him completely. George, he guessed, could not be dissuaded from backing John over Klein. But the commonsensical, fair-minded Ringo might still be amenable to reason. So in July, Ringo and his wife, Maureen, received a rare invitation to dinner at Cavendish. After a sumptuous meal cooked by Linda, Paul reopened the case against Klein. As Ringo would later recall, he felt he was being emotionally blackmailed; whenever he volunteered something in Klein’s favour, Linda dissolved into tears and said, ‘They’ve got you, too.’

After the Abbey Road thaw, Paul was seen less and less at the Apple house in Savile Row where he’d once been a daily, omnipotent presence. ‘He’d only come in for business meetings that he absolutely had to,’ Tony Bramwell recalls, ‘though he was still on the phone all the time, asking me to do things.’

Admittedly, life now held other interests. On 28 August, at the Avenue Clinic in St John’s Wood, Linda had given birth to a girl. Paul was with her throughout the confinement; while the midwifery stuff he remembered so well was going on, he stared fixedly at a Picasso print on the wall. ‘It showed a guitar being played with only two fingers,’ he was to remember, ‘so I thought I’d try to write a song around the same chord.’

He watched his daughter arrive, six pounds eight ounces and perfect, later describing it as ‘the first time I’d really seen magic taking place in front of my eyes’. She was named Mary, after the mother whom he’d lost when he was 14 but who had never really left him.

Actually, he now had two daughters, having decided to adopt Linda’s daughter, Heather, just like his father had adopted his stepmother Angie’s daughter, Ruth. But unlike Ruth’s, Heather’s biological father, Joseph Melville See, was still very much alive in Tucson, Arizona.

In the years since his divorce from Linda, See had had little contact with Heather and had raised no objection to her being brought from New York to London to live with Paul. Even so, he could have created all kinds of legal obstacles to the adoption plan, maybe thwarted it altogether. He decided not to do so, he told his subsequent partner, Beverly Wilk, ‘because Heather will have a better life as a McCartney’.

Despite the distractions of double fatherhood, the chunky spectre of Allen Klein continued to haunt Paul, and what Klein had done and was still doing to Apple only compounded his feelings of betrayal, rejection and impotence.

If the company’s vast expenditure and waste had been curbed, there was no longer any sense of pioneering or mould-breaking at 3 Savile Row–only fear of where the axe would fall next. Klein’s relentless firing of the useful along with the useless had continued unabated, finally even reaching the Beatles’ two most trusted aides, Neil Aspinall and Peter Brown (though both were immediately reprieved by John and George). All that survived from the Paul era were the press office and the ‘Apple Scruffs’, clustered around the front steps, who already sensed what had been done to their darling and greeted Klein’s arrivals and departures with shouts of ‘Mafia!’

The front ground-floor office had been commandeered by John and Yoko as headquarters for the peace campaign their two bed-ins had initiated. It also housed a new company, Bag Productions, named after their fondness for wearing bags over their heads and set up to handle their joint music and film enterprises. Apple staff were expected to work for Bag Productions on projects such as collecting acorns to be sent as peace-tokens to world leaders, like China’s mass-murderous Mao Zedong. The press office, meanwhile, was called on to publicise Self-Portrait, a 20-minute film of John’s penis slowly achieving partial erection. A bit of a change from virginal Welsh sopranos and Yorkshire brass bands.

At the Montreal bed-in, John had recorded his campaign anthem, ‘Give Peace a Chance’, with Yoko and a choir made up of celebrities and media people who happened to be there at the time. It gave him the idea for a rock band consisting, not of a shackled-together four like the Beatles, nor even necessarily of musicians, but an impromptu ensemble with as many or as few members as happened to be on hand and which would keep changing size and shape like an amoeba.

For ‘Give Peace a Chance’, he therefore coined the name the Plastic Ono Band, putting Yoko firmly in the foreground and commissioning four perspex towers full of audio equipment as its only other permanent constituents. But although Paul was not involved at any point, the song still bore the Lennon–McCartney byline. John was later to regret feeling ‘guilty enough to give McCartney credit on my first independent single instead of… Yoko, who wrote it with me’.

The Apple record label continued to acquire and develop new artistes, but with few of the lavish resources Paul used to pour into it. George mainly took over the driving-seat, signing the American soul singer Doris Troy and the Radha Krishna Temple singers, whose orange-robed troupe was a familiar chanting, bell-clashing sight up and down Oxford Street. (As a result, the newest catchphrase among 3 Savile Row’s tense and paranoid workforce was ‘Hare Krishna’.) Crosby, Stills & Nash auditioned with a gorgeous version of ‘Blackbird’, but were rejected.

Paul’s final producing job for Apple was with Mal Evans’s Welsh band the Iveys, now renamed Badfinger (‘Bad Finger Boogie’ had been an early title of ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’). During a pause in the Abbey Road sessions, he decided which of the quartet should be lead singer and instructed them exactly how to perform his song ‘Come and Get It’. The track was intended for Ringo’s film The Magic Christian, but sounded like a send-up of Klein and his almost coercive promises of wealth there for the taking: ‘If you want it, here it is, come and get it, make your mind up fast/ Did I hear you say that there must be a catch?/ Will you walk away from a fool and his money?’

But there could be no walking away from Klein for the moment, immersed as he was in a project that had Paul’s full consent. This was the fight to save Northern Songs from the clutches of Lew Grade’s Associated Television, which by now had been dragging on for almost four months.

The situation was still exactly as it had been back in May: a group of City investors held the block of shares both the Beatles and Grade needed for overall control, but still coyly refused to sell to either side. Initially, this consortium had felt it only right for Lennon and McCartney to own the publishing company which administered their back catalogue. The leading members had been wooed by meetings with John and Yoko in person–but the strategy had misfired when John lost patience with all the schmoozing and declared he was ‘tired of being fucked about by men in suits sitting on their fat arses in the City’.

The real problem, however, was Klein, whose chequered CV had recently been laid out in detail by the Sunday Times Insight team. The Consortium felt an old-fashioned sense of responsibility for the future of Northern Songs and feared that if the Beatles won control, ‘the toughest wheeler-dealer in the pop jungle’ would end up as its chief executive.

Apple hastily offered reassurances that Klein would not be involved with Northern in any way if the Beatles’ bid were to succeed. There were also strenuous efforts to counter all the recent stories of disunity and instability at 3 Savile Row. To emphasise the company’s bright future under Lennon and McCartney, the two offered to extend their contractual commitment as songwriters beyond the present expiry date of 1973. Paul even posed for a photograph by Linda of Klein and himself joking around, apparently after the signing of what looked like an important contract but in reality was just another ‘funny paper’.