The Beatles: Off The Record 2 - The Dream is Over

1980)

1970

Thursday, April 9

John I received a phone call from Paul on Thursday afternoon. He said, ‘I’m going to leave The Beatles as well.’ I was happy to hear from Paul. It was nice to find that he was still alive! Anyway, Paul hasn’t left… I sacked him.

Paul "When people say I let it out, it was actually months after we had broken up. No one was saying anything and I was putting out this crazy press release with the McCartney album because Peter Brown said to me, ‘We need some press on this. You’d better do something,’ and I didn’t want to be interviewed. I didn’t feel secure enough to do that. So I said, ‘Okay, we’ll do a question and answer thing.’ So I said to Peter, ‘Write me out a questionnaire of what you think they’d ask me.’ He wrote it all out and I just filled it all in, like a questionnaire, and it all came out weird."

Friday, April 10

Paul’s announcement that he has left The Beatles appears on the front-page of the Daily Mirror…

Paul The press got it and it looked like I was doing a real number. John then thought, ‘Aha, he’s done the announcement of The Beatles’ split.’ But it was months after. Someone’s got to do it. In actual fact, we signed contracts that were saying that The Beatles were still going and that was one of the terrible things when The Beatles broke up. But I became known as the one who broke The Beatles up.

Derek Taylor, The Beatles’ press officer This is the truth about Paul McCartney. He cannot make that Beatle scene any more because what we know as The Beatles and love as The Beatles and prized and valued and changed our lives by, is not what it was. It is a hang-up, it’s a drag and it is a prison for four souls screaming for freedom. It was once a garden with tangerine trees and marmalade skies and girls with kaleidoscope eyes and cellophane flowers of yellow and green. Nothing can take that away. As long as all of us are alive we should all be on our knees with our stereo phones on our ears thanking God it happened… It was the only dream I ever had that came true. I love them for it. The Beatles. They have done enough for you and you have done enough for them. For every dollar you spend on them, they give you a dollar’s worth of themselves. I am sick at heart, press, public, Beatles, we seek too much of each other.

Disc & Music Echo reports Apple was fraught with the usual scenes, which come when The Beatles hit the headlines. The road outside No. 3 Saville Row, W1, was jam-packed with pressmen, excited fans and onlookers. But inside, everyone went about their business in the normal way. Only the press office, with Derek Taylor and Mavis Smith at the helm, seemed in any way to have anticipated the avalanche of calls and callers. One floor down, Allen Klein, The Beatles’ business boss, was undisturbed. The first thing he said when confronted by reporters was that he hadn’t even seen Paul’s statement, and as far as he was concerned, the whole situation was the same as it had been for the last six months.

Paul Klein was not the exclusive reason why The Beatles broke up. We were starting to do our own things before he arrived, but it certainly helped. There were various reasons why we split. I don’t think even the four of us know all the reasons, but Klein was one of the major ones…

Linda McCartney I knew I hadn’t broken up The Beatles. I’d pleaded with them to stay together. It really broke my heart to see Paul so upset that he didn’t have a band anymore, that he felt completely washed up and redundant.

Derek Taylor "Paul McCartney has not left The Beatles, nor has Richard Starkey, George Harrison or John Lennon. The Beatles left them at an unrecorded moment in time. Neither has it anything to do with Linda McCartney or Yoko Ono."

Yoko Ono I hated being blamed for the break-up of The Beatles. I wasn’t responsible. It was John’s decision after Ringo and then George told him they wanted to leave. He persuaded them to change their minds and then he changed his mind. He wanted to say, ‘I started the group and I broke it up.’ In the end, though, it was Paul who announced the break. John was angry about that because Paul had a new album out at the time and John thought he did it to attract publicity.

George When we broke up, I thought, ‘Thank God that’s over!’ The idea of The Beatles was like having a job and you are either fired or the factory burns down. For me, I was glad that we burned it down. It was too stifling. It’s not gloomy, it’s just that it wasn’t as much fun for us in the end as it was for all of you.

Paul The inevitable thing after The Beatles, really, was that you were actually facing up to growing up. The thing of finally being on your own. The biggest trouble for me was the break-up of The Beatles. The Beatles’ break-up was shocking. It totally screwed my head. It was not easy being in a top job one day and the next day you haven’t got a job. I asked myself, ‘Am I any use to anyone? I was very useful yesterday playing bass and singing, but now we’ve broken up.’ That was very hard.

Ringo I went back to my luxury home in Weybridge and just sat in the garden for months, wondering what on earth I was going to do with myself. Playing with The Beatles had been my whole life for ten years and now it was over and I didn’t feel qualified to do anything else. The initial break-up was so emotional, mainly for me, but not so much for the others. We had been together for so long and then suddenly I had nothing to do. I sat in my garden thinking, ‘My God, where do I go from here?’ I felt so absolutely lost. I was not interested in being in a new band right away. I was bigger than any band I could have joined. I went into hiding to escape the pressures. You just sit around the house like everyone else does. You go into London or you go shopping or see a film or you watch telly. I was sick really, and then, one day, I jumped up and I thought, ‘Hell, I’m going to get myself together. I can’t sit here for the rest of my life,’ so I went off and did an album, which was a limp way to get in again, but it was a start.

The break-up of The Beatles produces an opinion from Mick Jagger, of The Rolling Stones Obviously The Beatles could have got somebody else, he insists. It’s not impossible. It’s never going to be the same band without Paul McCartney, but it would be another band, probably as good or a bit different. John’s got a good voice and George has quite a good voice and they could have easily got another bass player who doubled on organ or something. The only thing to me was that they can’t have wanted to play together that much because they would have got another bass player.

Paul After all we’d been through, I thought that they knew me. I think we were all pretty weird at the time. I’d ring John and he’d say, ‘Don’t bother me.’ I rang George and he came out with some effing and blinding, not at all Hare Krishna. We weren’t normal to each other at the time.

Paul’s Daily Mirror announcement that he has left the group reaches John and Yoko who are at 20 Devonshire Place, London, where they are undergoing primal scream therapy with Arthur Janov at his clinic…

John "Janov’s book came to me in the mail and the name Primal Scream intrigued me. I mean, Yoko’s been screaming a long time. Just the words, the title, made my heart flutter. Then I read the testimonials, ‘I am Charlie so-and-so, I went in and this is what happened to me.’ I thought, ‘That’s me. That’s me.’ We were living in Ascot and there was a lot of shit coming down on us. And these people say they get to this thing and they scream and they feel better, so, I thought, let’s try it. They do this thing where they mess around with you until you reach a point where you hit this scream thing. You go with it, they encourage you to go with it, and you kind of make a psychical, mental, cosmic breakthrough with the scream itself."

Amidst all the commotion, Paul, Linda and the family leave their St John’s Wood home and head off to their farm in Scotland to escape the prying eyes of the media. He will stay there, almost undisturbed, for months…

Paul "I went off to Scotland for a while, because I just couldn’t handle being in London, with the music business and people saying, ‘When are you going to get together with the lads, Paul?’ That was the big question. It’s like asking a divorced couple when are you going to get back together. You just can’t stand the thought of going back to your divorcee… I was a city boy, but lived far enough out of town to see a bit of the country. The farm is 600 acres and just right for the family and me. I can breathe the air. It never ceases to amaze me that I put seeds in the ground, the sun shines at the right time, the rain comes on at the right time, then something grows and you can eat it. That’s something to give thanks for… We don’t eat meat because we’ve got lambs on the farm and we just ate a piece of lamb one day and suddenly realised we were eating a bit of one of those things that were playing outside the window, gambolling peacefully. But we’re not strict, I don’t want to put a big sign on me, ‘Thou Shalt Be Vegetarian’. I like to allow myself. I like to give myself a lucky break… I just love to find that, even in this day of concrete, there are still horses alive and places where grass grows in unlimited quantities and sky has clear in it. Scotland has that. It’s just there without anyone touching it…

"We were in Scotland and we decided to take a trip to the Shetland Islands, so we piled in the Land Rover with the two kids, our English sheepdog, Martha, and a whole pile of stuff in the back with Mary’s potty on the top. On the second day, we get up to a little port called Scrabster at the top of Scotland. But when we tried to get on the big car ferry, we got in the queue but we were two cars too late, we missed it. We thought, ‘Don’t despair. We really didn’t want to go on that big liner, a mass-produced thing. Let’s beat the liner,’ but we gave that up and instead we decided to try and get a ride in one of those little fishing boats. So I went to a bunch of boats but they weren’t going to the Orkney Islands, so I went on another one, this trapdoor thing, and they were sleeping down below. The smell of sleep is coming up through the door. At first, the skipper said, ‘No,’ and then I said there was thirty quid in it for him and then they say they’ll take us. It was a fantastic little boat called the Enterprise and the captain was named George. We brought all our stuff aboard and it was low tide, so we had to lower Martha in a big fishing net and a little crowd gathers and we wave our farewells. As we steam out, the skipper gives us some beer and Linda, trying to be one of the boys, takes a swig and passes it to me. Well, you shouldn’t drink before a rough crossing to the Orkneys. The little one, Mary, throws up all over Linda, as usual and that was it. I was already feeling sick and I gallantly walked to the front of the boat, hanging onto the mast. The skipper comes up and we’re having some light talk but I don’t want it. He gets the idea and points to the fishing baskets and says, ‘Do it in there.’ So we were all sick, but we ended up in the Orkney Islands and we took a plane to Shetland, it was great…

When The Beatles broke up, there we were, left with the wreckage. It was very difficult to suddenly not be in The Beatles, after your whole life, except for your childhood, had been involved with being in this very successful group. I always say I can really identify with unemployed people, because once it was clear that we weren’t doing The Beatles anymore, I had real withdrawals and had serious problems. I started drinking and not shaving. I just didn’t care. I just thought, ‘That’s the end of me as a singer, songwriter, composer,’ because I hadn’t got anyone to do it with, unless I work out another way to do it. Gradually Linda got me out of that. She’d say, ‘Come on, this can’t go on, you know. You’re good. You’re either going to stop doing music or you’d better get on with it.’

Saturday, April 11

In light of the fact that 18 to 20-year-olds can now vote, the music paper Disc & Music Echo publishes the results of its pop opinion poll where they asked its readers: If you could choose a pop personality as your local MP, who would you like it to be? John tops the poll with 22% of the votes. T. L. Graham, of Glasgow, Scotland, writes John is the only pop star interested in politics and the only one with guts to say what he thinks.

Friday, April 17

In the UK, Paul releases the album McCartney…

Paul "After John said he was leaving, I hung on for months, wondering whether The Beatles would ever come back together again and hoping that John might come around and say, ‘All right, lads, I’m ready to go back to work.’ None of us knew what to do, but we decided to wait until about March or April until our film, Let It Be, came out. But I was bored. I like to work. I’m an active person. Sit me down with a guitar and let me go. So, naturally enough, in the meantime, I began to look for something to do. I decided I was not going to sit there, sucking my thumbs, waiting for everyone to come back, so the album McCartney turned out to be the answer in my case. I had just got a new recording machine in my house and I found that I liked working on my own. At first it wasn’t going to be anything serious but it turned out to be a great time. When we had to go to the (Morgan) studios, Linda would make the booking and we’d take some sandwiches and a bottle of grape juice and put the baby on the floor and it was all like a holiday. So, as a natural turn of events, from looking for something to do, I found that I was enjoying working alone as much as I had enjoyed the early days. So, anyway, McCartney came out and Linda and I did it totally, the record, the cover, the ads, everything presented to the record company. Then there started to appear these little advertisements. On the bottom was ‘On Apple Records’, which was okay. But somebody had also come along and slapped on ‘An ABKCO managed company’. Now that is Klein’s company and has nothing to do with my record. It’s like Klein taking part of the credit for my record. All those little things kept happening, such trivia compared to what happened. Maybe that sounds petty, but I can go into other examples of this kind of thing. All these things that are continuously happening makes me feel like I’m a junior with the record company, like Klein is the boss and I’m nothing. Well, I’m a senior… The income from the McCartney album is still being held by Apple and Linda and I are the only ones on the record."

Derek Taylor, The Beatles’ press officer on McCartney "I didn’t enjoy it as much as Sgt. Pepper, but that’s my hang-up, and neither as much as Revolver. But McCartney is a very, very personal art form and it makes me sick this morning, lovely morning though it is, to have to cry out in pain on behalf of this brilliant man who is trying to discover who he is in music."

‘The Lovely Linda’

Paul When the Studer 4-track was installed at home, this was the first song I recorded, to test the machine. On the first track was vocal and guitar, second, another acoustic guitar, then overdubbed hand slaps on a book and then finally, bass. I wrote this in Scotland, and the song is a trailer to the full song, which will be recorded in the future.

‘That Would Be Something’

Paul This was written in Scotland in 1969 and recorded at the mike, as the mixer and VU meters hadn’t arrived.

‘Valentine Day’

Paul Recorded at home and made up as I went along, acoustic guitar first, then drums. Maybe drums were first… Electric guitar and bass were added and the track is all instrumental. Mixed at EMI.

‘Every Night’

Paul This came from the first two lines, which I’ve had for a few years. They were added to in 1969 in Greece (Benitses) on holiday. This was recorded at EMI with vocal, acoustic guitar, drums, bass, lead guitar, harmony to the lead guitar, double tracked vocal in parts and electric guitar (not used).

‘Hot As Sun’

Paul A song written in about 1958 or 9 or maybe earlier, when it was one of those songs that you play now and then. The middle was added in Morgan Studios, where the track was recorded recently.

‘Glasses’

Paul Wine glasses played at random and overdubbed on top of each other. The end is a section of a song called ‘Suicide’, which is not yet completed.

‘Junk’

Paul Originally written in India (in 1968) at Maharishi’s camp and completed bit by bit in London. Recorded vocal, two acoustic guitars and bass at home and later added to at Morgan.

‘Man We Was Lonely’e

Paul The chorus, ‘Man we was lonely’, was written in bed at home shortly before we finished recording the album. The middle, ‘I used to ride’, was done one lunchtime in a great hurry, as we were due to record the song that afternoon. Linda sings harmony on this song, which is our first duet together… The steel guitar sound is my Telecaster played with a drum peg.

‘Oo You’

Paul The first three tracks were recorded at home as an instrumental that might someday become a song. This, like ‘Man We Was Lonely’, was given lyrics one day after lunch, just before we left for Morgan Studios, where it was finished that afternoon.

‘Momma Miss America’

Paul An instrumental recorded completely at home. Made up as I went along, first a sequence of chords, then a melody on top. Piano, drums, acoustic guitar, electric guitar. Originally, it was two pieces but they ran into each other by accident and became one.

‘Teddy Boy’

Paul "Another song started in India and completed in Scotland and London, gradually. This one was recorded for the Get Back (Let It Be) film but later not used. Re-recorded partly at home and finished at Morgan. Linda and I sing the backing harmonies on the chorus and occasional ‘oohs’."

‘Singalong Junk’

Paul This was Take 1 for the vocal version, which was Take 2 and a shorter version. Guitars and piano and bass were put on at home and the rest added at Morgan Studios. The strings are Mellotron and they were done at the same time as the electric guitar, bass guitar and sizzle cymbal.

‘Maybe I’m Amazed’

Paul Written in London at the piano, shortly after I had first gotten together with Linda. It was one of those songs that just came out. It was very special. I added the second verse slightly later… Recorded at EMI. Linda and I are the vocal backing group. Mixed at EMI. I enjoyed doing it, I enjoyed singing it.

‘Kreen Akrore’

Paul There was a film on TV about the Kreen Akrore Indians living in the Brazilian jungle and how the white man is trying to change their way of life to his, so the next day, after lunch, I did some strumming. The idea behind it was to get the feeling of their hunt. So later, piano, guitar and organ were added to the first section. The second had a few tracks of voices (Linda and I) and the end had overdubbed breathing, going into organ and two lead guitars in harmony. Done at Morgan, the engineer is Robin Black. The end of the first section has Linda and I doing animal noises (speeded up) and an arrow sound (done live with bow and arrow – the bow broke) then animals stampeding across the piano case… We built a fire in the studio but didn’t use it, but used the sound of the twigs breaking.

George on the McCartney album ‘That Would Be Something’ and ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ I think are great and everything else I think is fair, you know, quite good, but um, a little disappointing. Maybe I shouldn’t be disappointed maybe. It’s best not to expect anything then everything is a bonus, you know. I just think those two tracks in particular are really very good. And the others, I mean, just don’t do much for me… The arrangements of some of those songs, like ‘Teddy Boy’ and ‘Junk’, with a little more arrangement they could have sounded better. I suppose it was the only thing he felt he could do at the time, you know, and he started off just testing his machine. Eddie Cochran did something like that, didn’t he? On ‘Summertime Blues’ and ‘C’mon Everybody’ he played bass, guitar and drums.

Saturday, April 18

The music journalist Penny Valentine reviews Paul’s album McCartney in Disc & Music Echo. She writes, I don’t know what he was thinking when he planned this album. Perhaps he is laughing at us all. That’s fine, but it’s a pretty cruel way of doing it… almost a betrayal of all the things we’ve come to expect.

Saturday, April 25

Disc & Music Echo publishes a Public Post Office Telegram from Paul and Linda, replying to Penny Valentine’s review of the McCartney album. It reads, "Dear Penny hold your hand out you silly girl I am not being cruel or laughing at you I am merely enjoying myself you are wrong about the McCartney albumn (sic) it is an attempt at something slightly different it is simple it is good and even at this moment it is growing on you love – Paul and Linda McCartney."

Tuesday, April 28

In New York, during a visit to see the new Apple office at 1700 Broadway, George finds himself in a lengthy conversation with the WPLJ DJ, Howard Smith…

We just cut a track in London of Ringo’s song called ‘It Don’t Come Easy’, and so maybe he’ll put that out as a single… Paul and John and myself have just got so many songs. If we do our own albums, that way we don’t have to compromise… Paul wants to do his songs his way, he doesn’t want to do his songs my way, and I don’t wanna do my songs their way, really. And I’m sure that after we’ve all completed an album or even two albums each, then that novelty will have worn off.

Smith You think The Beatles will get together again then?

George Uh, well, I don’t know. I couldn’t tell, you know, if they do or not. I’ll certainly try my best to do something with them again, you know. I mean, it’s only a matter of accepting that the situation is a compromise. And it’s a sacrifice, you know, because we all have to sacrifice a little in order to gain something really big, and there is a big gain by recording together, I think, musically and financially and spiritually and for the rest of the world, you know. I think that Beatle music is such a big sort of scene that I think it’s the least we could do is to sacrifice three months of the year at least, you know, just to do an album or two. I think it’s very selfish if The Beatles don’t record together.

Smith But everything looks so gloomy right now.

George It’s not really, you know. It’s no more gloomy than it’s been for the last ten years. It really isn’t any worse. It’s just that now over the last year, what with John and lately with Paul, everything that they’ve thought or said has come out, you know, to the public. It’s been printed, it’s been there for everybody to read, or to comment about, or to join in on…

Smith But the things. The feelings had been there all along?

George No, I wouldn’t say that. We’re just like anybody else. Familiarity breeds contempt, they do say, and we’ve had slight problems. But it’s only been recently, you know, because we didn’t work together for such a long time in the John and Yoko situation, and then Paul and Linda. But really, it’s not as bad as it seems, you know… We’re all having a good time individually.

Smith There seems like there’s so much animosity between Paul and John. It seems like Paul is saying it’s all over.

George It’s more of a personal thing, you know. That’s down to the management situation with Apple, because Paul, really, it was his idea to do Apple and once it started going, Paul was very active in there and then it got really chaotic and we had to do something about it. And when we started doing something about it, obviously Paul didn’t have as much say in the matter and then he decided he wanted Lee Eastman, his in-law, to run it and we didn’t. That’s the only reason, you know. But that’s only a personal problem and he’ll have to get over it because the reality is that he’s out-voted and we’re a partnership. We’ve got these companies, which we all own 25 per cent of each, and if there’s a decision to be made then, like in any other business or group, you have a vote, you know. And he was outvoted 3 to 1 and he doesn’t like it, it’s a real pity. We’re trying to do what’s best for The Beatles as a group or best for Apple as a company. We’re not trying to do what’s best for Paul and his in-laws, you know… It is because it is on such a personal level that it is a big problem, you know. When I go home at night I’m not living there with Allen Klein, whereas, in a way, Paul’s living with the Eastmans, you see… It’s not really between Paul and us, you know, it’s between Paul’s advisors who are the Eastmans and our business advisors, which is Allen Klein. But it’s all right.

Smith I somewhat detected some kind of animosity between Yoko and Linda. Is that part of what it’s all about?

George Ah, I don’t know. I don’t think about it, you know. I refuse to be part of any hassles like that, you know. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Hare, Hare. And it’ll be okay, you know. Just give ‘em time because they really do love each other. I mean, we all do. We’ve been so close and through so much together… The main thing is, like in anybody’s life, they have slight problems and it’s just that our problems are always blown up and shown to everybody. But it’s not really a problem; it’s only a problem if you think about it … I get on well with Ringo and John and I try my best to get on well with Paul. Whatever happens, it’s gonna be okay. In fact, it’s never looked better from my point of view. It’s really in good shape; the companies are in great shape. Apple Films, Apple Records, my song company is in good shape because I’ve been productive over the last year or so. It’s really good that we got back a lot of money that a lot of people had that was ours, a lot of per cents that different people had.

Smith Did Klein do all that for you? Were you really that broke or were all of you just crying poor?

George We weren’t broke. We had earned a lot of money but we didn’t actually have the money that we had earned, you know. It was floating around because of the structure of things. Since 1962, the way everything was structured was just freaky. None of us knew anything about it. We just spent money when we wanted to spend money, but we didn’t know where we were spending it from, or if we paid taxes on it, you know. We were really in bad shape as far as that was concerned, because none of us really could be bothered. We just felt as though we were rich, because really we were rich by what we sold and what we did. But really it wasn’t the case because it was so untogether, the business side of it. But now it’s very together and we know exactly where everything is and there’s daily reports on where it is and what it is and how much it is, and it’s really good.

George goes on to explain his conflict with Paul…

He’d written all these songs for years and stuff, and Paul and I went to school together. I got the feeling that everybody changes and sometimes people don’t want other people to change, or even if you do change, they won’t accept that you’ve changed, and they keep in their mind some other image of you. Gandhi said, ‘Create and preserve the image of your choice.’ And so different people have different images of their friends or people they see.

Smith So what was his image of you?

George Well, I got the impression it was like, he still acted as if he was the groovy Lennon/McCartney. There was a point in my life where I realised anybody can be Lennon/McCartney, you know, ‘cos being part of Lennon/McCartney really I could see, you know, I could appreciate them, how good they actually are. And at the same time, I could see the infatuation that the public had, or the praise that was put on them. And I could see everybody’s a Lennon/McCartney if that’s what you wanna be. But the point is nobody’s special, there’s not many special people around… If Lennon/McCartney are special then Harrison and Starkey are special, too. What I’m saying is that I can be Lennon/McCartney too, but I’d rather be Harrison, you know.

Thursday, April 30

John and Yoko meanwhile continue with primal scream therapy by visiting Arthur Janov’s clinic in Los Angeles, California …

John We were there six months. We had a nice house in LA. We’d go down to the session, have a good cry, and come back and swim in the pool. You’d always feel like that after acid or a good joint, you know, sort of in the pool tingling and everything was fine. But then your defences would all come up again, like the acid would wear off, the joint would wear off, and you’d go back for another fix. Now I can cry, that’s what I learnt from Primal Therapy.

Friday, May 8

In the UK, the Let It Be album is finally released by EMI…

John There was twenty-nine hours of tape, just so much tape, twenty takes of everything because we were rehearsing and taping everything. Nobody could face looking at it, so we let Glyn Johns remix it, because we didn’t want to know. We just left it to him and said, ‘Here, do it.’ It’s the first time since the first album that we didn’t have anything to do with it. None of us could be bothered going in, Paul, nobody could be bothered about it and the tapes were left there. We got an acetate each and we called each other and said, ‘What do you think? Oh, just let it out.’

Paul We walked away from that LP. We didn’t really want to know. The best version of the album was before anyone got hold of it. Glyn Johns’s early mixes were great but they were very bare, very Spartan. It would be one of the hippest records going if they brought it out. That was one of the best Beatles albums because it was a bit avant garde. I loved it. It was purely as we recorded it, down there in Apple or up on the roof. It had a good sound on it, from Glyn Johns, just a couple of mikes over the drums, it was very basic and I loved it.

Ringo It was a strange time for us then, because we weren’t doing anything and that album needed fixing, but he (Phil Spector) couldn’t fix it unless we said so. So we said, ‘Yes.’

John He worked like a pig on it. I mean, he always wanted to work with The Beatles, and he was given the shittiest load of badly recorded shit with a lousy feeling to it ever, and he made something out of it. He did a great job.

Ringo Even at the beginning, Paul said, ‘Yes,’ and then he heard it. I spoke to him on the phone and said, ‘Do you like it?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, it’s okay.’ He didn’t put it down, and then, suddenly, he didn’t want it to go out. It was two weeks after that that he wanted to cancel it.

John When I heard it, I didn’t puke. I was so relieved after hearing six months of this like black cloud hanging over, that this was going to go out. I thought it would be good to go out, the shitty version, because it would break The Beatles, you know, it would break the myth. ‘That’s us, with no trousers on.’ We were going to let it out in a really shitty condition, and I didn’t care. I thought it was good to let it out and show people what had happened to us, ‘This is where we’re at now. We can’t get it together. We don’t play together anymore, you know, leave us alone.’

Paul "When the Let It Be album came out, there was a little bit of hype on the back of the sleeve for the first time ever on a Beatles album. It said it was a new phase Beatles album and there was nothing further from the truth. That was the last Beatles album and everybody knew it. There was no new phase about it all. Klein had it re-produced because he said it didn’t sound commercial enough."

‘For You Blue’

George ‘For You Blue’ is a simple twelve-bar song following all the normal twelve-bar principles, except that it’s happy-go-lucky.

‘I Me Mine’

George, in his book I Me Mine " ‘I Me Mine’ is the ego problem. There are two ‘i’s, the little ‘i’ when people say ‘I am this’ and the big ‘I’, i.e. OM, the complete whole, universal consciousness that is void of duality and ego. There is nothing that isn’t part of the complete whole. When the little ‘i’ merges into the big ‘I’ then you are really smiling! I suppose having LSD was like somebody catapulting me out into space. The LSD experience was the biggest experience that I’d had up until that time… suddenly I looked around and everything I could see was relative to my ego, like ‘that’s my piece of paper’ and ‘that’s my flannel’ or ‘give it to me’ or ‘I am’. It drove me crackers, I hated everything about my ego, it was a flash of everything false and impermanent, which I disliked. But later, I learned from it, to realise that there is somebody else in here apart from old blabbermouth. Who am ‘I’ became the order of the day. Anyway, that’s what came out of it, ‘I Me Mine’. The truth within has to be realised. When you realise that, everything else that you see and do and touch and smell isn’t real, then you may know what reality is and answer the question ‘Who am I?’ "

‘Two Of Us’

Linda McCartney As a kid, I loved getting lost. I would say to my father, ‘Let’s get lost.’ But you could never seem to be able to get really lost. All signs would eventually lead back to New York or wherever we were staying. When I moved to England to be with Paul, we would put Martha, Paul’s sheepdog, in the back of the car and drive out of London. And as soon as we were on the open road, I’d say, ‘Let’s get lost,’ and we’d keep driving without looking at any signs. Hence the line in the song, ‘Two of us going nowhere’. Paul wrote that on one of those days out.

‘The Long And Winding Road’

Paul We were never asked if it was okay to put all that stuff (orchestra/backing vocals) on ‘The Long And Winding Road’. If I had been asked, and someone had said, ‘Is it okay to do it, I’d like to do it like this,’ then I might have said, ‘Yeah, it’s okay to do it.’ But I was moaning about it because I was just presented with this finished record. Allen Klein said, ‘Phil (Spector) had mixed the record.’ In fact it says on the record, ‘Reproduced for disc, a new phase’. It wasn’t so much that I hate screaming violins and women singing, which is how it came out like. I love that. In fact, I really love Phil for that. He’s the master of that. But the point is, I hadn’t been asked. If I had put it on it, I wouldn’t have minded. But the thing is, it just appeared and they say it’s your new record and I’m saying, ‘What? Who did all that?’ That was the problem.

Beatles producer, George Martin "I thought the orchestral work on it was totally uncharacteristic. We had established a particular style of music over the years, generally overlaid music on most Beatles tracks, and I felt that what Phil Spector had done was not only uncharacteristic, but wrong. I was totally disappointed with what happened to Let It Be."

Apple Records promoter, Pete Bennett Having spent numerous hours and days during the editing process, the song made a long and winding impression on me. During the editing process, everybody was eating banana sandwiches and celery.

‘Across The Universe’

John I was lying next to me first wife in bed and I was irritated. She must have been going on and on about something and she’d gone to sleep and I’d kept hearing these words over and over, flowing like an endless stream. So I went downstairs and it turned into a sort of cosmic song rather than an irritated song.

‘Get Back’

Paul "When we were doing Let It Be, there were a couple of verses to ‘Get Back’ that were actually not racist at all. They were anti-racist. At the time there were a lot of stories in the newspapers about Pakistanis crowding out flats, living sixteen to a room, or whatever. So in one verse of ‘Get Back’, which we were making up on the set of Let It Be, one of the outtakes has something about ‘Too many Pakistanis living in a council flat’, which, to me, was actually talking out against overcrowding for Pakistanis. If there was any group that was not racist, it was The Beatles. I mean, all of our favourite people were always black. We were the first people to open international eyes, in a way, to Motown."

Wednesday, May 20

The Beatles’ Let It Be film is premiered in London at the London Pavilion and in Liverpool at the Gaumont in Camden Street…

George "This film is just pure documentary of us slogging and working on the album. The whole of the album was filmed because we want this film to go out simultaneously. Originally, we were rehearsing the songs we were planning to do for some big TV spectacular. We had an idea of doing it as a TV show, but we didn’t really know the formula of how to do it. We didn’t want to do another Magical Mystery Tour, as we had already been on that trip, and we didn’t want to do the Tom Jones Spectacular, and we were always trying to do something different. So, we were down in Apple rehearsing and we decided to film it on 16mm, maybe to use it on a documentary and the record happened to be the rehearsal of that record."

John The film was just a film of us making the LP. It’s in documentary form, but it’s a very interesting film. You see what you go through to make a record. It’s not that simple, it’s a long process, and a lot of it is captured on film. Obviously, we played a lot of music that we were interested in at the time. We don’t have any set style. We’re not always going to record in one style or another.

George The film, rather than a TV show, happened to be the film of us making the record. So, it’s very rough in a way, but it’s nice, you know, because you can see our warts, you can hear us talking, you can hear us playing, tuning, and you can even hear us laughing, and all of those things. It’s the complete opposite to the clinical approach that we normally had.

Ringo It was supposed to be 25 per cent each, and I’ve got about two shots, you know. I did a lot of my comedy for them. I ran around, hiding and peeping and looning about, but they never used any.

John "There was a couple of jam sessions in Let It Be, with Yoko and The Beatles playing, but they never got in the movie, of course. I understand it all now… That film was set up by Paul for Paul. That’s one of the main reasons The Beatles ended. I can’t speak for George, but I pretty damn well know, we got fed up of being sidemen for Paul. After Brian died, that’s what happened… The camerawork was set up to show Paul and not to show anybody else, and that’s how I felt about it. And, on top of that, the people that cut it, cut it as ‘Paul is God’ and we’re just lying around there. That’s what I felt… There were some shots of Yoko and me that had been just chopped out of the film for no other reason than that the people were orientated towards Engelbert Humperdinck… I felt sick."

Paul reflects on the January 1969 Let It Be sessions, It simply became very difficult to write with Yoko sitting there. If I had to think of a line, I got very nervous. I might want to say something like ‘I love you, girl’, but with Yoko watching, I always felt that I had to come out with something clever and avant garde. She would probably have loved the simple stuff, but I was scared. I’m not blaming her; I’m blaming me. You can’t blame John for falling in love with Yoko any more than you can blame me for falling in love with Linda. I told him on the phone the other day that, at the beginning of last year, I was annoyed with him. I was jealous because of Yoko and afraid about the break-up of a great musical partnership. It’s taken me a year to realise that they were in love, just like Linda and me.

The English journalist Roy Shipston reviews the film "Let It Be, the latest, and possibly the last Beatles film, is hardly a feature film in the usual sense – it is a documentary, an explanation of why the group is in the state it is in; almost an apology. It reveals three more or less disinterested Beatles, and one with frustrated enthusiasm, trying to keep it all together… Paul. There is no plot, no script, only what they happen to say at the time, and not much of that quality, which abounded in their early films… humour."

Saturday, May 23

The current success of a fragmented Beatles, forces the release of a syndicated UK news report entitled Beatles Album Hits American Jackpot…

The report reads "Beatles have hit the jackpot again! In America, the Let It Be album looks like becoming the biggest seller of all time, and ‘The Long And Winding Road’, the track released as a single there, has already outsold ‘Yesterday’! Figures released by Beatles boss Allen Klein this week, show that, despite recent publicity about personal and professional rifts, John, Paul, George and Ringo are still the darlings of America. Said Apple’s Mavis Smith, ‘It’s quite incredible! They’re certainly selling more records now than they’ve ever done. Even at the height of the scream era.’ "

Saturday, May 30

The underground release of the bootleg album Get Back To Toronto – High Quality Stereo Recordings With Love From John And Yoko, forces an Apple spokesman to remark "We are aware of the existence of a bootleg Beatles album, which we understand is a very poor recording of Let It Be, but we’re not at all worried by it."

JULY

From his Scottish farmhouse, Paul is quoted as saying, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr are the most honest and sincere men I have ever met. I don’t mind being bound to them as friends, I like that idea and I don’t mind being bound to them musically. I liked them as partners and I liked being in their band. But most of all, we must change the business arrangements we have for our own sanity. Only by being completely free of each other, financially, will we ever have any chance of coming back.

Friday, July 31

Cynthia Lennon rushes around London in the sun, preparing for her marriage tomorrow to the 28-year-old Italian, Robert Bassanini …

Cynthia Of course I’m nervous this time, of course I’m afraid. I so want it to go right. I’m not any tougher but I’m wiser. I don’t feel as though I could be hurt any more but if I were hurt again, I’d face it in a different way. I’d fight. I’ll work very hard at my marriage this time. I want a complete partnership, because last time, I retired too much. I was a little bit too complacent. I didn’t know things were going wrong. The end for me was very sudden. I had no doubts, I was very happy and I’m easily contented. All I ever wanted was to be a housewife. I was happy to be in the sun. It’s difficult getting married again when you’ve already got one failure behind you, but this time I’m very sure. I’ve thought a lot about losing confidence in myself. I’ve fought it and got over it. There were moments when I was very low down. Moments when I thought nobody would ever love me again. In the beginning, it was very hard… Robert and I wanted it to be a very private, very quiet affair but the whole thing seems to have got out of hand. I’m just wearing a simple floral dress that I’ve worn before and I always do my own hair. I want to be just as I am for my own wedding.

Saturday, August 15

Meanwhile, a headline in today’s Disc & Music Echo reads, "The Long And Winding Road Is Beatles New Film. The report by Mike Ledgerwood continues The Beatles are to make another film. A special documentary of their spectacular career, made up mainly from cinema and TV sequences, is currently being compiled at their Apple HQ. I understand that a tentative title is The Long And Winding Road. The movie, which has been in production for about a year, features every foot of film ever shot and screened of the group … The Beatle weddings, their MBE awards, their TV shows, the group’s concerts around the world, their meetings with the Maharishi, stretching right back to the beginning in Liverpool’s Cavern Club. The mammoth task of collecting the film from movie, TV and newsreel companies, both in Britain and abroad, has been organised by Apple’s Neil Aspinall, who is at the moment editing the epic down from 100 hours of material. I was told at Apple, ‘It will be a full documentary on the rise of The Beatles. We’ve had a huge task getting everything together. Also included is everything we at Apple have ever filmed. We don’t know when it will be ready for release.’ "

Also inside this week’s edition of Disc & Music Echo, Mike Ledgerwood reports on the eerie silence now surrounding The Beatles’ Apple headquarters at 3 Saville Row…

The big black flag with the embroidered green apple is suspended motionless above No. 3 Saville Row, W1, dipped as in mourning. The street is strangely still. You realise suddenly the reason. The fans, whose determined doorstep rituals had become a familiar sight, have gone. Inside too, the atmosphere of Apple has changed. There’s an air of uncertainty. Things aren’t what they used to be at Apple. Even the employees of the multi-million pound Beatle-bossed Empire have to own up. ‘People don’t come to see us anymore,’ they say. ‘Where have all our friends gone?’ they ask. Once the Apple offices fairly buzzed with activity. It was rush hour all the time… Apple was once a place where you learned to expect the unexpected – and usually accepted it without question. ‘Did you see a donkey on the way up in the lift?’ Derek Taylor, The Beatles’ highly respected PR man inquired once. And he wasn’t joking either. Today, however, it’s sadly different, and suspiciously silent. The gloss is gone. And lately there have been rumours that the whole Apple idea has turned sour, and the company is to close down… The Beatles themselves are conspicuous by their absence these days. Paul was never an ardent Apple man, but you could expect to stumble over Ringo Starr on the stairs, or exchange a few words of greeting with George. And the Lennons, too, were often in and out. John and Yoko have been in America for ages now and George is engaged in marathon recording sessions. Only Ringo has been around, and word has it that even the friendliest Beatle has been unsociable of late… Lately, there has been more tightening up. Derek Taylor has departed to write a book. Peter Brown, part of the Apple hierarchy, has assumed the role of pressman. And entertaining expenses – the welcome whiskey-and-Coke extended to visitors – have been curbed considerably. An integral and important part of the unique Apple atmosphere was always the friendly freedom which abounded. Producers, journalists, disc jockeys, a wide cross-section of showbiz, could come and go. The building was ‘open house’ to all and sundry. A meeting place for all pop people. And it paid dividends. Apple was held in high esteem. You’d drop in for a drink with Uncle Derek, do your thing and split. Now, this is no more. Now, Apple is a shadow of its former self. The shine has gone. There’s an air of despondency and uncertainty among the staff. They’re aware of the rumours that the axe is poised yet again… and they’re worried. And outside, the faithful fans – often the first to know – seem to have deserted the shrine. Is the writing on the wall?

Friday, September 25 (UK)

Ringo releases his second solo album; the Nashville-influenced Beaucoups Of Blues…

Ringo "That came about after I had met Pete Drake in the studio with George Harrison (All Things Must Pass sessions). Drake noticed that I had a lot of country tapes in my car. I told him I liked country and he said, ‘Well, why don’t you do a country album?’ And I said, ‘Oh no. I’m not going to sit around in Nashville for six months,’ because that was how long it used to take us to do an album. He said, ‘It doesn’t take that long. I did Nashville Skyline (Bob Dylan) in two days.’ I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ I mean, I am sure it didn’t take only two days for Nashville Skyline. It probably took four! Anyway, I said, ‘Okay, I’d love to do one. Can you get it together?’ We went into the studio on a Thursday and I had ten tracks done by the Friday, the next night! We did ten tracks in the morning and ten tracks at night. I think some of my finest vocals are on that album, because I was relaxed. At first, I was really nervous and Pete would say, through the glass, ‘Hoss, if you don’t get loose, I’m going to come up in there and stomp on your toes!’ "

Saturday, September 26

John begins recording his John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album at Abbey Road Studios in London. In adjoining studios are George, concluding work on his album, All Things Must Pass, and the Australian rock band, The Masters Apprentices, recording their first UK EMI album. Their lead singer is Jim Keays …

Meeting John Lennon was amazing, Jim recalls. Actually, I met him in the toilet. I was having a ‘wee’ and he came in and stood beside me and I looked around and it was John Lennon! I’m not usually stuck for words. I would have spoken to the Queen of England if she had come in there, but I just couldn’t utter a syllable. I didn’t know what to say to him. He left and I still didn’t say a word to him and I was kicking myself that I didn’t have a conversation with him. One other day, I looked in John’s studio and I thought that there was nobody in there. So I thought I’d take a look to see what was happening, if anything, and there was no one in there, except for John. He didn’t know I was in there. I looked through the glass and there he was, sitting, writing a song. Then, all of a sudden, the song came out. He sang, ‘A working class hero is something to be.’ He wrote that song, right there and then as I was watching. That was a great thrill to see that happen.

George I was in one room singing ‘My Sweet Lord’ and John was in another room, in Abbey Road, singing ‘I don’t believe in Jesus, I don’t believe in nothing.’ He went through that situation with Primal Scream, which was really not the best thing I recommend for anything. Maybe he needed to do it, but it was the point in time where we were totally the extreme to each other and that song, ‘Working Class Hero’, reminds me of that.

Saturday, October 17

Today’s New Musical Express features an interview with George Martin, carried out by Richard Green. The conversation headlined Beatles Record Again? The Odds Are Much Against It, takes place in Martin’s recently opened, £400,000 complex, AIR Studios, situated in London’s busy Oxford Circus…

Green What is the possibility of further Beatles recording sessions?

Martin It all depends on Paul and John and if they want to work together again… I think The Beatles would have liked these studios. They would have liked a place of their own, but it never came about for various reasons. That is a pity. The formation of Apple was an example of putting the wrong people in the wrong jobs. Even if The Beatles did decide to record together again, they may find it hard to do so when they choose to. They’re the sort of people who decide in the morning that they want to make a record that night. With all the demand for studio time at the moment, they would probably find it difficult to be able to record in that way. They never really made set plans for recording. It was all done on the spur of the moment. They’d ring me and say, ‘We want to go into the studio today.’

The costs to hire Martin’s new studios, planned as far back as 1965, are not cheap. Studio 1, with its 16-track facilities, is £35 an hour…

Martin "The swing in recording costs began at about the time of Sgt. Pepper. That cost £15,000 in studio costs alone, but with an album like that, that sells millions and millions, it is well worth all the expense and effort involved."

Saturday, October 31

Stuart Sutcliffe’s mother, Millie, breaks years of silence to talk about her departed Beatle son…

"Stuart persuaded me to go down to the Cavern to hear these boys called The Beatles… As long as I live, I’ll never forget that sound. It lifted the soul out of my body. I couldn’t believe it came from those little boys. John and Stuart formed a friendship so deep that few could appreciate it. They were very loyal to each other and even after Stuart split from The Beatles to continue his painting in Hamburg, the pair corresponded constantly. Today, I believe that John still has two bundles of letters to each other. In 1961, John broke his arm defending Stuart in a fight. Later, he modestly shrugged off the injury, to his Aunt Mimi, as a sprain, sustained in a fall. Stuart was playing with The Beatles in Litherland, a suburb of Liverpool, and the popularity of the group was growing daily. The girls were growing crazy for them. I always waited up for Stuart to come home. It was 3am, when he finally came in, without his glasses. He told me, ‘You’ve no reason to wait up this morning. We’ve been attacked. I got knocked out… unconscious. I was hit from the back. My glasses are nonexistent. I couldn’t even pick up the pieces, but John got the thug, and he broke his wrist giving him what he’d given me.’ Stuart refused to see a doctor after the fight. He had no time to be ill. He was too fond of life. He said if I called a doctor, he’d be gone before he arrived. Stuart died a little less than a year later. The death certificate said,