Paul McCartney (57 page)

The 11-day hearing of McCartney vs. Lennon, Harrison, Starkey and Apple Corps opened on 19 February 1971 at the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, before Mr Justice Stamp. The British pop business had engendered other legal battles but none that riveted the nation’s attention as this one did. Every newspaper carried daily reports, even The Times–though still clinging to its archaic formula of calling the participants ‘Mr McCartney’, ‘Mr Lennon’ or ‘Mr Starkey’.

This being a civil action not a trial, the leading players weren’t required to give evidence other than in statements read out by their lawyers, or even to attend court. But on John Eastman’s advice, Paul turned up every morning with Linda, who was now pregnant again, and sat attentively through the whole day’s proceedings. None of the other Beatles ever put in an appearance. ‘The message was clear,’ Eastman says. ‘He was the only one who cared enough to be there in person.’

His brother-in-law gave him another piece of advice he also followed scrupulously. ‘I said, “This is going to be theatre, so you have to treat it like theatre. Wear a suit.”’ He chose the dark blue double-breasted pinstripe of the Abbey Road cover, but didn’t wear a tie for fear of looking too deliberately conformist. It would have been obscured, anyway, by the heavy black beard which he had regrown.

He would later recall how on his first day in court, surveying his bewigged and gowned counsel, David Hirst QC, and a three-foot-high pile of supporting documents, he found himself wondering all over again if he really was doing the right thing. ‘Anyone else suing the Beatles would have been immoral, but for one of the Beatles to sue them… it was almost as if I was committing an unholy act.’

Allen Klein was not named in the action, but essentially it was all about his management–and himself. He, too, was in court every day, seated a few feet from Paul; the bogeyman dentist of so many recent nightmares, now reduced to podgy life-size, and wearing one of his trademark grubby turtlenecks. The two never exchanged a word.

Born performer that Paul was, he knew he had Mr Justice Stamp’s attention from the beginning. Whenever a statement was made that he particularly disagreed with, he gave a little shake of his head, certain it had registered with the bench. Klein was later to remark bitterly that ‘the judge got Beatlemania’.

His QC David Hirst’s opening address expanded on his three main complaints against Klein. Under the head of interference with his artistic freedom, there had been the remixing of ‘The Long and Winding Road’ and the attempt to block the McCartney album on the grounds that it breached the Beatles’ partnership agreement. In fact, Hirst said, the agreement allowed for solo albums, prohibiting only solo appearances–a clause John had many times disregarded, first in live performances with Yoko, then fronting the Plastic Ono Band.

Over and above his affidavit, Paul accused Klein of financial malpractice, made possible by Apple’s chaotic business affairs. In the four years since the Beatles’ partnership had come into being, he said, he’d never once seen a copy of its accounts. As a result, his advisers were warning the Beatles might not have enough in their collective coffers to meet an imminent tax bill of between half and three-quarters of a million. Latterly, when he’d tried to investigate Apple’s financial position, he said, Klein had instructed the company’s accountants not to give him information. However, he’d gleaned sufficient to accuse Klein of deducting excessive management commission, to the tune of some half a million pounds.

David Hirst attacked Klein as ‘a man of bad commercial reputation’, citing his multifarious exploits across the Atlantic. And during the trial, still more evidence came to hand. ‘We heard that, from sheer stupidity and negligence, he’d been convicted on 10 charges of failing to file tax returns in New York District Federal Court,’ John Eastman recalls. ‘David knew that Justice Stamp always adjourned at one o’clock sharp. So I got a certified copy of the judgement in Klein’s tax case and at 12.55 David handed it up to the judge to read during lunch. He came up with this great line: “Mr Klein has as little respect for the British Inland Revenue as for the US Internal Revenue Service.”’

Klein mounted an aggressive defence, albeit by proxy. Apple’s counsel, Morris Finer QC, read an affidavit from a senior accountant saying that in two years under ABKCO’s management the Beatles’ assets had increased from just over £1 million to £6.5 million and that Apple was now solvent and fully able to meet its tax liabilities.

Finer stoically went on to read a 46-page statement from Klein himself, justifying everything he had done since May 1969. The failure to produce accounts for the Beatles’ partnership back to 1967 he blamed on ‘obstruction’ from Lee and John Eastman–i.e. it had been Paul’s fault. Far from taking more commission than his entitlement, he claimed often to have taken less. He also pointed out the benefits Paul enjoyed under the partnership agreement, especially now that another solo Beatle was so strongly outshining him. Under its royalty-pooling system, he got 25 per cent of George’s global blockbuster All Things Must Pass–by implication, a lot more worth having than George’s quarter-share of the McCartney album.

John, George and Ringo were each heard from in statements whose stilted language, read in a posh lawyer’s voice, sounded bizarrely unlike them. John’s gave Klein back some points for clearing the ‘spongers and hustlers’ out of Apple. It also downplayed Paul’s grievances, saying that there’d always been conflict within the Beatles but that, far from undermining them, it had made them stronger:

From our earliest days in Liverpool, George and I on the one hand and Paul on the other had different musical tastes. Paul preferred ‘pop type’ music and we preferred what is now called ‘underground’. This may have led to arguments, particularly between Paul and George, but the contrasts in our tastes, I am sure, did more good than harm musically speaking and contributed to our success.

When it came to Klein’s appointment against Paul’s wishes, John uttered a blatant untruth–that, historically, band decisions had often been taken on a majority vote. As he knew better than anyone, the pre-Klein Beatles had been an unshakable democracy: nothing was done without the consent of all four. He ended by accusing Paul of behaving ‘selfishly and unreasonably’.

George’s and Ringo’s statements, too, spoke of their previous ability to resolve their internal problems. George described how his own walk-out during the Let It Be sessions–the result of ‘the superior attitude which for years past Paul has shown towards me musically’–had quickly been patched up. ‘Since the row, Paul has treated me more as a musical equal. I think this whole episode shows how a disagreement could be worked out so that we all benefited.’

Ringo instanced the even worse contretemps when he’d delivered the news that McCartney’s release was to be postponed so as not to clash with Let It Be, and Paul had ordered him out of the house, jabbing fingers at his face. He still felt that the band’s disagreements ‘contributed to really great products’ and that ‘all four of us together could even yet work out everything satisfactorily’.

Paul’s statement was read last. It recalled how Klein had been brought in by John after the Beatles’ apparent acceptance of Lee and John Eastman as managers, and how despite his misgivings–borne out by Klein’s derailing of the NEMS purchase deal–he’d initially gone along with the majority vote. He recalled how Klein had tried to win his favour by belittling John, at one point confiding, ‘You know why John’s angry with you, don’t you? It’s because you came off better than he did in Let It Be.’ And at another: ‘The real problem is Yoko. She’s the one with ambition.’

David Hirst had remained impressively on the ball, picking up pointers to the partnership’s disintegration from All Things Must Pass as well as John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. ‘One has only to look at recent recordings by John or George,’ Paul’s deposition continued, ‘to see that neither thinks of himself as a Beatle.’ He ended by rejecting John’s assertion that band decisions had ever been carried by a majority vote: ‘I know of [none] taken on a three-to-one basis.’

With the evidence all in, and only lawyers’ closing submissions to come, there was no further point in attending court, so Paul and Linda returned to America to complete their joint album, now transferring operations from New York to Sound Recorders studios in Los Angeles.

But the stress of the case seemed to have impaired Paul’s usual focus and the work dragged on indecisively. ‘I tried getting him together with Jim Guercio, who produced and managed my first big music clients, Chicago, and had just won a Grammy for his work with Blood, Sweat and Tears,’ John Eastman recalls. ‘Jim was so keen to work with Paul that he put off his honeymoon.’

Together they laid down a track called ‘Dear Boy’, which both chided and thanked Linda’s former husband, Mel See, for not holding on to her. However, even the turbocharged Guercio seemed unable to galvanise Paul back into his old efficiency: he would block-book the studio, not turn up until evening and then only want to smoke a joint and jam. Recording ‘Dear Boy’ alone took five separate sessions. ‘After about three days, I got a call from each of them, saying it wasn’t working,’ Eastman remembers.

The McCartneys were still in LA when, on 12 March, after a week of deliberation, Mr Justice Stamp delivered his verdict in the Court of Chancery. The judge found in Paul’s favour on every count, ruling that the Beatles had ‘long since ceased to perform as a group’, that Apple was not ‘a Frankenstein set up to control the individual partners’ and that the situation with regard to the partnership accounts was ‘quite intolerable’.

Allen Klein incurred withering personal condemnation for having taken commission ‘grossly in excess’ of what he was entitled to. His claim to have taken less than his due, the judge added, was ‘like the irresponsible patter of a second-rate salesman’. Since neither the Beatles’ manager nor anyone else around them seemed competent to handle their finances, Paul’s application for an official receiver would be granted.

Four days later, at the annual Grammys ceremony in Hollywood, Let It Be won the award for Best Movie Soundtrack. John, Paul and George were named joint recipients, but only Paul went onstage to collect all three statuettes, firmly leading three-months-pregnant Linda by the hand. Neither of them had bothered to dress up for the occasion; indeed, they looked oddly like a pair of runaways, a brighter-coloured version of John and Yoko two years earlier.

Paul responded to the half-mourning applause with just a ‘Thank you! Goodnight!’ and they vanished into the darkness again. The accidental symbolism was impossible to miss. And also that his true triumph had lain in not letting it be.

The moment Judge Stamp’s verdict was announced, Morris Finer QC lodged an appeal on John, George and Ringo’s behalf. But on 26 April, it was withdrawn. As Finer explained to the Court of Appeal, ‘My clients now consider, in the unhappy circumstances which have arisen, that it is in the common interest to explore… a means whereby the plaintiff may disengage himself from the partnership by agreement.’

Paul was effectively free of Apple, his one-time passion, other than in an obligation to release his records through Apple Music until 1975. And the Beatles were officially no more. ‘When we heard we’d won, we didn’t yell and throw our hats in the air,’ John Eastman recalls. ‘We just looked at each other and sort of went “uh!” After that, I think I slept for 36 hours.’

While the case was still going on, Paul had put out his first solo single, ‘Another Day’, written and unsuccessfully tried out with the Beatles and finally recorded with Linda in New York the previous January.

It was another of his ‘short story’ songs, about a lonely woman trapped in a soulless office job and living for the occasional visits of a feckless lover–in fact, very much how the protagonist of ‘She’s Leaving Home’ might have ended up with her ‘man from the motor trade’. This one had even deeper empathy with the implicitly ageing, faded figure who ‘takes a morning bath and wets her hair… slipping into stockings, slipping into shoes, dipping in the pockets of her raincoat’.

Although Paul’s name alone appeared on the single, it came in a picture cover showing him and Linda together and she was credited as his co-writer. For all that, it seemed a throwback to the Beatles, even using the sound effects of voices and laughter so familiar from Sgt. Pepper and ‘Revolution 9’. Just then, record-buyers wanted nothing more than a throwback to the Beatles, so it easily jumped to number two in Britain and five in America.

The signs thus could not have been better for the album credited to Paul and Linda McCartney which followed on 17 May. At High Park Farm, they now had a flock of 200 Highland blackface sheep whose wool was sold commercially. Ever-practical Paul had become adept at shearing, handling even the aggressive rams with their dangerous downturned horns.

One day, driving north from Glasgow with Linda, he decided Ram was a perfect title for their album because ‘it was strong and male… and succinct. Once you heard it, you weren’t going to forget it. Then there was the idea of ramming… pushing ahead strongly.’ The front cover was taken from a Linda photograph of him straddling one of the beasts in question and gripping its horns as if taking part in some non-equine rodeo.

‘Another Day’ did not appear on Ram, but the single taken from the album for US release only, ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’, employed its Beatle carry-over formula with even greater success. This was a medley of Abbey Road-style song-fragments, built around Paul’s own Uncle Albert and full of ‘Yellow Submarine’-style comic voices–ringing telephones, bird-calls, rain-showers and thunderstorms. It reached number one on the Billboard chart, sold a million copies and later won Paul a Grammy for Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists.

The album was likewise a commercial smash, reaching number one in the UK and two in America. But it was slaughtered by the critics whose approval Paul so desperately sought. Rolling Stone called it ‘incredibly inconsequential’, ‘monumentally irrelevant’ and ‘emotionally vacuous’, noting how John Lennon had ‘always held the reins in on McCartney’s cutesey-pie, florid attempts at pure rock Muzak’. The Village Voice called it ‘a classic form/content mismatch’. Playboy accused Paul of ‘substitut[ing] facility for substance’ and likened the effect to ‘watching someone juggle five guitars… it’s fairly impressive but you keep wondering why he bothers’.