The Beatles: One Guy Standing There, Shouting ‘I’m Leaving’
There is almost no attempt in this new set to be anything but what the Beatles actually are: John, Paul, George and Ringo. Four different people, each with songs and styles and abilities. They are no longer Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and it is possible that they are no longer the Beatles. — From the review of the “white album,” Rolling Stone, December 21st, 1968
The status of the Beatles hasn’t changed much since then. Only now, bitterness and mistrust have begun to set in. For if they have indeed “broken up,” the break took place well before Paul McCartney released his new album, and announced he was leaving.
In the words of John Lennon, “We were long gone, a long time ago.”
What has happened in the last few weeks — with the release of Paul’s album, with the appearance in these pages of his only interview in a year, and the release to the press of some terse comments from a self-interview which is packaged with press and disc jockey copies of his album — is the public result of the bitter fight over Beatle business manager Allen Klein, and the formal end of the Lennon-McCartney song writing team.
And underlying that is the passage of time, in which boys turn into men, in which they marry, in which they grow up, in which they grow apart.
“The Beatles haven’t had a future, for me, for the last two years,” John said after all this hit the papers. “All of us are laboring under this delusion about Beatles and McCartney and Lennon and Harrison and Starr. But, you know, we all have to get over it, us and the public. It’s a joke. What we did was what we did, but what we are is something different.”
If there is a “reason” that the Beatles broke up, it goes back to a series of events which center around the formation of Apple. After Brian Epstein’s death and the release of Sergeant Pepper’s, the Beatles were set adrift to find their own direction without guidance. They started Apple, set up to be “run” by the Beatles as a collective, and in it they installed their long-time friends and associates to take care of the business.
They found out, however, that four musicians and their road managers do not a successful record company make, no matter who they are. John, George and Ringo, bored with the daily meetings over minor business hassles, soon drifted away from it, and it quickly became Paul’s trip.
Paul — who in the meantime had married Linda Eastman, whose father and brother are music business lawyers — couldn’t run it either. And it was a mess. Apple turned into a huge financial loss, draining like a sieve, under incompetent management, replete with freeloaders, hangers-on, loyal and loving Beatle workers, and all of it bogged by bickering among the people and the Beatles unable to resolve it.
John soon let it slip to the papers that the operation had bled the Beatles nearly dry. Then he brought in Allen Klein.
And the fight began: John and Yoko Lennon in one corner, Paul and Linda McCartney in the other. John with his clothes off and other weird trips, drifting further and further away from Paul, the “nice Beatle” repulsed by John’s carryings-on. And John, with George and Ringo, wanting Allen Klein in to bring order to the chaos, versus Paul, whose new in-laws wanted to take over the Beatles.
So it went. And so, they “broke up.”