46 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER18, 2021
this distaste for schlepping around and
playing in the rain with the danger of
electricity killing you,” McCartney told
me. “You kind of just look at yourself
and go, ‘Wait a minute, I’m a musician,
you know. I’m not a rag doll for chil-
dren to scream at.’”
On August 29, 1966, the Beatles
played Candlestick Park, in San Fran-
cisco. The band stood on a
stage at second base, far re-
moved from their fans, and
ended their half-hour set
with Little Richard’s “Long
Tall Sally.” “It was just a
dispiriting show, we just
went through the motions,”
McCartney told me. They
came off the stage, he said,
and “we got loaded into a
kind of meat wagon, just a
chrome box with nothing in it, except
doors. We were the meat.” The Beatles
never played for a paying audience again.
T
he divorce rate among musical col-
laborators is high, and the break-
ing point is hard to predict. In 1881,
Richard D’Oyly Carte, a leading im-
presario of the West End, built the Savoy
Theatre, on the Strand, to showcase the
comic operas that made W. S. Gilbert
and Arthur Sullivan famous. Nine years
and many triumphant openings later,
Gilbert, the librettist, took umbrage at
the extravagance of the rug that Carte
had installed in the Savoy’s lobby, and
wound up in an intense dispute with
Sullivan, the composer. After the inev-
itable unearthing of other resentments,
Gilbert wrote to Sullivan, “The time
for putting an end to our collaboration
has at last arrived.” They soldiered mis-
erably on for a little longer, petering out
with a mediocrity, “The Grand Duke.”
The Beatles never sank to mediocre
work; they went out on the mastery of
“Let It Be” and “Abbey Road.” Nor did
the band’s dissolution have any singu-
lar trigger—any carpet. But perhaps the
problems started when in August, 1967,
their manager, Brian Epstein, died of a
drug overdose. Although Epstein was
only thirty-two, the band saw him as a
unifying, even paternal, figure. Eventu-
ally, Lennon, Harrison, and Starr hired
the Stones’ manager, Allen Klein, to run
the group’s affairs; McCartney sensed
that Klein wasn’t to be trusted, and in-
sisted on doing business with Lee and
John Eastman, the father and the brother
of Linda Eastman, his soon-to-be wife.
The band’s creative core was also drift-
ing apart. Lennon-McCartney was no
longer an “eyeball to eyeball” collabora-
tion. Once, they had worked in constant
proximity—on tour buses or in shared
hotel rooms. Now Lennon wrote at
his estate in the suburbs,
McCartney at his house in
North London. They still
got together to give each
other’s most recent songs a
polish, or to suggest a dif-
ferent line, or a bridge—the
“middle eight.” The results
could be sublime, as when
McCartney added “woke up,
fell out of bed, dragged a
comb across my head... ” t o
Lennon’s “A Day in the Life.” But the
process had changed. And Harrison, who
was developing as a songwriter, was grow-
ing frustrated with his modest quota of
songs per album. After hanging out in up-
state New York with The Band, he be-
lieved he had glimpsed a more commu-
nal and equitable version of musical life.
All these stress fractures could be felt
in 1969 when the Beatles gathered at
Twickenham after the New Year’s hol-
iday. Usually, they came to the studio
with fourteen or so songs more or less
ready to be recorded. Not this time.
“John had no songs, and Paul had no
songs,” Ringo Starr told me from his
home in Los Angeles. “It’s the first time
ever we went into the studio like that.”
McCartney’s song “Get Back,” for in-
stance, was so skeletal that at one point
it took shape as an attack on Enoch
Powell’s anti-immigrant politics. “We
never learned so many new numbers at
once,” Lennon said.
In the documentary “Let It Be,” we
see intervals of careful, creative work,
ebullient playing, and purposeful noo-
dling, but they are interrupted by long
passages of chilly tension and joyless
boredom. Then, there was the presence
of Yoko Ono, who freely offered her
thoughts. Like the “dramatic” possibil-
ity of having the Beatles perform to
“twenty thousand empty chairs.” At one
point at Twickenham, McCartney says,
“It’s going to be such an incredible sort
of comical thing, like, in fifty years’ time,
you know: ‘They broke up ’cause Yokosat on an amp.’” Feminism was not a
powerful strain in the Beatles, and Len-
non’s bandmates struggled with the con-
stant presence of a girlfriend in the sa-
cred space of the studio.
One of the more memorable mo-
ments in the film—it also appears, with
less emphasis, in “Get Back”—is an ex-
change in which Harrison bristles at
McCartney for telling him what to play.
McCartney takes pains not to come on
too bossy, but he wants what he wants:
McCartney: I’m trying to help, you know.
But I always hear myself annoying you, and
I’m trying to—
Harrison: No, you’re not annoying me.
McCartney: I get so I can’t say—
Harrison: You don’t annoy me anymore.Harrison was increasingly brittle.
After a week of rehearsing, Lennon was
derisive of Harrison’s “I Me Mine,” a
song that broadly hinted at the egos at
work in the Beatles:
Harrison: I’m leaving ...
Lennon: What?
Harrison: ... the band now.
Lennon: When?
Harrison: Now.
After another sour moment, Harri-
son made good on his threat, heading
home to his estate in Surrey. “See you
around the clubs,” he said by way of
farewell. That afternoon, he wrote “Wah-
Wah,” lamenting his bandmates’ failure
to “hear me crying.” Lennon seems un-
fazed. “I think if George doesn’t come
back by Monday or Tuesday, we ask
Eric Clapton to play,” he says.
When I asked Starr about Harrison’s
walkout, he laughed and said, “It wasn’t
that huge in our eyes. We thought he’d
gone for lunch like the rest of us. Then
I got on the drums, Paul got on his bass,
John on the guitar, and we were like a
heavy-metal band. ... That’s how we
got that emotion out.” Although Len-
non, Starr, and McCartney initially drew
on their wit and the catharsis of play-
ing to cope, their inability to get through
to Harrison, who decamped for a cou-
ple of days to Liverpool, weighed heav-
ily on them. “So, cats and kittens,” Len-
non says, “what are we going to do?”
The end now seemed a little more real.
At Twickenham, Lennon could be
unfocussed and petulant; he “was on
H,” as he put it, sporadically using her-
oin—not injecting it but probably sniff-
ing it. And he was clearly defensive