about Ono. “I mean, I’m not going to
lie,” he tells McCartney one day. “I would
sacrifice you all for her.”
Eventually, Harrison got over his snit
and returned to the fold. After the Bea-
tles moved from Twickenham to more
familiar studio space at Apple headquar-
ters, at 3 Savile Row, the situation calmed
considerably; Billy Preston, a keyboard
player from Ray Charles’s and Little
Richard’s bands, joined them and lifted
up the band’s sound and its collective
spirit. The Beatles were having fun again.
Now, amid yellow teacups and overflow-
ing ashtrays, there was progress and even
greater collaboration. When Harrison
looked for help with the lyrics to “Some-
thing,” Lennon told him to play Mad
Libs: “Just say whatever comes into your
head each time: ‘Attracts me like a cauli-
flower,’ until you get the word.”
No matter what troubled them, the
Beatles thrived when they were making
music together. “Musically, we never let
each other down,” Starr says. They also
recognized that McCartney had become
the band’s insistent engine, the one push-
ing them to get the work done. “We’d
make a record, and then we’d usually be
in my garden, John and I, hanging out,”
Starr recalls. “It’s a summer’s day—you
get three a year in Britain—and we’d be
relaxing and the phone would ring and
we would know by the ring: it was Paul.
And he’d say, ‘Hey, lads, you want to go
into the studio?’ If it hadn’t been for him,
we’d probably have made three albums,
because we all got involved in substance
abuse, and we wanted to relax.” And yet
when they put down their instruments
their problems were hard to ignore. To
recall a moment from Twickenham:
Harrison: I think we should have a divorce.
McCartney: Well, I said that at the meet-
ing. But it’s getting near it, you know.
Lennon: Who’d have the children?
T
he Beatles finished recording “Abbey
Road” in August, 1969. At a busi-
ness meeting a few weeks later, Lennon
told McCartney that his idea of play-
ing small gigs and returning to their
roots was “daft.” “The group is over,” he
declared. “I’m leaving.”
“That was sad for all of us,” Mc-
Cartney told me. “Except John didn’t
give a shit, because he was clearing the
decks and about to depart on the next
ferry with Yoko.” McCartney made the
breakup public when he included a short
interview with the release of his first
solo album.
Lennon was now fully engaged with
a new outfit, the Plastic Ono Band.
Starr recorded an album of standards
and then one of country tunes. Harri-
son, who promptly made “All Things
Must Pass,” the best work of his career,
was especially glad to get on with his
post-Beatles life. The band, he said,
“meant a lot to a lot of people, but, you
know, it didn’t really matter that much.”
It mattered plenty to McCartney. He
and Linda went off to a farm in Camp-
beltown, Scotland, where McCartney
drank too much, slept late into the af-
ternoons, and then drank some more.
He’d always enjoyed a drink or a joint.
And when he took acid, he told me, he
had visions of bejewelled horses and the
DNA helix. But now, he said, “there was
no reason to stop.” He was depressed.
“The job was gone, and it was more than
the job, obviously—it was the Beatles,
the music, my musical life, my collabo-
rator,” he told me. “It was this idea of
‘What do I do now?’” In McCartney’s
absence, a rumor that he’d died began
on a Detroit radio show and spread across
the world. Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis
sent a telegram inviting McCartney torecord; a Beatles aide replied that Mc-
Cartney was out of town. When a re-
porter and a photographer from Life
showed up on the farm, McCartney
threw a bucket of water at them. “The
Beatles thing is over,” he told them after
settling down. “Can you spread it around
that I am just an ordinary person and
want to live in peace?”
The crackup was raw and public. Len-
non, who was undergoing Arthur Jan-
ov’s primal-scream therapy, was not pre-
pared to muffle his pent-up grievances.
Seven months after the “Let It Be” doc-
umentary was released, he gave a long
and acrid interview to Jann Wenner, the
editor and co-founder of Rolling Stone.
The Beatles, Lennon said, “were the big-
gest bastards on earth.” McCartney and
Harrison, especially, had shown noth-
ing but contempt for Ono. He took aim
at journalists who wrote about her look-
ing miserable in the documentary: “You
sit through sixty sessions with the most
big-headed, uptight people on earth and
see what it’s fuckin’ like.”
Lennon went after McCartney in
particular. “We got fed up with being
sidemen for Paul,” he said. The docu-
mentary itself was evidence of McCart-
ney’s self-serving manipulations, he
thought. “The camera work was set up