Beatles : End of love

After months of discord and financial torturous negotiations, the Beatles had finally returned to their natural habitat: the Abbey Road studios. For seven days in early July 1969, they placed their trust and creativity cream. More to the start of that year, the group had barely managed to stay in each other's presence. Now they were working harmoniously again.

The idyll of them would not last. On July 9, two additional characters are here to disrupt the delicate balance of power between them. On the side of the Beatles together, there were three, not four. And the intruders were none other than John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono.

The couple had suffered a car accident in Scotland a week earlier, and Mrs. Lennon had barely been discharged from hospital. The presence of Lennon would return the group ostensibly back to full load. But McCartney, Harrison and Starr no longer knew if Lennon was a guy or a fifth pillar working to destroy the artistic heart of the Beatles. As the recording engineer at Abbey Road, Phil MacDonald said Mark Lewisohn, "We were all expecting them to arrive. They did not know what condition would be John. There was, in fact, a 'tension' in the air: they were almost afraid to Lennon, because they did not know how he was. I felt that they had three a little afraid of him. "

"When John finally came, it was a relief, and the group joined very well," said McDonald. Lennon, however, was not alone. Obviously, his wife entered the studio behind it - wheeled on a stretcher to hospital. The other Beatles watched in disbelief, the medical team set up a cot in the studio, and then gently moved her little patient to her. She was lying there, as a constant spectator of the recording sessions for the next weeks - still, despite Lennon insisted that one should be armed microphone above her bed if she wanted to contribute something.

Eighteen months had separated the 1967 disc history of the Beatles "Sgt Pepper" and double his successor, the "White Album". When that project was completed epic, the internal politics of the group were so fragile that McCartney felt it was vital for them to peek at a new contract. So the Beatles were persuaded to spend the month of January 1969 in front of a film crew. In theory, the cameras were documenting the creation of the new album and preparations for the much-awaited return to the group's live performances. Instead, they have been silent witnesses of a depressing series of discussions and rare bursts of musical composition. At the end of that month, there were some hard, no show as well as an audible, but inefficient in terms of visibility session half an hour on the roof of their headquarters in London and all the chances that the Beatles could never work together new.

The prospect was overthrown - and the only - Lennon's renewed enthusiasm for the thing. His experiences with heroin had sunk sessions in January. Then he found a man who could design on it, to rescue the financial corporation bankruptcy of the Beatles, Lennon and this led to believe he could still insert life into the group. The arrival of the executive Allen Klein brought his own baggage of problems, but they only came to light later.

Meanwhile, Paul married his girlfriend photographer, Linda Eastman, and then John and Yoko did the same thing, missing the wedding of McCartney's office to get married in Gibraltar and then staged a retreat on the bed for peace in the world ( hotel) Hilton Amsterdam. It was an early sign that Lennon could now conceive of life beyond the Beatles: neither invited or even informed that the watch the bed was about to happen. In public at least, Lennon was happy to keep the fairy tale that nothing had changed. The Beatles were more creative than ever. As he told the weekly publication of pop music 'Disc' in April, "If I could time myself, I think, I think I could write about 30 songs a day. Paul also: he's crazy about it. As soon as I leave here, I go to the home of Paul and we will sit down and work. "It was an idyllic scene, the remaining two days in which the two teenagers sat in the room of Paul and spit the lyrics of another" original song by Lennon -McCartney ", as they used to call them. In fact, barely two collaborated on something besides a lack of guidance in 1969. But their fans were eager to believe that the partnership was as fertile as it had been in 1963.

What is most intriguing about the version of Lennon's songwriting process them in April 1969 is the statement that "Paul and I are now working on a sort of assembly of song that can make a track only one side of the disc. We have two weeks to finish the whole thing, so we're really working on it. "Chris Thomas, who was left to produce multi-session recordings of the Beatles in 1969 when George Martin had other commitments, confirmed that Lennon and McCartney were already mixing ingredients for a musical collage when the group returned to Abbey Road in the middle of April.

Lennon's statement raises all kinds of questions. For starters, it was made more than two weeks before the Beatles have tried to write any of the songs that end up going into the (hard) "Abbey Road". Moreover, the context was not a new disk, but the painful conclusion of the disk that they had started in January. This raises the possibility of a hybrid between "Let It Be" and "Abbey Road" - half soundtrack, half studio creation, a desperate attempt to confirm anything said on camera.

Instead, like any Beatles fan knows, the idea of the medley was transferred to the album they were just beginning. But here too it says Lennon raises questions. There is a standard myth of creation to "Abbey Road", which insists that Lennon hated the idea of a medley, she endured during the sessions, and agreed to complete it only because he was about to leave the group. The credit (or blame) the idea is generally given to McCartney, while another developer also hold their own version, "A symphonic piece on the two was my idea," said George Martin for a journalist. "And to be perfectly honest, John did not approve."

But well before the medley have been recorded here was Lennon, happily shouting the idea to the world without any hint of disapproval. This suggests an alternative theory for the design of "Abbey Road" - that Lennon was happy to share the creative burden on the album, and McCartney medley because in April, the two were still on good terms. But such long-held unit would soon be shattered.

For a time, the Beatles were able to focus on music, with Lennon focusing on a hymn of love for his wife, "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", McCartney satirizing the business group's "You Never Give Me Your Money "and Harrison to borrow a line from a discovery of the Beatles, James Taylor, for his love song," Something ". Lennon and McCartney, to cooperate as one of two Beatles members to record the autobiographical "The Ballad of John and Yoko," and stuck their faces in the single written by McCartney, "Get Back".

They give money, and who controlled it, took possession. In addition to the growing discrepancy between Klein and the suggestion to be an entrepreneur McCartney of the Beatles, his father, Lee Eastman, other areas of the corporation's financial group fell into chaos. One involved the NEMS, the company of Brian Epstein, who supposedly should still be managing the interests of the band, the other affecting Lennon and McCartney in particular, concerned his manager of publishing rights, Dick James, who had sold their shares the company that they owned together, Northern Songs. Both fronts of the battle consumed an enormous amount of energy of the Beatles, broke the morale of the group, and inevitably brought Klein and Eastman to a violent quarrel. Lennon and Ono also packed a second time to awake in bed, in Montreal, but between May and July the Beatles existed only as a pawn in the corporate power struggle.

After this creative hiatus, the Beatles were scheduled to return to Abbey Road on July 2, 1969, the morning after a breakfast to commemorate the launch of the first solo single, Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance." McCartney has crept into the studio 24 hours before, so he could record the voice for "You Never Give Me Your Money," perhaps realizing that it might be easier to focus on that response to the financial hardships of their fellow group the Beatles were not there to argue with him.

Meanwhile, Lennon, Ono and their children, Julian and Kyoko, were traveling by car in Scotland. Lennon, always a nervous driver, took his eyes off the road for a second, and sent their car into a ravine. The family was lucky to survive, all four passengers were wounded in the strike - cuts, bruises, concussions and mild shock - and injuries on the back of Yoko Ono called for a week in hospital. The party of "Give Peace a Chance" went on without them, and the next seven days of recording sessions for the Beatles.

McCartney, Harrison and Starr quickly discovered that without Lennon or his wife ubiquitous, they could create music quickly and without discussion. McCartney recorded his brief phrasing of guitar in "Her Majesty" for posterity, and led the three-man version of the Beatles over a medley of "Golden Slumbers" and "Carry That Weight." The latter took borrowed the melody of "You Never Give Me Your Money", and then properly confined to the role of responsibility within the Lennon-McCartney in this conjunction, effectively McCartney sang to himself: "Man, you will carry this burden for a time "(Boy, you're gonna carry that weight for a long time).

George Harrison, meanwhile, had responded to the financial problems of the Beatles in a different way: "During that time we had all these meetings," he told the BBC the launch of "Abbey Road", "I used to have these horrible pains head, just sitting there, listening to all that junk. Then one day I was out, kind of skipping school, and I went to Eric Clapton instead, because it is pleasant, with trees and such. It was obviously an escape from the tension that had accumulated. I picked up a guitar for the first time in weeks, because I had been so busy - and the first thing that came out was 'Here Comes The Sun'. "

The song was written around a variation of a D major chord and translated into something universal, transcending deeply the circumstances of his conception. The song also allowed Harrison to experiment with their newly acquired synthesizer Moo, one of the first to cross the Atlantic. It took the Beatles working hours to create even the most basic of noise from this technological monster, but the results - a gentle blow electronic sound - added to the ethereal atmosphere of the song.

Themselves then, Paul, George and Ringo had done well in making real progress. But all that ended abruptly when Lennon and Ono returned to the scene. This time the fault was not theirs. It was by accident or on purpose - maybe he was subconsciously punishing his desertion pro Lennon - McCartney concluded the meeting by announcing that it was time to write "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." The song had been attempted at first during the sessions of January 1969, where animosity rose as much as anything else at that time. In July 1969, however, was like waving a red rag to a bunch of bulls.

Acting as public relations group three months later, Harrison did his best to stay enthused: "It's one of those songs which you instantly whistles that some people will hate and others will love." But neither he nor supported Lennon the song. "I hate it," Lennon said in 1980 "because all I remember is that the band that Paul has forced us to make a hundred million times. He did everything to launch it as a single, and it was never . We spend more money in music than anywhere else in that whole disk. "For the next few days, the other Beatles struggled resentfully through dozens of takes of" Maxwell's Silver Hammer. "If it were pro group to implode before the album was completed, would be now. Instead, Lennon confined to snide comments and agreed to persevere until the track was completed to the satisfaction of McCartney.

With this harangue resolved, Lennon went into the studio as more work was done in "Something" and "Here Comes The Sun". The surrounding Octopus's Garden was safer territory, and the group effectively ended in a single session, as in the old days. Then, on July 21, finally was time for Lennon to stir and make a contribution itself - the song that was chosen, along with "Something" for a single during that year. He had been commissioned to write an anthem for a political campaign led by the U.S. lysergic guru Timothy Leary, under the slogan "Come Together". Instead, Lennon humorously borrowed the phrase and used it as a hook for a petard, his last great song with the Beatles.

He was much less proud of the fragments that he had donated to the medley for 2 to the side of the disc, but McCartney compensated with the simple beauty of "The End", summarizing the eternal message of the group in a single line: "And in the end, the love you make is equal to the love you take (And in the end the love you make is the same size as the love you receive). It also provided the final opportunity to Lennon, McCartney and Harrison appreciate your status of members of the Beatles, trading guitar licks young competitive as they had started the band a decade earlier.

Since "Abbey Road" was complete, however, everything collapsed. Having been photographed crossing the street outside the studio for the album cover, the four Beatles together for the last time for another photo shoot at the house of Lennon. Soon after, he was invited to attend a rock festival in Toronto, not the Beatles, but with the Plastic Ono Band, and for his painstaking preparation he blurted pra Klein that he no longer considered as the Fab Four.

Klein persuaded him to remain silent for long enough for a lucrative recording contract to be signed next week, but the resolution of Lennon is not turned away. When McCartney suggested they should be presented in non-advertised concerts in nightclubs around the country, first he said Lennon - McCartney - was crazy, so what then dropped the bombshell: he was leaving the Beatles.

Once they established that he would not go opening your mouth around, his comrades tried to recover from the shock. Harrison and Starr convinced that Lennon changed his mind soon, but McCartney was confined to lick their wounds on his Scottish farm. His voice was so conspicuously absent when the other Beatles played the role of RP for "Abbey Road" - so lacking in fact, the American DJ Russell Gibb was inspired to pass a rumor that Paul was dead. Dozens of 'clues' were set to 'prove' this theory, and the more the organization responsible for the Beatles insisted that it was false, it's hard to believe she appeared to be. The story soon swept the radio waves from the U.S. as a lightning. Eventually a photographer for Life magazine found McCartney and resulting photo that was considered remarkable enough to get on the cover of the magazine in November.

Meanwhile, Lennon and Harrison did his role as sellers of the Beatles. While Lennon admitted that there was always the possibility that every album of them could be the last, and revealed that "half of the tracks of the Beatles at Abbey Road I do not have them," Harrison continued to believe that this storm would pass soon. He revealed that he had a vast collection of songs that he would need a hard ground to relieve pressure, but at the same time he seemed to have gained the assurance of his bandmates that "we'll work on something of equal rights so that have the same number of songs that the other next album. "

The reaction to "Abbey Road" was almost universally positive. The critic of the (British newspaper) The Times acknowledged that the album was full of musical innovation, "and stressed" the remarkable and very exciting "glue that filled most of the second side. As John Mendelsohn's (magazine) Rolling Stone concluded, the fact that "the Beatles can unify seemingly countless musical fragments and lyrical flourishes in a number uniformly wonderful, as they did on Side Two, seems a powerful testimony that they are far from being given what they had to give, and no, they did not stop trying. "The point of view Mendelsohn has received permission to print its own merits. Your review was only to press for the originally designated as critical to the task of analyzing "Abbey Road", Ed Ward, had given an overwhelming verdict, and the editor of Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner, never liked to see your music preferences attacked in his magazine . Ward complained that "Side two is a disaster," "Something" is so common people that I'm sure it will be coverizada by 8 to 10 artists next month, "and the album as a whole" does not draw a fine line between boring, 'Beatle-ice' and chewing gum. Ward concluded: "Surely they must have the talent and intelligence enough to do something better than that. Or not? "

It was a question designed to not be answered. Lennon made a brief gesture of reconciliation by suggesting to the other Beatles that they could record their gloomy report on the heroin abstinence, "Cold Turkey". When McCartney refused, a second single from Plastic Ono Band was born. McCartney, meanwhile, was getting in bed - because of mourning for what he had lost, for world peace - and healing their wounds with alcohol, according to himself. When he emerged from this fog emotional and artistic, he installed a simple recorder of four channels at the base of his farm and slowly began to build songs for the first true solo album from a member of the Beatles.

Informs regular (label) Apple about the fate of the film and the disc in January of 1969 - originally titled "Get Back" is now "Let It Be" due to a ballad that McCartney Aretha Franklin was about to reveal to the world -- reassured fans that the Beatles world was still spinning. In early January 1970, Allen Klein suggested that the group should write a master studio Harrison song, "I Me Mine", as a trial version of the same would be in the movie. Three Beatles got together for one last time at Abbey Road, and sent an invitation to the bedroom. But this time Lennon chose not to answer the call: he no longer felt like a Beatle, and soon there would be no Beatles of which part.

"I Me Mine" was the epitaph of the group - a painstaking summary of everything that had happened in 1969, the year in which the quartet that had revolutionized popular music fell out to one another and with their corporate identity.

"You Never Give Me Your Money, Peter Doggett's history of the break-up and curious afterlife of The Beatles, still without title in Portuguese, will be released in the UK by The Bodley Head publishing house in 2010.