The Beatles: a long and winding break-up
Why the Beatles couldn’t just ‘let it be’ is the sad story behind the death of music’s greatest ever group.
It was a simple song written in Scotland in 1968 perhaps for Aretha Franklin, maybe Ray Charles, and certainly offered to Tom Jones, whose bossy record company had other ideas. Both Charles and Franklin would record acclaimed interpretations, but the band whose song it was remained uncertain of it. Indeed, it would destroy them.
They would record a dozen half-hearted drafts of it — rightly deeming these unfit for release — on Australia Day 1969, and return for another seven shots at it five days later. But by then the four musicians were at each other’s throats. It was an unhappy time for the Beatles. And the events that saw them complete the song and release it as their final single would fatally divide the childhood friendship of Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
The Long and Winding Road — written by McCartney but, as always, credited to the team of Lennon-McCartney — was the song that sank the most successful songwriting partnership of the 20th century.
How it did so is extraordinary. And 50 years ago this week, the Beatles ceased to exist because of the tensions it sparked.
Only three Beatles performed on the song we know so well. McCartney played piano and sang, Ringo Starr was on drums, and Lennon, uncharacteristically, played bass. And badly so. Lennon’s guitar playing might occasionally rise above the journeyman level, but he could be sloppy, ill-disciplined and impatient with the recording process. His bass-playing on the released version of The Long and Winding Road was so derisory — wrong notes, no notes, misstruck strings — it’s been suggested he set out to sabotage it.
It is more likely he assumed the bass maestro that day sitting at the piano would return to fix it at a later date. He often did. In any case, the tense Get Back project — initiated by McCartney but enthusiastically endorsed by Lennon as a return to the band’s roots of live settings with no overdubs — staggered to a halt and was then abandoned.
The warring Beatles reached a negotiated peace of sorts and, remarkably, moved on to record their final glorious moments, Abbey Road, just months later. The Get Back sessions, and the 96 hours of film that attended them, spent a year unloved and unmentioned as Abbey Road was completed and they kept busy: Starr worked on a Peter Sellers movie, The Magic Christian; McCartney married Linda Eastman and spent time in Scotland; Lennon married Yoko Ono and they went to bed for peace; and George Harrison toured Europe with the band Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, during which he began working on a gospel-inspired song he later called My Sweet Lord.
By the end of the 1960s, legendary American record producer Phil Spector was a five-foot four, gun-toting, drug-addled tantrum. His syrupy, echo-laden Wall of Sound technique was at the tail end of its popularity, but Lennon was a fan and used Spector to produce a solo hit, Instant Karma!, which Lennon wrote on the morning of January 27, 1970.
He called around to recruit a band of friends, including Harrison, to record it that night. He wanted it in shops tomorrow. Spector turned up late. Lennon had already mapped out the chunky piano chords for his muscular verses, but there is evidence of Spector with the echo, reverb and five piano players.
Days later, Instant Karma! began to ride high in charts around the world and Lennon and Harrison discussed having Spector stay in London to try to salvage the troubled Get Back sessions. The Beatles were all but over. Calling in the American would finish them off. Spector, now 11 years into a 19-year jail sentence for shooting dead actress Lana Clarkson at his home in 2003, was handed the Get Back tapes. He entered Abbey Road with them on Monday, March 23, 1970. He was about to commit his first “murders” — of good songs that he would overproduce until they were beyond resuscitation.
Spector’s work on the by now renamed Let It Be album has long been widely criticised but, as unpleasant and irrational as he was during the Abbey Road sessions, he improved on a few things as well, like the jaunty McCartney opener Two of Us, and also by adding 51 seconds to Harrison’s too-short I, Me, Mine simply repeating already recorded lines hoping no one would notice (and few did). Still, there was little blood to be squeezed from these stones.
Spector seized on three songs — a Lennon discard from 1968, Across the Universe, and McCartney’s pair of uncomplicated ballads, Let It Be and The Long and Winding Road — to deliver the full Wall of Sound catastrophe. Never one to hold back, whether armed or not, he took to them with Wagnerian excess.
Lennon was mostly unwilling to condemn the producer for his work on Across the Universe, but told Playboy magazine a few days before his death that “it was a lousy track of a great song, I was so disappointed by it”. He believed McCartney could have helped rework it to make a Beatles A side but instead “subconsciously sabotaged” it.
The recording of the single, Let It Be, seems to endorse Lennon’s complaint that the band would fuss much longer over McCartney’s compositions. In January 1969, they worked on it for days taping almost 30 versions as it slowly evolved to be placed in a tape box marked “best”.
Spector knew how much it meant to McCartney — that it was about his late mother appearing in a dream while the Beatle tried to rescue the band from infighting. But Spector rode roughshod over it, creating an album track considerably different from the already released single overseen by the trusted George Martin. Of course it needed echo — all Spector productions do — so he pushed Starr’s high-hat notes forward at the beginning of the second verse and gave them a distracting multiple ricochet effect that he perhaps thought would one day be popular.
He also pushed up the Martin-scored orchestration until it sounded aggressive and allowed the lead guitar lines at the end to annoyingly intrude over the singer’s final choruses. But he was a mate of Harrison.
Lennon hated Let It Be, sarcastically asking at the start of take 23: “Are we supposed to giggle in the solo?” And Lennon had a hand in sequencing the Spector version of the album, subversively placing the incoherent and nonsensical 50-second Dig It before Let It Be at the end of which, in a Goons-like voice, he mockingly introduces the next track: “And now we’d like to do Hark The Angels Come.” This was enunciated in such a way that the last syllable is “scum”. He was also responsible for side one ending after Let It Be with the crude Liverpool ditty Maggie Mae. Surely, isolating McCartney’s churchy classic with such coarseness was the plan.
But the crimes committed against The Long and Winding Road were the deal-breaker.
McCartney had written this on the same day in 1968 as Let It Be. It had been inspired by the tensions in a band whose cracks were evident, with both Starr and Harrison briefly leaving. Cajoled into returning in 1968, Starr found his kit festooned with flowers. When Harrison walked in during the Get Back sessions, a surly Lennon dismissively suggested the band recruit Eric Clapton.
The Long and Winding Road imagery had been inspired also by the 25km trail that led to McCartney’s newly acquired High Park Farm on Scotland’s Kintyre peninsula, known less romantically today as the B842.
Not that McCartney put too much effort into it musically or lyrically. It was a work in progress with an unconvincing vocal, just a demo to which he’d return with his legendary meticulous attention to detail, at least for his own compositions. The author was unaware that an early, rough version of it was in Spector’s hands and headed for official release. In defence of Spector, he had to do something to hide Lennon’s shoddy bass — Lennon was his mate — but the thought of getting McCartney, one of pop’s greatest bass innovators, to rework the dodgy lines never occurred to him. McCartney lived in St John’s Wood, the same north London suburb as the studio. He was a phone call away and could have been there in minutes. But the producer didn’t like McCartney.
Spector flooded the simple ballad with a familiar overdose of gimmicks: 18 violins, four violas, four cellos, three trumpets, three trombones, Starr on drums (and you can just about hear him), two guitarists, a harp and the Mike Samme Singers — 14 of them — combining for the celestial choir that might indeed hide some wonky notes but swamps McCartney’s effortless melody.
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Meanwhile, McCartney had been secretly recording a solo album at various locations, sometimes even Abbey Road, unaware Spector was committing crimes down the corridor.
The Let It Be album was given a release date — May 8 — and an early copy was sent to McCartney. He was appalled and wrote to the Beatles’ management, copying in his lawyer father-in-law, demanding that the strings, choir and horns be subdued, his original piano lines reinstated and his vocals made more prominent, signing off with “don’t ever do it again”. There was no response.
He then set an ambush release date for his own album, McCartney, of April 17. Lennon and Harrison wrote a note to McCartney insisting he hold off until Let It Be was out. They sent Starr around with it to St John’s Wood. McCartney threw him out of the house screaming: “I’ll finish you now … you’ll pay!”
On April 10, he sent out advance copies of his solo debut to music writers and radio stations in which was a self-interview of sorts.
Q: “Is your break with the Beatles temporary or permanent, due to personal differences or musical ones?”
Paul: “Personal differences, business differences, musical differences, but most of all because I have a better time with my family.”
It had been long. It had indeed been winding. And they had just come to the end.