You Never Give Me Your Money. PETER DOGGETT. Introduction

You Never Give Me Your Money

THE BATTLE FOR

THE SOUL OF THE BEATLES

PETER DOGGETT

In memory of Sean Body

and all those we lost along the way

Introduction

Fame is a curse, with no redeeming features.

Allen Ginsberg

The Beatles could be forgiven for doubting the value of celebrity. One of the quartet was shot dead outside his apartment building by a man who claimed to be a fan. Another was attacked brutally in his home; within two years, he too was dead. A third was involved in a marital breakdown that exposed every corner of his life to the public gaze. The fourth found it so difficult to survive outside the group that he lost himself in alcohol and cocaine.

These four men created music of such joy and inventiveness that it captured the imagination of the world, and has never lost its grip. Even a few bars of 'She Loves You' or 'Hey Jude' have the power to pull the listener out of the everyday, and into a fantasy world where every moment oozes with possibility, and love conquers pain. They have the magical ability to recreate the idealism that sparked their own creation, and open that source of inspiration to us all. The Beatles' songs seem to come from a time of dream-like innocence, and represent all the turbulence and splendour that we have learned to identify with their decade. The landmarks of their story have passed into myth, as familiar as the ingredients of a fairy tale. They provide a comforting collective memory – 'a universal gleam', as one observer noted, which could and still can illuminate the world.

Yet they were human, the heroes of this myth; stubbornly, sometimes distressingly human. Almost alone of their generation, they did not want the fantasy to continue. The public basked in the freedom that the Beatles evoked; the Beatles simply wanted the freedom not to be the Beatles. Through the late 1960s, while listeners mapped out their lives in their songs, the quartet plotted an alternative vision of the future in which they would be liberated from the four-man shackles that they had forged.

They soon realised that there could be no escape: they would always be the Beatles, and would always be judged against the peaks they had ascended in the past. Their individual efforts, no matter how inspired, would inevitably pale alongside the endless replays of their youth. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Richard Starkey ('Don't call me by my stage name, ' Starkey asked in a 2009 TV ad) are locked together for all time as the guardians of popular music's most enduring legacy. But their bonds don't end there. Since 1967, they (or their heirs) have been the co-owners of Apple Corps, a venture that was envisaged as a tax dodge, and refashioned as a revolutionary alternative to the capitalist system, but then corroded to become a magnet for lawyers and accountants. What was conceived as utopia turned out to be a prison.

The uncanny consequences of that fate – to be divided and yet eternally combined, separate but still together – are the subject of this book, which traces the personal and corporate history of the Beatles from the heights of 1967, through the relentless decay of their final months, to the endless aftermath beyond. Their ability to survive and sometimes prosper in the eye of a legal, financial and emotional hurricane is perhaps one of their greatest, and most underrated, achievements. Through it all, together and alone, at odds and at one, the Beatles somehow managed to create and preserve music that is as enduring as their myth, perfectly encapsulating its own time and enriching every time to come.

Prologue: