Chapter 6

Imagine how we've flowered since [the split]. George is suddenly the biggest seller of all of us. I think my music's improved a million-fold, lyric-wise and everything. I think we're much better than we ever were when we were together.

John Lennon, July 1971

I don't think Linda is a substitute for John Lennon, any more than Yoko is a substitute for Paul McCartney.

George Martin, August 1971

More than eight million people – the population of London or New York – fled their homes in 1971, as civil war racked Bangladesh. The territory comprised the eastern section of the divided nation of Pakistan, a geographically illogical entity formed after the partition of India 24 years earlier. One thousand miles of India separated West and East Pakistan, rendering equal distribution of resources impossible. An appalling cyclone in November 1970, which killed around 250, 000 people in the East, emphasised the divide. Demonstrations against the government were harshly repressed, and by March 1971 the result was a civil uprising – a bid for independence which was crushed with merciless brutality. Millions fled the violence in search of sanctuary across the Indian border. Instead, they found famine and dehydration, and thousands began to starve. Another 300, 000 citizens were killed in the fighting. It was a humanitarian catastrophe, widely ignored in the West.

One of Bangladesh's most famous sons was sitar maestro Ravi Shankar. Early that summer he explained the dire state of his homeland to George Harrison and told him that he was planning a fund-raising concert. Wary of imposing, he asked if Harrison would compè re the show. 'Why don't I play? ' Harrison replied. By the end of the conversation, one of rock's most spectacular displays of altruism was born. ^*23 Allen Klein booked New York's premier concert venue, the 20, 000-seater Madison Square Garden, for an appearance by 'George Harrison and Friends'. Demand for tickets was so intense that Harrison agreed to play two full shows on 1 August 1971. There had been rock benefits before, but never on this scale, encompassing not just live performances, but an album, film and accompanying single, all devoted to raising the consciousness of the world to the tragedy of Bangladesh. The challenge was enormous, not least because Harrison had been the Beatle least enthusiastic about touring in the mid-1960s and the first to suggest that the group should quit the road. Since then he had only performed as an unannounced guest with Delaney and Bonnie and John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band. Now he had to command an audience on the strength of his own name, with much more than his reputation at stake.

Though it was only four months since the Beatles' disunity had been exposed in the High Court, many fans assumed that they would be the 'Friends' promised on the concert posters. It was a bittersweet moment: was Harrison prepared to be overshadowed by the Beatles when he had just established himself as a viable solo artist? 'George lacked confidence, ' recalled his friend Leon Russell. 'I worked on some of his records, and it was not uncommon for him to do 180 takes of a song before he felt he'd got it right. He never thought what he was doing was good enough. ' For reasons of self-protection, or simply to boost the impact of the concerts, Harrison eventually asked all three of his ex-colleagues to perform. Starkey immediately agreed, as did Russell, Eric Clapton and Billy Preston. Harrison entered into lengthy negotiations with the recalcitrant Bob Dylan which resulted in his first major appearance in two years. 'Everyone wanted to play, ' recalled Apple Records' US head Allan Steckler. 'I had to turn down Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the Rolling Stones. ' But neither Paul McCartney nor John Lennon was able to place the lives of starving people before their own egos.

'Klein called a press conference, ' McCartney complained, 'and told everyone I had refused to do it for the Pakistani refugees. It isn't so. I said to George the reason I couldn't do it was because it would mean that all the world's press would scream that the Beatles had got back together again, and I know that would have made Klein very happy. It would have been an historical event, and Klein would have taken the credit. I didn't really fancy playing, anyway. '

Lennon's rationale was strikingly similar: 'I told George about a week before that I wouldn't be doing it. I just didn't feel like it. I just didn't want to be rehearsing and doing a big showbiz trip. And anyway they couldn't have got any more people in, if I'd been there or not. I get enough money off records and I don't feel like doing two shows a night. '

Neither man had grasped that there was more at stake here than the balance of power between the ex-Beatles. What did McCartney or Lennon's feelings matter alongside the chance to rescue people's lives? It was an ethical dilemma that haunted them for the rest of the decade: how could the Beatles refuse to play together for just one night, when they knew that they could help to feed the hungry and cure the sick? The group had never wanted to be messiahs, but did that entitle them to refuse the role? Did the Beatles have a moral duty to save the world?

Still caught up in the drama of their own lives, they were preoccupied with pettier concerns. It was only after Lennon's death that the real reason for his absence from the Bangladesh concerts was revealed. He insisted that he would not perform without Ono; Harrison told him that this was a gathering of rock superstars, not an avant-garde festival, and that she couldn't appear. Lennon was outraged, and decided that Harrison's inability to appreciate Ono's genius was symptomatic of his limited intelligence. 'There's no telling George, ' he said. 'He's very narrow-minded, and he doesn't really have a broader view. Paul is far more aware than George. . . he's got an inferiority complex working with Paul and me. . . George doesn't really know what's happening. '

At a press conference Harrison was asked, 'Are there ever times when you wish you were back together again as a group? ' It would become the opening gambit for every journalistic encounter with an ex-Beatle. Harrison handled it diplomatically: 'Yeah, there are times. But there are times also when we all appreciate not being together. '^*24 Lennon was asked the same question in London. 'I never wanted them [the Beatles] to slide down and sort of make comebacks and things like that. I said, when I was 20 [ sic] in the Beatles, that I'm not going to be singing " She Loves You" when I'm 30. Well, I was 30 this year and I didn't force it to happen. It just happened naturally. I guessed that by the time I was 30 I would have just grown out of it. And I have, you know. '

But the world wasn't ready to grow out of the Beatles. When the Bangladesh concerts took place, much of the media attention centred on the 'reunion' of Harrison and Starkey. The shows were a personal triumph for Harrison, who appeared serious, almost stern, in his crisp white suit and guru beard, but who delighted the crowd by dipping briefly into his Beatles repertoire. Starkey's appearance also rekindled the past. Shaking his head to the rhythm as he had in 1964, he seemed like a living incarnation of the Beatles of old, spreading their ageless magic throughout the hall.

The Bangladesh concerts confirmed Harrison's elevated status among the rock aristocracy. Bob Dylan might wield more enigma, and the Rolling Stones more charisma, but Harrison had proved himself the most successful of the solo Beatles and arguably music's most influential figure. His charitable gesture – $243, 000 would reach UNICEF from ticket sales alone, with much more to follow – raised hopes that the rock elite might display a deeper sense of maturity in the decade ahead. For years rock had been interpreted as the soundtrack of dissent, channelling the political ideals of the counterculture and providing anthems for the revolution that would surely follow. But the heroes of the new decade, from Grand Funk Railroad to Led Zeppelin, showed little interest in politics and no messianic zeal. Where their predecessors had sparked opposition to the status quo, the icons of the new age were selling nothing more significant than their own stardom. Harrison's efforts suggested another way for rock to progress, as a standard bearer of idealism that wasn't tied to a strict political manifesto.

Yet just as rock was shedding its radical agenda, Lennon chose to remodel himself as a revolutionary. To prove that the 'Power to the People' single was more than a gesture, he had appeared at political rallies in aid of everyone from the postal workers' union to the underground magazine Oz, then facing trial on censorship charges. His campaigning soon crossed the Atlantic. On 1 June, the Lennons flew to New York to complete the album he had begun in February. Within 24 hours they were contacted by Jerry Rubin, from the anarchist protest group the Yippies. Like his comrade Abbie Hoffman, he had viewed Lennon as a traitor after 'Give Peace a Chance', but then he studied the Plastic Ono Band album, and found that it soothed his despair at the decay of the revolutionary American left. That weekend, Rubin, Hoffman and the Lennons met in Greenwich Village, where Lennon had stumbled across David Peel, a hippie street singer who had become a local legend, and promised to attend one of his recitals in Washington Square Park. 'I really didn't think they would come, ' Peel recalled. 'But there they were. I sang them " Have a Marijuana" and a new song I'd written called " The Pope Smokes Dope". ' The troupe of radicals strode around the East Village, singing the simple refrains of Peel's dope anthems. Lennon had found a peer group that represented rebellion and danger, and also a new musical direction. 'I'm pretty movable as an artist, ' he recalled later. 'They greeted me off the plane, and the next minute I'm involved. ' Rubin, Hoffman and Peel believed that the revolution could be reborn with a Beatle at the helm, and for the next year Lennon played the role of a radical activist with such zeal that he persuaded both them, and the US government, that he was in deadly earnest. Meanwhile he was withdrawing large sums from Apple's Swiss bank accounts to finance his bohemian lifestyle.

While Harrison and Lennon confronted the outside world, and Starkey pursued a career as a movie actor, McCartney seemed to be floundering. 'He disappoints me on his albums, ' Starkey said. 'I don't think there's one tune on the last one, Ram. I just feel he's wasted his time. He seems to be going strange. It's like he's not admitting that he can write great tunes. I just feel he's let me down. ' Under assault from his colleagues and the critics, McCartney could not even trust his fans. Insulting graffiti appeared regularly on the wall around his London home. 'Someone had written the words " Fuck Linda", ' one innocent admirer recalled. 'Just as we decided to leave, a car started up and the doors to the yard opened. There we were, face to face with Paul and Linda. We all smiled and waved, and he pulled out of the driveway like a madman and gave us all the finger. '

In late July McCartney was at Abbey Road Studios with drummer Denny Seiwell and singer/guitarist Denny Laine. 'I missed playing in a band, ' he explained. He chose not to dip into the same pool of session men as the other Beatles: 'I felt that it was a bit too predictable, that everyone would leave the Beatles and go with old Phil Spector, or the drummer Jim Keltner. It was like a clique, and I just didn't want to join that clique. ' Instead, he opted for Seiwell, who had proved himself on Ram, and Laine, a reticent underachiever who had sung one major hit ('Go Now' with the Moody Blues) and written another (Colin Blunstone's 'Say You Don't Mind') without establishing a public profile. Laine offered his boss undoubted musical talent and no risk of competition. Yet safety was forgotten as McCartney completed his new band with someone who had no musical experience: his wife. Comparisons with Lennon and Ono were inevitable, but Ono had classical piano training and a history of avant-garde musical performances to her name. Forcing his wife to carry one quarter of the burden of Wings, as McCartney named the band, was an act of enormous courage, defiance and possibly folly. The reaction from his peers was incredulous laughter. 'Everybody can be artists, ' Lennon had said a few days earlier, but he drew the line at Linda McCartney ^*25.

To symbolise that the past was past, McCartney became the first Beatle to withdraw from the group's official fan club. 'I don't want to be involved with anything that continues the illusion that there is such a thing as the Beatles, ' he announced. His three former colleagues echoed his thoughts by disputing EMI's right to issue an album of the Beatles' 1964 concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Apple claimed they owned the tapes; EMI insisted that they had paid for the recording and could do what they liked with it. This was not the moment for a public display of nostalgia: Neil Aspinall completed a rough cut of the Beatles documentary movie that he'd begun the previous year, but shelved the project after sending each of the group a copy. Meanwhile, Harrison insisted that the story of Apple was 'only just beginning'. To prove the point, the company's recording studio was now open for business, nearly three years behind schedule. Harrison admitted, 'It's a bit sad now that Apple is in the position all four of us planned three years ago. I just wish Paul would use the studio. It's silly not to. ' But neither Lennon nor McCartney would ever set foot on the premises.

Indeed, Lennon was about to leave Britain for the last time. In August 1971, he recalled the abuse that he and Ono had received from the British public, and said, 'If I hadn't bought that fucking house, I'd leave – I'd go and live in New York. It's fucking great over there, the people are as hip as shit. Britain is at least 200 years behind. ' On 3 September the couple flew to America for what was intended as a short visit. 'I only decided to live there after I'd moved, ' he later said. 'I left everything in England. I didn't even bring any clothes. I just came for a visit and stayed. I should have informed the British government: I'd have got an amazing tax refund. If I'd only thought of it, I would have made a million pounds or something. '

In New York the Lennons took a hotel suite for six weeks and then rented a loft in Greenwich Village, home of the city's artists and radicals. Among them was David Peel, who had recently formed an organisation called the Rock Liberation Front with A. J. Weberman, a Village eccentric who had devoted himself to 'proving' that Bob Dylan was both a junkie and an enemy of the people. Now Weberman and Peel widened their sights to include 'rip-off people in the world of rock'. To Lennon's delight, their first target was Paul McCartney. 'We figured McCartney could use some liberating, ' Weberman explained. 'It was around the time he released that album that was really inane and said nothing about what was happening on the street. He was supposed to be a representative of youth culture, but he was just a businessman. We reckoned he could use a wake-up call. ' Weberman, Peel and a dozen supporters staged a mock funeral outside the Eastmans' law office. As Weberman proclaimed afterwards, 'I felt he's a good example of the capitalist, non-involved egotistical rock star which seems to dominate the hip culture. ' 'I hope they're not after me, ' Lennon quipped.

He was soon sporting a Rock Liberation Front badge and spouting their propaganda. 'I don't want that big house we built for ourselves in England. I don't want the bother of owning all these big houses and big cars, even though our company, Apple, pays for it all. All structures and buildings and everything I own will be dissolved and got rid of. I'll cash in my chips, and anything that's left I'll make the best use of. ' It was two years since he had promised to give all his future royalties to peace, only to renege on his pledge immediately. 'John was not trying to make money out of the revolutionary movement, ' insisted his friend film-maker Steve Gebhardt. 'He was not trying to turn it into a Rolls-Royce. ' Indeed, Lennon now determined that his life and work would be devoted to the overthrow of the capitalist system that had made him rich.

'Imagine' became a hit single, although not yet an anthem. The album included songs of unfocused political anger, alongside declarations of love for Yoko and his demolition of McCartney's reputation 'How Do You Sleep'. The cover of Ram had featured McCartney holding a sheep; Lennon included a postcard-sized photo of himself wrestling with a pig. It was noticeable, however, that the Imagine LP represented a significant move towards the commercial mainstream. ABKCO's promotions manager Pete Bennett, who was a staunch supporter of US President Nixon, explained: 'We told John he had to go more commercial if he wanted to get a big smash. An artist has to put out what he feels, but I'm sure an artist wises up, and that's why John put out this new type of album. ' Conceding the point, Lennon later told McCartney that Imagine was '" Working Class Hero" with sugar on it for conservatives like yourself '. The album duly followed All Things Must Pass and Ram to the top of the American charts.

The clash of ideology between radicals such as Rubin and Hoffman and Klein's team at ABKCO merely amused Lennon. He'd already warned Klein that he might be earning '20 per cent of nothing' if the Lennons kept to their plan of 'taking a really far-out show on the road, a mobile, political, rock and roll show'. Klein replied, 'I don't mind, ' though as Lennon noted, 'Maybe he thinks he'll sell some comics on the side. He'll have thought of something. ' He knew that

McCartney was planning to tour with Wings. 'When Paul's going out on the road, ' Lennon explained, 'I'd like to be playing in the same town for free next door! And he's charging about a million to see him. That would be funny. '

None of the three Beatles under Klein's supervision doubted his abilities, and they relished his reputation as a troublemaker. At worst, they saw him as someone who in Lyndon Johnson's immortal phrase was safer 'inside the tent pissing out'. So they weren't troubled by the $29 million lawsuit filed against their manager by the Rolling Stones on 1 September 1971 that alleged he had 'made false or fraudulent representations with intent to deceive and defraud'. Klein complained that the Stones' claims were 'at best ludicrous and at worst malicious', and 'an attempt to rewrite history'. (The case was settled out of court in May 1972. ) Yet by November Paul McCartney was able to suggest that although 'the others really dig [Klein]. . . I think they might secretly feel that I am right'.

McCartney's comments followed three months of delays that threatened to sabotage Harrison's charity crusade. The principle was simple: all the proceeds from the Bangladesh benefits should go directly to the victims of famine and civil war. But between cause and effect was a landscape of obstacles. For example, Klein and Harrison had neglected to apply in advance to the US government for the concerts to be given tax-exempt status. Now the proceeds were automatically liable to tax, unless the government agreed to set a precedent. There were problems in Britain as well. Before the concerts Apple's official receiver wrote to Harrison, noting that he was planning to donate all the profits from the live album (and his 'Bangla Desh' single) to charity. 'This does place me in some difficulty, ' the receiver explained, because 'the court order imposed on me the obligation to hold for the court the royalties not only on Beatle group recordings, but on any individual recordings made by individual partners. ' Harrison needed to obtain the approval of the other Beatles before any donation could be made. Lennon and Starkey were in agreement, but Peter Howard at ABKCO suggested that the receiver should ask McCartney himself – evidence of how strained relations between the two ex-Beatles had become. McCartney eventually consented five weeks later, whereupon the receiver raised the possibility that Harrison might be asked to pay income tax on the proceeds, even if he immediately gave them to charity.

Harrison expected that the concert record would be released by October, and the film by Christmas. But the British government was now claiming its own share of the proceeds. In late September Harrison met the financial secretary to the Treasury, Patrick Jenkin, and asked 'if it would be possible to reduce, or even scrub completely, the purchase tax on the record. Unfortunately, he seemed to think that it was more important for this country to get the tax on the record than for the extra money to go to the starving people of Bangladesh. ' Harrison even threatened to become a tax exile from Britain, but Jenkin could not be swayed.

By now almost everyone's motives were open to suspicion. It was reported that ABKCO/Apple 'picked up the approximately $100, 000 tab' for staging the concerts, presumably as a charitable donation. But soon it became clear that the money would be reclaimed from the profits of the record. (Klein did make a personal donation of $50, 000 to the relief fund, however. 'Has Eastman ever donated? ' Lennon asked McCartney. ) Record companies were also jostling for the small change. Klein entered lengthy negotiations with Capitol Records president Bhaskar Menon about distribution fees, while Columbia Records (who owned Bob Dylan's contract) also wanted a share. By the time the two labels and Klein had cut a deal, wholesalers were complaining that their margins had been sliced so savagely that they would lose money on every copy they shipped. So the album was delayed again, while illegal bootleg recordings of the concert went on sale without any charitable benefit. The Concert For Bangla Desh – Harrison's second three-record box set in twelve months – finally reached the stores at Christmas 1971. Radical journalist Mick Farren greeted it as 'the greatest achievement ever by its organisers – a group headed by George Harrison, Ravi Shankar and Allen Klein'. It would be the last time the press referred to Klein in such heroic tones.

Lennon continued to defend Klein, almost without reservation: 'I don't think he deserves the shit he gets thrown at him, and if time proves me wrong in the end, so be it. I think he deserves what he earns. ' Removed from the Bangladesh charity fracas, he concentrated on his radical agenda. 'Repression is bad for you, ' he had recently proclaimed, and there was little sign of restraint in his songwriting during the final months of 1971. First he penned a banal protest tune about the shooting of prisoners at Attica State jail in New York State, then he focused on the downtrodden Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. 'It became journalism and not poetry, ' he later admitted of his work during this period. 'I was making an effort to reflect what was going on. Well, it doesn't work like that. ' But in the reflected glory of revolutionaries such as Jerry Rubin, Lennon believed he had found his calling.

Klein had helped him organise a retrospective exhibition for Ono's art in upstate New York^*26 – her first such showcase in two years – and now Lennon envisaged a future in which they could both function as full-time artists, removed from the expectations of the past. Ono, however, was less optimistic. 'After my exhibition, ' she recalled, 'I stopped, because the crowds who came to the show came to see the Beatles. It was pandemonium, and my work is quiet. ' She refused to place barriers between her art and the spectators, in a bid to sharpen the sense of communication and vulnerability, and was rewarded with accidental breakages and deliberate damage. When Lennon penned a one-line note for Ono's Fly album late that year – 'Love means having to say sorry every five minutes' – he was not only parodying the sales pitch for the hit movie Love Story, but acknowledging that his wife's creativity was being submerged beneath his own. ^†4

All of Yoko Ono's creative enterprises – exhibitions, films, albums – were being paid for by ABKCO. 'Klein was in a difficult situation, ' remembered Apple Records' US head Allan Steckler. 'I remember him saying to me, " Steckler, what can I do? She's spending a fortune. But she's the guy's wife! How can I say no to her? " Klein wasn't thrilled by the Janov album, let alone when they started making political records, but we had to keep funding them. '

Jerry Rubin now imagined that Lennon and Ono would lead a revolutionary cavalcade to disrupt the 1972 presidential election. 'We would launch a musical, political caravan, tour the United States, raise money to feed the poor and free prisoners from jail, ' he recalled. 'The shows would combine music and fun with political consciousness-raising, and all the money would go to the people! ' So Rubin was surprised when the Lennons returned to the studio with Phil Spector, not to record one of their new political statements, but for a Christmas single built around their two-year-old peace slogan, 'War is over if you want it. ' It was completed too late to catch the seasonal market, but survived to become a perennial favourite. ^*27 During the sessions Spector asked Lennon if he had heard McCartney's new album, adding, 'It's really bad. Just four musicians, and it's awful. ' 'Don't talk about it, ' Lennon replied. 'It depresses me. . . whenever anybody mentions his name, I don't think about the music – I think about all the business crap. Don't talk about him. '

Just seven months after releasing Ram, McCartney had completed Wild Life, the debut album by Wings. He penned some twee sleeve notes under a pseudonym to hype the record's magical qualities, but it was a severe embarrassment. Among its few highlights was 'Dear Friend', which as McCartney explained later was addressed to Lennon: 'Let's lay the guns down, let's hang up our boxing gloves. ' But he could not stop himself dwelling on the past. 'He's talking about money now, ' said his assistant Shelley Turner ruefully. 'That's one of his pet points. He'll never stop. ' If he could have maintained the detachment of 'Dear Friend', the quarrel with the other Beatles might have been mended. Instead, McCartney let months of resentment and pain pour from his lips.

His obsession was the group's business partnership, no closer to being broken eight months after he had won the court case. 'I just want this thing settled, ' he said. 'We just can't get at the money. ' He repeated the demand he'd been issuing for two years: 'I just want the four of us to get together somewhere and sign a piece of paper saying it's all over, and we want to divide the money four ways. No one else would be there, not even Linda or Yoko or Allen Klein. We'd just sign the paper and hand it to the business people and let them sort it all out. That's all I want now. But John won't do it. ' And so he continued, letting rip at Klein, Lennon's political posturing and the Apple bureaucracy that wouldn't let him leave the label: 'I didn't want to bring the new album out on Apple. I phoned the others up and asked them, " Well, what about it? " They hummed and aahed over the phone but a couple of days later when I spoke to them they didn't like the idea. So I asked them, " Have you been talking to Klein? " ' Legal staff at EMI and Apple spent several weeks debating the issue of whether McCartney would be allowed to release Wild Life without using the familiar Apple logo that symbolised everything he wanted to escape.

Lennon could no more restrain himself than McCartney. He was so outraged by McCartney's comments in the rock paper Melody Maker that he typed a three-page reply, headed 'Please publish, " equal time". ' It was as acerbic and wounding as 'How Do You Sleep', as Lennon revealed how McCartney had told him, 'if we didn't do what you wanted, you'd sue us again, and that " Ringo and George are going to break you John" . . . Who's the guy threatening to " finish" Ringo and Maureen, who was warning me on the phone two weeks ago? Who said he'd " get us" whatever the cost? As I've said before – have you ever thought that you might possibly be wrong about something? ' Lee Eastman was caught in the line of fire: 'You must KNOW we're right about Eastman; he can't control himself in PUBLIC – even the people he buys paintings from squirm! (Shit from the inside, baby! )' Lennon briefly managed to calm himself: 'No hard feelings to you either. I know we basically want the same. . . whenever you want to meet, all you have to do is call. ' But his sarcasm won out: 'P. S. The bit that really puzzled us was asking to meet WITHOUT LINDA AND YOKO. I know you're camp! But let's not go too far! I thought you'd have understood BY NOW, that I'm JOHNANDYOKO. P. P. S. Even your own lawyers know you can't 'just sign a bit of paper' (or don't they tell you?! ). '

A month earlier Lennon had asked journalist Ray Connolly to deliver a letter to McCartney in London. 'He wanted to tell Paul something without going through the lawyers, ' Connolly said. 'I phoned Paul when I got home, but he had changed his number, so I dropped John's letter into his postbox. Later I phoned Paul's dad to check that Paul had received the letter. " I think so, " Jim McCartney said, " but things have got worse since then. If I were you, I'd keep well out of it. " ' The exchange of insults in Melody Maker demonstrated the breadth of the divide.

Remarkably, this very public duel provoked a truce. McCartney dared to make the first call, and the pair avoided arguing long enough to reminisce about the distant past. Within a few days Lennon sent his ex-colleague a gift^*28 with a handwritten note: 'Happy Xmas! (war is over if you want it. . . ) THE BEATLES. Dear Paul, Linda et al. This is THE DECCA AUDITION!! I found the bootleg not the tape: they were a good group fancy turning THIS down! Love John + Yoko. ' Shortly after Christmas the McCartneys visited the Lennons at their Greenwich Village apartment. The two men talked reconciliation and a solution to their business differences. But a few months later Linda McCartney admitted, 'We saw John and Yoko at Christmas, and it was all, " We're going to do it" and " You'll be out by March, man", and Yoko Ono said, " To hell with the contracts. " But nothing happened. '

The Lennons suddenly had more pressing issues to confront. They wanted to release an album of two impromptu performances from 1969 and 1971, under the title Live Jam, or perhaps London Air & NewYork Wind. But Allen Klein strongly resisted the idea. He was equally unimpressed when the Lennons started work on an album of political material in spring 1972. Klein explained why: under the terms of the contract they had signed with Capitol, the four Beatles would only be entitled to a second increase in their royalty rates if the two most recent albums they had released by autumn 1972 had each sold 500, 000 copies. Previous records by the solo Beatles had easily surpassed that figure, but Klein feared that a live or political offering from the Lennons might struggle to reach the target. Lennon cared nothing for long-term financial gain – all he wanted was unconditional support from his manager – and he felt that by daring to question his artistic decisions Klein was demonstrating a fundamental lack of confidence.

His growing distrust of Klein would pale alongside another looming crisis. For all his revolutionary rhetoric, Lennon had a naive faith in the morality of the capitalist system. He had experienced censorship in the past, but he never imagined that by aligning himself with some of the most notorious revolutionary figures in America he might incur the wrath of the US government. The more often he cavorted with the Yippies and the Black Panther Party, the more dangerous he appeared to the already paranoid Nixon administration. They feared that dissent organised by one of the world's most influential public figures might endanger Nixon's chances of re-election that November. On 4 February 1972 Senator Strom Thurmond wrote to the US attorney general, enclosing a summary of Lennon's contacts with the revolutionary left and suggesting that the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) might intervene. 'This appears to me to be an important matter, ' Thurmond wrote, 'and I think it would be well for it to be considered at the highest level. As I can see, many headaches might be avoided if appropriate action is taken in time. ' Lennon was only in America on a six-month visa, due to expire on 29 February, but he blithely continued to plot with his fellow radicals. He and Ono had sealed their solidarity with Rubin and Hoffman at Bank Street, in a blood pact: the four of them nicked their thumbs with a penknife and let their collective life force run together. With that gesture the Lennons pledged themselves to the revolution. After months of political disillusionment, Rubin was ecstatic: 'Something new is in the air. Somehow the arrival of John and Yoko in New York has had a mystical and practical effect that is bringing people together again. '

While Lennon relished the excitement of being a subversive, Ono retained her natural pacifism. 'I made John and myself isolated from the rest, ' she insisted later, 'as our friends were trying to lash out, wanting to bomb the White House, something violent like that. I insisted that we should keep doing things in a peaceful way, because violence breeds violence. ' Yet a more sinister form of isolation was creeping into their relationship. As an FBI informant noted, 'John Lennon does not give the impression he is a true revolutionist since he is constantly under the influence of narcotics. ' Another detected a rift between Rubin and Lennon regarding the latter's 'excessive use of narcotics'. The Lennons were forced to travel to the US Virgin Islands in an attempt to conquer his renewed addiction to heroin. When they returned, tensions were evident in their relationship. 'If you were around them, you would see very quickly that she runs the show, ' recalled TV presenter Mike Douglas, whose programme they commandeered for a week. 'She was very rough on the staff. The kids were very young, and probably fans when they arrived, [but] probably terribly let down at some of the behaviour. ' A few weeks later the couple travelled to San Francisco to undergo treatment with methadone – withdrawal from which, Lennon admitted later, 'almost killed Yoko'.

On 30 January 1972, British army paratroopers shot dead 13 Catholics on the streets of the Northern Irish city of Derry. It was the single most radicalising moment of the entire 'troubles' that afflicted the area from 1968 onwards. Lennon memorialised the tragedy in a song, 'Sunday Bloody Sunday', which preached the republican manifesto of the IRA in an affected New York accent. Much less predictable was Paul McCartney's reaction to the shootings. Two days later he took Wings into the studio to record his own political anthem, the inappropriately chirpy 'Give Ireland Back to the Irish'. 'I always used to think, God, John's crackers, doing all these political songs, ' he explained. But the events in Derry slapped him in the face and demanded a response. Ironically, his song kept closer to the Lennons' peace ethic than theirs did, striking a tone of disapproval rather than rebellion. When Lennon had first written about the situation in Ireland, in a song called 'The Luck of the Irish', he had promised to donate all his earnings to civil rights activists there. If McCartney made a similar gesture, he kept it quiet. It was hard to avoid the cynical feeling that one of McCartney's motives was to show Lennon that he too had a political conscience.

From the Lennons, there was now the promise of a series of fundraising concerts for the Irish struggle. They would begin at Madison Square Garden, echoing Harrison, and then tour Ireland itself. Friends began to scout for a suitable home there for the couple. Meanwhile, Allen Klein boasted that George Harrison was proposing to perform a charity show in London on behalf of the homeless. 'You know what's happening at Wembley? ' he crowed. 'George will announce he's gonna do a concert, right? About two weeks before, Ringo will say, " Hey, I'll play too. " Then

John says he's gonna be there. Everyone will wanna know where Paul is. He'll think I'm trying to embarrass him. You betcha. I'm gonna roast his fucking ass. ' None of these events happened, however, and by early March 1972 it was apparent that if Lennon left the USA the immigration authorities would not allow him back in. His life degenerated into a routine of INS hearings, deportation orders and appeals, sapping his radical energy.

Meanwhile, Klein's own activities flashed into the spotlight. Journalist Peter McCabe published 'Some Sour Notes from the Bangladesh Concert' in the magazine New York. He alleged that, far from channelling the royalties from Harrison's album to charity, Klein and ABKCO were making a profit of $1. 14 on each copy. A further 25 cents was supposedly earmarked for Bob Dylan, and 50 cents to the songwriters and publishers who were also supposed to be donating their services for free. Assuming an eventual sale of three million copies, McCabe said, this meant that around $6 million would not be reaching its intended destination.

Phil Spector, who had co-produced The Concert For Bangla Desh, phoned the magazine to register his disapproval of McCabe's piece. Klein's reaction was more substantial: he filed a libel suit against this 'false and defamatory matter', demanding $150 million to compensate for the damage to his reputation, the distress the article had caused and the loss of sales it would provoke. He called a press conference to defend himself, and prepared a detailed breakdown of the costs and receipts of the project, which he sent to Rolling Stone magazine. They printed it verbatim and then queried his arithmetic. But Klein insisted that he and ABKCO hadn't taken a penny from the project; indeed, they were actually losing a dollar on each set.

The press conference descended into farce because Klein's staff made the mistake of issuing invitations to the city's underground press. Among those who accepted was A. J. Weberman, who had already led a demonstration against Capitol Records, complaining that they should be manufacturing and distributing the Bangladesh album at cost, not at a profit. He was predictably outraged by McCabe's article, and led a small party of Rock Liberation Front activists to the ABKCO office, chanting slogans such as 'You'll wonder where the money went, when Klein runs a charity event. ' 'We brought along some rotten fruit, ' he recalled. 'We called it our Free Food for Starving Music Executives Programme. We said, " Hey, if you guys have to steal from the people of Bangladesh, you must be a bunch of hungry mother-fuckers. So what we have for you is free fucking lunch. " We took all these vegetables that we got from the dumpster and threw them all over the office. ' He and Spector got into a fist fight, Weberman said, 'and Spector attacks my old lady, Ann. He likes to beat on women, you know. Wonderful fucking human being. '

When news of the demonstration reached the underground press, Weberman received an unexpected phone call. 'John and Yoko called me up, ' he remembered, and they said, 'Hey, man, bring your old lady for tea, cos Klein is ripping us off too, man. ' So we went over there to Bank Street. John and Yoko were there, stark naked. And I started hanging out with them. Sometimes he would be going through cold turkey. He got deeper and deeper into junk. Lennon would sit around and tell me how much he hated McCartney, and how he'd like to punch him out. But if I ever said anything bad against [Bob] Dylan, he wanted to punch me out too, and Yoko had to restrain him.

A maverick even by the standards of Greenwich Village, Weberman had connections with dope dealers and revolutionaries, sometimes in the same skin. So too, he claimed, did Lennon: 'There was one guy who was smuggling Lebanese hash into the US. With the money he got, he'd go into gun stores and purchase weapons, and then ship the weapons back to Ireland. Lennon introduced me to this guy, who was a total fucking revolutionary from the IRA. I said to Lennon, " Man, you're pretty well connected back in England. Now I'm gonna hook you up here in the United States. " ' So, Weberman claimed, he hooked Lennon up with a group long suspected of funnelling money from Irish republican sympathisers in the USA to the IRA. They became the beneficiaries of Lennon's song 'The Luck of the Irish'. 'Lennon gave them this huge contribution, ' Weberman says, 'and they had a big party to celebrate. They invited me – at last I was a hero! Everyone was saying, " Hey, this is Weberman, he turned Lennon on to us. " '

The Irish republican movement was stoutly defended by the British underground press until February 1972, when several catering workers were killed in a bomb explosion at a barracks in Aldershot. Further killings followed, as the conflict in Northern Ireland hardened into guerrilla warfare. Thereafter, the IRA lost the sympathy of everyone in the UK but the revolutionary left. From his distant vantage point in New York, however, Lennon maintained his contacts with the organisation. 'I was over there on a speaking tour, ' said Gerry O'Hare, then a prominent member of the more militant Provisional wing of the IRA. 'A guy said to me, " Would you like to meet John Lennon? " I said, " Are you spoofing? " Two days later I went to his apartment. ' He asked if the ex-Beatle would perform a benefit concert for the republican movement. 'He offered to do one in Dublin, ' O'Hare said. 'He gave me the impression he was genuine. But I got the impression that if he did one in Dublin, he also wanted to do one in Belfast too, for the Protestant community. But he said he had a problem, that if he left America he might not be able to get back in. '

As Professor Jon Wiener's detailed research has demonstrated, several arms of the US government were now keeping Lennon and his comrades under surveillance, with a view to securing his deportation. ^*29 Fortunately for Lennon, they worked in competition rather than concord, ensuring that – despite strong rumours about his heroin use – they could never catch him in possession of illegal substances, even though a simple bust would have meant immediate deportation. As spring became summer, Lennon gradually eased back from active participation in the revolution. But the flow of money continued. Besides the Rock Liberation Front, Weberman and Peel were also prominent in a group called the Zippies. In June 1972 Apple issued Peel's album The Pope Smokes Dope, which Lennon and Ono had produced, and took out an advert in the Zippies' news-sheet BeachBlanket Struggle. They could probably have booked the space for $50, but instead Lennon arranged to pay the paper $50, 000. 'I told him we were going to have a riot at the Republican Party convention in Miami, ' Weberman explained, and that we needed money to get buses and bring in the demonstrators. John gave us a couple of thousand dollars in cash, and the rest came from this ad. He had some idea what was going to happen – he knew there was a chance that it would turn out not to be a peaceful event, but he still gave us the money. You can't tell me that he didn't believe in violence. He helped to pay for it.

Once again the combined resources of the FBI and the INS failed to spot this evidence of subversion. But one political gesture was impossible to ignore. In June 1972, as his lawyers were advising him to keep a low profile, Lennon issued Some Time in New York City, an album of radical political anthems. ^*30 The production (by Phil Spector) and vocal performances were exhilarating, but the simplistic content of the material, which sounded like a precocious child's guide to revolution, was severely damaging to Lennon's reputation. One of his staunchest supporters in the British underground dismissed the record as 'irritating, embarrassing and, finally, just plain unpleasant'. SomeTime in New York City not only failed to match the commercial impact of McCartney's Wild Life, but was outsold by Starkey's SentimentalJourney and Beaucoups of Blues. The man widely regarded as the leader of the Beatles was once again their weakest commercial asset.

The record's failure was symptomatic of a wider feeling that the four Beatles were yesterday's men. It wasn't just that Lennon was the only one of the quartet to issue an album in 1972, or that two of the group (Harrison and Starkey) had effectively vanished. The outside world had been entranced by the human drama of the Beatles' split and the almost weekly sparring between Lennon and McCartney during 1971. Now the saga seemed passé; and so, in every dimension but nostalgia, did the Beatles. For fellow musicians, their influence had been inescapable during the 1960s: everyone seemed to be following the Beatles or, if they were courageous, reacting against them. Now there were new stylists in town, and nobody wanted to be caught in last year's designs. Acts who consciously maintained the Beatles' tradition, such as the Electric Light Orchestra, Badfinger and Raspberries, endured jibes about their outdated, 'retro' sound. It was as if the Beatles were the hangover from a decade that the world was already embarrassed to remember.

Lennon's battles with US immigration officials ensured that he remained newsworthy, but his former colleagues were less visible. While Lennon mixed with revolutionaries, Starkey appeared at events such as Elizabeth Taylor's 40th-birthday party, where Hollywood celebrities and minor European royals welcomed him into their exclusive milieu. He released one single in 1972, 'Back off Boogaloo', the lyrics of which seemed to echo his disappointment with McCartney's recent output: 'Everything you try to do, you know it sure sounds wasted. ' The title was a gift from Britain's pop phenomenon of the moment Marc Bolan, and when his band T. Rex performed at Wembley in the summer, before an audience exhibiting 'Bolanmania', it seemed appropriate that Starkey should be there to document the occasion for an Apple Films production. Reporters noted gleefully that he was able to pass through the pre-teen crowd without being recognised.

For Harrison, 1972 was a year of recuperation and retreat after the exertions of the Bangladesh benefit. But there were always meetings to determine which department of which government was now stalling the funds needed so desperately in the newly independent nation. They drained Harrison's already depleted creativity, ensuring that if he did feel inspired to write a song, it was usually tinged with despair at the failings of humanity. At home he grew increasingly estranged from his wife. When he made a rare appearance at Apple, he could seem tense and removed. Geoff Emerick was running Apple Studios at this time. 'George could be infuriating on occasions. Every now and then he would get into his Hare Krishna thing, and he'd walk around with this little bag that resembled a sling: he looked as if he'd broken his arm. You'd go up to him and ask him a question, any question: " Do you want to do your vocals now? " or something like that – and he'd start to answer you but then begin mumbling away, chanting his mantra. ' Everything connected with the physical world seemed to annoy him. When EMI failed to offer an appropriate advance for his next album, he sent an angry postcard to the managing director: 'How much did EMI make from All Things Must Pass/My Sweet Lord? ' He addressed the card symbolically to 'EMI Wreckords'.

Meanwhile the negotiations about the Beatles' partnership simmered expensively. But another item of business forced its way to the top of the agenda. In May the third year of Allen Klein's three-year management contract came to an end, and both sides had the option to call a halt. Harrison had become alarmed by the morass into which the Bangladesh project had fallen; Lennon felt personally betrayed by Klein's apparent distaste for his political campaigns; Starkey would do whatever the others agreed. But none of them was yet prepared to crawl back to McCartney and admit that perhaps he had been right. Neither did they wish to endure the very public humiliation of looking for a new manager. So they compromised, and agreed that because Apple was effectively dormant and consequently required very little management, they should renew Klein's contract for two or three months at a time, rather than a full year. Lennon, however, had a more sinister agenda. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who had recorded an album for Apple at Lennon's request in December 1971, explained: 'Lennon had realised he wanted to cut off from Klein, and he had to do it in a ruthless way, the same way that Klein worked. So he was not able to tell anybody. He just started legal proceedings secretly, and then he was ready to pull the trap when the moment came. '

Maybe Klein guessed what was happening; maybe he still had faith in his personal rapport with the three Beatles. Either way, it was now in his financial interest to find a project that would emphasise his importance to Apple, and reinforce his grip as the company's manager. After suggesting to Harrison that he should look for an offshore tax haven to safeguard his income, he focused his attention on the documentary movie that Neil Aspinall had assembled a year earlier. The film had been shelved, but Aspinall remained hopeful that one day all four of the Beatles would agree to its release. He intended to accompany it with an album of the group's greatest hits, guaranteed to sell in millions. Aspinall was aware of Klein's waning popularity among his clients, however, and also realised the financial implications of allowing the American to take credit for the project and claim a share of its earnings. To ensure Klein could not seize the film, he dismantled the master reels kept at the Apple office. Around the same time Aspinall formed his own company, Standby Films, which meant that he could retain control of the Beatles film as a personal project. Its name reflected his subservient role in the Beatles organisation: waiting until he was needed.

One problem confronting both Klein and Aspinall was McCartney's reluctance to become a museum piece. 'It's rather like an obituary to me, ' he complained in May 1972. 'I don't like these old " remember when" things. I don't like talking about the old thing when inevitably anything I say I'm doing now won't match up to all the glorious things they'll show happened in the past. ' He was talking on the occasion of a nostalgia trip over which he had no control: a lengthy BBC Radio series, The Beatles Story. The corporation secured interviews with Lennon, McCartney and Klein, but none of them was in the mood to glorify the past. 'So much emphasis is put on " Oh, the Beatles have broken up, " ' Klein said. 'I don't think it was a tragedy. They haven't died. Maybe it was time they had a chance to live their own lives. ' Lennon concurred. 'We were friends, and we had a function, ' he said, 'but the function ended and the relationship had nothing to last on but memory, and it broke down. I know a lot of people were upset when the Beatles finished, but the circus has to come to an end. The Beatles were a monument, and had to be either changed or scrapped. ' As if to acknowledge the point, Lennon, Harrison and Starkey withdrew their support from the Beatles' Fan Club, and it folded that spring – its membership reduced from a 1963 peak of 350, 000 to just 11, 000.

McCartney's reluctance to be judged against his past achievements reflected insecurity about his latest venture. Wings became a quintet in January, in time to record their 'Ireland' single. Briefly, McCartney could luxuriate in the kind of controversy that had been Lennon's domain, as radio stations refused to broadcast the record. In its Top 40 countdown, the BBC would only refer demurely to 'a record by Wings'. In early February McCartney fulfilled the fantasy rejected by the other Beatles in 1969, when Wings performed unannounced concerts at British universities. The novelty of seeing a Beatle in the flesh overshadowed any qualms about the group's music, which sounded under-rehearsed and inchoate. 'We all wanted to play Beatles tunes, ' recalled drummer Denny Seiwell, 'but Paul wanted to start a whole new world for himself – rightly so. He wanted the world to get to know us, like they knew John and Ringo and George, but we could never be Beatles. ' The closest that McCartney came to his past was a rousing finale of Little Richard's 'Long Tall Sally', which had closed the last Beatles concert in 1966.

Gradually, however, he began to build the skeleton of a new career. His decision to update the nursery rhyme 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' for his next single attracted derision from critics, but the record became an instant children's favourite. Like Starkey's attempt to confound public opinion by switching from country to electronic music, McCartney appeared to relish puncturing expectations. He continued to encourage his wife's musical ambitions, agreeing a deal with Northern Songs that would let her composing credits stand, in return for McCartney's agreement to make a TV special for Sir Lew Grade. In July Wings undertook their first scheduled tour, though they avoided major cities and concentrated on small towns in Europe. When the press tracked them down, they found McCartney bullish. 'The Beatles have definitely ended, ' he repeated like a mantra, as if repetition would bring acceptance. 'The man from the record company said, " Would you play just once a year, lads? " like a sort of memorial tribute. Well, I'm not going to get into that, because I'm not dead yet. It's no good for me now. ' His wife complained, 'We have no income, it all goes to Apple. We are stuck, let me tell you. ' 'What annoys me is the other three and their preaching, ' McCartney added. 'John goes around saying, " Join Rock Liberation – give the people what is theirs, " and he could get us out. ' But the partnership remained intact, despite Klein's claim that Lennon, Harrison and Starkey were ready to buy out McCartney's 25 per cent share and then let ABKCO assume complete control of the Apple empire. 'I don't really see them much, ' McCartney said, 'and I don't really see why I should see them. We had a bit of trouble, and that trouble is still on. '

Lennon could have echoed that sentiment. By late summer his anxieties about Apple and the Beatles paled alongside the pressure he was enduring from the US government. He was convinced that FBI agents were shadowing his movements and taping his phone calls. A. J. Weberman scoured his underground connections to secure Lennon a telephone that couldn't be bugged. In return, the Lennons – who, after Ono's film Fly, had some experience with insects – helped Weberman procure 500 flies, which he released into the Republican Party national headquarters. But constant meetings with lawyers and their insistence that Lennon should do nothing to antagonise the authorities gradually forced him and Ono away from their comrades. 'I know we haven't got many friends, ' he admitted that summer, 'but I never did have. '

During a visit to rehab in San Francisco earlier that year the Lennons had met investigative TV reporter Geraldo Rivera, who had uncovered a scandalous history of abuse in a New York State children's institution. In July Rivera asked Lennon if he would consider a Harrison-style fundraiser – which expanded to two shows at Madison Square Garden, the same venue where Lennon had originally planned to perform for Irish civil rights. 'Geraldo wanted to help John stay in the USA, so he arranged this benefit concert, ' recalled Steve Gebhardt, who filmed the event for the Lennons. David Peel had introduced them to a local bar band, Elephant's Memory, who had been put on retainer the previous Christmas on the assumption that they would be touring the world in 1972. Aside from the Some Time in New YorkCity sessions and an occasional TV appearance, the One To One concerts on 30 August represented the sum total of their work together. Embarrassingly, tickets for the event sold far more slowly than Harrison's a year earlier, reflecting the toll that Lennon's political activity had taken on his popularity. He was reduced to recording radio ads guaranteeing a splendid time for all. When the tickets still didn't sell, he swallowed his pride and phoned Paul McCartney to see if he would join him on stage, but McCartney declined. Klein discreetly gave the remaining seats away.

This time there was no confusion about the charitable status of the concerts, and the money swiftly reached its target. Moreover, Lennon delivered a performance worthy of the occasion. 'The weird thing was turning left and right and seeing different faces, ' he recalled. 'It didn't matter what I was singing – I'd see Yoko or one of the Elephants or [Jim] Keltner on the drums, and feel little flashes of, Oh, it isn't one of them, this is different. I've got to sing all the damn numbers. ' If he lacked the stage polish of McCartney or the finesse of Harrison's Bangladesh big band, Lennon compensated with a quality that was his alone: passion. So intense was his focus that when he revisited the primal pain that had inspired him to write 'Cold Turkey' or 'Mother', he screamed and writhed like a man possessed, a living emblem of Arthur Janov's therapy. Yet the audience reserved its most fervent reaction for the moment when Lennon promised to 'go back, just once' and delivered a compelling rendition of the Beatles' 'Come Together'. He forgot the lyrics, but the spectacle was vivid enough to suggest that the spirit of the 1960s was still alive. The shows closed with a mass chorus of 'Give Peace a Chance', for which the crowd were given percussion instruments. After the performers left the stage, fans streamed out onto the streets of New York, still chanting, still banging their tambourines joyfully. It seemed like one last sunlit gathering of the tribes before the clouds descended and the hippie dream faded to dusk. Lennon was ecstatic, and began to talk again about the world tour he'd imagined a year before.

There were excitable suggestions that Lennon might share the bill at another Madison Square spectacular with Wings and a Harrison/ Starkey big band. But the Beatles were otherwise occupied. Harrison was at Apple, recording an album with the hubristic working title of The Magic Is Here Again. Starkey was engaged in his most challenging and fulfilling film role, playing a version of his teddy boy past in That'llBe the Day. McCartney was at Abbey Road, completing the Wings double album that had been in preparation since the spring. And at the Record Plant in New York Lennon was watching his wife record her own double album of feminist songs with the bar band who were supposed to be his. 'When I decided to make a double album, their faces all became very long, ' Ono complained of the Apple/ABKCO staff. 'But I decided to do it anyway, because I figured that if George Harrison can put out a triple album then I can put out a double album. Later I began to think that if George Harrison can put out a triple album, then I should be able to put out a triple album. But I decided to stop at 22 songs. '

That was precisely 22 songs more than Lennon had completed in recent months. The more creative Ono became, the more Lennon faltered. 'It is very difficult for two composers to be living together, ' Ono said, admitting that she rose several hours earlier than her husband so that she could work undisturbed. Were they happy, she was asked? 'Not necessarily. Sometimes we're very happy, sometimes we're not. We're human. There was a negative situation at one time, like Scott and Zelda [Fitzgerald], but we overcame that because we were a bit more aware, thank God. ' Lennon's awareness was coming under extreme pressure, however. On election night in November the couple attended a party at Jerry Rubin's apartment in SoHo. The revolutionaries had opted to support the Democratic Party candidate, George McGovern, who had promised to end the Vietnam War. They had gathered – Rubin, Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg and their comrades – in the expectation that righteousness would seize the day. But McGovern lost to Nixon in the biggest electoral landslide yet recorded.

When the Lennons arrived the party was soaked in despair. Lennon was drunk, artistically blocked, jealous of his wife's creativity, harassed by the US immigration authorities. Now he saw the radicals on whom he had staked his reputation, and whom he blamed for his persecution by the government, weeping for their own lost dreams. He ripped into Rubin and Hoffman, calling them 'middle-class Jews' and 'pigs'. When theatre director Judith Molina tried to calm him, he screamed at her, 'I want to cut you with a knife. ' Others remember him threatening to go outside and shoot a cop. The only person who could quell his anger was Carol Realini, Rubin's roommate. In full view of Ono, Lennon and Realini began to talk, and then kiss, before he led her into the next room. She told him that she couldn't make love while his wife was outside the door. 'We're getting divorced, ' he told her. Soon Ono and the remaining guests were forced to listen to cries and groans of sexual pleasure. Then Lennon re-emerged, gestured silently at Ono and headed for the door.

This was an extreme but not isolated incident of marital discord. 'After we'd done the One To One concert film, ' recalled Steve Gebhardt, 'I remember John saying to me that the days of everything being Johnandyoko – one word – were over. I was shocked. ' Ono completed her record, Approximately Infinite Universe, which was greeted more positively than her previous releases. Lennon did his best to publicise it, writing a personal note to the Capitol Records boss asking him to throw the company's weight behind it. But in mid-January 1973 Lennon and Ono

quarrelled publicly at another party. 'I wish I was back with Paul, ' Lennon reportedly said. His young assistant May Pang insisted that the idea of a Lennon/McCartney reunion was 'ridiculous'. New York newspapers began to speculate that the Lennons were separating. To dispel the stories, the couple bought each other Valentine's Day cards in the Village, rightly confident that their gesture would make the gossip columns.

In March the couple flew to Los Angeles for an urgent meeting on Apple business. The company had been renewing Allen Klein's management contract regularly, but when the end-of-February deadline arrived, they asked for the notice period to be reduced to two weeks. Klein's office had compiled two double albums of the Beatles' greatest hits in preparation for Neil Aspinall's unfinished documentary film. News of the project had filtered out, and a manufacturer of bootleg records was preparing to distribute an illegal Beatles compilation to steal Apple's thunder. Also in America were George Harrison, who was collaborating with Ravi Shankar, and Richard Starkey, who was preparing to make his first album of pop material since the Beatles' break-up. The two men met amicably with Klein in New York, and then flew on to California 'We're all friends, even if we had split up, ' Starkey recalled, 'so I said " Have you got any songs, boys? " and John said, " Yeah, I've got a song, " so I said, " Well, come and play. " '

Lennon arrived with 'I'm the Greatest', which he'd begun to write after watching A Hard Day's Night more than two years earlier. Then, it had sounded sullen and bitter. Retooled for Starkey, it emerged as a sardonic tribute to the Beatles. There was a reference to 'Billy Shears', the role Starkey had played on the Sgt Pepper album, and producer Richard Perry added sound effects of a similar vintage. 'Ringo, John, Klaus [Voormann] and myself grouped around a piano in the studio to put the finishing touches on that song, ' Perry recalled.

Then someone called me out of the studio to say that George was on the phone. 'I hear there's some recording going on, ' George said. 'Can I come down? ' So I said to John, 'George is on the phone and wants to come down to record with us. Is it OK? ' 'Hell, yes, ' John said. 'Tell him to get down here right away and help me finish this bridge. ' George arrived, and without saying a word he joined in on the same wavelength we were on. He played guitar and John played piano, and they complemented each other perfectly. There was the Beatles' magic unfolding right before my eyes!

Perry's excitement was forgivable: he was watching the revamped Beatles line-up that never coalesced in 1970. For Lennon, though, Voormann was clearly not a substitute for McCartney: 'The three of us were there, ' he said, 'and Paul would most probably have joined in if he was around, but he wasn't. ' Even without McCartney, 'I'm the Greatest' sounded like a lost gem from the Abbey Road sessions. 'Everyone in the room was gleaming, ' Perry purred. 'It's such a universal gleam with the Beatles. ' Lennon complained later that Harrison had suggested the Beatles should make that gleam a permanent feature; and one major obstacle to a reunion, desired or otherwise, was about to be removed.