Paul McCartney revisited one of the most contentious chapters of The Beatles’ history in “Man on the Run.”
McCartney defended his decision to sue The Beatles and revealed the “f— you, John” moment that came after in the documentary chronicling the end of an era and the beginning of the singer’s journey with Wings. But before creating Wings, McCartney dealt with the fallout of The Beatles’ breakup. The band’s original manager, Brian Epstein, had died, and arguments over who should be hired had hit a fever pitch.
McCartney refused to sign onto the idea to hire Allen Klein, who was backed by John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison, as the new manager.
“I saw through it. The way things were going, Allen Klein would just swallow up all The Beatles’ fortune,” McCartney said in the Prime Video documentary, available Feb. 27. “I thought I had to fight it.”
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“My brother-in-law, he and his dad were a huge help. They said to sue them, and I said, ‘Well, I’ll sue Allen Klein, but I can’t sue The Beatles,'” he added. “‘These are my mates. They’re gonna hate me for it, the public’s gonna hate me for it, I’m gonna hate me for it.’ But otherwise, I would never get out.”
McCartney did sue the other Beatles in 1970 because he felt financially trapped in a partnership that was being steered by manager Allen Klein. At the time, McCartney believed Klein was mismanaging the band’s multimedia company, Apple Corps. The lawsuit wasn’t really about breaking up the band musically — that had already happened — it was about legally dissolving the business before things got worse.
Lennon later wrote a song dissing McCartney’s exit from the legendary band, titled “How Do You Sleep?”
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The lyrics read: “The only thing you done was ‘Yesterday’/And since you’re gone you’re just another day,” and “The sound you make is muzak to my ears.”
“The only thing you did was ‘Yesterday’ was apparently Allen Klein’s suggestion,” McCartney claimed in the documentary. “But in the back of my mind, I was thinking, ‘If all I ever did was ‘Yesterday,’ ‘Let It Be,’ ‘Long and Winding Road,’ ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ ‘Lady Madonna’… F— you, John.”
“How do I sleep at night? Well, actually quite well,” he said.
By 1973, Lennon, Harrison and Starr had also sued Klein for financial misconduct. They eventually severed ties with him.
“John broke up The Beatles,” McCartney insisted in his documentary. “But I got the rap. And that’s a bit of a weight to bear.”
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McCartney and Lennon met in their teens at a church festival in Liverpool, England. Lennon was already a part of his own band, The Quarrymen, at the time. After meeting McCartney at the event, Lennon asked him to become a part of the group. Roughly three years later, The Beatles were formed.
At a screening for “Man on the Run,” McCartney reflected on his close relationship with Lennon. From teenage mischief to the pressures of Beatlemania, the musician explained his complicated friendship with Lennon endured through it all.
“As it shows in the film, I knew John from a very early age — we were just a couple of rock and roll fans,” he said, according to The Sun. “We enjoyed hanging out together, and we started writing little songs round at my place. My dad had a pipe in his drawer. So we thought we’d smoke it. We couldn’t find any tobacco, so we smoked tea! We had all those memories in common.”
“Then we went through the whole trajectory of The Beatles. But John was always just that guy to me, even when he was being really mean, and I was having to take it. At the same time, it was like, ‘Yeah, it’s just John, he does that’. He’d always done that — so that made it a little bit easier.”
“But I loved him, you know. I loved all the guys in The Beatles,” McCartney added. “I try and think of how else it could have been, but with just me, John, George and Ringo, it was a magic grouping. And we did OK!”
