The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [20]
Paul made an attempt to carry on as if Brian hadn’t died by saying, “Now, now, boys, we’re going to make a record.” Being the kind of person I am, I thought, well, we’re going to make a record all right, so I’ll go along, so we went and made a record. And that’s when we made Magical Mystery Tour. That was the real . . .
Paul had a tendency to come along and say, well, he’s written these ten songs, let’s record now. And I said, “Well, give us a few days, and I’ll knock a few off,” or something like that. Magical Mystery Tour was something he had worked out with Mal [Evans, the Beatles’ personal assistant], and he showed me what his idea was and this is how it went, it went around like this, the story and how he had it all . . . the production and everything.
Paul said, “Well, here’s the segment, you write a little piece for that,” and I thought, bloody hell, so I ran off and I wrote the dream sequence for the fat woman and all the thing with the spaghetti. Then George and I were sort of grumbling about the fuckin’ movie, and we thought we better do it, and we had the feeling that we owed it to the public to do these things.
When did your songwriting partnership with Paul end?
That ended . . . I don’t know, around 1962, or something, I don’t know. If you give me the albums I can tell you exactly who wrote what, and which line. We sometimes wrote together. All our best work—apart from the early days, like “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” we wrote together and things like that—we wrote apart always. The “One after 909,” on the Let It Be LP, I wrote when I was seventeen or eighteen. We always wrote separately, but we wrote together because we enjoyed it a lot sometimes, and also because they would say, well, you’re going to make an album, get together and knock off a few songs, just like a job.
You said you quit the Beatles first.
Yes.
How?
I said to Paul, “I’m leaving.”
I knew on the flight over to Toronto or before we went to Toronto: I told Allen [Klein, the Beatles’ manager] I was leaving, I told Eric Clapton and Klaus [Voormann] that I was leaving then, but that I would probably like to use them as a group. I hadn’t decided how to do it—to have a permanent new group or what—then, later on, I thought, fuck, I’m not going to get stuck with another set of people, whoever they are.
I announced it to myself and the people around me on the way to Toronto a few days before. And on the plane—Klein came with me—I told Allen, “It’s over.” When I got back, there were a few meetings, and Allen said, well, cool it, cool it, there was a lot to do, businesswise, you know, and it would not have been suitable at the time.
Then we were discussing something in the office with Paul, and Paul said something or other about the Beatles doing something, and I kept saying, “No, no, no,” to everything he said. So it came to a point where I had to say something, of course, and Paul said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “I mean the group is over, I’m leaving.”
Allen was there, and he will remember exactly and Yoko will, but this is exactly how I see it. Allen was saying, don’t tell. He didn’t want me to tell Paul even. So I said, “It’s out,” I couldn’t stop it, it came out. Paul and Allen both said that they were glad that I wasn’t going to announce it, that I wasn’t going to make an event out of it. I don’t know whether Paul said, “Don’t tell anybody,” but he was darned pleased that I wasn’t going to. He said, “Oh, that means nothing really happened if you’re not going to say anything.”
So that’s what happened. So, like anybody when you say divorce, their face goes all sorts of colors. It’s like he knew really that this was the final thing; and six months later he comes out with whatever. I was a fool not to do it, not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record.
You were really angry with Paul?