The moment all The Beatles turned on Paul McCartney: “I’m being stabbed in the back!”
The Beatles had always worked as a democracy. Even through their various fights and fallouts, from big brawls over business moves to silly brotherly squabbles, it’s always been the unified vote that wins out. So when the day came, fairness fell on the opposing side of Paul McCartney, and all three of his bandmates turned against him at once. It was an earth-shaking moment for the foundation of the band.
Especially in their later years, the band fell out a lot. However, even as their relationships began to be strained, there was always brotherly love to fall back on. They’d have a raging argument, but Lennon and McCartney would still come into the studio and play on one another’s songs. They were still always there when they needed each other most and even though the band did eventually split, no one could ever say that the four friends didn’t try to hold it together, at least for a few years after the cracks began.
But there was one falling out that McCartney, and really the whole band, never recovered from. It wasn’t so much the argument as the person they were arguing over—Allen Klein.
In a cast of music history’s top villains, Allen Klein has to be up there as one of the worst. He was like a caricature of the role as he had a sign on his desk that read, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the biggest bastard in the valley.” Throughout his career, there are countless stories of the businessman screwing artists over, especially The Rolling Stones, who had their $1.25million advance planted directly in his account, and The Beatles, whose downfall essentially began the second they began dealing with him.
After the group’s long-term manager, Brian Epstein, died, Klein offered to take over, claiming he could fix the financial hardship they were beginning to face and put them back in the green. However, Paul McCartney smelt a rat. He didn’t trust Klein one bit.
McCartney was pushing back against the contract Klein had put on the table. However, the democracy of the band meant that all decisions went to a vote. “I said, ‘Well I’m not going to [sign it now]. I demand at least the weekend. I’ll look at it, and on Monday. This is supposed to be a recording session, after all,’” McCartney said in the book All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words,
“I dug my heels in, and they said, right, well, we’re going to vote it.”
Three hands rose on the side of ‘for’, with John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr all voting to sign the contract. But it was Ringo’s vote that hurt most. “I said, ‘No, you’ll never get Ringo to,’” McCartney remembered, “I looked at Ringo, and he gave me this sick look like, Yeah, I’m going with them. Then I said, ‘Well this is like bloody Julius Caesar, and I’m being stabbed in the back!’”
It was the first time in the band’s history that a member had been outvoted so clearly and harshly, and for McCartney, it was a huge blow. “It’s the first time you realize in our whole relationship that whenever we voted, we never actually had come to that point before — three were going to vote one down,” he said. “That was the first time, and they all signed it, they didn’t need my signature.”
In the end, McCartney was proved right. Klein withheld huge sums of money from Lennon and Harrison and later sued them for $4.2 million, making it clear that the out-voted Beatle’s suspicions were more of a premonition that the manager was bad news.
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