Paul McCartney was the only one to push back against his Beatles bandmates when they wanted to appoint Allen Klein as their new manager. John Lennon was the biggest supporter of Klein, and George Harrison made it clear he backed him too. McCartney believed he could delay Klein’s appointment, but a vote by his bandmates put a stop to his hopes.
Paul McCartney felt betrayed by his Beatles bandmates
During a Friday night recording session, Klein visited The Beatles and told them he needed their contract with him signed immediately. He claimed he had a board meeting the following morning. McCartney pushed back, wanting to take the weekend to review the deal. When Lennon accused him of stalling, McCartney said he had a right to wait until Monday to sign.
“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 recalled in the book All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. “I dug my heels in, and they said, right, well, we’re going to vote it.”
Initially, this didn’t worry McCartney. While he knew Lennon and Harrison supported Klein, he believed Ringo Starr would side with him.
“I said, ‘No, you’ll never get Ringo to,’” McCartney recalled. “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!’”
According to McCartney, this was the first time any Beatle had been outvoted in this way.
“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.”
He later had a major fight with Ringo Starr
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McCartney felt betrayed by Starr at that moment, but he was outraged with his bandmate during a later meeting. After The Beatles broke up, Lennon, Harrison, and Starr wanted McCartney to delay the release of his debut solo album. They wanted the band’s final album, Let It Be, to come out first. Starr went to McCartney’s house to deliver this message to him.
“They eventually sent Ringo round my house at Cavendish with a message: We want you to put your release date back, it’s for the good of the group’ and all this sort of s***, and he was giving me the party line, they just made him come round, so I did something I’d never done before, or since: I told him to get out,” McCartney said, per the book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles. “I had to do something like that in order to assert myself because I was just sinking.”
Though all three Beatles supported the decision, it was once again Starr who delivered the upsetting news.
Paul McCartney’s bandmates eventually came to understand his point of view
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McCartney believed his bandmates had wronged him in their dealings with Klein. Several years later, he likely felt vindicated when they parted ways with Klein. Harrison began to feel disenchanted with Klein’s management after he mishandled funds for the Concert for Bangladesh. Lennon and Starr grew to feel the same way, and they all severed their working relationships with Klein by 1973.
“There are many reasons why we finally gave him the push, although I don’t want to go into the details of it,” Lennon said, per the book The Beatles Diaries Volume 2: After the Breakup. “Let’s say possibly Paul’s suspicions were right … and the time was right.”
Klein sued the three former Beatles, and they settled the lawsuit out of court in 1977.
