With over 60 years in the music industry behind him, Paul McCartney has worked with a whole host of collaborators, for better or worse. Beyond his bandmates in The Beatles, his musical partnerships range from a duet with Stevie Wonder to an unexpected appearance on a track with Rihanna and Kanye West. Behind the scenes, too, McCartney has amassed a mammoth network of industry professionals, though he didn’t think of all of them favourably.
One of the most treasured working relationships all of The Beatles was their partnership with Brian Epstein. After discovering the band in their earliest stages at the now-iconic Cavern Club, Epstein adopted the role of manager for the remainder of his life. He was responsible for their slick, suited new look, and he even assisted them in securing a deal with EMI.
Epstein was one of few people who became so integral to the band’s success that they earned the title of the “fifth Beatle”, so his loss was felt deeply by the band. Epstein passed away in the summer of 1967, and the Fab Four suddenly began to crumble. Though there were other factors that would contribute to their eventual breakup – tensions between McCartney and John Lennon, for example – Epstein’s death would be a major one.
Left without management, McCartney scrambled to keep the band together. This seemingly impossible task would eventually be taken over by Allen Klein in 1969, barely a year before the band called it a day. McCartney was against the idea of working with Klein from the beginning, even suggesting that he only won the other band members over through his treatment of Yoko Ono.
“Klein saw the Yoko connection and told Yoko that he would do a lot for her,” McCartney once stated, as quoted by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines in All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words. He had certainly won over Lennon, but George Harrison and Ringo Starr seemed to follow suit. Though McCartney would refuse to sign the contract handing management over to Klein, he was outnumbered by his bandmates.
McCartney felt betrayed by his bandmates and their decision to bring in someone he described as a “sort of demon”. Reflecting on a session spent with Klein before he adopted the position of manager, McCartney described him as such, even suggesting that he haunted his dreams. “He got to me,” he said, “Really, it was like I’d been dreaming of him as a dentist.”
Though the band’s breakup not long after wasn’t entirely down to the introduction of Klein, it certainly exacerbated the tensions within the band and contributed to McCartney’s growing dissatisfaction with the state of affairs. The relationship between the two lead songwriters was already on the rocks, and it couldn’t take much more strain.
The addition of Klein dropped yet another internal disagreement onto an ever-increasing pile of them, creative and non-creative, which would eventually prove too much to bear. By the spring of 1970, the Fab Four were no longer. Between the apparently demonic presence of Klein and ongoing disagreements with his band members, McCartney decided that enough was enough and announced his departure from the band with the dawn of a new decade, marking the end of The Beatles.
