Get Back session - January 29, 1969

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Event
Date January 29, 1969
Short description Get Back session
Location 3 Savile Row

John stormed in saying, "I don’t give a bugger what anybody else wants, but I’m having Allen Klein for me!" They all went to meet him. Paul recalled, "The very first thing that made me suspicious about him was meeting him, because he is a bit of a boy. I thought, ‘Okay,’ and treated it ordinarily. But it was nine o’clock, and we had been meeting all day, so I said, ‘I think I’ll go home to Linda,’ and everybody said, ‘Oh no, man. How can you be so uncool? We are here meeting this great guy, and you are going home!’ But I thought, ‘He’s a businessman, and you don’t do business after nine o’clock at night, do you?’ But the crunch came when we came to discuss percentages. I thought, ‘We are big stars now, and Brian asked for twenty per cent in the beginning.’ I even argued with him… I said, ‘Twenty? I thought managers only took ten per cent?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s twenty these days.’ So, I said, ‘Okay, maybe I’m not very modern.’ But I said to the others, ‘He’ll do it for five. We are big boys now.’" Paul had wanted his brother-in-law, John Eastman, for the job. John did not like this idea, later saying, "John Eastman gave me the impression of being an inexperienced, somewhat excitable and easily confused young man. We all knew of Paul’s friendship with the family… and I was against the idea of having, as a manager, anyone in such a close relationship with any particular Beatle. But, even apart from that, he didn’t strike me as having the right experience or knowledge for the job which had to be done." In his 1970 Rolling Stone interview, John said, "We almost signed over to him at one time. When Paul presented me with him, I thought… well, when you’re not presented with a real alternative, you take whatever’s going. But then Eastman made the mistake of sending his son over and not coming over himself to look after the Beatles. Playing it a bit cool. So finally, when we got near the point and Allen came in, they panicked. I was still open, I would have taken Eastman if he’d turned out to be something other than he was. But we arranged to see Eastman and Klein together, in a hotel where one of them was staying. And the four Beatles and Yoko went to see them together. We hadn’t been in there more than a few minutes when Eastman was having like an epileptic fit and screaming at Allen, that he was the lowest scum on earth and calling him all sorts of names. And Allen was sitting there taking it. Because this guy was abusing him with class snobbery. And we all know Eastman’s name is Epstein. And the rest of it. That’s the kind of people they are. But Paul fell for that bullshit because he’s got Picassos hanging on the wall." They later met with Eastman alone. John recalled, "He kept coming up to me and saying, ‘I can’t tell you how much I admire you…’ This was supposed to be the guy who was taking over the multi-million dollar pound corporation and who was going to be slick and was sort of intimating that Allen’s Broadway offices weren’t nice enough! Paul was saying, as if it meant any fuckin’ difference, that Eastman’s were in the good section of town. ‘Oh boy, man, that’s where it’s at, and Eastman’s office has got class!’ But I don’t care if it’s fucking red, white and blue! And the more we said ‘No,’ the more he said ‘Yes.’ It was just like that. We were still talking and Eastman went mad and started shouting and all that. And I don’t know what Paul was thinking in the room, I mean his heart must’ve sunk." Peter Brown felt the other three besides Paul decided to go with Klein just to show that Paul wasn't the boss of the group. He said, "The day-to-day driving force at Apple was definitely Paul. He would come in most days, so, naturally, he was the person we spoke to. And he was the most reliable in making decisions… so Apple had been built in Paul’s image. But what happened was that when John woke up, partly as a result of Yoko’s prodding, he found the structure already in place. So when he said that he’d like to do this or that, we had to say, ‘Well, you can’t do that because we’ve already got a structure, it’s already done.’ And that was the start of most of the problems, because John came along and said, ‘I want something different’, and we would say, ‘it’s already done’. And he would say, ‘Well, I don’t like it’, and we would say, ‘Well, it’s too late, you should have been here before.’"

Recorded On This Date

Take E90505
Take E90505

Availability: All the below recordings are available via bootleg unless otherwise noted.

A (*) indicates a performance not available on any release, legitimate or bootleg.

Source

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