It wasn’t often The Beatles took formal votes on decisions, as most things were discussed and agreed upon as a group. But in 1969, during a recording session that should have been routine, Paul McCartney found himself on the receiving end of something that hadn’t happened before: all three of his bandmates siding against him, and the issue was Allen Klein.
After the death of manager Brian Epstein, the band was left with a gap in leadership. Soon, John Lennon was quickly won over by Klein’s pitch, and George Harrison and Ringo Starr agreed.
But McCartney remained unconvinced. He wanted the band to be represented by Lee Eastman, his future father-in-law and a respected entertainment lawyer.
The moment came when Klein turned up at Apple and asked the band to sign his contract on the spot. He said he had a board meeting the following morning and Paul asked to wait until Monday.
“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 later recalled in All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words.
But the other three pushed back, and then someone suggested a vote.
McCartney didn’t think it would be unanimous: “I said, ‘No, you’ll never get Ringo to’. I looked at Ringo, and he gave me this sick look like, Yeah, I’m going with them.”
The vote went three to one, which meant Lennon, Harrison and Starr signed with Klein, while McCartney didn’t. “That was the first time”, he said. “And they all signed it. They didn’t need my signature.”
It wouldn’t be the last time he felt sidelined. Months later, after finishing his debut solo album McCartney, he was visited at home by Ringo Starr, who wanted them to delay the release of the album so that ‘Let It Be’ could come out first.
“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’”, McCartney said in Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now. “And he was giving me the party line – they just made him come round”.
“I did something I’d never done before, or since: I told him to get out. I had to do something like that in order to assert myself because I was just sinking.”
Years later, the rest of the band would part ways with Klein. George Harrison lost confidence in him after the mishandling of funds for the Concert for Bangladesh, and Lennon and Starr also ended their working relationships with him.
“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 in The Beatles Diaries Volume 2: After the Breakup. “Let’s say possibly Paul’s suspicions were right … and the time was right.”