Fire and Rain by David Browne Page B

Voormann, a German artist and musician who’d met the Beatles in Hamburg and was playing bass at the session. Evans corralled a bunch of locals from a nearby pub to join in on the background vocals in the chorus. By 4 A.M. it was done—recorded, mixed, and ready to roll off a vinyl assembly line. Again, Lennon was elated: The Beatles would never have bashed out a song so fast. “There was a simplicity in the way he did it that I don’t think he would have been able to get across with the Beatles,” recalled Voormann. “He felt much freer than before.”
    In the L.A. hotel room, Brower and the Free Press’ John Carpenter picked up separate phone lines and prepared to hear the results. “Instant Karma” roared out; even over a Transatlantic connection, Brower could hear its massive, reverberating piano chords and White’s loud, pushy shuffle beat, which put a massive exclamation mark at the end of each line in the chorus. But those lyrics . . . “Who on earth do you think you are—a superstar? Well, right you are!” taunted Lennon with a rasp that stung like scalding water.
    When it was over, Carpenter looked at Brower and brought up the use of the word “karma” in the song. “Isn’t that the name of your company?” he asked. “I don’t know if that’s a song for your festival. It doesn’t sound very positive.”
    Brower had to admit that, yes, it was the name of his production company, and no, he didn’t know what to make of its message. Similarly, plenty of Beatle fans scratched their heads when copies of “Instant Karma” arrived in stores ten days later: The sleeve credited the song to “John Ono Lennon.” Although Lennon had had his middle name officially
changed from Winston to Ono when he wed Ono the previous March, “Instant Karma” marked the first time he used the name on a record. Even in the world of John Lennon, it was hard to imagine a more puzzling month than the one just ended.

    Both everyone and no one knew where Paul McCartney was. Certainly, the other Beatles and Apple employees knew he’d spent a good deal of the winter holidays at his bare-boned farmhouse outside Campbeltown in the remote southwest of Scotland. He’d purchased it several years before, during his relationship with Peter Asher’s sister Jane. In the fall of 1969, when a new degree of tension enveloped the Beatles, McCartney had retreated to the house with Linda, her seven-year-old daughter Heather from her previous marriage, and her and McCartney’s new baby Mary. Aside from a Life magazine photographer and journalist who tracked him down that fall, looking to prove he was actually alive during the “Paul Is Dead” uproar, McCartney was guaranteed isolation.
    None of the Beatles ever made the trip to the house, and in February, Lennon gave an interview—one of many at the time, sometimes to promote his peace causes, sometimes to simply keep his name in the papers—saying he and McCartney hadn’t spoken in two months and only communicated by postcard. Even Peter Brown, Apple’s dapper and unflappable administrative director and one of the few in close touch with McCartney, didn’t bother making the trek to the farm, knowing he’d have to hike from a main road to reach it. McCartney told everyone the house didn’t have a phone, even though it did; Brown, who’d more or less taken over the duties of handling the Beatles after Brian Epstein’s death in 1967, would often receive calls at Apple from Scotland.
    With McCartney’s exact whereabouts up in the air and communication among the Beatles fractured, Klaus Voormann was particularly
stunned to receive a call one winter afternoon from McCartney himself. Would Voormann be up for a visit to McCartney’s home in London?
    In Hamburg a decade before, Voormann, then a young Berlin-born artist with male-model