That’s the precise location of American photographer Ethan Russell, who at John’s invitation has trekked up to the rooftop and made a death-defying climb of an adjacent wall to get an overhead shot of the world’s most famous rockers against the vastness of London, “mere mortals after all.”

For forty-two minutes, the Beatles play five songs, including three versions of “Get Back” and two apiece of “Don’t Let Me Down” and “I’ve Got a Feeling,” for a total of nine performances.

The Metropolitan Police are circling the building, having told Apple employees, “You’ve got ten minutes.” But the constables are Beatles fans, too. They let the band play on for a little while longer. Finally, officers make it inside and up the stairs to shut the performance down. Assistants scramble to flush drug stashes down the toilets, just in case.

Once police reach the rooftop, the Beatles finish playing.

John quips into the microphone, “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we’ve passed the audition.”

The four Beatles smile in agreement.

We’re still the best damn rock ’n’ roll band on earth.

When Paul is asked in 2019 if he sensed at the time that the rooftop concert would be the group’s last, he says, “No, I don’t think I did; I don’t think any of us did. It was really just the culmination of a lot of writing and rehearsing that we had done up to this point.”

But the end never needs an invitation.

Chapter 38

Chapter 38

Keep me searching for a heart of gold…

—“Heart of Gold”

Apple’s losing money every week,” John tells Ray Coleman, editor of Disc and Music Echo, in January of 1969. “If it carries on like this, all of us will be broke within the next six months.”

“That was my opening,” Allen Klein later says. The thirty-seven-year-old New Jersey–born music executive has already guided the finances of the Rolling Stones as well as those of Sam Cooke and Bobby Darin, plus Donovan and the Animals. He’s become legendary in the music world as “the Robin Hood of pop” for negotiating huge advances for his recording artists—and for regarding a contract as “just a piece of paper.” A sign on Klein’s desk in New York reads: YEA, THOUGH I WALK THROUGH THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH, I SHALL FEAR NO EVIL: FOR I AM THE BIGGEST MOTHERFUCKER IN THE VALLEY.

Via his connections to Mick Jagger, Klein sets up a clandestine meeting with John and Yoko in the Harlequin Penthouse at the Dorchester hotel in London.

“He was very nervous, you could see it in his face,” John remembers, but Klein, trained as an accountant, quickly succeeds in charming John because “he not only knew my work, and the lyrics that I had written, but he also understood them, and from way back. That was it.”