The Plastic Ono Band walks onstage to the glow of handheld lights. They play five songs, including the classics “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”—“only with all of us blasting it. Fantastic. It’s just pure sound.”

“What’s next?” John turns to Eric Clapton, who doesn’t have an answer.

“C’mon!” John calls while he keeps jamming. They play his “Yer Blues” and “Cold Turkey,” the song’s live debut.

“Then we went into ‘Give Peace a Chance,’ which was just unbelievable,” John says. “The buzz was incredible.”

“I never felt so good in my life,” he remembers, vowing, “I don’t care who I have to play with, I’m going back to playing rock onstage!”

*  *  *

Allen Klein calls a Saturday meeting on September 20. The Apple offices are empty as the Beatles file into the boardroom.

Klein has hammered out a new deal with EMI’s Capitol Records that will sharply raise the Beatles’ cut of wholesale record prices from 17.5 to 25 percent.

John, with Yoko by his side, stares across the table at Paul. Tell them now that you’re done, he wills himself.

Instead, John launches an attack on Paul and his contributions to Abbey Road.

“I liked the ‘A’ side but I never liked that sort of pop opera on the other side. I think it’s junk because it was just bits of songs thrown together. ‘Come Together’ is all right, that’s all I remember. That was my song.”

Paul takes the slings and arrows.

The pain gets worse. As Paul tries to convince John that they can find compromises to his complaints, John’s suddenly had enough. “You don’t seem to understand, do you? The group is over. I’m leaving,” he tells them.

“I must say I felt guilty at springing it on them at such short notice,” he later reflects, though Paul says, “I remember him saying, ‘It’s weird, this, telling you I’m leaving the group, but in a way it’s very exciting.’ It was like when he told Cynthia he was getting a divorce.”

*  *  *

On September 26, John returns to the studio. With Eric Clapton on guitar, Klaus Voormann on bass, and Ringo on drums, he records twenty-six takes of “Cold Turkey” and rejects them all.

That same day, Abbey Road gets its UK release.

“It’s strange that we have now reached the point where nobody worries TOO much about what the Beatles are doing on record,” Melody Maker writes in its review of what will go on to become the group’s bestselling album.

Many critics single out the album’s second song, the one inspired by George’s wife, Pattie. “‘Something’ is a song of mine,” twenty-six-year-old George says in an interview with the Detroit Free Press, “probably the nicest melody I’ve ever written.”