In 1967, The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein died unexpectedly. His death shocked the band and forced them to accept further responsibility for the group’s management. According to those around The Beatles, this was not a good thing. After Epstein’s death, they began making a series of terrible decisions that felt incredibly “juvenile.”
The Beatles made a series of bad decisions after Brian Epstein died:David Puttnam worked as a photographer’s agent when he met The Beatles. He was friendly with the band, but he recalled feeling disappointed with their decisions in the period after Epstein’s death.
“I remember the moment that Brian died,” Puttnam said in the book All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words by Steven Gaines and Peter Brown. “Oh God, they seemed to begin to be entirely self-destructive, entirely.”
As they tried to run their own affairs, the band started making increasingly bad decisions.
“They were mad,” Puttnam said. “It was like everything flew apart. It was one lunatic scheme after another. There were always schemes. They weren’t like scams; they were schemes. They were never moneymaking schemes. Their ideas weren’t Allen Ginsburg far-out. They were juvenile because they had never been thought about.”
Puttnam said the band could plot for hours and not come to any tangible conclusions. Their management style was very “scattered.”
Brian Epstein gave The Beatles ‘stability’:Puttnam said that after watching The Beatles function after Epstein’s death, he realized how important the manager was to the band.
“Brian gave some stability to it,” he said. “I remember him telling me that there was a policy. We’re not going to do that. We’re not going to do that. I’ve turned down that. You had a sense that someone had made a series of decisions to which were going to be roughly adhered. There didn’t seem to be any central policy.”
Paul McCartney agreed that Epstein had kept The Beatles on track. They struggled after he died.
“It’s discipline we lack,” he said in The Beatles: Get Back. “We’ve never had discipline. We had a sort of slight, symbolic discipline. Like Mr. Espstein. You know, he sort of said, ‘Get suits on,’ and we did, you know. And so we were always fighting that discipline a bit. There really is no one there now to say, ‘Do it.’ Where is, there always used to be. Daddy’s gone away now, and we’re on our own at the holiday camp.”
He still made some bad management decisions: While McCartney said Epstein kept The Beatles disciplined, he also frowned at some of the decisions his manager made. He believed their record deals didn’t do enough to benefit the band.
“But Brian did do some lousy deals and he put us into long-term slave contracts which I am still dealing with,” he explained in The Beatles Anthology. “For ‘Yesterday,’ which I wrote totally on my own, without John’s or anyone’s help, I am on 15%. To this day I am only on 15% because of the deals Brian made, and that is really unjust, particularly as it has been such a smash. It is possibly the smash of this century.”
McCartney believed this came down to Epstein’s lack of experience as a manager, not any malicious decision-making.