The Beatles on the Roof

by Tony Barrell

  Wanting a firmer hand on the tiller, The Beatles looked around for the ideal person to rescue their struggling company. They had a meeting with Lord Beeching, the man who had taken an axe to Britain’s railway system five years before, leading to the closure of many “uneconomic” lines and stations. Beeching didn’t want the Apple job, and his parting advice was that the group should concentrate on their music.

  ‘Hey Jude’ was still sitting at the top of the charts and receiving considerable radio play when, on the morning of Friday, October 18, John and Yoko received a surprise visit from the Metropolitan Police. They were lying in bed at Ringo’s flat in Montagu Square – where they were living temporarily – when they heard a disturbance outside. After the police banged on the window and pushed at the door, several officers were eventually admitted to the flat. Dogs were brought in, sniffing out more than 200 grains of cannabis resin, and John and Yoko were taken to Paddington Green police station and charged with possession of drugs and obstruction. The police might have found a lot more had John and Yoko not been warned of the raid a few weeks in advance by a journalist friend and removed most of their narcotics from the flat.

  The notorious Detective Sergeant Pilcher had commanded the raid. At that time, 33-year-old Norman “Nobby” Pilcher of the Drug Squad was advancing his career and getting his kicks by busting famous pop stars. His other victims included Donovan and members of The Rolling Stones. But this time his overzealousness had been noticed: the home secretary, James Callaghan, questioned the necessity for so many police officers and dogs in a raid on just two people, and asked him how the press had managed to arrive so promptly on the scene.

  George and his wife Pattie were having a much better time than John and Yoko. They had flown to the USA with The Beatles’ old friend and road manager Mal Evans in order to accompany one of Apple’s recording artists, the singer Jackie Lomax, on a promotional tour of various cities. This became an extended trip of nearly seven weeks when George decided to book time at Sound Recorders Studio in Hollywood to finish recording Jackie’s debut album, Sour Milk Sea. George also found time to socialise with Donovan, Frank Sinatra and members of Cream, and to play music with Bob Dylan at his house in Bearsville, near Woodstock in New York. The pair wrote the song ‘I’d Have You Anytime’, which would become the opening track of All Things Must Pass.

  At the end of October, the photographer Linda Eastman moved in with Paul at his house in Cavendish Avenue, along with Heather, her five-year-old daughter from her severed 1962 marriage to geologist Joseph Melville See. Paul and Linda had originally met on May 15, 1967, at the Bag O’Nails club in London’s West End, after being introduced by Peter Brown – although Paul and Jane Asher were still an item then, and would remain so for more than a year.

  “I knew Linda because she’d been married before and lived in Arizona,” says Peter, “and when they broke up she came back to New York with her daughter and wanted to be a photographer. And she did not want to be an Eastman, all that Park Avenue stuff: she didn’t think that was cool. So she became friendly with a little group of gay men, who I was part of. She decided that this group of guys was very cool, and she became part of the group. So I became friendly with her and I liked her a lot.

  “When she came to London once, she came to see me at the office with her portfolio. And the only thing that was in the portfolio was a lot of photographs taken in New York of The Rolling Stones. I told her I didn’t have time to look at it then, but could she leave it with me? She did, and I went through it and I loved the pictures. She came to pick it up and I said I’d taken one out – ‘I’m sure you’ve got plenty of them and you don’t mind me taking one out, because I’d like to keep it.’ And she said, ‘The one of Brian Jones.’ And I said, ‘How would you know which one I took?’ It was one of Brian on his own. And she said she just knew. I loved Brian and we were very good friends, but she didn’t know that. So I really took to her: I loved her, I thought she was savvy, and we became friends.”

  On May 15, 1967, Peter called in at Abbey Road studios. “And Paul was there on his own, finishing something or other, and then he said to me, ‘What are you doing later?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ And he said ‘Well, hang on a bit and we’ll go and get some dinner.’ So we went to the Bag O’Nails club for dinner, which is where Linda, who I knew from New York, came over to say hello to me and I introduced her to Paul.”

  Yoko was expecting her first baby with John, which was due in February. But on November 4, suffering symptoms of stress, she was admitted to Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in London. John kept a vigil in the hospital ward, sleeping beside her. When a bed was available he slept in it; otherwise he lay on the floor.

  During their stay, John’s divorce from Cynthia became official, and John and Yoko’s experimental album Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins was released in the USA. The grooves contained tape loops and ad-lib conversations, while the cover, a full-frontal naked selfie of the two soul mates taken in the flat in Montagu Square, was even more problematic for America, where it was concealed by a brown paper sleeve.

  While in hospital, John and Yoko continued to make recordings, capturing the sound of their son’s heartbeat in the womb. Tragically, on November 21, Yoko suffered a miscarriage, the cause of which appeared to be the distress caused by the recent dope bust. A week later, the day before Two Virgins came out in the UK, John pleaded guilty in court to possession of cannabis, and was fined £150 plus costs.

  On November 5, 1968, the Republican challenger Richard Nixon narrowly defeated the vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, by half a million votes to become the 37th president of the USA, succeeding Lyndon B. Johnson. “Tricky Dick” was promising “law and order” in America and “peace with honour” in Vietnam, claiming he had a secret plan to bring the war to an end.

  Michael Lindsay-Hogg was working with The Rolling Stones, preparing a colourful television special that would be known as The Rolling Stones Rock And Roll Circus. But he found the time to visit Apple in Savile Row after receiving a telephone call from Paul McCartney. Paul said The Beatles had been happy with his ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Revolution’ promos, and now they wanted to make their own TV special and would like him to direct it.

  Paul was talking about The Beatles making a departure from their customary working methods: instead of continually overdubbing to create complex masterpieces in the studio, they would get back to being a proper band again, recording a series of songs live with no tinkering or trickery – “no electronic whatchamacallit”, as he later put it. A decision was made to sideline the group’s long-serving record producer, George Martin, whom they associated with their more elaborate recordings. So Paul approached Glyn Johns, a record producer who was also part of the team on Rock And Roll Circus, asking him to engineer the sound for The Beatles’ TV programme.

  Apple was now considering possible gig venues for the recording of the TV special. Rather than playing a single concert, they might play up to three and have the best footage edited together. The group could be supported by some of the acts recently signed to their Apple label, such as the singers James Taylor, Mary Hopkin and Jackie Lomax. One obvious location was the Royal Albert Hall, where Cream had played their farewell bash towards the end of November. That was later dismissed, according to the New Musical Express, “because of booking and other problems”.

  Another contender was the Roundhouse, where The Doors and Jefferson Airplane had played in September. It had also hosted various hippie gigs and freak-outs, such as the launch party for the alternative newspaper International Times – an event Paul McCartney attended incognito, disguised as an Arab. Dates around the middle of December were set aside at the Roundhouse, and the event made the news in NME, which said there would be three live concerts there, with The Beatles performing songs from their new double album. The shows would benefit charity, and Mary Hopkin and Jackie Lomax would perform as well. “These concerts will be a mindbender,” Apple executive Jeremy Banks told the paper. Alas, the Roun
dhouse concerts didn’t materialise either.

  Denis O’Dell took John and Paul to see a disused flour mill that he had discovered years before near the River Thames, but they turned that down as well. Denis complained that it was impossible to negotiate with The Beatles at that stage, because the members of the band were only ever in agreement about a location for a day or two at the most, before arbitrary differences developed between them.

  The idea of playing on a big cruise liner was considered, but there were problems with the obvious contenders. The Queen Elizabeth had been sold to a group of American businessmen who wanted to keep it in Florida as a tourist attraction, and the new £30 million vessel Queen Elizabeth 2 was still being tested and not ready for service. The QE2 had serious engine trouble when it was trialled in the Atlantic over Christmas of 1968, with 750 brave “guinea pig” passengers on board.

  One of Paul’s ideas was that The Beatles return to Germany and play a club incognito, under the name of Rikki & The Red Streaks, to give people the surprise of their lives when they walked in. He hadn’t dreamed up the name: it was a real group, early-sixties contemporaries of The Beatles in Liverpool and Hamburg. This was yet another idea that they didn’t pursue, though Paul tucked it away for later in his career. After he formed Wings in the seventies, he took the band out to play low-profile, little-publicised college dates, eliciting those astounded looks when people realised they were in the presence of a Beatle. And the Wings single ‘Seaside Woman’, featuring Linda McCartney on lead vocals, was released under the similar pseudonym Suzy and The Red Stripes.

  November 1968 ended with the release of an intriguing film: Sympathy For The Devil, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, which featured scenes of The Rolling Stones working on their Beggars Banquet album at London’s Olympic Studios, intercut with other sequences about Black Power activism and pornography. Its original title, which it retained for its release on the continent, was One Plus One, the name suggested by Denis O’Dell for Godard’s projected Beatles documentary. Reviewers were less than impressed with the movie, one calling it “boring, disjointed, distasteful and lacking in musical or narrative content”.

  Early in December, Elvis Presley’s TV spectacular – now known as his Comeback Special – was broadcast on NBC in America, and was an enormous success, pulling in almost half the TV viewers in the USA. Dressed in black leather, the 33-year-old King of Rock’n’Roll redeemed himself by performing live on stage for the first time since 1961, and sounding vital and exciting again. For the “informal jam” sequence of the show, the singer sat in a circle with musicians including guitarist Scotty Moore and drummer DJ Fontana (keeping time on a guitar case) and belted out classics such as ‘That’s All Right Mama’, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’.

  TV specials were very much the thing at the end of 1968. The December issue of The Beatles Book Monthly excited fans with the news that the details of the group’s own “one-hour colour television show” would be announced shortly: “After rehearsals they will give a set of separate ‘live’ performances before invited audiences. All three shows will be recorded on colour videotape and the final television programme will be made up from the best parts of the three. Much of the material will be songs from the Beatles’ current bundle of 30 LP tracks but a few oldies will be included too. Songs selected for each of the three performances may vary slightly. At press time nobody at Apple could say for sure whether or not a late decision would be made to include guest appearances by other Apple recording artists such as Mary Hopkin and Jackie Lomax.”

  The TV show, said the fan magazine, would eventually be seen “on a hundred million television screens all around the world”. People were asked to stop deluging the Apple offices with letters requesting tickets for the shows: these letters already numbered more than 20,000, easily exceeding the number of available seats. But fans had a chance of attending if they entered The Beatles Book Monthly’s lucky dip, filling in a coupon and posting it to the magazine’s London address; all the coupons would go into a big revolving drum, and a pair of tickets would be awarded for each of the first 50 coupons pulled out.

  The news that they would be playing live again, said the magazine, “gives a very firm answer to those people who think that The Beatles want to retire from the rough and tumble of show business. They may get fed up with some of its worst aspects – and say so – leading people to believe that they will never, under any circumstances, do a certain thing again. But, they find a way round it because they don’t really want to disappoint all the people who have supported them so well over the past few years.” The magazine staff appeared to be drunk on optimism, asking fans who were lucky enough to receive tickets to write about the shows they saw. “We’ll print a full selection of readers’ letters about the Beatles’ first ‘live’ performances for almost three years in a future issue.”

  In early December, John made home cassette recordings of himself as he composed new songs, singing in an appealingly rough and sleepy voice and playing acoustic guitar. The most repetitive of these began with the line “Everyone had a hard year” against a pattern of guitar-picking. In these early lyrics, everyone “had a good time” and “saw the sun shine”, as well as having a “facelift”. He was also riffing on colloquial expressions for behaviour, so everyone “let their hair down”, “pulled their socks up” and “put their foot down”. The song in this early, monotonous form was crying out for some development (such as a chorus, unless this was the chorus, repeated over and over again – in which case it needed verses). Fortunately, it was destined to be merged with Paul McCartney’s ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, where it somehow worked with miraculous perfection.

  The other song was an early form of ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, although it lacked a chorus and those title words didn’t appear. But he was singing “I’m in love for the first time”, and the stylish, Lennonesque false stops and unaccompanied introduction to the verse (“And if somebody loves you like she do…”) were already there, as were the lines “It’s a love that lasts forever/It’s a love that has no past.” It was clearly and unashamedly about his love for Yoko Ono.

  Following Sympathy For The Devil, Jean-Luc Godard set about making a radical new film in America. For one scene in his movie, he filmed Jefferson Airplane on top of the Schuyler Hotel in the Midtown district of New York City. Grace Slick and the rest of the band ascended to the roof of the nine-storey building on 45th Street during the chilly afternoon of December 7, 1968. “Hello, New York!” cried the singer Marty Balin. “Wake up, you fuckers! Free music! Nice songs! Free love!”

  They played a spirited version of their song ‘The House At Pooneil Corners’, succeeding in disrupting the flow of traffic in the streets below. But they were prevented from playing any more by the NYPD, who quickly intervened. One of the policemen offered a conflicted opinion of the event: “I don’t mind – it’s nice, believe me,” he said. “It’s a good change. But the city can’t stand it. I can’t either.” The Airplane called a halt to their performance, and the actor Rip Torn, who was starring in Godard’s film, was arrested for harassing an officer.

  The 28-year-old Conservative councillor and fundraiser Jeffrey Archer paid a visit to Apple Corps, wanting a slice of the action after hearing rumours that The Beatles were planning a spectacular charity concert. Archer had met The Beatles back in March 1964 when he attended Brasenose College in Oxford, and he was photographed with the group after he obtained their support for an Oxfam campaign. At the time, Ringo remarked to the critic Sheridan Morley that he thought Archer was “the kind of bloke who would bottle your piss and sell it”.

  On December 10, the production of The Rolling Stones Rock And Roll Circus began at Wembley Studios in London. The project put an array of contemporary rock talent together, including the Stones, The Who and Eric Clapton, who was brought in to accompany John and Yoko. As circus performers swung and cavorted and Michael Lindsay-Hogg directed and Glyn Johns recorded, The Who pla
yed their song-cycle ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’ and, early in the morning of December 11, the Stones played lacklustre versions of six songs, including ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and ‘Sympathy For The Devil’. There was one song apiece from Jethro Tull, Taj Mahal and Marianne Faithfull, and a short-lived supergroup called Dirty Mac – comprising John, Yoko, Eric, the Stones’ Keith Richards on bass and Hendrix’s drummer Mitch Mitchell – performed John’s ‘Yer Blues’ from the White Album, plus a jam they called ‘A Whole Lotta Yoko’.

  A week later, John and Yoko continued to develop their embryonic career as artistic collaborators, performing at an alternative Christmas event staged at the Royal Albert Hall by the Arts Lab, an avant-garde organisation based in a London warehouse. The couple entered a large white bag on the stage, in which they remained for more than half an hour. That evening also saw a young woman in the audience spontaneously remove her clothes and dance around naked. When the authorities moved in to eject her, other free spirits began stripping off to show their solidarity.

  Michael Lindsay-Hogg would attend a series of other meetings at Apple about The Beatles’ own proposed TV special, though he was concerned that the other members of the group were displaying less commitment towards the project than Paul. Paul was so keen on it that he suggested an expansion of the concept: if Michael filmed the group during rehearsals, they could use the footage to make a 30-minute programme to be shown a week before the TV special, as a teaser.

  Everybody agreed on a start date of early January 1969 for the filming, before the meeting ended with John Lennon playing a cassette. As Michael and the other Beatles listened attentively, the faint sounds that came out of the tape machine were of a man and woman talking intimately, giggling and making other, more suggestive noises. It soon became embarrassingly clear that it was a recording of John and Yoko having sex.