by Tony Barrell
Across the Atlantic, three American astronauts prepared to make history. NASA’s pioneering Apollo 8 mission would take Frank Borman, James Lovell and Bill Anders out of the Earth’s orbit, round the moon 10 times, and back to Earth again. The day before blast-off, there were concerns that the weather might cause the flight to be postponed: the forecasters were predicting thick cloud and fog, and dense cloud would prevent visual tracking of the rocket up to 2,000 feet. In the event, the launch went ahead at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on December 21, and the astronauts began their three-day approach to the moon.
Down on Earth, in Savile Row, the staff at Apple were expecting some unusual visitors. During his trip to California, George Harrison had met several Hells Angels, who told him they would be coming to London and paying him a call. George had already warned Apple staff about the rebel bikers in a memo, writing: “They will be twelve in number complete with black leather jackets and motor cycles. They will undoubtedly arrive at Apple and I have heard they may try to make full use of Apple’s facilities. They may look as though they are going to do you in but are very straight and do good things, so don’t fear them or up-tight them. Try to assist them without neglecting your Apple business and without letting them take control of Savile Row.”
Only two Angels turned up, Frisco Pete and Billy Tumbleweed, but they and their roaring Harley-Davidsons quickly made an impression on the Mayfair street. The receptionist Debbie Wellum was one of many Apple staff who were transfixed by their dramatic arrival: “There was a heck of a noise outside, and they parked up in Savile Row and walked in, and the stench of patchouli oil was incredible.”
As George had predicted, they made “full use of Apple’s facilities”, staying in a room in the building. They also raised the noise levels in the neighbourhood. “They were racing each other on their bikes,” says Debbie, “and they’d go from the top of Savile Row, the Vigo Street end, all the way down to West End Central police station, screech to a halt, turn round and go back again and screech to a halt again. They knew it was a police station – I told them – but they didn’t care. They tried to get me to go on the back of a motorbike with them, and I wouldn’t go.”
On Monday, December 23, Apple threw a big Christmas party which was attended by John and Yoko dressed as Father and Mother Christmas. The Hells Angels got into the spirit as well. “We had lovely food, laid on by Prudence and Primrose from the kitchen,” says Debbie. “Prudence and Primrose were two very well-to-do cordon-bleu cooks who worked at Apple, and they cooked wonderful meals and were very good fun.” One of the highlights of the day was the arrival on a tray of an enormous roast turkey. “When they laid all the food out, the Hells Angels walked in and started eating it. And when Prudence, the tiny one, asked if they would leave the food alone – because it wasn’t time to eat it yet – they started picking it up and throwing it all round the place. I think they brought with them a lot of medication, shall we say, which they put in the punch.”
The American Apple staffer Chris O’Dell, who worked in the A&R department, remembers a fight breaking out at the party between the Angels and New Musical Express journalist Alan Smith, whose wife, Mavis, assisted Derek Taylor in the press office. “I think the Hells Angels were drunk, for one thing, and they could just become obnoxious. And this reporter made a comment that pissed them off, so they just slugged him.”
Frisco Pete and Billy Tumbleweed outstayed their welcome in the Apple building for a little longer, resisting a polite request from Neil Aspinall that they should leave, and it was left to George, who had sanctioned their visit in the first place, to give them their marching orders.
On Christmas Eve, as the crew of Apollo 8 orbited the moon, they made a live television broadcast, showing their views of the Earth and the moon and reading verses from the Book of Genesis. The broadcast was watched by millions, proving even more popular than Elvis’ Comeback Special. Two days after Christmas Day, the latest American space heroes splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after their week-long adventure, becoming Time magazine’s “Men of the Year”. Dr Thomas Paine, acting director of NASA, declared: “I call this a triumph for the ‘squares’ of this world, the men who are not hippies and who work with slide rules, and are not ashamed to say a prayer.”
The Beatles, if it were possible, were actually getting hairier. Paul had grown an impressive beard, and the recently altered waxworks at Madame Tussaud’s were already out of date.
The Beatles’ next big project, beginning with their rehearsals in front of the cameras and ending with their first live performance in more than two years, was now approaching rapidly. John, Paul, George and Ringo enjoyed several days of peace and quiet over the remainder of Christmas and New Year, before reconvening in January 1969 to begin the most challenging and unpleasant period in their collective career.
CHAPTER TWO
Winter Blues
As the year 1968 gave way to 1969, George Harrison was in an upbeat mood. He was sharing his house – Kinfauns in Esher, Surrey – with not one but two very attractive women. There was Pattie, his wife of nearly three years; but there was also her friend Charlotte Martin, a Parisian model. Charlotte had recently split up with Eric Clapton, and she had been welcomed into the Harrison household to help her recover from the break-up.
There was an intriguing romantic complexity to this situation. One of the reasons why Eric had ended his relationship with Charlotte was his powerful attraction to George’s wife, but George and Charlotte had recently begun an affair.
Putting his domestic concerns behind him, George was in creative mode on that first day of January, and he left the house to drive into London, walking into the Apple building at 3 Savile Row. A conversation shortly afterwards with The Beatles’ publicist, Derek Taylor, set George thinking about a project that might have kept him busy for months. Taylor was a bright, funny, personable man who was respected by all four Beatles, and whose eccentric habits included addressing other men as “squire” or “vicar”.The artist Alan Aldridge once said of him: “You fell in love with this guy right away: warm, witty, urbane and full of hilarious repartee.” On that New Year’s Day, Derek suggested to George that the pair of them co-write a musical, the subject matter of which would be everyday life at Apple Corps. In the months since its inception, the company had quickly become a crazy, diverting adventure, full of colour and way-out ideas, and the publicist thought it was a promising basis for an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza.
Days later, he explained the thinking behind the idea, the seed of which had come from a conversation with Mike Connor, head of the Apple offices in Los Angeles. “For everyone at Apple, life is a mixture of fact and fiction,” said Derek. “Often this office is like Alice In Wonderland, and, since Apple is constantly surrounded and involved in music, it seemed a natural subject to base a musical around. George has already written an outline and some of the music. I’m in charge of ideas and lyrics.”
George was a good choice for musical collaborator. Not only had he produced the Sour Milk Sea album for Jackie Lomax and jammed with Bob Dylan, but also his soundtrack to the film Wonderwall – on which he worked with various Indian musicians – had recently hit the record shelves. He was behaving for all the world like a free and easy solo songwriter and producer, almost forgetting – perhaps deliberately – that he was still under contract as a member of the world’s most successful pop group, and that it was very nearly time to work on The Beatles’ next project. On the following day, January 2, he was expected to join his bandmates at one of their old haunts, Twickenham Film Studios, to begin rehearsals.
These were not regular rehearsals, hence the movie-studio location. As Paul McCartney had suggested towards the end of the year, they would be filmed, and the footage would be edited and used to promote their forthcoming TV special.
Twickenham Film Studios, a discreet cluster of buildings over the road from St Margarets railway station in Twickenham, was The Beatles’ default movie-making facilities. T
his was where they had shot the non-location scenes for their first two films, A Hard Day’s Night and Help!; they had made promotional films here in 1965 for the songs ‘I Feel Fine’, ‘Ticket To Ride’, ‘Help!’, ‘Day Tripper’ and ‘We Can Work It Out’, as well as for ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Revolution’ in September 1968. For The Beatles’ colleagues at Apple, including Neil Aspinall and Denis O’Dell, it seemed the obvious place to make a new film.
But the promos had been relatively short, and the big movies had been quite tightly directed, with the members of the group playing versions of themselves fleshed out by scriptwriters. This time it was cinéma vérité: they were themselves on screen, and there was no script.
The Beatles had certainly been in situations before where the outcome of a project was uncertain. On a small scale, individual songs with fairly ordinary beginnings had blossomed into sonic masterworks in the studio: ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, say, or ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. On a larger scale, Magical Mystery Tour had grown from a vague idea about a psychedelic coach trip into a daring and controversial TV film, plus a series of excellent songs. But this latest project seemed especially open-ended, and its ultimate medium amorphous; and on top of that, the group was not in the best of collective health.
It was less than three months since they had finished work on the White Album, which they had packed with original compositions, draining their collective stock of musical ideas. And now John and Ringo, like George, had their own extracurricular projects to occupy them. John’s relationship with Yoko Ono was intense and virtually all-consuming, and the couple had already begun their career of international political agitation. Ringo was looking forward to an acting job in The Magic Christian, a new comedy film directed by his friend Peter Sellers in which the drummer played a homeless orphan adopted by Sellers’ character, the billionaire Sir Guy Grand. The movie looked like the start of a new career for Ringo, and provided a hard deadline for The Beatles’ latest project, as he was scheduled to arrive for hair and make-up in February.
A more damaging and disruptive factor at The Beatles’ Twickenham sessions was heroin, which had entered John and Yoko’s lives the previous year. This was a particular worry for Paul, who later remembered that John “was getting into harder drugs than we’d been into, and so his songs were taking on more references to heroin. Until that point we had made rather mild, rather oblique references to pot or LSD. Now John started to be talking about fixes and monkeys, and it was a harder terminology which the rest of us weren’t into. We were disappointed that he was getting into heroin because we didn’t really see how we could help him. We just hoped it wouldn’t go too far.”
John later ascribed his and Yoko’s opiate usage to the criticism and mockery to which the pair were subjected by the outside world, and within the group itself. “I never injected it or anything,” he told Rolling Stone in 1970. “We sniffed a little when we were in real pain. And we get into so much pain that we have to do something about it. And that’s what happened to us. We took ‘H’ because of what The Beatles and others were doing to us.”
But what heroin was doing to Lennon, a once-prolific songwriter who had been the de facto leader of The Beatles in their early days, was anything but conducive to the intensive work required by the new project. It evidently dulled his creativity and made him lazy and lethargic, and it would trigger conflict within The Beatles as they progressed with the project that would become Let It Be.
The only group member who appeared to be 100% committed to the filmed rehearsals was Paul, who had initiated them in the first place. On one level, he was clearly concerned that The Beatles were disintegrating, and believed that a collective project of some kind, perhaps any kind, would give them the cohesion and enthusiasm they needed to survive as a unit. On another level, his innate work ethic continually demanded that he remain occupied. Several years later, he told an interviewer: “One of my hang-ups has always been having a job. With Let It Be, I remember us having a meeting and me saying I wanted to do a film, and John saying, ‘Oh, I see, he wants a job. He wants work.’ And I did. We hadn’t done anything for three months and I was getting a bit itchy.”
This was the general pattern after the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, in August 1967: without any spoken agreement, McCartney would take up the mantle of marshalling the group for their next project, like a stern father mobilising his bone-idle teenage sons to do something with their lives, for Christ’s sake.
“From Brian’s death onwards, Paul was always the driving force,” recalls Peter Brown, “because he was the one who had the energy and wanted to get on with things.Magical Mystery Tour was the first of those things. And although Paul could be irritating, he was enormously helpful to me, because putting Apple together was not easy.
“Although The Beatles were the owners, Neil Aspinall and I were on the board. But still my attitude was to get anything done, we had to have the approval of The Beatles, obviously. And it was only Paul who would be willing to come in and discuss things. At that point he was the only one who lived in London. Ringo had an apartment in London, but he didn’t really live there. I would call Paul and say, ‘Will you come in? We need to sit down and talk,’ and he would. Also, it wasn’t just because he was in London: it was because he was the one who had all that energy.”
Back in 1967, Peter had witnessed Paul’s strength as a motivator, which was evident even in times of trouble. “When they stopped touring, for the first time in their career they had lots of time to go into the studio if they wanted to. Sgt. Pepper, which is one of the greatest albums of all time, was made over several months… So there was a sort of relaxation in the summer of ’67, and then Brian died, and Paul’s attitude was ‘What are we gonna do now?’ And I remember being very irritated myself, because it was very upsetting for me when Brian died, because he was my best friend as well as my colleague. And then also I had to be the prime witness in the coroner’s court, which was very harrowing, then I went to Liverpool for the funeral. We asked The Beatles not to come, because of the media and everything. We did it very fast, before anyone thought the funeral was going to take place, and then the moment I got back, Paul decided that we had to have a meeting. We did it in Ringo’s apartment in Montagu Square. The meeting was between all The Beatles, Neil and Mal and me, and I was really depressed and miserable, and not very keen to be doing this so quickly, like within a couple of days of the funeral, but Paul insisted on it.
“I was sort of chairing that meeting and I wasn’t feeling great, and then we took a coffee break and I got up and walked across the room, and I was looking through the window, into space. And then I suddenly felt these arms around me from the back, hugging me, and someone saying, ‘Are you all right?’ It was John. And I turned round and said, ‘No, I’m not,’ and he said, ‘Nor am I.’ I think one of the reasons that John and I got on together subsequent to Brian’s death is that we both loved Brian. But my point is that Paul was determined that we should get on with business. The fact that Brian wasn’t there any more was even more reason why we should do it and do it immediately, which is why Magical Mystery Tour happened so quickly.”
From that first week of January 1969, The Beatles essentially became commuters, travelling daily from their homes to the film studio, putting in several hours of rehearsal, and returning home in the late afternoon or the evening. John, George and Ringo were all coming by road from different towns in Surrey, the most Beatle-infested county in the kingdom. George was coming in from Esher, about six miles away, taking him little over a quarter of an hour on a good day. Ringo had the longest journey of them all, whizzing in from Brookfields, his new home in Elstead, 25 miles away in the south-western part of the county, which would have taken up to an hour. At that time, John and Yoko were living eight miles from Twickenham in Ringo’s previous residence, Sunny Heights in Weybridge, which the drummer had yet to sell; their journey would have taken about half an hour.
Paul’s main home was in Cavendish Avenu
e, a tree-lined street of substantial houses tucked away behind Lord’s Cricket Ground in St John’s Wood, just a short zip from Abbey Road and about 12 miles from Twickenham. Unlike the others, and despite his status as one of the world’s most famous pop idols, Paul would often use public transport between north London and Twickenham. The Beatles’ assistant Mal Evans described Paul’s journey on that first day, Thursday, January 2, for the amusement of fans:
“At half eight that morning, between bites of breakfast, I’d telephoned round all four fellows to remind them it was getting up time and they were due at Twickenham by eleven. On that first day Paul was last to arrive – half an hour after noon! – having come by underground, then local train, then taxi from Hampton Court station. He’d meant to do the entire journey by public transport but, knowing he was late, he chickened out and caught a cab rather than wait at the bus stop!”
The Beatle may have been concerned that he might be recognised and mobbed by fans at that Hampton Court bus stop, despite the fact that he had recently grown a bushy black beard that made him look a bit like a Cuban revolutionary. The previous year, he had dared to make several incognito journeys, employing a variety of attention-diverting costumes. Denis O’Dell was amused by the way McCartney and Linda Eastman managed to retain their privacy while moving around in New York City and Los Angeles, as well as London: “This was possible largely because throughout 1968 Paul had become a master of disguise. He greatly valued being able to do the things that most of us take for granted, such as taking a bus or walking in a park, and was not prepared to let his celebrity status prevent him from doing normal, everyday things. In an effort to retain his anonymity he had learned to dress and behave in a manner that would prevent him from being recognised. He managed to achieve this by wearing very ordinary clothes that seemed to come from a previous era. In fact some of them did. During that year he bought a great many garments secondhand from Portobello Market and frequently travelled to the Wigmore Street offices by bus. When I questioned him about his unconventional fashion sense, he replied, ‘Denis, you have to understand, these are clothes that you can move about in.’”*