John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  It was a remarkable show of solidarity against the tide of abuse and ridicule. Unfortunately, the Rolling Stones did not like the way their Rock and Roll Circus turned out, and blocked the film’s release until almost thirty years later.

  23

  BEDLAM

  I don’t believe there’s any cause worth getting shot for.

  The Beatles’ big mistake, they now knew, was never having formally announced an end to touring after Candlestick Park in 1966. As a result, despite all the shows on vinyl they had given since, their return to live performance was still a source of endless media rumor and speculation. And, almost as if Brian’s ghost were whispering diplomacy in their ears, they never quite liked to puncture that huge bubble of expectancy. However honest and unpredictable John might be on other issues, the question “When are you guys going on the road again?” was one even he could be relied on to sidestep or fudge.

  But while he and George and even Ringo branched off on individual creative paths, Paul McCartney’s commitment to the band, and pushing them onward and upward, still far outweighed any solo project. A compulsive showman, he still missed the buzz of live performance, which for the other three, John especially, had no more allure than a dentist’s drill. Despite the achievements of their studio years, Paul felt that by severing their old intimate link with their audience, some vital creative spark had been extinguished. With the onus of leadership now on him, reestablishing that that bond—and with it, the Beatles’ sense of unity, both as performers and people—became his crusade.

  The two separate, brief live performances of “Hey Jude” and “Revolution” they had filmed as TV promos in July 1968, strengthened Paul’s hand. Rather than the old mindless shrieking, it had been pleasant to face more mature, empathetic listeners who paid rapt attention and did not hurl a single jelly bean. So good was the feeling that the Beatles had jammed a few extra numbers, with John seemingly enjoying it as much as anyone. Citing this precedent, Paul secured his agreement, and George’s, to an ambitious though quite logical and practicable strategy for early 1969. They would give one stage performance, to be circulated to their hungry public as a film made and marketed by their own Apple organization. As a prelude or trailer to the concert, there would also be a short documentary showing them in rehearsal.

  Paul’s initial suggestion was that Yoko might direct the film. To his tidy, pragmatic mind, it seemed an ideal way both of giving her the respect John demanded and prying her loose from his side while the Beatles were at work. But Yoko, the avant-garde filmmaker, had no interest in shooting a straight documentary—indeed, felt the offer to be as subtly insulting on a professional level as a personal one. Instead, the job went to Michael Lindsay-Hogg, a gifted young television director whose association with the Beatles dated back to their “Paperback Writer”/“Rain” promo film in 1966. He had also directed the live “Hey Jude”/“Revolution” sequences and the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus, featuring John’s debut performance as a non-Beatle.

  The setting for the comeback concert was to be no ordinary hall or stadium but some exotic outdoor location such as had never served as a backdrop for rock music before. Various grandiose ideas were suggested, like the Egyptian Pyramids, the Sahara Desert, and the deck of a liner in midocean. Lindsay-Hogg brought with him a more realistic suggestion; a two-thousand-year-old Roman amphitheater in Tunisia. “The Beatles were to start playing as the sun came up, and you’d see crowds flocking towards them through the day. It would have been fantastic.”

  While scouts from Apple Films evaluated the Tunisian location, Lindsay-Hogg began shooting the “Beatles at work” scenes that would precede the show. These were laid on a soundstage at Twickenham Film Studios, where in less complicated times they had done interiors for A Hard Day’s Night and Help! Shooting began on January 2, 1969, just eleven weeks after the White Album had wound to its exhausted, divisive end. The Beatles were required to keep filmmaking rather than Abbey Road hours, which meant starting work at around ten a.m. rather than in the early evening. Moreover, a cavernous soundstage in midwinter was a cheerless place to make music, even had the musicians been in total accord. “It wasn’t Minsk in January by any means,” Lindsay-Hogg says. “But in the morning, people tended to keep their coats on. By afternoon, the lights and body-heat would have warmed the place up.”

  After the previous November’s drug bust, and consequent exposure of their hideaway to well-and ill-wishers, John and Yoko had been forced to move on from Montagu Square. Pending the acquisition of a home of their own, they had the same Good Samaritan as before to thank for offering them a roof. Ringo had lately bought Peter Sellers’s riverside mansion in Elstead, Surrey, but still owned his old Weybridge home, Sunny Heights. This he loaned to the runaways for as long as they needed it. John’s flight had come full circle back to the St. George’s Hill estate, just down the road from Kenwood.

  From the outset of rehearsals at Twickenham, resentful reluctance floated like ectoplasm in the chill air. “It was obvious that Paul was the driving force behind the project, and that the other three didn’t really want to be there,” Michael Lindsay-Hogg remembers. “Paul would always be the one to check in on time every morning, and he was the only one I ever really discussed the filming with. The others would arrive between one and two hours late. On a couple of days, John didn’t turn up at all.”

  The uncivilized hours, the intrusive cameras, even the abhorrent sense of having to, could not altogether suppress John’s innate professionalism. “He was a musician,” Lindsay-Hogg says. “Put him in a chair, give him a guitar and a cup of tea, and he’d do something. Even at his semi-best, he was still very quick…quick to be funny, quick to attack.” The great change the director noticed was in Lennon and McCartney’s creative relationship. “I’d seen how they worked together when we filmed Paperback Writer, and it was fascinating to see. Now one of them would write a song, bring it in and just tell the others how to play it as if they were session-men.”

  The anger finally surfaced after eight days, when George walked out, tired of the uncomfortable conditions and, as he saw it, being bossed and bullied by Paul. Prior to the sessions, he had been in America, hanging out with Bob Dylan and the Band and being treated as a respected equal. Now here he was again as a second-string Beatle, still regarded as the “bloody kid” who had tagged along all those years ago. He had had an angry confrontation with Paul, while the camera was running. But in an unrecorded exchange with John, things had gotten even worse. “They actually came to blows,” George Martin says. “You’d think it would have been with Paul, but it was John. It was all hushed up afterwards.”

  Off camera, too, a far graver source of disharmony was starting to develop. Since the previous autumn, a flow of agitated memos from the Beatles’ accountants had warned of the vast sums being swallowed up by Apple Corps. At their own rash invitation, Apple’s headquarters in Savile Row had become a magnet for anyone hoping to get into the pop business, needing finance for some or other creative project, or, under the terms of “Western Communism,” simply seeking a handout from supposedly bottomless Beatle coffers.

  By Christmas 1968, even Apple’s most utopian-spirited codirector was growing alarmed by the apparent orgy of begging, scrounging, freeloading, and time-wasting at 3 Savile Row. “Eighteen or twenty thousand pounds a week was rolling out…and no one was doing anything about it,” John would recall. “All our buddies that had worked for us for 50 years were just living and drinking and eating like fucking [ancient] Rome.” To mark that festive season, there had been a tea party for employees’ children at which, like some paternalistic northern mill owner, he appeared as Father Christmas, accompanied by Yoko as Mother Christmas. The rosy-intentioned kiddiefest was turned into a brawl by some Hell’s Angels from San Francisco whom George had invited to London. Those present would never forget the sight of Father Christmas trying to shield Mother Christmas from flailing fists and falling bodies with spilled tea trickling down his glasses. />
  During the first days of rehearsing at Twickenham, John was interviewed by a journalist he had known since the Beatlemania era, Ray Coleman of Disc and Music Echo. Coleman naturally inquired after the health of Apple, prepared for some anodyne boardroom-formulated response. Instead, John gave him the whole scoop: “We haven’t got half the money people think we have. We have enough to live on, but we can’t let Apple go on like it is. We started off with loads of ideas of what we wanted to do—an umbrella for different activities. But like one or two Beatles things, it didn’t work because we aren’t practical and we weren’t quick enough to realise that we need a businessman’s brain to run the whole thing…. It’s been pie in the sky from the start. We did it all wrong—Paul and me running to New York saying, ‘We’ll do this and encourage this and that.’ It’s got to be a business first, we realise that now…. It needs a new broom and a lot of people will have to go…. It doesn’t need to make vast profits, but if it carries on like this, all of us will be broke in the next six months.”

  In fact, this apocalyptic view was far from justified. Although Apple’s original raison d’être had been to lose money, and though it certainly attracted spongers, con artists, and hangers-on like wasps around a honeypot, it was very far from just being (in George’s phrase) “a haven for drop-outs.” Its failure in the retail field and undiscriminating largesse were more than balanced by the instant spectacular success of its record label. Aside from the Beatles’ own automatically chart-topping output, Mary Hopkin’s single, “Those Were the Days,” had been an international hit. The roster of talent being built by Ron Kass and Peter Asher promised solid growth across the musical board, from the illustrious Modern Jazz Quartet to the American singer-songwriter James Taylor.

  The search had already long been under way for the “new broom” John had mentioned, to run both Apple and the Beatles. Recognizing that no other pop impresario could take Brian Epstein’s place, the four were agreed it should be someone from the world of big business, whose role would be purely commercial and administrative. One such figure to be approached was Lord Beeching, who, three years earlier, had “rationalised” Britain’s railway network by closing down huge stretches of it; another was the Queen’s financial adviser, Lord Poole. John had also offered the job to Neil Aspinall, the Beatles’ oldest and most loyal associate, urging, “Come on Nell…you may as well have the 20 percent.” Though titular managing director of Apple, Neil had no wish to take on such a hugely magnified role. However, by the time Disc and Music Echo published John’s cri de coeur on January 18, a solution to the problem seemed to have been found.

  The last thing Paul McCartney ever intended or expected was to fall for a woman with the same intensity that John had. “I’m glad I’m not in love like that,” he once remarked revealingly when John and Yoko were first together. But suddenly—as if the old Outlaw follow-your-leader spirit still held sway—he was. In mid-1968, he had begun seeing a rangy young New Yorker named Linda Eastman, then working as a freelance magazine photographer. The chemistry had been instantaneous; Linda now lived with him in London, arousing even fiercer hostility from his fans than Yoko did from John’s.

  Linda’s father, Lee Eastman, was a respected Manhattan lawyer whose clients included many top show-business names as well as some of American’s foremost painters. Her brother John also worked in the practice. Toward the end of the year, Paul accompanied Linda to New York, met Lee and John Eastman, and returned convinced that here were the rescuers Apple sought. It certainly seemed a neat and easy solution, answering the Beatles’ need for experienced business hands on the tiller while they got on with being creative. John had a deep-seated dislike of faits accomplis, especially if they came from Paul, but even so, in the absence of any rival candidate, the Eastmans’ path seemed clear.

  Whatever the misuses of the Apple house, it came into its own as a refuge from those disagreeable rehearsal sessions at Twickenham. After George’s walkout on January 10, the Beatles decided to abandon their cheerless soundstage and, after a short break, continue work in the studio that Magic Alex Mardas had been installing in the basement of 3 Savile Row. George agreed to return on condition there was no more talk of concerts in Roman amphitheaters or on the decks of ocean liners, and they simply concentrated on making their next album. Although this took away most of the point of a tie-in documentary, Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s two cameras continued filming anyway.

  The previous July, George’s American friends the Band had taken time out from backing Bob Dylan to release Music from Big Pink, an album whose folkish simplicity was a conscious reaction to Sgt. Pepper and its countless intricately engineered imitators. Once more going with the flow of their own backwash, the Beatles decided on a similarly direct, intimate style, as close as possible to the way they used to sound in Liverpool and Hamburg. Restored to his accustomed role as producer, George Martin was briefed by John in terms that as good as wrote off the brilliant work they had created together at Abbey Road. “[He] came to me and said, ‘On this one, George, we don’t want any of your production crap. It’s going to be an honest album, OK? I don’t want any overdubbing, or any of the editing that you do. I want to do it so that when we listen to it I know we did it.’ In this slighting spirit of regression and renewal, the album was provisionally titled Get Back.

  Martin had been led to believe he would be working in a studio whose technological marvels would make Abbey Road seem prehistoric. Instead, he found that only the control room was in a usable state. To begin recording when the Beatles demanded, on January 22, most of the sound equipment had to be hastily shipped in from EMI. A tight-lipped Martin had to deal with further problems, from an intrusively noisy air-conditioning unit to a lack of feed holes for cables onto the studio floor. After the bleakness of Twickenham, the Beatles demanded that their work environment be as homelike as possible, with comfortable armchairs and an open fire burning in the hearth. “When they listened to the first tracks, there was this mysterious crackling noise in the background,” Neil Aspinall remembered. “Finally we realised it was the bloody fire.”

  Despite vastly pleasanter surroundings and a clearer objective in view, tension soon began seeping back. Playing whole tracks in one go, without editing or overdubbing, was something the Beatles had not done since Martin had wrung their first album out of them in a single day back in 1963. “And course it became terribly tedious because they couldn’t give me what I wanted—a perfect performance,” Martin remembers. “I’d say ‘Okay, seventeen…John that was a lovely vocal, but Paul had a bit of a glitch on the bass.’…On the 61st take, John would say ‘How was that one, George?’ I’d say ‘John, I honestly don’t know.’ ‘No fookin’ good then, are you?’ he’d say. That was the general atmosphere.”

  Since Yoko had taken up station next to John, and Eric Clapton had played lead guitar for George on the White Album, no one any longer regarded the Beatles as an inviolably self-sufficient foursome. On the Get Back sessions, they acquired their first black American auxiliary in keyboards player Billy Preston, whom they had first met when he appeared at the Hamburg Star-Club with Little Richard. Preston fitted effortlessly into the music, while his happy-go-lucky personality did much to improve the problematical vibes. When not working on tracks for the album, they used up hours of tape and film in talking and jamming every kind of irrelevant number—fifties rock-’n’-roll classics, old Beatles tracks, current chart hits by other people, show tunes, comic songs, even nursery rhymes, around a hundred titles in all. “They didn’t care what I filmed because they were the producers and could cut anything they didn’t like,” Lindsay-Hogg remembers. “It all began to feel like Sartre’s play No Exit…characters trapped together in a room, uncertain why they were there and not knowing how to get out. There didn’t seem to be any way of stopping it.”

  The only possible ending was for the Beatles to give the live performance they had originally intended, albeit at some venue nearer at hand than Tunisia or Egypt. Ringo suggested g
oing back to their old Liverpool home, the Cavern club, but none of the others fancied such a sentimental journey. Weary of the whole subject, John was heard to mutter, “I’m warming to the idea of doing it in an asylum.” The least bad option seemed to be the Roundhouse, a converted tram shed in Chalk Farm, which had become the London counterculture’s favorite auditorium. Then Lindsay-Hogg came up with an idea that combined maximum visual drama with minimum inconvenience. “One day when we were all having roast lamb in the Apple boardroom, I said why didn’t they do the show here, from their own roof? As we were in midwinter, it would have to be quite early in the day, before the light started to fail. I told them they should aim to make so much noise that George Martin would hear it over in St. John’s Wood.”

  The roof of 3 Savile Row included a good-size flat portion accessible via the main stairs (as more than one casual visitor had demonstrated by stealing portions of valuable lead insulation and making off with it unchallenged). A quick inspection confirmed that it could easily accommodate a makeshift wooden stage and the requisite camera and sound-recording equipment. Besides shooting from chimney level, Lindsay-Hogg planned to hire a helicopter for aerial views like those of Shea Stadium in 1965. “I went to Paul and asked if it was OK. He answered, ‘That’s a yes’ with his thumb turned down and ‘That’s a no’ with his thumb turned up. Then I looked at John, who just nodded. I took that to be the say-so that mattered.”