George wandered in the day before they were due to start recording and was stunned into silence when he saw Alex wiring up twenty-four tiny individual speakers and hanging them all over the basement walls. The equipment Alex said he had designed and built himself was still in boxes all over the basement floor, and was clearly labeled with the manufacturer’s name from Germany. Ringo and Paul had always been skeptical of Alex; now George saw him for what he was. The more John protested that his little Greek necromancer was a genius, the more they saw John as deluded or mad. Eight-track mixing desks had to be hired in a hurry, but the basement studio was a mess, and not soundproofed, with the heating system thumping away in the corner. They couldn’t work there and ended up back at Abbey Road.
As usual, the sessions were filmed as a promotional tool, with Denis O’Dell and me in charge of filming. During the studio period, while they recorded the tracks over several weeks, things were very tense. Yoko was even more of a permanent fixture at John’s shoulder, kissing him, nibbling at his ear, whispering to him. She even went to the bathroom with him, and everyone would look at each other and wonder. They seem glued together. Things came to a head when Yoko started making musical suggestions.
It’s quite conceivable that Yoko wasn’t aware that she was interfering or in the way. For the most part, her behavior was unforgivable, but she might have just been ignorant. She just plonked herself down, either on John’s amp or on a chair at his side and joined in without being invited. It infuriated the others, and the more it did, the more aggressive she became.
Almost every photograph taken at the time shows Yoko as John’s shadow. The Beatles would lean out of a window to be photographed, and Yoko would be there, with the hint of a triumphant smile, pushing her way to the front, in a large hat that filled the frame. John would be seated on a chair playing guitar, Yoko beside him, and you’d suddenly see that the entire time her arm was outstretched, her hand resting against his back, ready to prod, to command. I don’t know how she snowed him so totally.
She and John used to whisper away in their corner, with a completely different, us-against-the-world perspective to everyone. I know they did, because filming quietly on the sidelines, I heard. Having discussed life and its ins and outs and meanings, and worked out that it all means nothing, John and Yoko didn’t want to, couldn’t possibly, give the edifice of the Beatles any credit, or indeed any respect. She wanted it to be a cooperative, with her included. John wanted it to be both a co-op to assuage Yoko, and a rock band to assuage his inner child, his inner Elvis. Around a Beatle meeting table, or around a Beatle rehearsal and recording or writing situation, that kind of dichotomy wasn’t going to work.
It was probably in retaliation for Yoko’s constant presence that Paul started to bring Linda into the studio sometimes. Or perhaps, in a nonconflictive way, he wanted John to understand the problems he caused by having Yoko around. But if that was Paul’s plan, it backfired. Linda was so low-key no one could object to her presence. She took pictures, but she didn’t get in the way and she certainly didn’t venture an opinion about their work. She was relaxed and intelligent, with a sense of humor. She has been accused of being pushy. I never observed this in her. She was always pleasant, never in the way. Yoko demanded service as if we were her personal servants. If she were our employer, the one who paid our wages, there might—just—have been an excuse. But she abused her position as John’s new girlfriend. She wouldn’t accept that she wasn’t a Beatle. She was actively encouraged in this by John. He expected everyone to treat her in the same way as the entire Apple staff treated him. Everyone, whoever it was, had to do her bidding. But John was always courteous and could be endearing and funny. I came to dislike Yoko all the more because she didn’t have a very nice way of asking for things. She would point at someone and demand quite imperiously, “Get me a jar of caviar,” or “Put my chair next to John’s.” Linda on the other hand would smile nicely and ask politely for what she needed.
George always felt that he was seriously underappreciated. Although, as a unit, the Beatles were the biggest band in the world and generated the most influence, as individuals they were perceived in different ways. George felt that he was the Beatle people took the least notice of and it always bugged him. Paul was, of course, Paul. He was great looking, the singer and frontman with John. John was also John. That’s all they had to be. It was like the king being the king. Together, they were Lennon-McCartney, a powerful force.
Ringo was a character, always very popular, especially in America where he ended up living after he moved more into films. But George had been insecure for years. He had never seemed to know who he was and he bottled it all up. I always sensed this dark moodiness and tension about him, and while I thought it was mostly to do with his almost insane jealousy over Pattie, it was obvious that for a long time he felt inferior creatively to Paul and John. Eventually, he gave up being a Beatle round about the time Apple was formed. He started playing with other musicians and came to appreciate that he was a better musician than he thought he was. He was playing with his old love-rival, Eric Clapton, and Delaney and Bonnie, backing other people and recording with Billie Preston. He produced the album with Jackie Lomax, who used to have a Liverpool group called the Undertakers. They wore undertaker suits, top hats and black ribbons. George loved it.
All this gave him a new degree of confidence, but even as he began to find his own creative niche in the group, here was an interloper who in a few months had changed the fragile balance of power. At the start of John’s affair George had remarked that Yoko was “nothing but a Bohemian tart from New York who had been such a troublemaker there she was given the cold shoulder,” but he didn’t lose his cool until the so-called Get Back recording sessions, which I filmed in Twickenham Studios early in January 1969. The original idea was to make a film of the making of the album, but not only did it spiral into a disorganized mess, with the Beatles loosely jamming their way through more than a hundred songs, but the air almost sparked with tension and animosity toward Yoko. George was affected the most. When Yoko made yet another musical suggestion directed at him, he turned on Paul instead of her. He just put his guitar down and said to Paul, “I’m through. You want to play all the guitar bits, then you fucking play ’em, ’cos I’m going.” Then, like Ringo, he walked out.
John said, “Fuck it. If he’s not back by Monday we’ll get Eric in.” (He meant Eric Clapton.) Without missing a beat, Yoko immediately went and sat in George’s still-warm blue cloth chair and began wailing. She called it “playing air.” Trust me, it was wailing. Our cameras moved in for a close-up and, for the first time ever, Yoko Ono was recorded smiling. Much to their own bewilderment, the remaining Beatles picked up their instruments and found themselves jamming with Yoko. It was unbelievable. But it wasn’t a sharing. It was a room full of angry people beating the hell out of their instruments in a fury. George did return after a bit of meditating, but the atmosphere was uneasy.
Later, John expressed how upset he was. “Yoko only wants to be accepted,” he said. “She wants to be one of us. It’s hateful that someone can be treated with so much hostility just because they love someone.” Ringo snapped, “Well, she’s not a Beatle, John, and she never will be.” They hoped that he would soon tire of her, as he had tired of most of his other momentary crazes. But he got tight-faced. “Yoko is part of me now. We’re John-and-Yoko, we’re together,” he insisted. That was what they all feared almost more than anything.
When it had come to choosing a venue for the promo film for the ultimately aborted Get Back double album, the Beatles had grand ideas way beyond their then financial position. One moment it was going to be at the Roundhouse in London with Yoko’s Middle Earth hippies and freaks who were into the heavy rock band UFO; but the Middle Earth people started raving and shouting like crazed capitalists about bread—in other words, their split. They squabbled like some alternative bazaar about money and seating and selling their tie-dyed T-shirts. Then it was going t
o be a George-type charity thing, something to feed the starving masses. Jeffrey Archer, then a conservative MP and publicity hound, turned up at the offices, sensing a great scoop for himself. In 1964 he had invited the Beatles and Brian to a dinner at Brasenose, his old college at Oxford to mark the twenty-first anniversary of Oxfam. Of course, there just happened to be reporters and cameramen handy. Before they knew it, the headlines the next day had said, BEATLES TO BACK JUNIOR CONSERVATIVE MINISTER’S CHARITY CAMPAIGN which—as socialists—didn’t please them. Since then, Archer was always popping up with a proprietal air, and sure enough, there he was again, ready to sign them up. It was explained that while they did support charity, they couldn’t be seen to be political.
Instead, they told Archer that they had decided to film in a Roman amphitheater in somewhere like Tripoli, with thousands of Bedouins streaming in from every direction, followed by people of every race and color. It was to be like an earlier version of what eventually became the Coca-Cola ad: “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” Warming to the multihued psychedelic visions they still shared, they imagined that as the sun set over the vast panorama with the Mediterranean as a backdrop, they would come on stage and sing. It was all incredibly expensive, like a Cecil B. De Mille movie, and remembering the food he’d been forced to eat in India (when he wasn’t eating beans) Ringo killed the idea stone dead. No way would he go to Tripoli, he said flatly. In truth, Ringo didn’t even know where Tripoli was, but he said it sounded “too foreign.”
They decided that the same thing might work in the middle of some desert in America. Mal was to be dispatched to scout a good empty location miles from anywhere. Neil Aspinall looked worried. “Can you imagine the insurance claims if thousands of fans turn up and get lost in the middle of nowhere?” he said. “And how will we truck enough lavatories in?”
George started to laugh. “A great idea, scuppered by portable toilets!” he said.
Paul’s creative idea was to book a club in Germany under the name he liked, Ricky and the Red Streaks. “Hey, can you imagine the expression on their faces when we walk in?” he said. “That would be great to film.”
Promoted to “Head of the Foreign Department,” Jack Oliver was told to set it up. “You can’t keep a thing like that a secret,” he said. “The place would be mobbed. It would be bedlam.”
The Beatles talked idea after mad idea through, until they simply ran out of time. In the end, two days before the last date scheduled for filming, Denis O’Dell and I suggested we should film the rehearsals for the filming of the concert, which now looked as if it would never happen, just to have something in the can. One of them, Paul, I think, said, “Oh, let’s just do it the day after tomorrow on the roof.”
Tired and fed up, the Beatles looked at each other. At first, they were surprised, then the idea grew on them. John said, “Bugger it, the roof’s a good idea. We can always film something for real later.” We didn’t bother to tell him that this was it—there would be no later. We needed a film to be released soon, in conjunction with the Get Back album, not at some time in the distant future. George was the only one who was a bit reluctant, but in the end he agreed. They decided to do six songs and worked out the running order.
I hastily made all the arrangements. Neil Aspinall, who had nothing particular to do at the time, became the producer. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who had gone on to direct “Jumping Jack Flash” and “Rock and Roll Circus” for the Rolling Stones after “Paperback Writer,” was hired to direct in 35mm. A bit of scaffolding was erected on the roof of Apple Headquarters. The sound went downstairs via a snake directly into the mixing board in the studio. I set up the lights and called the press; they turned up.
What had seemed a bit of an anticlimax turned out to be an iconic moment. On January 30, 1969, warmly wrapped up against the cold, rarefied air, people were on the rooftops as far as the eye could see, hanging onto freezing chimney pots and half of London came to a standstill as thousands stopped to listen and watch. Office workers hung from windows and passers-by lined the streets.
My job was finished and I retreated to my office to listen to the circus from a distance. Now and then, I would amble down to the street to chat with the junior shopkeepers at Gieves and Hawkes, who clustered in their doorway, or just to watch the reactions of people passing by. Carried on the chilly and damp January air, for forty minutes, the music swept over the rooftops of London. It was only one two-hundred-watt sound system, but apparently you could hear it as far away as Park Lane and Soho, a mile distant. As I watched the office workers excitedly hanging out of their windows, laughing with pleasure, I suddenly saw that this was a wonderful and unique event.
Of all the six songs they performed—some of them twice and not counting an impromptu “God Save the Queen”—the one that struck me most was “Don’t Let Me Down.” I knew that this concert was really the end. Poignantly I felt that although John had written that particular song as a tribute to Yoko, it seemed to be directed at the Beatles themselves in their relationship with each other, and was also a plea to the world to understand them and all that they had tried to achieve. The song that achieved the most reaction from the crowd because it was a bit of a belter and they could hop about to it, was “Get Back.” This also said a lot about the way things were. It was a heartfelt plea from John and Paul, mostly to each other, saying, “Let’s get back to where we were in the beginning.”
The phones kept ringing, but everyone was outside, having a good time. Eventually, when someone answered, it was the BBC, asking questions for the six o’clock news. Then the senior tailors from Gieves and Hawkes complained about the noise and sent for the police, who were on their way round anyway. The police arrived and we got the doorman to stall them, by asking if they had backstage passes. They were stalled further inside with the office boy using the same ploy. The boys in blue fought their way bravely through secretaries and Apple Scruffs and whoever else put out a foot to trip them up, until they reached the very top. It was all very good humored. We negotiated with them for more time, and to give them their due, they watched out of sight for twenty minutes or so while the boys went on playing. Finally, they said, “Look lads, it’s too loud, you’re going to have to stop.” The open-air concert had started at about noon and ended at about a quarter to one when the police pulled the plug.
Afterward, everybody went downstairs and had a cup of tea and sandwiches. It was very civilized. Then they all went their merry way—as if it had been just another day in the life of the Beatles. In fact, it was the last time they ever played together as a unit. Sadly, this strange little rooftop concert was to prove a farewell to the most incredible years in the history of pop music. The Beatles were at the top of the building; now there was nowhere left to go, but down.
We sat in Alex’s miserably inefficient basement studio and listened to the tape. It was grim. External sounds intruded, like traffic, car horns, and, worst of all, the roar of the central heating plant and even the drains gurgling. In their capacity as “quality control,” the Beatles shook their heads. Paul said, “It’s awful. We can’t use it.” They listened several times, and decided that only the “Get Back” track was good enough for a single, the rest was too poor to allow out. The album was initially redone at Abbey Road with George Martin under more controlled conditions and, with a lot of new material later added by Phil Spector, it was eventually released as Let It Be. To give George his due, he just got on with the task and didn’t say, “I told you so.”
They spent three weeks during December 1968 and January 1969 filming at Twickenham for material to make a proper movie. Much if it, like the rooftop tapes, was a mess. What was intended as a short promo film ended up being an awful pseudodocumentary with no story line. It was so bad that few people wanted their names in the credits. In the end, as a typical Beatle joke, Mal Evans—their roadie—ended up being listed as producer.
In the larger picture, the Beatles started to implode at a time when the accountants prepared
yet another report saying they would soon be broke if costs weren’t controlled. John claimed to be the only person who read the report, but instead of discussing it properly, he announced to the press, “We’re going broke, we need to stop this Apple business.”
Paul heard someone say, “You’ll need a Beeching to get you out of this mess.” At once he contacted Lord Beeching, the government minister who had wielded his famous “axe” to drastically prune the railway system by closing down hundreds of stations and lines in order to make it profitable. However, Beeching was probably the only person in the country who didn’t know who the Beatles were, and pompously, he declined Paul’s invitation. Other important names were tossed in the air. Even Caleb, the Apple soothsayer, was consulted. His magic runes advised against any of the contenders. It was perhaps fortunate for the Beatles that shortly after, Caleb’s runes instructed him to move on from Apple.
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The Beatles always knew, and never begrudged the fact, that Brian got 25 percent of the gross on everything. What they hadn’t quite taken on board was what this represented. He gave them their money after taxes, and they never questioned how he had arrived at that sum. All expenses, including his own (and he had very expensive tastes) were deducted from the remaining 75 percent, after which it was split four ways among the Beatles. So Brian earned more than any of them.
There was more than enough to go around, even taking that into account, but right from the start, Brian didn’t realize the enormity of the Beatles’ earning capacity and negotiated some very foolish deals, particularly with John and Paul’s song publishing and the merchandising, which turned into a nightmare when it was calculated that he had probably given away the equivalent of about £100 million (£1 billion in today’s currency). It was only after Brian’s death that the Beatles came to realize how badly their affairs had been handled. Maybe it wasn’t their fault. Irving Azoff—manager of the Eagles—once said that when you cross the creative business with the accounting business, you’ll get chaos. The Beatles made the music and they felt it was up to Brian to make the money.
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