by Bob Spitz
[II]
In the days immediately following Brian’s death, various factions began assembling to wrest control of his music empire. “There was a big power grab,” recalls Alistair Taylor, who watched the action raptly from the sidelines. “The infighting was awful. Vic Lewis, Robert Stigwood, Peter Brown—the knives were out. Everybody wanted control of the Beatles.”
Incongruously, Brian had left no will designating an heir, but his chairman’s share of NEMS legally passed to Clive Epstein, who, according to most observers, wasn’t equipped to run the company. It was clear that Brian had wanted Stigwood and his partner, David Shaw, out of the picture and had begun proceedings to ensure against their proposed takeover of NEMS.
In the ensuing mad scramble for control, no one bothered to consult the Beatles about replacing Brian Epstein. Incredible as it might seem, Stigwood had never even met the band. “In fact, the Beatles were shocked to learn that Brian had planned to sell NEMS,” Brown recalled. This was the first they’d heard that their management situation was in play—and they weren’t happy, to say the least, about the prospect.
On Friday, September 1, 1967, only four days after Brian Epstein died, Paul rounded up the Beatles for a meeting at his house to jump-start his plans for a Magical Mystery Tour. When the others pulled up in front of Cavendish Avenue, late in the afternoon, Paul was waiting for them at the front door with his sheepdog, Martha, panting by his side. “Let’s go upstairs to the music room,” he said. “There is something we should get to without delay.”
He wasn’t kidding when he said “without delay.” Despite lacking a concrete plan, a crew, or even a basic script, he wanted to begin filming Magical Mystery Tour right away, that very week. The Beatles had flirted with leaving for India over the weekend in order to pursue their study of Transcendental Meditation, but Paul convinced them that it was more critical to consolidate their business interests and to keep the band visible. No one had the foggiest idea of what their legal and financial obligations were, he argued. “They didn’t know where any of the money was,” Neil Aspinall recalled, “they didn’t have a single contract for anything with Brian, not with a record company, not with a film company—Brian had them all.” And they had no idea where he kept them. What is more, they only had a beggar’s stake in NEMS, leaving them dependent, for the time being, on the business decisions of others. “It didn’t make them vulnerable,” Neil insisted, “but it did make them realize that they had to get it together…. [T]hey needed an office and an organization of their own.”
Paul’s Mystery Tour scenario was achingly simplistic. It was diagrammed on a single sheet of paper he’d first shown to Brian Epstein back in May. The entire blueprint was contained in a circle divided into eight segments labeled as follows:
1. Commercial introduction. Get on the coach. Courier introduces.
2. Coach people meet each other / (Song, Fool On The Hill?)
3. marathon—laboratory sequence.
4. smiling face. LUNCH. mangoes, tropical (magician)
5. and 6: Dreams.
7. Stripper & band.
8. Song.
END.
There was no more to it than that; everything else—the look and feel of the project—existed entirely in Paul’s head. “John had spent an afternoon in his swimming pool thinking up ideas for the script,” an insider reported; otherwise, it was going to be improvised on the fly.
At least a Magical Mystery Tour dealt with elements they were capable of putting to use. Music, for one. Every film needed a soundtrack, especially one that necessitated the Beatles’ lip-syncing to certain sequences. There was already a title song in the can, as well as “Your Mother Should Know” and “The Fool on the Hill,” which Paul had written while visiting his father in March, during the Sgt. Pepper’s sessions. He had a fat reserve of songs in his arsenal—John has said as many as twenty, but that is most likely an exaggeration. As John recalled, “[Paul] said, ‘Well, here’s a segment, you write a little piece for that.’ ” That put tremendous pressure on John to contribute, a task he wrestled with over that pulpy, hot weekend. However, when the Beatles entered Studio Two on Tuesday evening, ready to roll, it was evident that John had come up with a killer.
“I Am the Walrus” is pure Lennon fantasy, written, he claimed, over the course of two acid trips. The lyric is based on Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from Through the Looking-Glass, which John considered “a beautiful poem,” although he pleaded ignorance when it came to the political undertones in the narrative. What fascinated John was the mazy wordplay of the original piece, which he used to form his own literary pretzels twisting around a cloud of psychedelic imagery. “Corporation teeshirt, stupid bloody Tuesday man…” “Crablocker fishwife pornographic priestess…” “The words don’t mean a lot,” he admitted; they are mostly nonsense, having no more substance than the mantra “Goo Goo Goo Joob” that rounds out the chorus. Of all the imagery, only “I am the eggman” has a basis in personal experience, a reference to a 1966 orgy he attended with Eric Burdon, who earned the nickname for breaking raw eggs on girls during sex.
The session itself was chaotic—George Martin graded it as “organized chaos… but also disorganized chaos”—because of the haste in which it was arranged and the prevailing influence of drugs. In many ways the basic rhythm track evolved like any other, beginning with electric piano and drums, then adding overdubs of bass and more drums to support the ever-shifting arrangement. John also laid the vocal in with relative ease, so that by the end of Wednesday’s session they had a complete, if unspectacular, version in the can.
There it languished until almost a month later, when the song got a dressing unlike any other in the Beatles’ repertoire. John had been listening to—and studying—an acetate of “Walrus” throughout the interim and under a smorgasbord of substances. At that point it was too basic and straightforward, especially for a lyric he considered “so weird.” They needed to give it a proper arrangement—proper, of course, being a euphemism for weirder than weird.
At first, the Beatles’ experiments with a mellotron had little effect on the track other than to produce some spooky, surrealistic textures. But as time wore on, they began to layer on instruments—eight violins, four cellos, a contrabass clarinet, and three horns—building dense levels of overdubs. Take followed take. By playing notes at the bottom end of the scale, they found they could stretch the tones even further. The bizarre sounds began to overlap and curdle until it was hard to distinguish their identities. They did the same thing with voices. The Mike Sammes Singers, an almost comically white-bread commercial chorale, was hired and put through a series of vocal gymnastics. Eight men and women accustomed to doing light television themes and folk songs chanted, “Ho-ho-ho, he-he-he, ha-ha-ha,” and, “Oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper,” along with shrill whooping noises. The pièce de résistance, however, came at John’s giddy direction: a ludicrous refrain that droned on behind George Martin’s orchestration: “Everybody’s got one, everybody’s got one…” (later corrupted by so-called Beatles experts to be “Everybody smoke pot, everybody smoke pot…”).
Martin, who bristled at the musical hodgepodge, decided to let the Beatles “have their heads” on the session. “Some of the sounds weren’t very good,” he recalled. “Some were brilliant, but some were bloody awful.” The Beatles, however, were clearly pleased.
Even though Martin and the boys had edited and remixed the twenty-five takes of “I Am the Walrus” into a final sizzling master, John delivered the coup de grâce to the performance. While they were mastering the edit, he turned on a radio in the control booth and tuned in a live BBC production of King Lear, with John Gielgud in the title role. That was all his overactive imagination needed to hear. In the moments that followed, they mixed lines directly from the broadcast—Act IV, Scene VI—into the track, creating the familiar sound of nighttime radio in an already furiously overloaded song.
“The Fool on the Hill,” b
y contrast, evolved in a stunningly straightforward way. Written back in March, days before finishing “With a Little Help from My Friends,” Paul drew unknowingly on personal feelings about social hermits like the Maharishi, whom he had not met at the time. “It was this idea of a fool on the hill, a guru in a cave, I was attracted to,” he recalled. Years earlier he’d heard the tale about a recluse in an Italian hill town who had missed World War II, and that may have sparked the title. But one night in Liverpool Paul conjured up the lonely image and wrote what is arguably one of his finest and most beautiful compositions.
Unlike “I Am the Walrus,” nothing in the arrangement is cluttered with effects. Paul’s plaintive, handsomely controlled vocal matches his lonely piano accompaniment in sentiments that never strayed far from those on an early demo. Only the organ and a flute meander obliquely around the melody in an irregular groaning pattern, playing off the piano figure and giving the production an unpredictably cautious lift.
Throughout the recording of the soundtrack, production began on the Magical Mystery Tour film, which proceeded in a predictably haphazard manner. Other than Paul, no one had given it much thought, and even he was shooting from the hip. “We literally made it up as we went,” he recalled. There was no real cast to speak of, no featured roles to fill. Faces were the important thing; the Beatles wanted characters, eccentrics who would look and perform in an outrageous way. Only John made a specific casting request: he insisted on hiring Nat Jackley, an old-style music hall comedian whom he had always admired, as well as a couple of midgets. (“John would always want a midget or two around,” Ringo noted.) The rest of the troupe was filled in by rooting through Spotlight, a legitimate casting magazine—fat actors, busty women, grotesque-looking contortionists—and inviting along Victor Spinetti, who had appeared in their other films. Neil and Mal hired the actors, then located a sixty-two-seat bus, an old yellow job on which they painted the Magical Mystery Tour logo, which Paul had designed.
The caravan took off for the West Country just after noon on September 11, 1967, leaving from Allsop Place, a service road behind the Baker Street tube station, which had been the starting point for all the early rock ’n roll coach tours. On board were thirty-three actors, four cameramen, a soundman, a technical adviser, the four Beatles Fan Club secretaries, and an entourage of friends, with Paul McCartney acting as tour guide and emcee.
It would be useless to highlight each stopover on the Magical Mystery Tour. For the most part, it was a mess—five days of chaotic, incoherent shooting on location, in and around Surrey and Devon, with visits to the Cornish beaches on the Atlantic coast and Somerset. “We would get off the bus: ‘Let’s stop here,’ and go and do this and that,” Ringo recalled. “Then we’d put the music to it.” Occasionally it worked, but often they were beset by technical and logistical problems that undermined their efforts. What’s more, the tour was hardly magical or even a mystery, inasmuch as the bus was trailed everywhere by a convoy of twenty or so cars filled with press, fans, and media hangers-on who blockaded roads and snarled traffic. Fed up, an apoplectic John Lennon leaped off the bus and ripped the banners off the sides.
The Beatles had intended to spend another week filming sequences on a set at Shepperton Studios, outside the city, but in their haste to get under way they’d forgotten to book stage time there or anywhere else. Every soundstage within fifty miles was already reserved, many of them by Stanley Kubrick, who was in production making 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it took some clever improvising by a NEMS functionary to hire the empty hangars at West Malling Air Station in Kent, a deserted base used by the U.S. Air Force in World War II, for filming the interior sequences.
Eventually, the Beatles had enough footage to string together an hour’s worth of film, but everyone involved with the project knew this wouldn’t turn out to be one of their masterpieces. Paul had taken over the direction after three separate cameramen botched the job. “It was strictly amateur time,” says Peter Brown, who watched with mounting dread as £40,000 of bills began piling up at NEMS. “If Brian had been alive, he would have pulled it into some kind of professional shape—or talked the Beatles out of it. But without him, Paul was not to be appeased.”
Back at NEMS, it was clear that no one was minding the store. NEMS needed someone savvy, someone who lived and breathed the music business to take over the reins—and fast. But who? The lineup of prospects was a misbegotten bunch.
Peter Brown was basically Brian’s “social secretary” and, along with Alistair Taylor, considered a “Liverpool lad” and therefore not sophisticated enough to stand nose-to-nose with the London jackals. The same with Neil Aspinall, who, as the Beatles’ point man, was perhaps the obvious choice to take over. But even George Martin thought Neil lacked “sufficient clout” and, applying typical British prejudice, “was out of his class” in dealing with the genteel executives who ran major record labels.
During the first week of the Magical Mystery Tour, Stigwood took matters into his own hands. He marched into Peter Brown’s office and ordered him to arrange a meeting with the Beatles so that he could present them with his credentials and discuss the future of the management company. The second week in September, while the Beatles were in Hayward’s Heath, he staged his showdown, over lunch in the hotel that doubled as the film company’s production office.
On one side of a table, the suits—Robert Stigwood, David Shaw, Clive Epstein, and Peter Brown—sat shoulder to shoulder, with grave faces and guilty eyes. Across two plates piled with sandwiches, facing them like a jury, were the Beatles and Neil Aspinall, arms folded across their chests. Stigwood, who was a charming and effusive man, explained how prior to Brian’s death there had been a vacuum at their management company and how he had been running it successfully for the past six months. Clive, shifting culpably in his chair, nodded approval. “Now that Brian isn’t here,” he said, “I’m the natural successor and I want to take over the operation.”
The Beatles sat passively through Stigwood’s presentation, the smoke from their four cigarettes clouding the cramped space. Their eyes gave nothing away. Finally, John allowed his face to convey confusion and distaste, saying: “We don’t know you. Why would we do this?” Paul didn’t give Robert time to respond. “First of all, we don’t have a clue about what’s been going on. But it doesn’t really matter because it’s not our business. We’ve got our own people to look after us, otherwise we don’t need anything else.” They weren’t interested in a manager at the moment, Paul said. Stigwood could go on managing NEMS’ interests if Clive so chose, but that had nothing to do with the Beatles.
Despite the cool reception, Stigwood continued to press his point. Why not let things run their course? he wondered. Because, John reminded him, NEMS was built on the Beatles’ success, not on Cream or the Bee Gees. If Stigwood wanted to discuss their continued involvement, they might consider remaining with the company—they might—but not, in any case, by holding a minority participation. The percentages would have to be reversed, giving the Beatles a controlling 51 percent interest. Stigwood, however, wouldn’t hear of it. He remembered mentally tabulating the bags of money flowing out of NEMS, much of it wasted on Magic Alex, and thought: “A joint company doesn’t work unless I can control it and say, ‘There’s not a hundred thousand pounds to spend this week.’ ”
Stigwood needed control, the Beatles craved complete freedom—neither was willing to give an inch. Of course, Brian’s unsecured 70 percent stake in NEMS raised the possibility of a hostile takeover. Such action was never threatened per se, although elements in the heated exchange gave the impression that it might be considered, prompting the Beatles to issue a public statement. “They would be willing to put money into NEMS if there was any question of a takeover from an outsider,” a spokesman told NME. “The Beatles will not withdraw their shares from NEMS. Things will go on just as before.”
After a bit of back-and-forth, Stigwood agreed to disassociate himself from NEMS, taking Cream, the Bee Gees
, and a few other assets with him as the foundation of a new company, the Robert Stigwood Organization, that would grow into a multimedia empire; the rest of the roster, such as it was, for the moment remained under Clive Epstein’s languid control, with Vic Lewis at the helm. (Later, Stigwood would claim, “We shook hands, and I don’t think we’ve ever had a cross word about it.” At the time, however, he demanded a £25,000 buyout to leave quietly, which, according to Ringo, “was a very reasonable price” to pay for their freedom.)
After all this time, the Beatles were finally on their own, finally free to make every decision as they alone saw fit.
[III]
Throughout the fall of 1967, while Britain waged an all-out assault on conformity, the Beatles hastened to consolidate their interests. The longtime holding company, Beatles Ltd., was officially renamed Apple Music Ltd., after which seven subsidiaries were formed: Apricot Investments Ltd., Blackberry Investments Ltd., Cornflower Investments Ltd., Daffodil Investments Ltd., Edelweiss Investments Ltd., Foxglove Investments Ltd., and Greengage Investments Ltd., each capitalized with a substantial financial endowment. Money was no problem. “There was an enormous sum of money—well over a million pounds—that had been accumulated by EMI while the new contract was being negotiated,” recalls Peter Brown. “The Beatles received twenty-five percent of that—and that was the money that set up Apple.”