by Bob Spitz
That night at Weybridge, in the middle of another drug-induced reverie, the TV flickered off, whereupon John, already chastened and in a self-abasing mood, asked Pete if it was okay if he invited a woman to the house. Shotton, who had no intention of staying up another night with his friend, was relieved. “Well, I think I’ll call up Yoko,” John said.
“Yoko Ono?” Shotton was dumbfounded. He’d seen her around, as something of a mysterious figure on the periphery of the Beatles’ entourage, but never saw John raise so much as an eyebrow in her direction. “I didn’t know that you fancied her. You never said anything about her.”
“I don’t know if I fancy her,” John replied, “but there is something about her that I like.”
Yoko arrived at Weybridge in a taxi sometime before midnight. Things got off to an embarrassingly slow start for two untimid, headstrong souls. “She and John were like two nervous birds,” Shotton recalls. They sat in the dimly lit parlor, on the opposite end of a couch, hands folded awkwardly in their laps in the manner of suitors in an arranged marriage. Shotton, unable to make “heads or tails” of their clumsy conversation, excused himself and went to bed. Eventually, John led Yoko upstairs to his studio, where, amid stacks of record albums and toys, sat two reel-to-reel tape recorders on which he’d first sketched out many of the Beatles’ hits. “I played her all the tapes that I’d made, all this far-out stuff, some comedy stuff, and some electronic music,” John told Rolling Stone in 1970. It was such a crazy-quilt collection of material, much like a recorded journal of random thoughts strung together like mismatched beads. Some were leftover tape loops from Sgt. Pepper’s, some based on Spike Milligan antics; a few dated back to the early Beatles era—those that had survived the aftermath of drug-induced tantrums. The flaky irregularity of it fascinated a conceptualist like Yoko, who slipped right into the spirit of the tapes. “She was suitably impressed,” he recalled, “and then she said, ‘Well, let’s make one ourselves.’ ”
“We improvised for many hours,” Yoko remembered. “He used the two tape recorders and put through them any sounds that came into his hands…. I sat down and did the voice.” In high-pitched, almost painful wailing, Yoko contributed the kind of jarring vocals that reminded listeners of “the babel inside an insane asylum.” They worked steadily through the night, improvising and overdubbing, but especially “enjoying the uncertainty of how it would all turn out.” The free-form, impressionistic structure was exhilarating, the momentum a turn-on building all night to a certain feverish conclusion. “It was dawn when we finished,” John recalled, “and then we made love at dawn. It was very beautiful.”
During the early-morning reverie, John was overcome by the intensity of the whirlwind encounter. “I had no doubt I’d met The One,” he recalled. “Yoko and I were on the same wavelength right from the start, right from that first night. That first night convinced me I’d have to end my marriage to Cyn.”
John encountered Shotton in the kitchen early the next morning. Shotton says that John acted edgy and distant during a breakfast of hard-boiled eggs. It was clear that he was “shellshocked” by the inevitability of the night’s events and the ultimate conclusion he’d reached. Shotton asked how things had gone with Yoko, and John “just looked at me with a dead, blank stare.” Finally, John told him: “We’ve been up all night. Will you do us a favor, Pete? Will you find me a house?”
“You’ve already got a house,” he told John. “You’re sitting in it.”
“No, I want another house. I want to go and live with Yoko.”
“John, you’ve spent one night with her,” he argued, “one fucking night!”
But John was not to be deterred. “Pete, this is what I’ve been waiting for. All. My. Life. I don’t give a fuck about the Beatles. I don’t give a fuck about the money. I don’t give a fuck about the fame. I don’t give a fuck about anything. I’m going to go and live with Yoko, even if it means living in a tent with her. I’m going—and I don’t give a fuck.
“I have just fallen in love—probably for the first time in my life. I can’t bear to be apart from her. In fact, I want to go back up [stairs] in case she has an accident—or escapes through the window.” And with that, he turned and dashed from the room.
“John had been feeling dead inside for so long,” recalls Shotton. “Now, at last, he saw the chance to be reborn.”
And Yoko had acquired an additional act.
Chapter 35 Good-bye to the Boys in the Band!
[I]
The question they all ask is—have they gone off their heads?” That was the eye-popping headline above Don Short’s long-awaited feature about the Beatles in a summer issue of Melody Maker, and not an unfair topic at that, considering the stories swirling around John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Opening a boutique and meditating with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had given the press and fans plenty to fret about. Magical Mystery Tour had provided the first signs of their fallibility. Now each new report out of Apple made the Beatles seem harebrained, if not mad. Except for George’s coy reference to “a hectic recording scene,” there was hardly any mention of plans for another album on par with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which remained a fixture in the charts a year after its release. No new Beatles film was slated for production, no concert in the works. “It seemed to many of us who followed their exploits that the Beatles had lost their focus,” recalls Short.
An Apple press release announcing the May 23 opening of a second boutique caught even the most stalwart Beatles watchers by surprise. It was no secret to anyone that the original shop on Baker Street was a colossal bust. Peter Brown maintains that “the Beatles were embarrassed by the dreadful place.” So, who in their right minds, one might ask, would repeat that mistake? To this day, no one seems to have an answer. The most that can be ascertained is that by now they did whatever they liked on impulse, regardless of the cost or consequences. In this case, the impulse was for brightly colored handmade suits that couldn’t be had off the rack. Throughout 1967 and most of 1968, the Beatles and their entourage were VIP customers at John Crittle’s ultrahip, eponymous tailor shop in New Kings Road. “We bought a few things from him,” George recalled at the time, “and the next thing I knew, we owned the place!” Apple bankrolled 51 percent of Crittle’s new line, took over his pricey lease, and transformed the shop into Apple Tailoring (Civil and Theatrical), which bore their imprimatur.
Owning another boutique, however, wasn’t enough to contain the folly. Paul insisted they produce “de-mob” suits, a double-breasted pinstripe number modeled on the demobilization suits given to former soldiers after the war so that they could return to the workplace in appropriate attire. He was “absolutely fascinated” by the outfit and was convinced they would catch on, wearing them himself to help promote the line. But the public was hostile and appalled. So were John and George when the suits piled up in a basement storage room. John’s attitude toward money was indifference, if not disdain—“I had to give it away or lose it,” he liked to say—but his attitude toward Paul’s money-losing schemes steamed his glasses. For him, it wasn’t so much the money as it was Paul’s “headtrip,” his wholesale decision making, hogging the spotlight and calling the shots, while George chafed at the extraordinary waste of funds. It infuriated George that John and Paul “blew millions” of pounds on rubbish, income in which he and Ringo had a rightful share, and it served as a lesson, he said, to discourage anyone from contemplating a partnership.
Even as their accountants panicked at the indiscriminate outlays, the Beatles were shelling out generous advances to scores of strangers who had responded to Paul and John’s invitation for an Apple grant. There was no effort whatsoever to cut back expenses, no attempt to conserve chunks of income that might provide them with a reasonable nest egg should the bubble finally burst. By the time any one of them raised an eyebrow, it was already too late. After they appeared on The Tonight Show in New York, “tens of thousands” of requests arrived daily begging for monetary suppo
rt. “Suddenly Apple was a free-for-all,” George recalled, with “every weirdo in the country”—in many countries—turning up in the Apple foyer, demanding an audition or the opportunity to present some screwy scheme. “Any numbskull could walk in and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great idea,’ ” says Alistair Taylor, “and the Beatles would get out the checkbook. ‘How much do you need?’ ”
Everyone came to Wigmore Street seeking a handout. And when Wigmore got too overrun with beggars and schemers, the Beatles simply bought a larger place, plunking down nearly $1.5 million for an eighteenth-century building on Savile Row, the former base of entertainment magnate Jack Hylton, to serve as headquarters for “the chaos.”
“I remember going round there when we were thinking of buying it, and the basement was fantastic,” recalled George. “There was a huge fireplace and oak beams…. We thought, ‘This is great! We’ll be down here writing and making records.’ ” In addition to their new record and film companies, their electronics division and merchandising, their sumptuous dining room and private offices, the Beatles saw the opportunity to build a state-of-the-art recording studio where Hylton’s private screening room once operated. Why should they put up with the logjam at Abbey Road? Or its antiquated consoles? The seeds of discontent had already been sown. According to George Martin, “Magic Alex said that EMI was no good, and he could build a much better studio.” Everyone, including Martin, agreed that the four-track system they’d used for Sgt. Pepper’s was prehistoric. It was being updated to a bulky eight-track configuration, but Alex promised to deliver a whopping seventy-two. All it took, he said, was an infusion of the Beatles’ funds.
With Alex at work on this latest knickknack, the Beatles pumped money into several other projects, beginning with Apple Films. No sooner had Denis O’Dell arrived to head the motion picture division than an ambitious slate of films was announced for immediate production. The pace was furious for such a start-up. O’Dell, who had worked with Stanley Kubrick and Richard Lester, brought with him a Julio Cortázar short story called “The Jam,” which John Barry was poised to adapt, then soon after hired Nicolas Roeg to direct a script called “Walkabout,” set in Australia. Negotiations had also been completed for the purchase of another script, “Some Gorgeous Accident,” based on a popular novel by James Kennaway. There were preliminary discussions about using the Beatles’ own 16mm footage for a documentary feature about the Maharishi. And John was tinkering with writing a screenplay based on his books, A Spaniard in the Works and In His Own Write.
A more immediate concern of Apple’s new film division would be the upcoming full-length cartoon feature, Yellow Submarine. The Beatles had played virtually no part in its production, aside from contributing a mix of four original songs to the soundtrack. As far back as 1965 Brian Epstein had dealt away the rights to their animated images to an American producer backed by King Features, which put out a series of approximately sixty rather charming cartoons based on the Beatles and their songs. It seemed like a marginal matter at the time, a low-level licensing deal (while netting them a high-grade 50 percent of the profits), like other assets in the NEMS portfolio. But buried in the deal was Brian’s promise for cooperation on a feature film, along with the Beatles’ personal endorsement, which, seemingly negligible at the time, became more valuable as each month passed.
It didn’t take King Features long to call in its chit. After seeing the results of the cartoon series, the producers submitted a succession of proposals for a snappy vehicle that combined the Beatles’ droll personalities with “Fantasia-like” animation. They’d even hired Roger McGough, a Liverpool poet and bandmate of Mike McCartney’s,* to contribute sly, Scouse-like dialogue and in-jokes. But for all the attempts at appeasing him, Brian had not been reassured. He knew the Beatles would hate the whole idea of a cartoon. “He dreaded going to them with it and asking for their involvement,” recalls Tony Barrow, “and so, in typical fashion, he dodged the project for as long as was humanly possible, making himself and the Beatles unavailable.”
In the meantime, the producers cobbled together a story based loosely on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s alter egos, laced with hip, karmic dialogue and acid-soaked imagery, and hired actors to imitate the boys’ voices. The Beatles themselves were the most superfluous component. “We only had one or two meetings maximum with them,” George recalled, “[B]asically there was very little involvement from us.” The entire movie was completed with little or no awareness from the Beatles. Even the commitment to provide a soundtrack, which they decided to honor in deference to Brian, was regarded like an albatross. “Their reaction was: ‘OK, we’ve got to supply them with these bloody songs, but we’re not going to fall over backwards providing them,’ ” recalled George Martin. “ ‘[W]e’ll give them whatever we think is all right.’ ” And that is all they did, the bare minimum, ponying up “All Together Now,” “Only a Northern Song,” “It’s All Too Much,” and “Hey Bulldog,” which, in the scheme of things, were basically throwaways. But now, with Brian dead and the movie out of their control, the Beatles still had to contend with the clatter surrounding its release.
Yellow Submarine had its premiere at the London Pavilion on July 17, 1968, with the fans’ reception around Piccadilly Circus exploding into a scene reminiscent of Beatlemania. Thousands of people flooded the garishly lit esplanade, shrieking as the Beatles and their guests arrived in a whirlwind of old-fashioned excitement. With few exceptions, the critical reception was equally enthusiastic. The Daily Telegraph hailed the film as “brilliantly inventive” and urged audiences of all ages to give it a whirl, seconded by the Christian Science Monitor, which praised its strong “visual imagination” and “romantic emotion.” “The film packs more stimulation, sly art-references and pure joy into ninety minutes than a mile of exhibitions of op and pop and all the mod cons,” rhapsodized the Observer. Even the Beatles had to admit it was loaded with charm. Ringo, who crooned the main theme, naturally “loved Yellow Submarine,” while George, normally the slowest of the four to warm to such a contrivance, flat-out “liked the film,” and said, “I think it’s a classic.”
The strongest reaction to it came from the Daily Mail. Trudi Pacter, the paper’s crackerjack entertainment columnist, reproached the Beatles for blowing so far off course. “The Beatles stubbornly continue to experiment,” Pacter complained, which seemed the real focus of her displeasure. There was a commingling of too many new elements, too many deviations from the simple, happy formula that had amused the world for so long through the Beatles’ clever wit and joyous songs. Every week, every day, seemed to bring a new announcement from the Beatles of another fabulous project outside of their traditional province. The fans needed to know that they weren’t being patronized, they needed something familiar to grab onto, some validation of their faith. They needed to know that there was music in the mix.
[II]
On May 30 the Beatles met at George’s house to discuss the next album. Unlike their previous launches, there was a surplus of material to choose from—the luxurious outpouring of songs written in India, as well as several that had been completed in the intervening months. For most of the afternoon they demo’ed the songs, spitting them out like table talk, almost impressionistically, on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. There were twenty-three in all—seven by Paul, eleven by John, and five by George—with others in the hopper, waiting to be reshaped.
Listening to them played back convinced the Beatles they had something powerful to build on. The songs were bolder and more emotional, though less self-conscious, than Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s. And yet, there was clearly something uneven in their collective tone, something that seemed to pit the songs against one another in rhythmic apposition, as if to keep the next phase of the recording process from turning into a rote exercise. “They have a different feel about them,” John reflected in glorious understatement, perhaps mocking the jarring irregularity of the material.
The new repertoire, almost to a song, had lost its col
laborative aspect. They were individual efforts—John’s songs, Paul’s songs, George’s songs, written alone—and bore few of the familiar qualities that identified them as Beatles songs. That wasn’t to say they were less accomplished or any less interesting; nor did it say they wouldn’t record them as a group, with the same kind of interplay vital to other sessions. But it was a clear indication that each of the writers had evolved in different, aggressively distinctive ways; they were more confident about their work and, therefore, were less willing to compromise.