by Bob Spitz
Finally, on August 22, sensing that “the whole thing was going down,” Ringo threw his hands up and walked out, effectively quitting the group. The in-fighting had finally gotten to him. Everywhere he turned, he encountered the same crude, belligerent exchanges. The ongoing party that had been the Beatles’ recording sessions had turned cruel and forbidding. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” Ringo said upon reflection. “There was no magic, and the relationships were terrible.” Ringo had known all along that he wasn’t part of the Beatles’ exalted brain trust, but he was upset, he said, about the way he’d been treated, ignored until the band was ready for him to play. He told the others that he “felt like an outsider.” He felt unappreciated, “unloved and out of it.” He had bottomed out.
Convinced that he wouldn’t be missed, Ringo took his family to Sardinia for a vacation on Peter Sellers’s yacht. The band tried carrying on without him, recording a blistering version of “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” but it took all three of them to patch together a composite drum track that suffered from being too mannered. They sorely missed Ringo’s “feel and soul,” his intuitive fills, which established the beat and kept the rhythm in check. He never got much credit, but his drumming had become a kind of center of gravity for the songs, just as Ringo’s droll deadpan helped anchor the band. From the beginning, he’d been the missing piece of the puzzle, and it didn’t take long for the Beatles to appreciate his absence.
A week later a telegram arrived at Ringo’s Mediterranean beach retreat, begging him to return to the studio. Needing no further invitation, he reached Abbey Road on September 9, in time to participate in an uproarious remake of “Helter Skelter,” Paul’s attempt at making “the most raucous… loudest,” dirtiest-sounding track possible, which had originally run on for an epic twenty-seven minutes. The Beatles’ goal was to pare down the cacophony to a sleek four minutes. In a studio crowded with perfectionists, it was not an easy task. They threw everything they had at the mikes to make the song “louder and dirtier”—distortion, feedback, echo, tape hiss, howls. John attempted to play the saxophone in a duet with Mal Evans, equally unproficient on the trumpet. Paul’s savage vocal, with backup from John and George, kept the Vu meters redlined throughout the deafening onslaught. All the while, they kept pressing Ringo to “just beat the shit out of the drums, just kill them,” as he windmilled his arms around the kit. According to an engineer on the scene, he “drummed as if his life depended on it.” After a particularly ferocious eighteenth take, Ringo flung his sticks across the room and shouted: “I’ve got blisters on my fingers!” which provided the perfect ending to such an imperfect song.
The Beatles’ goal, according to John, had always been to put out a double album. He, George, and Paul had written “so much material” in India that to do otherwise would have meant scrapping too many good songs. Besides, over the four months in the studio, they’d added to their already impressive new repertoire with “Glass Onion,” “Birthday,” “Savoy Truffle,” “Martha My Dear,” “Helter Skelter,” “Cry Baby Cry,” and “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” There were also various versions of “Revolution” being considered. But hardly anyone aside from symphony orchestras and opera companies had ever released a two-record set. It was too expensive for a label to produce that much original material, let alone to pay writers’ royalties for so many songs. Bob Dylan had managed to pull it off on Blonde on Blonde, but he was a force to be reckoned with, an exception even to the exception.
In addition, George Martin had been dead set against a double album since the subject arose back in April. “I thought we should probably have made a very, very good single album, rather than a double,” he later recalled. Ringo also thought a double album was extravagant, preferring its release as two single records, while George viewed the thirty-one songs as being “a bit heavy,” the four sides “a mistake.”
But this was said in hindsight, with the ring of the cash registers still echoing and nothing at stake. But in October 1968, after five months of hard work on the emotionally charged project, there was a consensus among the Beatles that the complete set was “definitely rocking,” and they turned their attention to choosing a suitably rocking cover.
Like the records it contained, the breakthrough album cover was a masterpiece of Beatles ingenuity. Paul decided to revisit Robert Fraser, whose insight during the Sgt. Pepper’s concept proved particularly instrumental. Fraser, he knew, represented Richard Hamilton, the motivating force behind the pop art movement and no slouch when it came to audacious design. It was Hamilton who proposed calling the album “something as utterly simple” as The Beatles and packaging it in a “prissy” all-white cover, with nothing more than an embossed title. Hamilton also contributed the idea of including a squared-off poster in the form of a collage containing family photos of each of the Beatles. As a last, unique touch, Hamilton persuaded them to stamp a number on each album to create the impression of a limited edition. The Beatles liked it so much that they forced EMI to retool its assembly line in order to print consecutive numbers on the covers.
The release of The Beatles—known forever afterward as the White Album—on November 22, 1968 (exactly five years after With the Beatles appeared), was regarded in most quarters as an international event, certainly “the most important musical event of the year,” as the Times (London) expressed it in a column that morning. Except for the news that Yoko had miscarried the night before, nothing upstaged its long-awaited appearance. The rush to buy the new record was so great and unprecedented that EMI had considered rationing its initial shipment of 250,000 copies so that supplies would be spread evenly among retailers until more could be pressed. Not surprisingly, the entire run was sold out within hours of its release, with those lucky enough to snag a precious copy scouring Richard Hamilton’s minimalist cover for clues, as if it might contain some hidden message in the absence of conventional design.
The press, most of which received copies early that morning by special messenger, responded with fitful delirium. “It isn’t revolutionary and won’t change the face of music, but… [i]t is beyond comparison,” argued the Record Mirror’s ambivalent critic. “Skill and sophistication abound,” declared Newsweek, “but so does a faltering sense of taste and purpose.” Nik Cohn, writing in the New York Times, called The Beatles “boring beyond belief” and denounced “more than half the songs [as] profound mediocrities,” while elsewhere in the newspaper’s pages, Richard Goldstein, who had infamously blasted the beloved Sgt. Pepper’s, hailed the White Album as “a major success,” proclaiming it “so vast in its scope, so intimate in its details, and so skillful in its approach that even the flaws add to its flavor.” There was such an extravagance of music on those four sides, so many sprawling themes and styles to sift through, so much energy and vigor in the grooves, that taken as a whole, the album stymied critics as to how it figured in the Beatles’ canon. THE BRILLIANT, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY, headlined NME, whose editor, the usually rapturous Alan Smith, described “Revolution No. 9” as “a pretentious piece of old codswallop… a piece of idiot immaturity and a blotch on their own unquestioned talent as well as the album. For most of the rest,” Smith concluded, “God Bless You, Beatles!”
Though the White Album was a somewhat controversial recording, it was nowhere as controversial as what was yet to come. Only one week later, on November 29, Apple released an experimental album by John and Yoko, a composite of their recorded hijinks that first blissful night at Kenwood, called Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. On the front and back covers John and Yoko posed stark naked. “It was a bombshell,” recalls Tony Bramwell, who responded to John’s request for help with the jacket photo. Bramwell had no idea what he was in for when he arrived at the Montagu Square flat on an afternoon in early November. “John intended to take the picture himself, but about all he could do with that camera was press the shutter. So I adjusted everything for him, worked out the lighting, showed him how to use the ‘delayed action’ feature, and then left.”
Their pose, arranged rather hastily by John, was a grainy, unglamourous image of them standing in front of an unmade platform bed, his arm draped protectively around Yoko’s shoulders. There is nothing erotic about the picture; neither of their bodies is particularly attractive or appealing. There is no come-on in their slack, trancelike stares, nor anything to suggest a postcoital lassitude. “What we did purposely is not to have a pretty photograph, not to have it lighted so that we looked sexy or good,” John insisted. “We used the straightest, most unflattering picture just to show that we were human.”
For John, it was yet another shot aimed at an uptight establishment and a chance to instigate more flak among the other Beatles, who had seen more than enough of Yoko Ono, with or without clothes. He was still steamed over what he perceived as their open hostility toward Yoko, the way “they all sat there, with their wives, like a fucking jury, and judged [her].” Well, he’d take his revenge where he could get it.
Paul remembered John showing him the cover and being “slightly shocked” by the nudity, but Ringo, following his initial embarrassment, turned to John in exasperation and said, “Ah, come on, John. You’re doing all this stuff and it may be cool for you, but you know we all have to answer… for it.” How, he wondered, was this going to affect the Beatles’ image as musicians? How were they supposed to explain it to the fans? And not just the cover photo, but the so-called music on the record. “Ringo and Paul hated every last note on that album,” says Peter Brown, who admits doing his share to stall the project as long as he could. Mostly everyone agreed there wasn’t a redeemable measure on it; it was “a collection of bizarre sounds and effects… neither surprising nor important musically,” a complete put-on. The kids who bought it, thinking that somehow the Beatles were involved, were sure to feel ripped off.
No one other than John wanted to put it out, but he insisted. Referring to Apple’s current lineup, he pointed to the others’ pet projects—Paul with Mary Hopkin and the Black Dyke Mills Band, George with Jackie Lomax—as examples of the label’s artistic freedom. They had even signed a classical artist, John Tavener. According to John, he had intended all along to produce an album with Yoko and demanded they accept Two Virgins as his contribution.
Sir Joseph Lockwood made EMI’s position perfectly clear: the company would press the album but had no intention of distributing it (Two Virgins was eventually released in London on Track Records, and in the United States by Tetragrammaton). The weekly music magazines—Disc, Melody Maker, and NME—refused to run ads for it, citing the ages of their impressionable young readers. And the Beatles’ accounting firm, Bryce Hammer, resigned in protest over the cover. But the antagonism that Two Virgins aroused gave new impetus to John’s conviction that the Beatles had become passé and were, moreover, useless to him. As he saw it, the band was content to continue making more Beatles records, content to hone their image as the lovable lads from Liverpool, content to go on treating one another as if they were indispensable friends. And worse: just content. The “togetherness had gone…. [R]ound about Sgt. Pepper’s it was wearing off,” John recalled. “There was no longer any spark.” As far as creativity was concerned, it seemed that they were headed in opposite directions. He had nothing left to give them. The collaboration with Paul was over, as was his marriage. The Beatles’ music no longer intrigued him. Yoko offered John a way out, a way to liberate himself from the stagnation, as well as a radically different perspective. “I decided to leave the group when I decided that I could no longer get anything out of the Beatles. And here was someone who could turn me on to a million things.” Yoko represented his ultimate rejection of the Beatles—a rejection that John had been entertaining for some time. With Yoko there to stimulate him, John said, “the boys became of no interest whatsoever, other than they were like old friends.” From that moment on, he told Ray Coleman, “It was ‘Goodbye to the boys in the band!’ ”
Chapter 36 Disturbing the Peace
[I]
After six years’ work, for the most part of which you have been at the very top of the music world, in which you have given pleasure to countless millions throughout every country where records are played, what have you got to show for it?… Your personal finances are a mess. Apple is a mess….”
Thus began a five-page letter of resignation sent to each of the Beatles on October 23, 1968, by Stephen Maltz, their young and levelheaded in-house accountant. It was a nervy piece of criticism, a blistering indictment of their business practices, which he said had been carelessly conducted almost from the day Apple opened its doors. The company was “a debacle,” Maltz avowed, a mosaic of disarray and incompetence. There was so much waste, so much unscrupulous recordkeeping, so much outright stealing, that it was a wonder there was anything left in the till for operating expenses.
Throughout the months that followed, troubling details about the Beatles’ finances began to emerge. Because of payment cycles snafued by byzantine accounting procedures and slipshod deals, the Beatles had earned virtually nothing in 1968, a “pitiful £78,000.” That would not even begin to cover their personal expenses, which had no restrictions. “The deal among the Beatles was: you just charged what you need,” according to Peter Brown, who rubber-stamped their vouchers. “The boys used to get cash every week, as they needed it, plus their bills would just be paid for by the accountants, no questions asked.” Meanwhile, everyone borrowed against a seemingly bottomless Apple loan account. “John was the biggest spender; he had no sense of money at all. Ringo was next: houses, cars, toys, presents for Maureen.” Maltz tried repeatedly to warn them about the enormous tax bite that required ratepayers in the Beatles’ bracket to earn almost £120,000 for every £10,000 they spent. What he didn’t tell them was that the often disgraceful way they behaved made them a target for criminal investigation.
The final straw came a few days before Maltz’s resignation, on October 18, when John and Yoko were busted for possession. It was a seedy, shameful affair at the Montagu Square flat, with a dozen police swarming in windows and doors to search for illegal drugs. John, who had been tipped off before the raid, thanks to a call from Don Short, scoured the place from top to bottom, “flushing handfuls of pills down the toilet,” according to Pete Shotton, and madly “hoovering the carpets because Jimi Hendrix and Ringo had lived there.” But John was no match for the dogs that sniffed out marijuana residue in a binocular case on the mantel and in a rolling machine stashed in the bathroom. The press had a field day, snapping roll after roll of photos as John and Yoko, looking nervous and disheveled, were marched outside to a paddy wagon idling at the curb.
If the bust signified anything, it demonstrated that the press and police had finally taken off the gloves. Until now, according to Ray Connolly, who was the Evening Standard’s pop columnist, the Beatles had been lionized by the press. “It was a measure of their popularity that no bad word was ever written about them in the daily papers,” he says. “It was an unspoken contract. The press was rooting for them—and protecting them.” Connolly included. He recalls visiting with John one afternoon at the Harrow Road Clinic, a few days before Yoko’s miscarriage. “Suddenly, a character called Michael X turned up, a real bad guy [who was later hanged for his part in a murder]. He opened this huge suitcase and took out enough grass to turn on the entire city of Westminster. Now, I’m a member of the press. Do I ever mention it? No, nor would John expect me to. That was the deal at the time.” And an exclusive deal, if contingencies were any indication. The Stones were rout
inely hounded by the press and police, as were other rock bands with a bad-boy image. “Never the Beatles. They were considered untouchable, by the police also. No one wanted to spoil the party.”
But that phase of the party, it seemed, was over. John’s outrageous public affair, Yoko’s out-of-wedlock miscarriage, the scandalous Two Virgins cover, even the escapades with the Maharishi—for respectable fans, it was too much to accept. They could deal with John’s outbursts, his rebellious nature, his opinions about the war. But with Yoko, apparently, he had crossed the line. No one knew better than John how grim the situation had become. Toward the end of the year, he told friends that everyone—the press, the police, even the fans—“were out to get” him. Convinced that the bust “was a frame-up,” he worried that the authorities would relentlessly pursue him from now on, destroying his reverie with Yoko.
As the volatile year 1968 drew to a close, the prevailing mood among the Beatles was both melancholy and uncertain. The complexion of the band had changed, it was in upheaval. The boys’ relationship to one another was being drastically realigned. Even their personal issues demanded a break with the past.
On November 8 John’s divorce from Cynthia was finalized by the courts.* Earlier, in June, Paul ended his five-year relationship with Jane Asher in much the same fashion that John had dispatched his wife. That summer, with their engagement more or less in limbo, both Paul and Jane sensed that things were going nowhere. Like the Beatles, they’d changed and grown in opposite directions. Paul, especially, knew it had to end. But—how? Who would initiate the break? Ultimately, as was custom, Paul just forced her hand.
As soon as Jane went on tour with the Bristol Old Vic, it was virtually inevitable that he would find, if only temporarily, a replacement. Everyone at Apple detected the familiar symptoms. “When Paul got bored,” says Peter Brown, “his dick got twitchy.” It was dispiriting coming home from the studio each day to an empty house. He craved some kind of nurturing, some intimacy. In the meantime, Paul entertained himself with an American girl who’d arrived on Apple’s doorstep seeking help to finance a screenplay and wound up, instead, with one of the Beatles. Through early June they were seen around town together, dining at restaurants or camped out at one of the clubs. “It wasn’t anything serious,” says Alistair Taylor, who heard enough of the office gossip to appreciate the situation, “just the usual distraction with a pretty bird.” But when Jane arrived home unexpectedly and discovered Paul and the girl in bed together, that was the line in the sand. The relationship was “broken off, finished,” as she described it on a popular TV chat show.