by Bob Spitz
Once again, it was rapidly shaping up as a Paul McCartney project. He was directing the cameramen, choosing the songs, blocking the arrangements as if they were classical scores. He worked frantically trying to fire up enthusiasm. But the way he controlled every aspect didn’t allow anyone else to contribute. “We put down a few tracks, but nobody was in[to] it at all,” John said.
George, especially, found it “stifling.” He had been growing frustrated and disillusioned with the interactions of the group for some time. As usual, the songs he’d written were being ignored. But nothing galled him more than his loss of creativity as a musician. George felt he absorbed more than the others what an insufferable dictator Paul had become, instructing him exactly what to play, as well as how and when to play it, indifferent to his or anyone else’s input. John would simply tell Paul to fuck off, but so far George was not up to the task. “I had always let him have his own way,” he recalled, “even when this meant that songs, which I had composed, were not being recorded.” In fact, on the last few albums, he’d played as a relative sideman for Paul, a role he cited as being particularly “painful.” He’d been promised that playing “live,” so to speak, would eliminate such heavy-handedness. But by the second week of rehearsals, Paul was cracking the whip and George’s patience had gone.
On January 10 there was a tense and hostile morning session during which Paul badgered George about how to play a simple guitar solo. George glared at him, lighting a cigarette in the interim while the anger and frustration building over the past ten days finally boiled to the surface. “Look, I’ll play whatever you want me to play, or I won’t play at all,” he grunted between clenched teeth. “Whatever it is that’ll please you, I’ll do it!” Later, on the lunch break, the two Beatles squared off in the studio canteen. George had taken enough shit and refused to continue recording in the same manner. It was too degrading, too painful. Paul, as usual, dismissed his grievances as “petty.” As their tempers rose, the movie cameras moved in for close-ups, right in their faces, filming the miserable confrontation as though part of a soap opera. “What am I doing here?” George wondered. All the niggling directions—play it slower, come in sooner, hit it harder—seemed suddenly unbearable. He fought the futility of it with rage. “I’m not doing this anymore. I’m out of here.” He packed up his guitar, snapping the case shut with sharp, angry blows. “That’s it,” he said, struggling into his jacket and heading toward the door, “see you ’round the clubs.”
When the recording session resumed that afternoon, sans George Harrison, the remaining three Beatles started to jam, a really violent, off-key bashing meant to take the edge off their frustration. The intensity of it was impossible to ignore. They pummeled and tore at their instruments as never before. Ferocious strains of feedback and distortion surged through the damp soundstage. “Our reaction was really, really interesting at the time,” Ringo noted. How else could they process all that had happened? Was it realistic to expect them to produce meaningful music without George? Yoko didn’t wait for an invitation to fill the void. She immediately laid claim to George’s chair and blue cushion. Looking quite pleased with the ominous events, flashing a fierce, tenacious smile, she jumped into the smoky spotlight, clutching the mike with both hands and screeching into it like a wounded animal. Reflexively, the high-strung musicians turned up the heat. For the moment, the Beatles served as her chastened backup band. Some bystanders stared in disbelief. The others, especially Paul and Ringo, may have missed the implication of Yoko’s grand triumph, but they understood her well enough to know that it had nothing to do with music.
George did not return at all that Friday, or the next day. Paul and Ringo expressed concern that he was calling it quits, whereas John suffered no such sympathy. “I think if George doesn’t come back by Monday or Tuesday,” he told Michael Lindsay-Hogg, “we’ll ask Eric Clapton to play. Eric would be pleased…. [H]e’d have enough scope to play the guitar. The point is, George leaves and do we want to carry on the Beatles? I certainly do.” When Lindsay-Hogg suggested they explain George’s absence by saying he was sick, John only hardened his position. “If he leaves, he leaves, you know…. If he doesn’t come back by Tuesday, we get Clapton…. We should go on as if nothing’s happened.”
On Sunday, January 12, all four Beatles met at Ringo’s house to discuss the apparent impasse. It was essential, they all decided, to bury the hatchet. Halfway through their talk, however, negotiations broke down and George stomped out, slamming the door as he left. A few hours later he was in the car, heading to Liverpool for a visit.
At first, the rest of the Beatles tried to shrug it off as a passing emotional outburst, throwing themselves dutifully into another round of rehearsals. But by Tuesday, things had reached a critical stage. Paul, unsure of what they should do, dismissed the film crew “as a matter of policy.” It was pointless for them to continue without George. In a heated five-hour meeting the next day, at the Savile Row offices, George laid down the terms for his return. If they wanted him to finish the record, they’d have to abandon all plans for a live concert and leave Twickenham. He had no intention of participating in either fiasco.
Without much choice, the other Beatles caved in to his demands. Logistics for the concert had become too much trouble anyway, and they agreed that Twickenham wasn’t working out as expected. But they dreaded returning to Abbey Road. The punishing White Album sessions were too fresh in their mind. They’d felt like prisoners there during those contentious five months. A new record required new, upbeat surroundings, some place different, some place with no history of conflict, a fresh slate where the Beatles could concentrate on doing what they did best: making music. But where? Every studio in the city was booked through the spring.
The right studio—the only studio, in John’s opinion—was their own, the one Magic Alex was building for them in the basement of Apple. Wasn’t that, after all, what they had commissioned it for? Besides, it would be like working at home. They wouldn’t have to travel; their staff was right upstairs; they could keep an eye on the business. The suggestion must have sounded like an ideal solution. Typically, no one questioned its feasibility. After talking it over with about as much detail as they’d give to, say, ordering dinner, the matter was settled. On January 20, with a week off to get everything in order, they would begin recording a new album in a place that not only felt like home but bore the family name: Apple Studios.
But Apple Studios, as it turned out, was nothing more than a name. Alex’s seventy-two-track marvel was, in George’s words, “the biggest disaster of all time.” The place was a shambles, with all of Alex’s wildest schemes woven into the loose, laid-back fabric of Apple’s tapestry. Somehow, seventy-two tracks had dwindled down to a neat, sweet sixteen—twice the number available at Abbey Road—patched together by a dense thicket of wires that snaked across the floor. The accompanying speakers were nailed haphazardly to the walls. “We bought some huge computers from British Aerospace… and put them in my barn,” recalled Ringo, “… but they never left that barn” and were eventually sold for scrap. According to George Martin’s AIR studio manager, “the mixing console was made of bits of wood and an old oscilloscope. It looked like the control panel of a B-52 bomber.” The building’s ancient heating system, conveniently located in a closet next door, rumbled through the walls, no doubt to complement the “very nasty twitter” from the air-conditioning unit. There was no soundproofing, and Alex had somehow forgotten to invent the invisible sonic screen that he promised would replace the trusty old studio baffles needed to prevent sound leakage into the mikes.
When George Martin arrived to inspect the facilities, he was stunned by the condition of the studios. “They were hopeless,” he declared, traipsing from room to room as though inspecting a recent bomb site. “In fact, Magic Alex, for all his technical expertise, had forgotten to put any holes in the wall between the studio and control room,” which made it impossible to run the necessary electrical cables for the recordi
ng equipment.
Despite Alex’s epic failure, the Beatles seemed more determined than ever to utilize their own studio. “You’d better put some equipment in, then,” they instructed Martin, who, always eager to indulge them, borrowed a pair of mobile four-track mixing consoles from EMI and installed them in Apple’s basement.
The proposed album itself was another matter. For the purpose of focus and vitality, the Beatles decided to scrap the twenty-nine hours of tape recorded at Twickenham and start from scratch. Even with the benefit of the rehearsals, the Beatles were still experimenting with concepts, trying to hit on an interesting approach that would provide the necessary edge. This much they knew: it had to be stripped down and largely spontaneous to give the illusion of a live performance without terrorizing the band. And more than ever they endeavored to delve into their past to get the old magic back, the long-suppressed authentic sound of rock ’n roll. Emphasizing that point for George Martin, John warned rudely: “I don’t want any of your production shit. We want this to be an honest album.” Martin, who was offended by the implication, managed to hold his tongue. With no idea how to proceed—“I assumed all their albums had been honest,” he quipped wryly—he merely asked John to describe their idea of an honest album and was told: “I don’t want any editing. I don’t want any overdubbing. It’s got to be like it is. We just record the song and that’s it.”
Martin’s role was tenuous enough without imposing more restrictions. Insecure about their future and eager to appear in control of it, the Beatles now sought to distance themselves from anyone tethered to the past. There was a growing suspicion among the four musicians that members of the old entourage were living off them, not only financially but creatively as well. This rap could hardly be applied to George Martin, who earned practically nothing from their records, nor sought to capitalize on their fame. But they feared that his ever-growing celebrity as their producer was creating a false impression about his contribution to their success. Recently John had grumbled to the press that Martin was more or less a cipher and argued against “all those rumors that he actually was the brains behind the Beatles.” It also enraged him that Martin filled up the Yellow Submarine album with bland instrumental interludes—John dismissed them as “terrible shit”—that were composed for orchestra. And later he complained to Rolling Stone about people, “a bit like Martin, who think they made us.” As a result, Paul invited überproducer Glyn Johns, who had worked with the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, and Traffic, to “assist” as a balance engineer during the new sessions, a maneuver that drove Martin ignominiously to the sidelines. If he was stung or humiliated, Martin refused to let it show, although it is clear that he was absent for many of the sessions, either by necessity or by choice.
Recording began in earnest on January 22, 1969, and rolled on for nearly a week in a knockabout fashion. A series of bluesy, impromptu jams paced the daily sessions, with the Beatles running through a lineup of old Liverpool and Hamburg standbys that reverberated through the halls. They played “Save the Last Dance for Me,” “Bye Bye Love,” “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” “Kansas City,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Miss Ann,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Tracks of My Tears,” and “Not Fade Away,” all of which received a thoroughly modern update. The interaction was far more animated than it had been earlier in the month. Part of the upbeat atmosphere could be attributed to the studio’s feeling like an informal clubhouse. “The facilities at Apple were great,” Ringo recalled. “It was so comfortable and it was ours, like home.”
As the week progressed, their rising outlooks coalesced into an album. Paul and John both brought in a fair number of original songs that ignited the Beatles to play tighter and harder. “Get Back” was an obvious crowd-pleaser, a “kickass track,” in Ringo’s estimation, that presented itself as a shuffle but ultimately demolished the form with accented rhythmic jabs and reversals that charge the groove with irrepressible force. Paul had written most of the melody the week before, during breaks at Twickenham. The playfulness of it immediately attracted John’s interest, and he collaborated on the words, seizing on the rising racial hostility in England between Pakistani immigrants and the National Front. Behind the good-timey boogie of licks and leaps lies a spikey little lyric as barbed as any of the Beatles’ sharp asides. One line—“Don’t dig no Pakistani taking all the people’s jobs”—was deemed too hot, while an abandoned third verse, especially, caught the inflammatory mood:
Meanwhile back at home too many Pakistanis
Living in a council flat
Candidate Macmillan tell me what your plan is
Won’t you tell me where it’s at
It was a good piece of social parody, but Paul and John worried it would be misconstrued and used to paint the Beatles as racists. After 1970 most of John’s songs, in particular, would bristle with topical references, but for now their artistic energies were directed elsewhere.
Another of Paul’s contributions, the spare, engaging “Two of Us,” set up another duet with John, and although it was a paean to Linda Eastman, the boys’ perfectly balanced harmonies, with voices wrapped around each other like security blankets, established a disarming performance that recalls the synergy of earlier albums.
There seemed to be a renewed sense of teamwork in the friendlier setting. But as the week wore on, as competition revived and the stakes were raised, egos collided anew. Yoko’s interference continued to make a bad situation worse. More than ever, according to George, she was putting out “negative vibes.” Between the Beatles’ takes, John withdrew further from the group fold, whispering in studio corners with Yoko, missing cues, often not showing up on time for a session and refusing to apologize for it. His mood vacillated wildly between the wittiness of previous occasions and the dark self-doubts fed and fueled by Yoko. Throughout the recording he was increasingly nervous and apprehensive. “It was a very tense period,” Paul recalled. He attributed much of John’s erratic behavior to heroin use “and all the accompanying paranoias.” In vastly different interviews about the period, both Paul and George used the identical phrase to describe the situation, saying John was “out on a limb,” dangling dangerously above the abyss, headed for a certain fall. “Don’t Let Me Down,” Paul believed, was “a genuine plea… a genuine cry for help.” (In fact, John said, “That’s me singing about Yoko.”) With his painfully thin frame, gaunt face, stringy, unkempt hair, and bloodshot eyes, John looked demonic, like a zombie had claimed his tormented soul. He needed help—just not from the Beatles; he wouldn’t accept their assistance, it was out of the question. “I don’t think he wanted much to be hanging out with us,” George explained, “and I think Yoko was pushing him out of the band.”
Of that, there seems little doubt. For someone who desired more interaction with the Beatles, Yoko acted resentful, even scornful toward them. She found the band to be “very childish.” As different as it seemed to mainstream ears, to her there was nothing daring about it, and she hooked right into John’s own lingering doubts about his creative powers and self-fulfillment.
For months he’d been questioning the limits of his potential, wondering how much he’d sacrificed by blending into a group. Though John continued to participate in group decisions and record with the Beatles, their sound was something he “didn’t believe in” anymore. He was just going through the motions, “just [doing] it like a job,” he explained. Musically, he was “fed up with the same old shit.” He felt constrained by the simplicity and limited format of the pop song. Somehow, he’d abandoned the element of risk. Yoko may not have been much of a musician, but she had the scene down cold and knew what to say in order to discredit it in his eyes. She told John exactly what he wanted to hear: that he was a genius, “better than Picasso”; the others were “insecure”; they weren’t “sophisticated, intellectually”; they were dead, artistically; they were holding him back. What, she wanted to know, was he going to do next?
Not since Elvis Pres
ley had anyone held such power over John—but Yoko, unlike a symbol, was in a position to use it. “Yoko had him under her spell,” recalls Tony Bramwell. “She was always in his ear, telling him what to do, how to sing. If she couldn’t get into the act, she was certainly going to influence it through John.” Out of these discussions, many of them in the studio, many of them while high on a dangerous drug, John’s antipathy toward the Beatles solidified.
John quickly changed the atmosphere in the studio. Once again the Beatles started banging heads; “they started picking on each other,” according to John, or rather, picking one another apart. All of them, except perhaps Ringo, belittled the others’ suggestions, complaining about someone’s contribution—“You’re not playing that right” or “That doesn’t go there”—blaming one another for the failings of a song. “I started to feel it wasn’t a good idea to have ideas,” Paul recalled, although he certainly did his share to inflame the situation.
George tried to defuse the explosive tension by bringing in a guest musician, the way he’d done with Eric Clapton on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” On January 19 he and Clapton had gone to a Ray Charles concert at the Festival Hall and recognized a young musician sent out to warm up the crowd. George hadn’t seen Billy Preston since Hamburg, when he was a sixteen-year-old wunderkind in Little Richard’s backup band. The Beatles had always been fond of Billy. George knew they’d get a kick out of seeing him again, so he invited Billy to sit in with them at Apple Studios the following day.
What George thought he was doing is impossible to say. He may have been hoping Billy’s presence would help generate some civility or at least “offset the vibes,” the negative vibes, that had been directed at him. Then again, he’d listened to the lethargic playbacks from their first few efforts and no doubt figured Billy’s keyboard might light up the band. Hoping to redirect the Beatles’ focus and sharpen their lackluster performance, Martin rolled Billy right into their work on “Get Back,” which seemed to mobilize the detached elements with a playful complement of electric piano figures, bringing a whole new energy to the song. Ringo appreciated how, when Billy joined the session, “the bullshit went out the window”; otherwise, he felt there was little upside to bringing him into the recording process. Paul welcomed the contribution—at first. He thought Billy “played great” and helped stabilize, however temporarily, his crumbling relationship with John. “It was like having a guest in the house,” he explained, “someone you put your best manners on for…. It might have helped us all behave better with one another on the sessions.” But as with any guest, as time wore on, Paul felt Preston overstayed his welcome. Billy turned up at the studio day after day, participating in everything from the direction of the music to deciding where, or even whether, they would stage a concert. Paul found this intrusion “a little bit puzzling,” to say nothing of presumptuous. Sitting in with the Beatles was one thing; joining them was another. Although many had claimed the title—Brian Epstein, George Martin, and Murray the K, to name a few—there was no room in the band for a “fifth Beatle.” Paul felt the same way when John had suggested replacing George with Eric Clapton; he never would have agreed to it—never. The Beatles had a legacy to protect. As far as he cared, they were—and always would be—John, Paul, George, and Ringo.