by Barry Miles
The way the companies were set up meant that all the directors resigned each year and were reappointed. When Klein moved in, he made sure that Peter Brown and Neil Aspinall were not reappointed. Klein could not believe that they were not all motivated by greed and the desire to be the most powerful man in the company, but they weren’t; most of them were motivated by misplaced loyalty to the Beatles – they would do anything for them, working incredibly long hours to achieve the impossible and receiving scant praise for doing so. As can be seen above, Apple was a typical sixties company: all the bosses, without exception, were men, and all the secretaries were women, and without the women very little would have ever been done there.
The Beatles had encountered strong opposition to the sleeve of Sgt Pepper from EMI – on the grounds of cost – and felt that EMI were out of touch with them and with the youth record market. Apple was seen as a way of controlling their own ‘brand’ as it would now be called. All along they had wanted to release more controversial and experimental material – John and Yoko’s Two Virgins being the best example, which EMI had refused point-blank to distribute – and the Zapple division was created specifically to do this.
Before Apple: Ringo Starr, George Harrison and John Lennon share a joke with an unknown man outside Teddington Studios, west London, in 1964.
The Beatles performed regularly at Teddington, most memorably in February 1964, when they arrived by boat to appear on the Big Night Out show and were ferried from the riverside in an open-top Porsche; the boys were flying high that night after their success in the USA, paving the way for their future transatlantic music and business adventures.
Chapter 1
‘Z’ is for Zapple
EARLY IN SPRING 1968 Apple Records placed advertisements in the music press written by Derek Taylor that read:
‘A’ is for Apple, ‘Z’ is for Zapple. Introducing Zapple, a new label from Apple Records.
For about a year now Apple has been producing pop records. And it’s done quite well too, with artists like Mary Hopkin, Jackie Lomax and, of course, the Beatles.
Many people have asked, why don’t we try something different for a change? Enough pop is enough, they’ve said.
Well, we don’t want Apple to become a ‘one-product company’ any more than anyone else does.
So we’ve done something about it.
This something is called Zapple.
What’s Zapple about?
We want to publish all sorts of sounds. Some of these sounds will be spoken, some electronic, some classical. We’ll be producing recorded interviews too. Some of the people we put on record will be well known, some not so well known.
This means that you’ll get plenty of variety. We don’t want Zapple to become a one-track record label.
We’ll publish almost anything providing it’s valid and good. We’re not going to put out rubbish, at any price.
What will Zapple cost?
We decided to divide the Zapple label into three price categories. These prices will depend by and large on the contents and production costs of the album. If the album doesn’t cost much to produce then you won’t pay much. The three price categories are as follows:
15/- (ZAP)
21/- (ZAPREC)
37/5 (ZAPPLE)
The first two Zapples will be out May 26th.
One’s by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It’s called ‘Life with the Lions: Unfinished Music No. 2’.
The other’s by George Harrison. It’s called ‘Electronic Sound’. This is a new thing for George. It’s all done on a machine called the Moog Synthesizer. One side’s called ‘Under the Mersey Wall’. The other’s called ‘No Time or Space’.
The third Zapple album will be by American poet Richard Brautigan. It’ll be called ‘Listening to Richard Brautigan’. We’re hoping to release it soon along with one other, which we’ve yet to decide on.
Where to buy Zapples.
Zapples should be on sale in most leading record shops and some bookshops. If you’re not sure what a ‘leading’ record shop is and whether there’s one near you, fill in the coupon below and pop it in the post to us.
Not only will we tell you where to get hold of a Zapple but we’ll keep you informed about future Zapples.
Our future Zapples will include records by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg and American comedian Lord Buckley.
So listen to Zapple. It’s something else again.
The advertisement ended with a coupon giving Jack Oliver’s name and the address of Apple at 3 Savile Row. In the USA Jack’s address was given as 1750 North Vine, Hollywood, Calif. 90028, the address of the Capitol Tower, the US subsidiary of EMI Records, distributors of Apple and Zapple records.
Zapple’s roots went back even earlier than those of its parent company Apple. It came from a Paul McCartney project back in the winter of 1965–6.
I knew Paul from the Indica Books and Gallery project. I had been the manager of Better Books, on Charing Cross Road, an avant-garde bookshop that specialized in French film, modern poetry, experimental art and theatre. There were film shows and poetry readings including one by Allen Ginsberg and another by Lawrence Ferlinghetti that I organized. The owner, Tony Godwin, had decided to sell it and move to New York, and it looked as if the avant-garde and experimental sides of the shop would cease to be. I decided to start my own bookshop and almost immediately connected with artist and critic John Dunbar, who was looking to start his own art gallery. It seemed obvious that we should combine forces, and John brought in an old friend of his, Peter Asher, who provided the initial money for the venture. Peter was one half of Peter and Gordon, a successful duo who had recently had a number-one hit in both the USA and the UK. Together we formed a company called Miles, Asher and Dunbar Ltd (MAD) and began to look for premises that would be suitable for both an art gallery and a bookshop. Indica Books and Gallery (yes, it was named after Cannabis indica) was started in August 1965 on £2,000, of which Peter Asher put in £1,400 and I put in £600 worth of books; I had an arrangement with Tony Godwin to buy stock from him at a trade discount and to be able to order books from publishers using his account. He had sold Better Books and approved very much of the idea of Indica and wanted to help us as much as he could.
Peter Asher stands outside Indica during the construction period. The cloth in the window was put up to stop people looking in at Paul McCartney, who helped to paint the walls and put up shelves.
Peter walks away from the crowd towards the camera, while playing host outside an Indica private-view party in Mason’s Yard. The gallery became known for its cutting-edge exhibitions, and those ‘in the know’ flocked to its private parties.
In the meantime I began to assemble the stock for the bookshop in the basement music room of Peter’s parents’ house at 57 Wimpole Street. Peter still lived at home then, as did his sister, the actress Jane Asher. Peter had an L-shaped room on the top floor, and in the smaller room next door (once a maid’s room), directly above Jane’s bedroom, lived Jane’s boyfriend, Paul McCartney. He had been there for several years, ever since the Beatles moved to London from Liverpool in 1963. Paul took an immediate interest in the book stock, and sometimes, late at night, when he got in from a club or a gig, he would browse through the books and leave me a note to say which ones he had taken. He was Indica’s first customer.
John Dunbar found premises next to The Scotch of St James’s, a club in Mason’s Yard, off Duke Street, St James’s. This was the appropriate area for the gallery because it was where the few modern art galleries that London had were located, one or two streets either side of Piccadilly. Paul McCartney yet again took an active role, preparing the walls, filling in holes with polymer filling, painting walls and helping put up the shelves. We had to whitewash the windows to stop crowds gathering to watch. Peter reported that Paul had been behaving in a suspicious way and would not let anyone into his room. We joked that he must have a groupie holed up in there. Then, on the
day the bookshop opened, Paul pulled up in his Aston Martin and heaved a large, heavy package out from the back seat. He had designed and had printed wrapping paper for the shop – 5,000 sheets of it. He had hand-lettered the name and address of the shop in black and white and composed them in the shape of a Union Jack – very sixties. It was a terrific gift, and he was correct in thinking that we had not thought to provide ourselves with wrapping paper, so it was very welcome.
In addition to the books I assembled in the music room, I also lent Paul magazines and books: Big Table magazine from Chicago, Evergreen Review from New York, New Departures from London, Paris Review and the like, all featuring Beat Generation or avant-garde work by Samuel Beckett, John Cage, Jack Kerouac, Cornelius Cardew, William Burroughs, Jean Genet and their circle. He enjoyed At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brian and Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry.
In those days it was Paul who was the avant-garde one. While John Lennon stayed at home in the stockbroker belt, Paul and Jane Asher attended premières and first nights; Jane had been a child actress and knew a large number of film and theatre people. Through Indica Gallery Paul met artists such as Takis and bought one of his ‘Signals’ – a red-and-blue light mounted on thin metal wands, person-height. Inspired by Paul, John and George also bought one. Unimpressed, Ringo had his chauffeur knock one up in the workshop of his garage. Paul called them ‘Peter and Gordon’ because the red light was the shorter of the two (Peter had red hair) – typical Beatle irreverent humour. Gallery owner Robert Fraser introduced him to a number of his artists, including Peter Blake and Eduardo Paolozzi, and he bought examples of their work. He attended private views of Claes Oldenburg and Richard Hamilton, and on one occasion Fraser took Andy Warhol round to Paul’s house and they screened Chelsea Girls for him and a bunch of friends using two projectors; Paul was impressed that Warhol didn’t seem to be particularly bothered about getting the two projectors in sync.
At my flat Paul listened to Blue Beat records (Shenley Duffus, ‘Duck Soup’ by Drumbago, the Charms, Derrick and Patsy, Prince Buster and the All Stars) as well as John Cage’s Indeterminacy – a set of texts, some longer than others but all read aloud by Cage in two minutes: for some he had to read very quickly, others very slowly. One crowd-pleaser, after a few joints, was a two-volume Folkways recording of a ceremony held in a Japanese Zen monastery. One track consisted of a bell that rang once a minute; the build-up of tension waiting for the bell to ring was palpable and the relief immediate and hilarious. I had a lot of records by Albert Ayler on ESP and Danish Debut, Pharoah Saunders, the two ESP recordings by Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra, Ron Blake and the controversial (at the time) Free Jazz album by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet: thirty-eight minutes of spontaneous collective inspiration by two reeds, two bassists, two drummers and two trumpets. It was this album that inspired Paul to suggest that if you were in complete control of your consciousness you would be able to differentiate between audio sounds so completely that you could release a record with Beethoven on the left stereo and the Beatles on the right, playing simultaneously. He said:
I remember one of our ideas was to master two records on to a thing and all you would do in the future was, you’d just switch out one of them with your brain. You’d say, ‘I’m not listening to the Beethoven, I’m listening to the Beatles’, but they would be both going on. So this was . . . cheap, cheerful, good value for money. You had to be able to switch one of them out.1
He was sure that the brain was capable of deciding which one to listen to and had the ability to flip between one and the other: in other words, a typical sixties stoned conversation. Other favourites included the IBM 7090 computer singing ‘Bicycle Made for Two’ and Luciano Berio’s electronic music compositions based on speeded up and collaged tape-recordings. In Paul’s own words, he was walking around town ‘with his antenna out’ absorbing information and ideas, filing them away for future use. Of course he was also imparting information; I learned far more about music listening to him talk and explain then he did from browsing his way through my record collection.
Paul’s reaction to the experimental literary magazines I lent him was to envisage an audio equivalent. One September evening in 1965 Peter Asher and Paul were visiting me and my wife Sue at our flat in Hanson Street. We were talking about how difficult it was for people to find out what was happening at the experimental end of the arts when Paul suggested an audio magazine that would come out monthly or even fortnightly, and instead of a review of a poetry reading or a book there would be a recording of the reading or the author reading from the book. The idea would be for an editor to gather in recordings of all that month’s most interesting cultural activity, be it a scientific lecture or an obscure performance at the Wigmore Hall. Paul said:
Instead of reading in Melody Maker that there was a great jam session down the Bag O’Nails and that Eric Burdon and Georgie Fame were playing together, there would be a recording of it . . . We could even have really important things from the BBC Third Programme that people might have missed. Have it available on subscription as cheap as it possibly could be. We should be able to put it out really cheap, what with the vast resources of EMI and NEMS!2
It was all very exciting. The problem was that none of us had time to actually do it. Between Peter and myself we could have edited it without too much trouble, but, as to actually making all the recordings and getting copyright clearances from people’s managements and from copyright holders, that was a full-time job. However, Paul felt sure that NEMS could handle the paperwork. It was just a question of the recordings.
Our stoned discussions, which were sometimes held at John Dunbar’s and Marianne Faithfull’s flat at 29 Lennox Gardens in Knightsbridge, had led us into the fantasy world of a radio station, a television station and a newspaper. However, in the reality of daytime practicality we scaled down our ambitions a bit and decided that we could record the initial issues of the audio magazine ourselves and that later we could branch out into live recordings and extracts from BBC plays and so on which would all involve complex negotiations.
It would have made most sense to make an arrangement with Northern Songs, Lennon and McCartney’s music publishers, to use their demo studios for the project, but we didn’t think of that, or if we did the idea was probably rejected because we would be largely working in the evenings and night-time, whereas Denmark Street would be strictly daytime. I mentioned that my friend Ian Sommerville might be able to do the job of running a recording studio as he was the person who recorded the three spoken-word albums that I had produced earlier that summer: Allen Ginsberg Reading at Better Books, Lawrence Ferlinghetti Reading at Better Books and Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and Andrei Voznesensky Reading at the Architectural Association. Earlier in the year Ian had recorded and produced William Burroughs’s first album, Call Me Burroughs, in the cave beneath the English Bookshop in Paris and had been the technical brains behind the cut-up tapes that William Burroughs and Brion Gysin had been producing ever since 1960. Ian was gaunt, with sandy-brown hair that stood on end as he constantly ran his fingers through it in a nervous gesture. He had a degree in mathematics from Cambridge and was living in a hotel in Earls Court with William Burroughs, who had just returned to London after nine months in New York. Ian was also the man we employed to install the electrical wiring for the bookshop-gallery, so he had already met John Dunbar and Peter Asher.
A meeting was arranged at my flat to try to get the project started. I used the living-room as a painting studio, and the only lighting was a daylight fluorescent fitting that was uncomfortably bright for a meeting. However, Peter, Paul, Jane, Sue and I made ourselves comfortable as best we could, and everyone but Jane got high while Ian, for some reason, explained the principle of floating equations. Peter seemed interested, but it passed over the heads of the rest of us. Eventually we got him to calculate how much it would cost to equip a basic studio. Ian, still looking rather nervous, made a list: two Revox 736 tape-recorders, a
pair of microphones with stands, amplifiers, speakers, a stock of tape, spare tape reels, a de-gauzer, editing block, blades, a cassette machine to make copies, a record player and various cables and bits and pieces. He wrote it all out in his beautiful copper-plate writing along with an approximate costing of each and a total. He was expecting to discuss and justify each item – the Revoxes were about £150 each – but Paul gave the list a quick glance and returned it to Ian saying he should call Brian Epstein at a certain number and the payment would be taken care of. Done, just like that.
Miles and Peter Asher pose outside Indica’s new premises at 102 Southampton Row for a feature in 16, an American pop music magazine (an edition of which can be seen in the window display).
John Dunbar looks down on his son Nicholas, who is playing on the steps leading to Indica’s gallery from the bookshop. John, who was married to Marianne Faithfull, was a leading figure in the counterculture art movement. When Indica Gallery folded, he became an artist and collector.
We still didn’t know where this studio was to be located, but a day or two later Paul called in great excitement. Brian Epstein had bought an office building just one block from the Indica Gallery off Duke Street, St James’s, and Paul had arranged with Brian that he, Peter, John Dunbar, Ian Sommerville and I were to have the top floor. The building came equipped with a fast modern lift, still a rarity in Britain. There was a reception room already furnished with a television and a carpet and an office where we could handle the paperwork, with a room leading off it that could house the studio. Paul was discussing plans for the studio with Epstein, as this was likely to be something rather more permanent than we had envisaged and would be used for auditions and as a demo studio for Brian’s groups. It would need to be soundproofed and have mixing facilities, a lathe to make acetates and so on. Ian had estimated that it would cost about £9,000 to install all this.