by Barry Miles
When the world went mad over the supposed death of Paul McCartney. In September–October 1969 rumours that Paul McCartney had died and that the Beatles had covered it up began to spread like wildfire across the world. Fans analysed records and album covers endlessly for clues substantiating the theory. Finally Paul, who had been living quietly in Scotland with his family, did an in-depth interview with Life magazine to quell the rumours, although conspiracy theorists continued to speculate. This special edition Paul McCartney Dead: The Great Hoax magazine was published in the USA in late 1969 by Country Wide Publications, New York City. Courtesy of the Mark Naboshek Collection.
The consumption of drink in the press office was listed by Chris O’Dell in her memoir Miss O’Dell. In one two-week period they consumed eight bottles of J&B Scotch, four bottles of Courvoisier, three bottles of vodka, forty-eight lagers, ninety-six Coca-Colas, twenty-four ginger ales, twenty-four bitter lemons, twelve tonic waters, twelve tomato juices, thirty-six bottles of lime juice and six hundred cigarettes. There was also a fairly large block of hash that was not on her list. In fact the press office expenses cost nothing in comparison to even one trip by one of the directors: first class to New York, best hotel, expensive dining with the finest wines for a group of record business executives. None the less, Paul began making lists of who did what, intending to cut out some of the dead wood.
There were vague attempts made to cut back on spending. Instead of the expensive restaurant bills, they hired Penny, a Cordon Bleu cook, so that the Beatles and the directors could eat in. Few of the staff utilized her culinary skills: Lennon wanted jam butties, Ringo wanted ‘soldiers’ (buttered toast cut in strips with the crusts cut off) that he dipped into soft boiled eggs and ate with a cup of tea, George sometimes called for a cup of Earl Grey from Fortnum’s but usually went for an omelette and chips at lunch. Penny sometimes knocked out a soufflé for them, but they would call down later and say they were still hungry so could she send up some chips. She was wasted on them, but other members of staff quickly realized what was on offer and sent up their requests. However, as far as business was concerned, everything seemed to be going well: ‘Hey Jude’, the first Beatles record released on their own label, went to number one. Then, on 18 October, John and Yoko were busted.
Paul’s and John’s appearance on television offering to help anyone who needed money for a project had resulted in an endless stream of people, all demanding attention. Some were satisfied with a drink or a joint or some free records, some received a small amount of money, and others had to be escorted, swearing, from the building.
John and Yoko, leaving court surrounded by police in 19 October 1968 after John’s hearing for possession of drugs. The hearing lasted only five minutes with bail being granted. However, when they left Marylebone Magistrates’ Court they realized that their car was not ready to pick them up, and John tried to shield the pregnant Yoko from the scrum of press, who were outside waiting for them.
Chapter 4
Blue Meanies
JOHN AND YOKO WERE living in Ringo’s old flat in Montagu Square, where Paul’s experimental studio had been located a few years before. They had advance warning; the police usually tipped off Fleet Street if a celebrity bust was coming up so they could send a reporter and photographer (a service that was of course paid for, but clearly neither the press nor the police were going to complain about it). Don Short, the showbusiness correspondent from the Daily Mirror, called John and told him what was coming up. Cleaning flats was not something that John and Yoko did, so John had imperiously called his old school friend Pete Shotton and asked him to do it. This was not the first time it had happened. As Tony Bramwell, Apple employee and a friend of Lennon’s and Shotton’s since the early days in Liverpool, recalled, ‘Pete went reluctantly because his feelings had been deeply wounded by the arrogant way John and Yoko treated him, calling upon him to clean up the pigsty of an apartment when the mess got too much for them. The final straw came when he was expected to do Yoko’s laundry. He had said to John, “John, it’s me, Pete – remember?” before storming off. Nevertheless, he was there when John needed him. They’d gone through the flat like a whirlwind, getting rid of the traces of every drug. Pete was carrying out piles of trash when Yoko turned up. “Get rid of him!” she screamed to John.’1 Pete felt that he would have probably found the small stashes of cannabis that Pilcher’s sniffer dog, Willy, discovered, but it did not matter much whether the pot was all found and disposed of because Pilcher was well known to always bring his own, just in case. In fact he later spent time in jail for planting evidence.
Detective Sergeant Pilcher and his gang of heavies found half an ounce of cannabis. In court Mr Frisby for the prosecution said a cigarette rolling machine was found on top of a bathroom mirror, a film canister and a cigarette case were found in the bedroom and were said to contain traces of cannabis resin. The police found about one and a half grams of cannabis in an envelope in a suitcase, and a little over a gram was found in a binocular case nosed out by a police sniffer dog. On 28 November 1968 Lennon, who pleaded guilty of sole possession, was fined £150 with 20 guineas of costs at Marylebone Magistrates’ Court. It was to be the cause of the years of problems that Lennon went on to have with the American immigration authorities. It was fortunate that heroin was not found or else his problems in the USA might have been significantly worse.
John downplayed his addiction in an interview with Rolling Stone, saying, ‘I never injected it or anything. We sniffed a little when we were in real pain. We got such a hard time from everyone, and I’ve had so much thrown at me, and at Yoko, especially at Yoko . . . We took “H” because of what the Beatles and others were doing to us. But we got out of it.’2 Of course it doesn’t matter how you take it, you are still an addict. As William Burroughs memorably said, ‘You can shoot it, sniff it or shove it up your ass, it doesn’t matter. It’s still junk and you’re still a junkie.’3
John’s and Yoko’s heroin addiction presented a number of problems because, like most junkies, they were very manipulative. John wanted his way on which tracks of his were to appear on the White Album and was prepared to do deals in order to achieve what he wanted. He told Rolling Stones’s Jann Wenner:
I did a job on this banker that we were using, and on a few other people, and on the Beatles . . . How do you describe the job? You know, you know, my job – I maneuver people. That’s what leaders do, and I sit and make situations, which will be of benefit to me with other people, it’s as simple as that. I had to do a job to get Allen [Klein] in Apple. I did a job, so did Yoko . . . Maneuvering is what it is, let’s not be coy about it. It is a deliberate and thought-out maneuver of how to get a situation the way we want it. That’s how life’s about, isn’t it, is it not?
This attitude extended into John’s, and through John, into Yoko’s way of dealing with Apple. They used it largely as a vehicle for their own ideas and projects and had little interest in the other Apple divisions or the success of other Apple artists.
John and Yoko brought Allen Klein in. Klein began as an accountant. He was famous for finding errors in royalty statements. Klein had some history with the Beatles. In 1964, when he was managing Sam Cooke, he had a meeting with Brian Epstein and said that he had heard that the Beatles’ royalty rates from EMI were ‘for shit’. He told Brian he could get them a million pounds if Brian would let him renegotiate their contract and take a fee. As Peter Brown reported, ‘Brian was royally offended . . . and he had Klein shown to the door’.4 The story of how Klein managed to reach John Lennon is long and complicated, but once he got John and Yoko into his suite at the Dorchester he put on such a convincing act that at the end of the evening Lennon wrote a note to Sir Joseph Lockwood, head of EMI Records, saying, ‘From now on Allen Klein handles all my stuff.’
After the arrival of Allen Klein, John and Yoko began to use Apple as their personal fiefdom. In his memoir Tony Bramwell wrote, ‘From the day Yoko went official as John’s lover, she had anot
her desk and chair moved into his office and started taking over, laying down the law, issuing orders. I have never seen anyone so assured, so completely in control, so much a pain in the ass.’5 By now the Beatles were working on the White Album, but John insisted that Yoko be with him at all times. She sat next to him on the piano stool and sometimes made musical suggestions, much to the repressed fury of the other three Beatles who would never have allowed their partners to make anything other than the occasional visit to a recording session. From time to time John and Yoko would go off to the toilets together. The other Beatles were astonished that John even wanted her with him when he went for a piss, but of course they were going to snort a line of heroin. When Yoko was recovering from her miscarriage a bed was moved into Abbey Road where they were recording the White Album and a microphone suspended above her head in case she wanted to make any comments.
John railed to anyone who would listen that the other Beatles and the staff of Apple hated Yoko because they were racists, but this was not true. As Derek Taylor pointed out, they didn’t hate her, but they didn’t love her either. As for the accusation of racism – musicians and most of the music industry have traditionally always been free of racism and bigotry, although there might have been a residual anti-Japanese feeling (the war had only ended twenty years earlier and stories about Japanese wartime atrocities frequently featured in the newspapers). Still, the real reason that people disliked Yoko was because she ordered them about and sent them on errands in a particularly rude way; she was brought up with servants, and that’s how she treated the staff of Apple. George found it particularly galling that she never gave the Beatles their definite article. He told me, ‘She would say, “Beatles do this” and “Beatles do that”, and we would say, “Uh, it’s the Beatles actually, love.” She’d look at you and say, “Beatles do this.”’ And he laughed and shrugged his shoulders. Whether Yoko was ever aware of the disruption her presence caused to the Beatles’ working practices I don’t know. Some people thought she was so involved in her own work and self-interest that she didn’t notice; others thought that it was a deliberate ploy to separate John off from the others.
The album took from the end of May to the middle of October 1968 to record, and although fraught with difficulties – both George and Ringo walked out at different points – the tension didn’t seem to worry Lennon who contributed some magnificent songs to it such as ‘Goodnight’, a lullaby written for his son Julian, ‘Revolution 1’, ‘Sexy Sadie’ about the Maharishi, ‘Dear Prudence’ about Mia Farrow’s sister who was with them in India, ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’ and ‘Julia’ – the only Beatles song where John performs alone with an acoustic guitar.
John Lennon with his Rickenbacker at a recording session at Teddington Studios. John was the band’s rhythm guitarist, influenced by the Everly Brothers and Ray Charles (at his most melodic). Lennon had a real affinity for Rickenbacker guitars; he bought his first one – a Capri 325 – in Hamburg as early as 1959.
None of the Beatles went to college; in fact Paul was the only one who might have qualified. Their great area of knowledge and learning was popular music. They would travel across Liverpool, changing buses three times, to hear an American single they had heard someone had or to get someone to show them a new chord. They talked music, analysed its structure, discussed vocal techniques, identified individual players on anonymous session musician lineups; they listened to it, they played it and they wrote it. The rest of the world did not command much attention. They were very young when they first began playing Hamburg – George was only seventeen – and being in a band, being ‘the Beatles’, was really the only thing they knew. Once they were managed by Brian Epstein all the normal everyday concerns were taken care of: they didn’t have to cook or to shop for clothes or do anything except get from home to rehearsals, recording sessions, television shows, interviews or performances. Throughout the mad years of Beatlemania they were sheltered from normal life by a Liverpool support bubble consisting of Epstein, their roadies Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall, plus Peter Brown, Alistair Taylor and Tony Bramwell. Between them they took care of all the boys’ needs: they controlled the groupies, filtered the drug dealers, chose couturiers, restrained courtiers and got the Beatles home in one piece. When Brian Epstein unexpectedly died they were cast adrift, their safety bubble burst.
John Lennon had already been showing signs of distress at being a Beatle; his dysfunctional upbringing had given him many demons, and the unnatural pressures of fame were beginning to crack the carapace. He had always been the closest of the Beatles to Brian, whom he regarded in part as his missing father figure, even though Brian was only six years older than him.
The other Beatles held up better initially, but Paul’s break-up with Jane Asher in the summer of 1968 precipitated a crisis for him. Ever since moving to London in April 1963 Paul had lived with Jane for many years at her parents’ home in Wimpole Street, where he had the security of an ordered, upper-middle-class intellectual lifestyle. He had Margaret Asher, Jane’s mother, as his missing mother figure and the emotional security of his relationship with Jane. When Jane found him in her bed with Francie Schwartz, an American groupie, she ended the affair, and Paul appeared to have some sort of breakdown, often showing up at Alistair Taylor’s flat in the middle of the night to cry on his shoulder. But Jane would not have him back, and he was soon with Linda Eastman. However, he never had quite the same self-confidence of the early years again. This affected his approach to Apple, and he managed to alienate many of the devoted staff. Paul arrived one morning in a long overcoat, unshaven and ‘dark in mien and mood’. Paul called a staff meeting in Ron Kass’s room. The staff crowded in and sat or leaned, wondering what he was going to say. Derek Taylor recalled Paul’s opening words:
‘Don’t forget, you’re not very good, any of you. You know that, don’t you?’ I had forgotten, I had. It had gotten to the point where I was really believing in myself, you know, really having a good time being me . . . I don’t think I ever hated anyone as much as I hated Paul in the summer of 1968. Postcards would arrive at my house from America or Scotland or wherever, some outright nasty ones, some with no meaning that I could see, one with a postage stamp, torn in half and pasted neatly showing the gap between the two halves. Joan [Taylor’s wife] received one bearing the words: ‘Tell your boy to obey the school-masters,’ and signed: ‘Patron.’ Far out.6
Paul had no experience in management and must have felt out of his depth: seeing tens of thousands of pounds being spent without proper controls or administration. Although Derek was by no means the worst culprit, Paul was right, there was a cavalier attitude in the press office: the easiest way to fob off someone who arrived and announced themselves as ‘Hitler to see John Lennon’ was to give them a drink. And Derek was probably too expansive in his largesse, but at least he was not selling the lead off the roof, as it turned out that the post boy was: he was always leaving the building with a bulging mail sack so no one suspected until it was too late. Apple desperately needed a man in charge (it was all men in those days). They had a managing director, Neil Aspinall, but were not prepared to let him get on with it. Taylor reported, ‘These were the days when Neil Aspinall as Managing Director would come to my room in Apple in the middle of the day and collapse on the sofa and sit staring and staring. He tells me now it was fear.’7
It was not that the Beatles had been infantilized; just that they had never had a chance to grow up in the normal sense of knowing how much things cost, how to buy a bus ticket, all the everyday things that most people know almost instinctively. They were always ‘the boys’, even after Apple set up they were still ‘the boys’. All of which was why the Beatles were probably the last people in Britain who should have attempted to run a company: they didn’t have the slightest idea of how to go about it, and terrible mistakes were made. They had no knowledge of business or money, no understanding of management or delegation, no concept of budgets or costings or any of the other elements that a
re required to manage a company. They tried to hire people to do those things, but as long as they were all four joint managing directors they constantly countermanded each other’s decisions, bickered and squabbled and made some appalling business choices. According to Derek Taylor, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, their only model for running a company was that of a northern mill owner.
Tensions quickly developed at Apple because there was no one in charge. On a practical level this meant that people like Peter Asher could not do their jobs properly. Peter told Rolling Stone, ‘I was theoretically head of A&R, but I was answering to a board of governors who were never in the same place at the same time. Sometimes I would sign someone and nothing would happen. At the same time, one of the Beatles would sign someone and I didn’t know about it. And they’d always be arguing with each other, and I was on the periphery of all the arguments.’8 He soon found that, although he was head of A&R, he could not go out and sign someone; he needed a quorum of Beatles on his side, at least one but preferably two. The same went for getting approval for the artwork for album and single sleeves; the Beatles would all countermand each other and were never there at the same time to make a joint decision. Sometimes it resulted in direct action. On one occasion George Harrison, outraged to find that a partition he had ordered to be demolished had been reinstalled, found a hammer and smashed down an eight-foot by three-foot panel, showering Sylvia, a secretary, with plaster, wood and nails. By Christmas 1968 the Apple office was struggling to function.
Now it was winter, and Apple was preoccupied by the Christmas and New Year festivities. However, I did manage at some point to corner each individual Beatle and make sure that they all knew – and more importantly approved – of my plan to fly to the USA in January to record as many of the poets on my list as I could for Zapple. George simply said that it was Paul’s and John’s thing and nothing to do with him; I got the sense that he disapproved. Ringo said, ‘Just get on with it’, as if I was interrupting him. John and Yoko said they were ‘behind the project 100 per cent’ but were too busy with their own problems to contribute much to the discussion. Yoko and I did talk a bit about Charlotte Moorman, the ‘topless’ cellist, and Carolee Schneemann and a few other performance artists associated with Fluxus in New York, who we might be able to somehow present on record. Yoko wondered what ‘Fluxus’ George Maciunas would think of that, as he had blacklisted most of the New York female performance artists from his organization. I saw it as a challenge for the future, but we never had a chance to follow it up. When I reached New York I did receive a telegram from John and Yoko suggesting that I record Gregory Corso and Diane di Prima, both of whom were already on the list. These were undoubtedly Yoko’s suggestions. I also worked closely with Ron Kass, head of Apple Records, Derek Taylor and, of course, Peter Asher, who had to approve studio rentals, travel expenses, budget and so on. Finally I telephoned Allen Klein in New York, and he yelled, ‘I expected you here last week. Everything’s arranged! Where were you?’ He hadn’t expected me and nothing was arranged, but the project did seem to be on. To do all this meant hanging around Apple for an inordinate amount of time, tracking people down and having meetings, and so I got to know the intimate details of the way the place was run, as well as gaining a working knowledge of what was in the press office drinks cupboard.